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. You say that was smart.
You're right. We're going to talk about that
at the end here. I think that's one of the best
depictions of faith that you'll find anywhere in, in arts,
movies, TV, books, literature, wherever you're looking.
I I think it's just an absolutely brilliant depiction
of that faith. Faith is stepping out in and
onto and relying on something that we cannot see and cannot
prove exists. The only way to really have
evidence that it's there is to depend on it to, to take that
step, that leap where, where if it's not there, then we're done.
And the only hope that we have is that it's there.
We are still celebrating Easter. I don't know if you know, Easter
is a season just like Christmas is a season in the church.
Growing up, it wasn't really a season when the church I grew up
in, we didn't really treat it that way.
And so I still have to remind myself of that.
But I think the the simple truth is, is that Easter's more than
just a season. That's the life that we're
called to live. Easter is the reason that we're
here. If Jesus had just died on the
cross as a faithful martyr, we would not be here today.
It's because Jesus resurrected, because he came back to life,
that God restored his life, gave him a new life.
That's why we're here. Without that, without that,
there is no church, there is no Christianity.
So in a very real sense, we are an Easter people called to live
an Easter life. And we saw last week that one
part of living an Easter life is recognizing that we're living in
a world turned upside down. And this week we're we're taking
a look at this reality that that living the Easter life means
living a life lived by faith. And that's a lot of living and
lived and lives in in one sentence, But a life lived by
faith is part of an essential part of the Easter life.
Without faith, we can't live the Easter life.
We're going to talk about that faith and, and is one of those
tricky things and that their people have a lot of different
conceptions of what it means to say faith and to have faith in
Christ. And, and I want to start with
sort of a negative side here and, and talk about doubt first,
because there's also a lot of pressure in, in some churches to
have no doubts. You, you can't have any doubts.
Any doubt is a sign of a lack of faith.
And all doubt is bad. And if you really love God and
you really trust God, you really believe in God, you won't have
any doubts. I think that's nonsense.
I, I think doubt is an essential part of faith.
And my, my daughter said this to me.
She's smart. I'm not sure if she heard it
from someone else or she made it up, but it stuck with me that
that the opposite of faith is not doubt.
The opposite of faith is certainty with we don't need
faith if we have certainty, if there are no doubts, faith is
unnecessary because you know, I, I don't, I don't need faith to
know that water freezes at 32°F. I've got a freezer.
I can test that myself. I don't, I don't need, I don't
need faith to know that if I jump off the top of this
building, I'm going to die when I hit the sidewalk.
I don't even have to test that. I've I've heard enough to know
that that's how gravity works and how human bodies and cement
work. We have when we have certainty,
faith is unnecessary. Faith is necessary because of
doubt. Without doubt.
There's no room for faith. This is why I think Jesus did
not scold or reprimand Thomas and and the reading that that
John read for you this morning, Jesus rose from the dead.
He appeared first to the women, sent them back to tell the men
Jesus is risen. He's going to meet you.
And the men said we don't really believe you.
We think you're nuts. Because they didn't really treat
the women as credible witnesses on this is, I think we give the
disciples, reasonably so, a hard time for doubting the women.
I think it's reasonable to give them a little bit of a hard time
for that. I think at the same token, it's
fair then to say that Thomas was pretty much a gender equality
guy. He didn't believe the men
either. Like, yeah, men, women, I don't
care. People don't come back to life
unless there's a prophet there to raise them.
Don't tell me Jesus rose. Jesus is dead, Thomas said.
Everything in my experience, everything we know about the
world, everything we know biblically says that Jesus is
dead and he's going to stay dead.
He's going to stay dead maybe until the day of resurrection.
And, and, and that made sense. Thomas's doubts were perfectly
reasonable because there was no prophet there to raise Jesus
from the dead and the day of resurrection was for them more
like what we talk about now as the future day of resurrection.
There were Jewish folks that believed in that a resurrection
was coming. There would be a day of
resurrection when the faithful of Israel would rise to new life
in the Kingdom of God. And, and that day of
resurrection was the day when all of the faithful rose.
No one anywhere was teaching that there would be a single
resurrection preceding the day of resurrection.
There was. There was.
It just wasn't there. No one had conceived of that,
just like no one had conceived of the notion that God's Messiah
would be crucified as a slave by the Roman Empire.
It was not. It was beyond belief for anyone.
Those things just made no sense. And so Thomas's doubts were
very, very reasonable. And Jesus didn't scold him for
those doubts. He used those doubts as an
opportunity to give a blessing. But let's let's take a look at
the doubts again. What what Thomas said.
But he said Thomas 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 has a that's pretty
graphic image there. And and I got to think that when
Jesus showed up, Thomas was like, oh please don't make me
put my hand in your side. Please don't make me put my
hand. I know I said that got to be
careful. We pray when we dare God to
prove something to us, you know, and Jesus didn't make it when
Jesus said here they are got my hands and my nails side hand
fingers. You want?
What do you want to do, Thomas? Like my Lord and my God, I
believe, I believe. Jesus didn't scold Thomas,
though. He invited Thomas to live in
faith rather than in doubt. But he didn't scold Thomas for
having the doubts. Instead, Jesus offered this
blessing. Then Jesus told him, Because you
have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not
seen and yet have believed. This is a tremendous blessing.
Again, Thomas is not evil here. Thomas is not wicked.
Thomas is. He just has very reasonable
doubts about the reality of something that that hours before
everyone would have said was impossible and was saying was
impossible. If if Thomas were born today, he
would be from Missouri. Show me.
You got to show me. If you want me to believe this,
you're going to have to. You're going to have to show me.
And Jesus showed him. But Jesus recognized a deeper
reality that the vast majority of the followers of Jesus to
believe it all would have to believe without seeing.
Jesus is alive. He is alive today, as alive as
he was and as real as he was and as solid as he was when he
appeared to Thomas and said, stick fingers, hands, side,
whatever you need man, it's OK. But it is the very rare
exception when Jesus makes his presence known to a person in
this world. Now I know of a couple of
people. They're they are intelligent,
they are reasonable, they are not crazy, and they are deeply
faithful. Who will tell you that they have
seen Jesus. One of those people is a is a
pastor by the name of Naeem Fazal.
And and I, I have had the opportunity to meet him and hear
him speak, not in a situation where he would Remember Me or
even that we met, but nine Fazal.
He's a pastor now in one of the Carolinas.
He was born in Pakistan to a Muslim family and at a point in
his growing up, he saw Jesus, an honest to goodness vision of
Jesus, and he left Islam and put his faith in Christ.
There's more to it than that, but you can read if you want to
read his story. He's a fascinating story.
You can find him on Amazon. God, the way God dealt with the
way Jesus dealt with Naim is very different than the way he
deals with most of us. Most of us do not get that.
And so if we're going to believe it all, we have to believe
without seeing. And that's the blessing Jesus
offered using Thomas's doubts not as an opportunity to
condemn, but as an opportunity to bless.
If we're going to believe in Jesus, then we need faith.
The Easter life is a life lived by faith.
But faith is more than just belief.
There are at least three dimensions to faith to make it
real, true, genuine faith, something that's solid and has
meaning and, and can carry weight in this life.
And we're going to look at, we're going to look at that 3
dimensions of faith. The first dimension of faith is
belief. The writer of Hebrews says this
in Chapter 11. 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 is a rewarder of those who diligently
seek him. Belief is absolutely necessary
for faith. If we don't believe that God
exists, we'll never come to God. If we don't believe that Jesus
is who he says he is, we'll never be willing to take that
step of putting our trust in Him and, and making our life, you
know, building our life on him and on his Word.
Belief is absolutely essential, but it's not all that's
essential. Belief alone is not enough.
The demons believe. The Bible says that they're
shaken in their shoes. Satan believes that Jesus is who
he says he is, but Satan's an active rebellion against Jesus.
Simply think of it this way. Imagine you're married and and
and your spouse believes in you. They took their vows and they
believe in you and they go out on Friday and Saturday night and
they're catting around doing all sorts of things with all sorts
of people that they ought not be doing.
You go back and say, hey, how can you do this?
You're supposed to be faithful to your wife.
I am faithful to my wife. I am faithful to my husband.
I believe in them. They exist.
Well, that's very nice. But that's not being faithful.
That's not being faithful. Being faithful means living in a
certain way in that relationship, not just believing
in someone's existence. And our relationship with God is
the same, living in a certain way, we have to believe that he
exists. But we also there's another
dimension of faith that is absolutely essential.
And that's the dimension of obedience in that 11th chapter
of Romans, which is kind of a who's who of faith.
In the Old Testament Scriptures, we see over and over again this
sort of thing. By faith, Noah prepared, and it
should be an ark rather than and ark.
That's a typo. By faith, Noah prepared an ark,
Abraham obeyed, Abraham offered up Isaac.
By faith, all these folks did something they did what God
called them to do. They went where God called them
to go. They they, they served how God
called them to serve. They gave up their lives as God
called them to give up their lives.
They acted on their belief. They obeyed.
James put it this way because it was a lot of conversation in the
early church about, you know, faith and works and and, and,
and everyone agreed you can't earn your salvation.
But but there was a well is believing enough and James was
talking to folks. Oh yeah, I, I, you know, it
doesn't really matter what I do. I believe in Jesus.
And James said it does matter what you do.
You say you can show me your faith without works.
James said I will show you my faith by my works, by what I do.
It is obedience to God. That is another essential
aspect. So, so coming to faith is more
than just just praying the sinner's prayer and going about
our lives with our Get out of Hell free card following Jesus.
Faith in Jesus is about being able to recognize who God is and
what God is doing in the world around us now and joining God in
that, following where God is leading us now, not just
believing certain things about God, following where God is
leading now. Whether that's to do a thing, to
go, a place to stop doing a thing, to speak, something to be
quiet there, wherever God is leading us in whatever
particular situation to follow obediently the leading of God,
that is faith. That's still only two
dimensions, though. For something to be kind of
really real in our in our life, it needs to be at least three
dimensions. We got belief, we've got
obedience. There is 1/3 dimension that is
absolutely essential for us to have a real faith.
And yet it's a dimension that we have no control over whatsoever.
And it's this. The third dimension is God's
faithfulness to us. Paul writes to Timothy.
Even if we are faithless, God remains faithful for he cannot
disown himself. We might lose faith in God, we
might be overwhelmed by doubts, but God will continue to be
faithful to us. And, and I love that turn of
phrase, He cannot disown himself.
I get the sense here that what what Paul is trying to
communicate is that faith is, is an essential part of who God is.
It's not just the thing that God does, but being faithful as part
of who God is. Just like God is love, God is
also faith. God is faithful like Jesus is
the way, the truth and the life. Jesus is also faithful.
It's just part of who he is. And even when we're not
faithful, God continues to be faithful and that is very good
news. Otherwise, God would have wiped
us all out way back in Genesis 6 when he said the heart of
everyone in the world has turned to nothing but evil all the time
except for one guy, Noah. But instead of wiping us all out
and saying failed experiment, God stayed faithful to us even
we were unfaithful to him. That's the history of the
Israelites throughout the scriptures of the Old Testament.
Even when they drifted away from God, God never abandoned them.
And even when things were happening that looked like God
abandoning them, it was God saying, this is the only way I
can get your attention to come back to obedience.
It's what Jesus did on the cross, God's faithfulness to us.
God came to us as one of us lived among us to show him
himself, to show us what a life of faith looks like.
And the humans of this world rejected him, denied him, and
killed him to get him out of the way.
And if God could have said, that's it, we're done, ZAP,
you're all gone. But God stayed faithful to us
even when we were faithless to him.
And that's why we're here. Jesus himself said no one comes
to me unless they're drawn by my Father in heaven.
Think about that. It's God's faithfulness to us as
individuals drawing us to Jesus. Without that, we wouldn't be
here. We would never even begin to put
our faith and our hope and our trust in Jesus unless God was
faithful to draw us to Jesus. And so God's faithfulness is an
essential component to our faith.
Without God's faithfulness, we can't be faithful.
Without God's faith, we can't have faith, certainly not a
faith that acts in obedience to the Word of God.
One final thing I want to say here as we're doing this and,
and is that faith is not insanity, it's not stupidity,
it's not ignorance. Y'all know by now I'm a nerd and
you found out last week I like Star Trek.
Maybe that was two weeks ago, I don't remember which.
Next Generation is my favorite. I love Star Trek The Next
Generation, I think one of the best TV series ever, but I don't
I still have issues with it. There are things in it that
rubbed me the wrong way. And one of the things that you
see in Star Trek The Next Generation, it's very clearly
the attitude of the writers that faith is nothing but mindless,
primitive, immature superstition.
Any kind of religious faith that societies in in the Star Trek
universe will eventually, if they're allowed to progress and
advance beyond religious faith and depend only on science and
reason and understanding. And, and so people of faith,
they almost invariably portray as as sort of almost half
witted, You know, like even if they're adults, they talk and
act and sound like children and they sound childish.
They sound, I'm not doing this to pick on Star Trek.
Star Trek is representative of how much of our culture treats
people of faith. The the suggestion, the
implication, and sometime the outright statement is is
religious faith is just silly, superstitious nonsense.
Grow up and get over it. But it's not what faith is.
There are really, really good, solid reasons to believe that
God is who he says he is in the Bible, that Jesus is who he says
he is in the Bible, and that we can put our trust and our hope,
our faith in them, obediently follow them.
And that's not a silly, superstitious thing to do.
It's actually a smart, reasonable thing to do.
One of the reasons I believe is people that have gone before me
that I know that they believed. I think particularly if my, my
grandmother, Ruth, my mom, my grandmother died many years ago.
Thank God my mom's still alive. I'm glad she's still around.
They are not stupid, they are not silly, they are not
superstitious, and they are not crazy.
And they absolutely believed in Jesus Christ and lived like they
believed in Jesus Christ as faithfully as they could to the
word of God as they understood it and understand it.
In my mom's case, is she still doing it?
There are other people throughout history, really,
really smart people, people smarter than my mom, my grandma,
and me all put together. People like Blaise Pascal, one
of the greatest mathematicians in history was a person of deep
faith in God. Isaac Newton, one of the
greatest mathematicians and scientists in history, a person
of deep faith in God. I think if you look at it, I
keep saying this, I'm going to have to go double check this,
but I think this is true. If it's not, I'll have to put a
disclaimer in the sermons before I post them online.
I think if you dig into it, you'll discover that Charles
Darwin believed in God, that his theory of evolution did not
exclude the work of God. Very smart, very credible, very
intelligent people who believe in God.
There's lots of good reasons. There's lots, but part of we've
talked a little bit about things in the Bible that if the, if, if
the story of Jesus were just fantasy.
So we're just a made-up lie for some reason.
It's a really bad lie. I mean, it's one of the, oddly
enough, one of the reasons to believe.
You know, they wouldn't have picked women to be the first
apostles and evangelists because women weren't considered
credible. They, they, they wouldn't have
had Jesus rising from the dead if they were making the story
up. The story would have been this.
We went to the garden this morning and Jesus's ghost
appeared to us. Lots of people believed in
ghosts. Lots of people said, Oh yeah, my
grandmother appeared to me once. My uncle, my, my, my, my child,
I've seen, they saw ghosts. They believed in ghosts.
That was, that was a a, a, you know, a normal ish sort of
thing. It wasn't like all the time
everywhere, but it's something that lots of people talked about
and lots of people believed in. Nobody believed.
And one person experiencing the resurrection all by themselves,
nobody believed that. So if they're making it up, it's
a bad lie. It's a really bad lie to tell.
I think that's a reason to believe.
There are a lot of other reasons to believe.
Don't have time to go in tomorrow.
I'm thinking more and more I might do a series on this off
and on at some point down the road.
And, and there are there are a couple of good books if you're
interested in this kind of thing, if you've got doubts in
your life or there's someone in your life that has doubts and
they're like, it just, you know, I just feels like silly
superstition to me. There's two books I can
recommend and there's more, but there's two that I know for
sure. One is called Evidence that
Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell and the other is The
Case for Christ by Lee Strobel and and Strobel and McDowell
have very similar stories. Both started as non believers.
Strobel is an atheist, McDowell is an agnostic.
Both started their research into Christianity so they could
disprove Christianity. And in the process of doing all
of their research, they came to believe that the evidence really
said, no, that's right. And Lee Strobel gave up atheism
and became a Christian. And Josh McDowell gave up
agnosticism and became a Christian.
Lee Strobel was his, his book's a little easier to read.
He was a journalist by profession and he writes like a
journalist. He can his his writing is very
accessible, very readable. Lee Strobel was a scholar and he
writes like a scholar. And so his writings a little
more dense, but there's just a lot of stuff in what they've
said say, these are the reasons why we believe.
It's not silliness, it's not superstition.
And the flip side of all of this, the other side of the coin
is that science I I got nothing bad to say about science.
Science is an incredible tool, very important.
Nothing that helps us get closer to the truth is contrary to God
because Jesus is truth and science helps us with that.
But there's some things that are out of bounds that science can't
really tell us about. And one of those things is our
origins of how and why we got here.
Now currently I I've said this at all three services today too.
If I'm getting my science wrong, let me know.
I don't like to get the science wrong because one thing it makes
me look stupid and I really hate looking stupid.
The other thing, it makes me look non credible as a witness
for Jesus and I really don't want to do that.
But this is my understanding of the science that right now, the
currently most favoured explanation for our origins in
the scientific world is The Big Bang theory, that all the matter
in the universe coalesced into one singularity and exploded and
and produced the universe. And it's still expanding now and
eventually will contract again. And they've got math to explain
all of this. The math is beyond me.
I have no hope of understanding the math, but there's some
things in that there are problems with the theory and I'm
not saying anything earth shattering today.
The scientists are well aware of these problems.
One of the problems is, is for the, all of that to come
together and explode and create the universe that did the, the,
the math worked out that you need X amount of matter.
And the problem is, is there's not enough matter in the
universe to adequately fulfill the predictions and expectations
of The Big Bang theory. For The Big Bang theory to work,
they need more matter than we can find in the universe.
That's one of the problems with The Big Bang theory.
So what did the scientists do? They developed an explanation.
Have you heard of dark matter? Anyone ever heard of dark
matter? Dark matter.
And again, if I get the science wrong, let me know.
This is my understanding, but I'm I'm out of my areas of
expertise here. Dark matter is matter that
cannot be perceived by any way for us.
You can't see it, you can't touch it.
You can't taste it. You can't smell it, you can't
hear it. There is no means or no tool
that we can use to directly perceive dark matter.
How do we know it's there if we can't see it, taste it, touch
it, smell it? If there's no way we can
perceive it by any means, how do we know it's there?
Well, the scientists say there's two ways. 1 is our theory says
it needs to be there, and the the math behind our theory says
it needs to be there. And the other is, is then we can
see the effects that it has in the world around us.
We can't see it, but we can see how it affects other things
around it. Does that sound at all familiar
to you? That's how we talk about God.
And now we've talked about God for as long as we've been
talking about God, we can't see him, but we had to get here
somehow. And an intelligent designer to
me is more reasonable than random chance.
And, and I can't see God, but I can see all of these things that
happen. And, and without God, it's hard
to explain how they could have the effects that God has in the
world around him. So we don't have to worry about
if there are people out there looking down their noses at us,
all those silly superstitious Christians that are, you know,
they want faith rather than reason.
Science, if it's trying to explain origins, ultimately
depends on faith rather than reason as well.
Even like, oh, I just lost his name.
I hate it when I do that. Names in my brain.
Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant people to ever live,
far smarter than I am, and talking about the origins of the
universe, and he was not a person of faith.
He said the universe came into existence because the universe
decided to come into existence. My friends, that is not science.
That's faith. That is a statement of faith.
And so that doesn't mean we get to look down our noses at
atheists and and agnostics and others.
No one ever gets drawn to Jesus by being condescended to or held
in contempt. But we don't have to feel like
that somehow we're participating in something ridiculous, stupid,
or primitive. There are really good reasons to
believe what we believe, to have the faith that we have.
And that's how we live our lives.
And that's what Jesus invites us.
The way he invites us to live our lives is by that faith.
Now, here's the thing, This is the final thing.
When we live by faith, when we live by faith, when we step out
and we not only believe that God exists, but we are paying
attention to what God is doing and what God is saying.
And we're following where God is leading even when we've got
nothing else to support us. When we do that, we become for
other people like that sand that Indiana Jones threw out on that
bridge, so that he did it so that when he was coming back
that way, he could see the bridge easier.
When we live like that, we help other people see the reality of
God who we are. Depending on our faith gives
substance to what we cannot see, and it helps others to believe
in what they cannot see because but they can see us believing in
it. They can say, you know what?
I know that person in that church, I know what they're
going through and I don't know how they're keeping their head
above water. They tell me it's Jesus.
I don't know how they make it.
I don't know how they get out of bed every day.
They tell me it's Jesus and they see in our faith a reality they
cannot see themselves, and that may be the thing that they most
need in order to take that step themselves.
So this is the Easter life, a life lived by faith in Jesus
name, Amen. Amen.