[The Easter Life is] A Life Lived by Faith (Rock Springs 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. 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.

John 20:24–29

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.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

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

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

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 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.