I opened today's sermon with a clip from Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade. In this clip, Indy has to take a
literal leap of faith onto an invisible bridge to find the
treasure and save his father's life.
If you want to watch the clip, there's a link in the
description or you can search Indiana Jones Leap of Faith on
YouTube. Also, I want to let you know up
front that I made a mistake in this sermon.
If you figure it out for yourself, you get 50 points
which you can use for anything you want.
At the end of the sermon, I'll tell you where the mistake was
and give you the correct information.
Talk to you then. Our scripture reading today is
John chapter 20, verses 24 through 29.
Now Thomas also known as Didymus, one of the 12 was not
with the disciples when Jesus came.
So the other disciples told him, We have seen the Lord, but he
said to them, Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, and put
my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I
will not believe. A week later his disciples were
in the house again, and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were closed and locked, Jesus came and stood
among them and said, Peace be with you.
Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here, see my hands, reach
out and put your hand, reach out your hand and put it into my
side. Stop doubting and believe.
Thomas said to him, My Lord and my God.
Then Jesus told him, because you have seen me, you have believed.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
May the Lord add His blessing to the reading and the hearing of
His Word. And I've got a video clip to
start the message with today. It's one of my favorite video
clips from one of I think one of the best movies ever made,
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Harrison Ford and Sean
Connery in it. I I think as far as the
franchise goes, that should have been the last crusade.
They insisted on making more, but this was the the last really
good one, I think. And Indy, as usual, is hunting
treasure. This time, he needs the treasure
to, among other things, save his father's life.
And as he's following the treasure map, he walks through a
cave, and he comes to a chasm that he can see The Cave
continuing on the other side of the chasm.
And he has to figure out how to get across because there's no
bridge that he can see. And he has to sort out what to
do. Donna, could you pump up the
volume a little bit for the the dialogue on this, for whatever
reason, is very low compared to our music.
I think that's one of the best examples and illustrations of
faith that you can find anywhere, books, movies, TV, you
know, high art, low art. I just think it's a beautiful,
beautiful depiction of of what faith entails having to step out
and something that you can't see and and it doesn't become
verifiably real until you've put all of your weight on it.
You know, till it till, till you've trusted in it and acted
on that trust. Now, as followers of Jesus
Christ, we are Easter people. We would not be here if it
wasn't for Easter. If the crucifixion had been the
end and Jesus had been a wise teacher and a faithful martyr,
we would not be gathered here today worshiping in his name.
We would not be following him in our lives.
It is because of Easter, because of the resurrection, that we are
a people. And, and so the life that we
live, the life that we're called to live is the Easter life, life
in light of Easter. Last week we talked about that
and saw that part of living the Easter life is living in a world
turned upside down. The second thing we're going to
see that living the Easter life is, is living the Easter life is
living a life of faith. The Easter life is a life lived
by faith, like Indiana Jones stepping out and what we can't
see and not knowing for sure, for sure that it's real until
we've stepped out onto it. Faith and doubt are not mutually
exclusive. It is possible to have doubts
and to have faith. I would argue that without the
possibility of doubt, there is no possibility of faith.
Someone told me, actually my daughter who said this, the
first person I heard say it, and I think she was spot on, that
the opposite of faith is not doubt.
The opposite of faith is certainty, and and we can see
that when Thomas doubts, Jesus doesn't condemn him.
There's a lot of good reasons for Thomas to doubt the the the
story that he had been told was preposterous.
Thomas knew Jesus was dead if he didn't see him die himself.
People that he knew well saw him die.
He knew that the Romans knew how to execute people and that they
didn't bring people down from the cross until they were dead.
He knew and trusted the people that brought him down from the
cross. He knew and trusted the people
that put the spices that wrapped him in the linens that placed
him in the tomb. That had been days ago.
He knew that Jesus was dead and there was no framework for
Jesus's resurrection. Now there were, there were
people, Jewish people of, of, of great faith that believed in the
reality of the resurrection at that time.
Not all Jewish folks did, but many of them did.
But when they talked about the resurrection, they talked about
the resurrection, the way we talk about the future
resurrection. They referred to it as the day
of resurrection. And the day of resurrection was
the day when all of the faithful dead, when all of God's faithful
dead, would rise to new life. There was no one who had ever
predicted the singular. This easy for me to say.
The singular resurrection of a crucified Messiah, a crucified
Messiah was a contradiction in terms.
The Messiah would never be crucified.
That's what happened to slaves, not God's chosen and anointed
king. And the notion that that one
person would experience the resurrection was not in anyone's
mind or mindset. The day of resurrection was for
everyone. And so this goes back again to
some things that that Rick had been teaching in the children's
sermons about, about things, the reasons why if Jesus
resurrection is a lie, one of the reasons why it's a bad lie.
We talked about one of the things Rick said and I said last
week too, is that that choosing women to be the first apostles
and evangelists is a bad lie. If you're trying to convince
people of something because people people didn't trust women
to be their testimony was not as valid.
That's we know that's dumb, but that was the mindset in those
days. And so it would have been a bad
lie. Another reason that telling
people that Jesus rose from the dead was a bad lie was that no
one had ever believed or even thought that that was a
possibility. A good lie.
If they were making up a lie, a good lie would have been look,
Jesus's ghost appeared to us. People would have believed that.
Lots of folks believed in ghosts and consulted ghosts and had
appearances from ghosts for them if they wanted to make up a lie.
A much more believable lie was Jesus's ghost appeared to us in
the garden this morning. But to say that Jesus rose from
the dead resurrected was a stupid lie because no one would
have been prepared to believe that.
There's Thomas been spent years with Jesus and and he, like the
other disciples, had heard Jesus over and over again say I'm
going to be betrayed, going to be handed over, going to be
crucified, I'm going to die, and then I'm going to rise again
from the dead. And Thomas, like all of Jesus's
other followers, thought Jesus was talking in parables because
they had no frame of reference for that being an actual
physical reality. None.
Not for a crucified Messiah and not for a singular resurrection.
A double whammy. And, and so to be fair, the
other thing I think that's worth pointing out here, because we
give the disciples a little bit of a hard time for, for not
believing the women. And I think it's appropriate to
give them a little bit of a hard time for that.
Thomas didn't believe the men either.
So at least he's equal in his skepticism.
It's like the women said it. I don't believe you guys any
more than I believe them. You know, gender equality right
there. And the book of John.
John didn't believe the men either when they said we've seen
Jesus. Not until Tommy wasn't even
seeing he's I want to touch. I need to know that that's
Jesus. There's got to be holes in his
hands that I can put my fingers in.
I want to be able to put my hand in his side.
That's a rather graphic and disgusting image, isn't it?
I got to think that that that John regretted that as soon as
he saw Jesus. He's like, oh, please don't make
me put my hand in your side. Please don't make me put my hand
in your side. You know, he was all right.
He eventually just needed to see him, but he was.
I got to, I got to touch it. I got it.
I got to put my hand in that wound in his side.
Thomas's doubts were reasonable and Jesus understood that.
Jesus understood that, and that's why he didn't condemn
Thomas. He used Thomas's doubts that
turned to faith as an opportunity to bless us.
We're just to review the text again.
But he said to them, this is Thomas.
Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger
where the nails were and put my hand into his side, I will not
believe. It's a bold statement.
Be careful what you dare Jesus to do.
I'm just going to say that. Didn't plan to say that this
morning. But if you say Jesus, you're
going to have to be careful that Jesus might do it, and then
you're stuck. So, all right, Jesus didn't
condemn Thomas for his doubts. He didn't scold him.
He called him to believe, but he didn't condemn him for his
doubts. Instead, this is what Jesus
said. Jesus told him, because you have
seen, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not
seen and yet have believed. Jesus recognized that Thomas's
doubts were not an indication that he had rejected God.
He wasn't abandoning Jesus, wasn't turning his back on the
Messiah. He's that a if Thomas had been
born in the 21st century, he'd be born in Missouri.
You know, show me. You want me to believe.
Show me, show me. And a lot of folks feel that
way. It's really hard to believe in
something that you have no frame of reference for.
No it. It defies everything you've ever
been taught as being logical, rational, reasonable, and to be
expected. It's real you.
You wouldn't struggle to don't know where you're going for
lunch. If you're going out for lunch
today, let's say you're going to Foxes.
It's one of my favorite places to eat lunch.
Oh my God, they got good onion rings at Foxes.
The person in the booth next to you, it's all excited and
they're so they can't contain themselves.
They walk around and they say, you know what?
My uncle, my uncle Bill died last week and then rose again
from the and it wasn't like he was dead on the table for a few
minutes and then and then came back to life.
He was at the undertakers. He was at the Funeral Home and
he sat up on the table there, scared the bejeebers out of the
undertaker. He's still having kittens.
He's the one that called me and told it's incredible.
You you would very politely slide as far away from that
person as you could get and hope that someone with the authority
to restrain that person came before it was time for you to
pay your bill of leave. You think they were nuts?
Any reasonable person would think that was nuts.
It was not unreasonable for Thomas to doubt and Jesus didn't
condemn him for doubting. He just used that as an
opportunity to bless you and me and the vast majority of
Christians in this world and in history who have, if we're going
to believe it all, we would have to believe without seeing I, I
know a few Christians, faithful people, intelligent people, non
crazy people who who will tell you with great sincerity that
they have seen Jesus. One of them, a gentleman I know,
don't know him well. He doesn't know me from Adam.
I've met him before, but it was in a context where he wouldn't
have any cause to Remember Me. He's a pastor in one of the
Carolinas, North Carolina, South Carolina, I can't remember.
He's originally from Pakistan and he was born Muslim, but he
saw Jesus. He had a vision where he saw
Jesus and he left Islam and put his faith in Jesus and now is an
amazing disciple of Jesus and leader in the church in the
United States. He's got books if you go on
Amazon and search for Naim Fazal.
If you need help spelling that, you'll have to have me text you
because I can't spell it without looking at it either.
But he's, he's a great preacher and he's a great writer and,
and, and and it's an amazing story.
But, but Naeem is by far the exception rather than the rule.
Jesus is alive and well and he appeared, He occasionally makes
himself physically known to people in this world.
Yet today, But for the most of us, if we're going to believe,
we have to believe without seeing.
And that that's what faith is, is believing without seeing.
Now there's a lot more to faith than just belief.
I think there are three dimensions, three essential.
You know, for an object to exist in real space, it has to have 3
dimensions. I think physics people out
there, you might correct me on this, but I think that that,
that we can only talk about two-dimensional and
one-dimensional objects. They don't really exist.
We just think about it because I remember in high school and
there was the line on the paper and my teacher saying that line
is 2 dimensional. It has, it has length, but it
has no depth or width, depth or width.
And I'm going, I can see the width right there on the paper.
And the teachers like you don't get it, Scott.
And I didn't, I didn't. But it represents something
that's not really there. For something to be real, it
needs 3 dimensions. I think faith has three
dimensions. The first dimension is belief.
Belief. Hebrews, the writer of Hebrews,
says this. But without faith it's
impossible to please him. That is God, for he who comes to
God must believe that he is, and that he's a rewarder of those
who diligently seek him. You have to.
You can't put your faith in God without believing in God.
You can't follow God without believing in God.
Now, you can believe in God without following God, right?
You hear that? You hear that?
You can't. You can't follow God without
believing in God. But you can't.
You can't believe in God. Well, the demons believe in God.
The Bible tells us that they're shaking in their shoes.
They're not following him. Satan believes in God and his
rebellion in rebellion against God.
Belief is essential, but it's not all that's essential for our
faith to be real. It takes more than just a belief
that God is and that Jesus is who he says he is.
The second dimension of faith, which is an essential element of
faith, is obedience by faith. The writer of Hebrews 11 you get
you get all three dimensions here in Hebrews Chapter 11.
By faith, Noah prepared an ark that should be an not and ark.
By faith, Noah prepared an ark. Abraham obeyed and went to the
promised land. Abraham offered up Isaac at
God's command. Over and over and over again at
these representatives, great representatives of faith in
Hebrews 11, we see that their faith LED them to do what God
said to do, to follow, to hear, to listen, and to obey.
James, put it this way. You want to tell me that faith
can exist without works? Fine.
You can say that you show me your faith without your works.
I'll show you my faith by my works without the work of
obedience. Without that, there is no real
faith. Simply believing is what the
demons and Satan do. We're called to obey.
It's the difference between belief and faithfulness.
Let's pretend you're married. Some of you are maybe everyone
today we don't have none of the I don't see the kids.
Nope, no kids today. Some of you are so you have
been. Some of you never been asked.
However that is that works. But pretend you're married and
your spouse says I believe in you.
On Friday and Saturday nights, they're out catting around doing
all sorts of things with other people that they shouldn't be
doing. You would never say that spouse
was faithful. He said, well, you can't tell me
I'm not faithful. I believe in my wife.
I believe in my husband. That's not Yeah, but that's you
got to keep the vows. You know, we're going to call
you faithful. You got to be faithful.
It's not enough just to believe that your spouse exists.
It's not enough just to believe that God exists.
It's not enough just to believe that Jesus is who he says he is.
Jesus calls us to live a life of faith, and that life of faith
requires us to be obedient to the Word of God.
That's why it's so important to know the Word of God, not as a
list of rules, but because by knowing the Word of God, we can
better recognize what God is doing in the world around us now
and join God in doing that. We can better understand and
recognize when God, God is calling us to do something or to
stop doing something and to follow that instruction.
Obedience is a necessary aspect of faith.
Without it, there is no real faith.
It's just A1 dimensional thing, but there is 1/3 essential
dimension to faith, and without it we have no faith.
But we have absolutely no control over this one.
And the third dimension of faith is this.
It's God's faithfulness, God's faithfulness to us.
Paul put it this way when he was writing to Timothy.
If we are faithless, God remains faithful for he cannot disown
himself. Makes a little more sense if you
read the verse before it, Paul, a couple verses before it.
Really Paul is talking about our the ways we have been faithful,
the way we respond to God versus how God responds to us.
And then the one right before this says if we disown God, God
will disown us. But even if we're faithfulness,
even if we are faithless, God will still be faithful to us
because he cannot disown himself.
It's a strange turn of phrase to say that that God is still
faithful because he cannot disown himself.
It says to me that the the reality Paul is driving at is
that that faithfulness is not a just a thing God does.
It's an essential part of who God is.
God is faithful. Just like God is love and Jesus
is the way, the truth and the life, God is faith, God is
faithful and without God's faithfulness to us, we have no
hope. Jesus himself said no one comes
to me unless they're drawn by the Father.
You want someone to put their faith and trust in Jesus and
part of the prayer is God lead that person to put their faith
and trust in Jesus. Be careful again with those kind
of prayers because sometimes people have to go through hell
before they can put their faith and trust in Jesus.
So just be aware when you're praying that prayer, you're not
praying for lambs and bunnies and puppy dogs for that other
person. You might be praying for some
struggle and hardship in their life.
But none of us would be followers of Jesus if it weren't
for God drawing us to Jesus. It might have been through other
people. It might have been directly
through our minds or through our own hearts.
But the only way we have a chance of ever coming to Jesus
is because God is faithful to us first.
If God weren't faithful to humanity, God would have wiped
us all out. In Genesis chapter 6, we got one
family, Noah, his family, everyone else.
You know, God could have just wiped everyone else.
So this is a failed experiment. We're done if when we crucify
Jesus. When Jesus was crucified, God
said, I, I this is me in the flesh.
This is my son. This is the one to show you and
be for you the way, the truth and the life.
You're rejecting him, you're despising him, you're lying
about him, and you're killing him to get him out of your way.
In response, I will kill you. But God didn't do that.
Instead, God stayed faithful to us and left the door open for
His mercy, for His grace, and for our opportunity to respond
to His faithfulness to us with our faithfulness to Him.
God's faithfulness to us is the foundation of every aspect of
our faith. Without God's faithfulness to
us, we could never follow Jesus. We could never follow God.
The three dimensions of faith, the other piece here that I want
to just take a moment to mention because I think it's important
and, and talking about a life of faith, faith in God is not
insanity or stupidity or ignorance.
It's not childishness. There are good reasons to
believe in and obey God, to have faith in God, believe and obey.
And and we can never prove it. We can't prove God's existence,
but there's again, I keep Rick and I are overlapping a lot
here. Sorry you're getting a double
dose, but but there's a lot of evidence out there that God
exists and that God is who he says he is in the Scriptures.
If you're looking for a book, well, a great book, I is the one
I think Rick was using Lee Strobel's book Evidence Demands
A verdict. There are other books out there
as well. And and if you don't recall, Lee
Strobel was an atheist and I believe a journalist.
And he set out, his intention was to do a deep dive and
thorough research of Christianity to prove that it
was false. And in his studies, he was
convinced that it was true and left atheism to become a
follower of Jesus. It's a good book.
It's a long book.
It's a good book. There are lots of good reasons
to believe that God exists. For me, one of those reasons is
the people that have gone before me as personal.
I know my grandmother, Ruth, my mom.
They're not stupid people. They're not crazy people.
They're not ignorant or childish people.
And they absolutely believe in Jesus Christ and they live.
Or my grandmother, she passed on years ago, but she lived like
she believed it. To me, that's, that's evidence.
It's not going to prove things. But there are other people,
very, very smart people. Blaise Pascal, one of the
greatest mathematicians in the history of the world, a person
of deep faith who believed in God, one of the smartest human
beings to ever live. Isaac Newton, one of the
smartest human beings to ever live, a pioneer in physics and
mathematics and and he believed in God.
Think if you dig in close, you'll discover that Charles
Darwin believed in God. A lot of smart people throughout
history have believed and lived like they believed.
And the other side of this too, is, you know, we can't, we can't
prove it. If we could prove it, we
wouldn't need faith. I don't need faith to know that
water freezes at 32°F. I got a freezer.
I can do that experiment myself. Don't need faith for that.
We can see that we can't prove God, but there's evidence.
The the flip side though, is, is when, when, when, when we hear
and encounter people that are sort of looking down their nose
at Christians or, or people of other religious faith and at
all, it's all just juvenile. It's all just, you know, you're
immature. You just haven't grown up enough
and, and left behind the old, you know, superstitions of the
past and realized that science tells us everything we need to
know. No, it doesn't.
Science can tell us a lot of things.
Science can tell us with confidence, with certainty,
nothing about our origins. You need to be able to observe
and repeat things and, and science can't observe and repeat
our origins. And, and it's interesting is I,
I love this. Again, if you're a science
person and I'm getting this wrong, let me know because I
don't like to get these things wrong, but I believe I'm getting
this right. The Big Bang theory is, is
currently the most popular scientific explanation for the
origin of all that is and, and there are problems with The Big
Bang theory and people that study it are aware of those
problems. There are certain aspects of our
reality in the physical universe that don't fit with The Big Bang
theory, and they're constantly within that trying to find ways
to fill those gaps. One of those things is, is for
The Big Bang to have worked, there needed to be a certain
amount of, there needs to be a certain amount of mass in the
universe that came together and then exploded.
And the problem is there's not enough mass in the universe.
It's just not there. And, and scientists will tell
you that I'm not, I'm not saying anything earth shattering.
They've scientists know this. People that are deeply committed
to The Big Bang theory know this.
They so they came up with this idea.
We know there's got to be for The Big Bang theory to be right.
And we know it's right because, you know, we know it's right.
There must be more mass. We just, you know, where is it?
And they came up with this theory.
See if this sounds familiar to you.
This to me sounds remarkably familiar.
They came up with this theory called dark matter.
Have you heard of dark matter? Dark matter.
You can't see it. You can't touch it.
You can't hear it. You can't smell it.
You can't taste it. It is impossible for us with our
senses or with any scientific means that are available
available to us, to observe dark matter.
There's only two reasons we know it's there.
One is our theory says it has to be there, and the other is the
effect that it has on things around it.
We can't see it, but we can see how it affects other things
around it. That's faith.
That's exactly what we say about God.
No, we can't see God, but we can see the effect that God has in
the world around us. No, we, we can't see God, but
but we know we got here somehow. And, and, and God seems a lot
more plausible to me than accident.
Stephen Hawking, another one of those brilliant minds in history
who was, you know, not a person of Christian faith at all.
In one of his books, he came down to this later in his life,
he said, he said the universe exists because the universe
decided to exist. That's not science, that's
faith. That's faith.
So when people are looking down their noses at us, we don't need
to cringe and feel embarrassed because we can't prove what we
believe, because they can't prove what they believe either.
And we don't look down our noses at them for that.
Looking down your nose at someone doesn't do anything to
bring into faith. But we can learn the good
reasons to believe that God does exist, that the story of the
resurrection is true. Might take some reading and some
studying to really get those reasons grounded in your head.
It's time well spent to do that. I might make that a preaching
series one of these days. And we can, we can go through,
I'll just take, you know, Rick's children's sermon outline and go
from there. But I wouldn't steal it.
I'd, I'd, I'd give you credit, Rick, I, you know, I only steal
from the best. So good reasons to believe and
obey. And this is the life that God
calls us to, to believe and obey.
Now that into that scene with Indiana Jones, he gets across,
he knows he's going to have to come back.
He doesn't want to deal with the psychological trauma of the
invisible bridge again. So he leans down, He picks up a
handful of sand and throws it out on the bridge so we can see
the bridge. Our obedience, our not just our
belief, which is not likely to convince anyone, but our
faithfulness to God is for other people.
The sand on the bridge, it is the way other people can say I
can believe it. I know what, I know what they're
going through. I don't know what's keeping
their head above water. I don't know what's getting them
out of bed every morning. They tell me it's Jesus.
But maybe it is when they see it in us, when they see God
sustaining us, when they see us putting our faith in God,
obediently following God even when it costs, even when it
hurts, and giving God the praise and the glory all along the way.
When they see that that makes us the sand on the bridge so that
they can get that courage to take that step, that leap of
faith as well, to step out on something that they can't see
for themselves yet. This is what Jesus did.
He was the sand, only He was the first biggest piece of sand on
the bridge. I died, I rose again, I'm
leaving, but I'm coming back. And we look at his life and say
because Jesus is, because I can see the results of Jesus's
faithfulness to God, I can choose to be faithful to.
And then the story just spread and spread and spread as the
disciples lived out their faith and the people that they lived
it out in front of. They lived it out and they lived
it out and they lived it out. And now, 2000 years later, here
we are living it out so that others can see it and they can
come to faith too. That's the Easter life, a life
lived by faith in Jesus name, Amen.
You may have already realized that the mistake I'd made was
that I got my authors and book titles mixed up.
Lee Strobel wrote The Case for Christ, Not Evidence that
Demands A Verdict. Evidence that Demands A Verdict
was written by Josh McDowell. Both are good books about
historical evidence that supports Christian faith.
Lee Strobel's book is a little more readable, and Mcdowell's
book is a little more dense and scholarly.
But both are worth reading, and I hope you'll check one or both
of them out.