[The Easter Life is] A Life Lived by Faith (New Beginnings UMC)

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.

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.