Why Ask?

Text: John John 20:19-31

Focus: Doubts

Function: to help people see that legitimate questions are an essential part of the faith

¹⁹When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²²When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

²⁴But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

²⁶A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” ²⁸Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. ³¹But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Today we are looking at the very end of the book of John. And I find it interesting that the last story that it includes is the story that has been, in many people’s opinion, misnamed “Doubting Thomas.”

The person we know as Doubting Thomas was actually asking a sincere and honest question.

But before we get to that, there is a whole lot of theology in this passage that is important for us to try to unravel.

You hear me pray and preach, almost every Sunday that we be filled with the Holy Spirit so that we can carry out our tasks.

Starting at verse 19, through verse 23, we read about Jesus’ first appearance to them according to John account of the resurrection. The first thing Jesus does is extend His peace to them.

It was stated that at first they thought they were seeing a ghost. But Jesus wants them to know that He has risen in bodily form, not just as an apparition from beyond the grave. He wants them to know that He has risen from the actual grave itself and is now standing among them.

He extends His peace and then breathes the Holy Spirit on to them.

And He gives them the purpose of the Holy Spirit. He says, Just as the Father has sent Him, so He is sending us.

Forgive people their sins. You forgive them. We have been taught that only God can forgive sins. But Jesus, in this passage, gives the church tremendous authority to forgive sins.

And I don’t mean the institution called the church that could either give or withhold communion based on their own doctrines, but the Church universal, the body of Christ.

We are the Church. Not the institution. And Jesus has called us as the Church to forgive the sins of others, to forgive the sins of the nations so that the world can be healed.

We lay down our right to revenge when we join the Kingdom of God, the family of God, the Church universal when we trust Jesus to save us.

The power of the Spirit resides inside of us so that we can forgive and heal the world of its transgressions. Peter said, Love covers a multitude of sins.

People wonder why I am so generous against so called “sinners.” It is because we are called to be like Christ and forgive the sins of others.

Now, on to doubting Thomas.

I titled the sermon, “Why Ask?” because I have come to realize something in my Christian journey. It is okay to ask questions and to have doubts.

It is in the place of questions that we are compelled to seek the face of God and wonder, even ponder, the possibilities of God’s grace, mercy and love.

Although Thomas probably didn’t witness Jesus’ execution as an enemy of the State for crying out against injustice, apparently John was the only disciple who was there at the cross according to the gospel accounts, we believe that he knew of Jesus’ death and burial. We don’t know why he wasn’t with the others, or what he was doing, there is no record, but he wasn’t there when Jesus first appeared to the twelve.

So, his doubt is sincere. He wants to see for himself.

He has to have proof. Now Jesus goes on to sort of reprove him for not believing the witness of his fellow disciples when they told him that they had seen the Lord.

But Thomas wants to make sure that it isn’t a ghost that they were speaking to. So, he wants proof of flesh and blood, not of life after death. He apparently already believes in ghosts and the spirits of people who have died and not ascended into heaven.

So the question is, Why Ask?

Right before the parable of the good Samaritan, we see the answer to the question, “Why ask?” when the Pharisee asks Jesus “who is my neighbor?”

The text says: “The Pharisee, wishing to justify himself, asked…”

Why did he ask? His question is not a sincere question of faith and doubt, while he is trying to reason out what has happened that he cannot explain, like Thomas, but one of a selfish nature intended to assuage his guilt over the fact that Jesus is right, he does not love his neighbor as himself.

Thomas was not trying to justify himself OVER the teachings of Jesus, he sincerely wanted to know if this was a physical verses metaphysical resurrection.

I believe that Jesus loves sincere questions. Mary asked the angel when he told her that she was going to give birth to the Savior, she said: “How can this be since I am still a virgin?”

God understands our human frailty. I believe that if we are not honest with God about our doubts, then we are insincere with God.

I tell people that God has big shoulders and can take it.

I have been reading through the book of Job in my morning devotions. And for the first time, for some reason, I am understanding it.

Job’s so called friends ASSUME he is guilty because calamity happens to him.

But Job knows that he is innocent and Job never curses God.

But that does not mean that he does not question God throughout the book.

He speaks of their idea of fairness and says that it cannot be true because bad things are happening to him and he didn’t deserve it.

He wants to have an argument with God.

And in the end, God appears to him and he gets his wish and he is properly humbled in the presence of God.

The whole book is about asking sincere and honest questions with the answer, “You cannot put God in a box or imagine what God is doing.”

So Thomas paints a picture for us that Jesus honors sincere questions. They are honest.

But have faith sill, Blessed are those who believe and have not seen. That is us.

The Resurrection Expands!

 

Text: Acts 10:34-43

Focus: Easter

³⁴Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, ³⁵but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. ³⁶You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. ³⁷That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: ³⁸how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. ³⁹We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; ⁴⁰but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, ⁴¹not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. ⁴²He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. ⁴³All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

He is Risen! (He is risen indeed!)

He is Risen! (He is risen indeed!)

He is Risen! (He is risen indeed!)

Happy Easter everyone.

As it turns out this year, Passion Weekend falls on the same weekend as the Jewish Passover. And for some reason, the Orthodox Church will celebrate Easter next weekend.

I don’t understand how the Jewish people originally set their calendars. They didn’t use the Roman calendar system. Their new year coincides with the celebration of the date of the first Passover and their redemption from bondage and slavery to the Egyptians.

That first Easter happened to Jewish people in Jerusalem. In today’s text, we read the account of the first sermon preached specifically to Gentiles, that is, people who were not born of Jewish descent.

That is why I titled the sermon, The Resurrection Expands. Because in today’s text, we see that the salvation that God provided to the Jewish people is now the salvation provided to the whole world through Jesus Christ.

Peter is preaching this sermon in the house of the Roman Centurion, Cornelius. Remember, the Romans were the enemy. As we get angry at the war crimes committed in Ukraine currently, and we see the people’s need for some sort of revenge, we remember that the occupying army does not treat the civilian enemy population with basic respect or basic human civil rights. Men are being executed and women are being raped as spoils of war. It makes me angry and along with others, we cry out to God for peace and justice on behalf of all the victims.

Jesus cried out for justice and it got Him killed. In the face of a political struggle, Jesus got political and the other side had Him murdered because He spoke truth to their abuse of power. And the sad thing is that they used devotion to God’s word and scriptural purity as an excuse to create outcasts of everyone they decided didn’t fit in. They used the excuse that they were defending the faith when they murdered Jesus.

And the instrument of that power to murder Jesus was sitting right before Peter in the form of the Roman Soldier as Peter is preaching the good news to him.

Preaching the gospel to your enemy is what the gospel is all about. Praise God for the resurrection power of Jesus Christ that can transform lives through the proclamation of the good news!

Our text does not include the ending of the sermon where before Peter even finishes, they start believing and the Holy Spirit falls on the room as a witness to their conversion to Christ.

Although Cornelius was a Roman officer, he was not really the enemy of God’s people.

He had already become a convert to Judaism. And apparently he understood what it was all about. I mean, he understood that it was about loving others.

When the people came to Peter and asked him to come to the house of the gentile enemy, the symbol of their oppression, they told Peter that Cornelius was already a righteous person.

Out of his own funds he built a synagogue for the people and he gave regularly substantial gifts to help the poor.

And that is where our text picks up in verse 34. Peter finally understands what had been a mystery to him before: God’s impartial love.

The Jews were a proud people and they were oppressed. So Cornelius made it clear by his lifestyle that he was not going to act in a way that was unjust.

We read the account of those whom John the Baptist converted before Jesus appeared. The Roman soldiers are mentioned among that group and John tells them to do their jobs with justice.

And by justice I do not mean judgment and execution, but with mercy and love and fairness, the kind of justice that Jesus proclaimed.

Cornelius understood what kind of justice that was, and so, God went out of the way to expand the power of the resurrection through his conversion.

I keep mentioning how in Peter’s eyes, he was the enemy. And I find it wonderful that Peter would not hold on to his bitterness and unforgiveness any longer and instead he offered mercy and love to one of those whom he could blame for the misery of his people.

God cares for those who do acts of justice. The Bible says that whomever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord and the Lord will repay.

God paid him back in a big way. The story earlier also tells us that Peter had a vision whereby God told him three times that God is able to cleanse what is made unclean. The vision happened right before the men came from Cornelius to ask Peter to come to the house.

I imagine that after Cornelius has a dream telling him to ask for Peter to come. And Peter has a vision telling him that God cleanses the unclean and they had shared those stories before Peter started preaching to them that the group gathered in the house was pretty excited about what was going to happen next.

And we are excited today as well. We are excited because the salvation provided by Jesus Christ goes to the world entire.

And there are two clues to this salvation. 1^st. God appears to have chased after Cornelius in order to save him. There are a lot of people searching for God who do not get the privilege of prophets and apostles coming to their house to share the good news with them.

And the conclusion that I draw from that is that Cornelius already demonstrates a deep faith in the love, mercy and justice of God before he is converted to salvation.

One could almost say that his good deeds saved him. I am not advocating works only salvation.

Because tied in with this is the fact that God took the time to tell him what he needed to do in order to be saved. He was, obviously, already doing it. But God points him to the resurrection and the power of faith in Christ and the power of what can happen when that faith is combined with the Holy Spirit living inside of the believer.

God had a lot more in store for Cornelius and his household. Just as God has more in store for us.

The resurrection expanded to the gentiles on this day and we are grateful for what it means.

And that last verse explains the purpose of the cross and the resurrection, that everyone who believes in him will have forgiveness of their sins.

Cornelius received that salvation because God is faithful to the just and is always seeking those who love as Jesus loved.

Pressing On

 

Text: Philippians 3:4b-14

Focus: Perseverance

Function: to remind people to focus on the heavenly reward

⁴If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: ⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; ⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

⁷Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. ⁸More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. ¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, ¹¹if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

¹²Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

This is a deep passage. I have often pondered the mystery of the phrase in verse 10 when he says “I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection…”

So, I hope to unwrap this passage a little bit this morning.

Paul starts out with the fact that he stands in the right position before God, not because of the fact that he was born of Jewish ancestry. Not because his family obeyed the law and had him circumcised on the 8^th day. Not because of his extensive religions vocation denoted by the fact that he was an expert in the Law and was called a Pharisee, a person of a strict religions sect that carefully obeyed all 1,000 commands in the OT and 13,000 commands in the Talmud, their commentary on the OT.

He makes the point that if anyone could have earned salvation, or more theologically correct: an upright standing with God, it would have been a person like him who kept himself blameless according to the letter of the law.

But he recognizes that the correct doctrine, without trust in God, is meaningless if we are trying to win God’s favor by our actions.

According to Paul, we cannot win God’s favor by our actions alone. It takes faith. Faith is trust. So then, He says that he has obtained a righteousness, that is, an upright standing with God, because he has trust in Jesus Christ to be His savior.

He says, it is faith, or more clearly, it is by living in the trust that God loves and forgives us and keeps us holy and pure by His Spirit inside of us that makes him a person who has an upright standing with God.

Brother Paul gives us a personal glimpse into the motivating factors in his life. For him, all of it is based on the fact that he has personally seen Jesus Christ risen from the dead in the vision that leads him to faith in Christ.

(When he was converted on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, At the time, he was on the way to incarcerate people for believing in Jesus and Jesus opened up the heavens and revealed Himself to Paul and Paul became a believer.)

And because Jesus rose from the dead, that is the goal of his life as well: His own resurrection from the dead. And he says that in his life, he presses on toward that prize of the resurrection.

He tells us that he has not yet obtained it. He is living on this side of the great veil of death that separates the living from the dead and because he is still on this side, he does not want to give up living a life that brings honor and glory to the fact that Jesus Christ has given him a real purpose and hope in this life.

Now, the whole passage is crouched in the fact that Paul rests in Christ to save Him. He trusts Christ to keep him close to Christ so that he can obtain the resurrection of the dead for himself.

As a pastor, I want the flock to rest in the loving arms of Jesus and keep themselves close enough to Christ to keep from straying and confident enough in Christ to be bold in their proclamation and demonstrations of their love for others.

Paul tells us he rests in Christ and at the same time, he presses on.

He motivates himself. And a large part of it, I believe born out of gratitude for his salvation, is to understand more and more thy mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.

There are a lot of questions around it for me. I don’t understand why it takes a death to pay the price for sin. I know that God could just forgive by choice, as God commands us to do.

But God forgave through the mystery of the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

God choose a violent and terrible symbol for us to behold when God saved us.

If you were living in the 1^st century, the word “Crucifixion” brought chills to your spine and a sense of terror and dread. You knew how awful it was. In contrast, our crosses today are golden.

We might not fully appreciate what Jesus did for us when He gave his life for us.

To Paul, the mystery of what that meant was an intellectual pursuit because it was driven by his love and gratitude to Jesus Christ.

I ponder the questions myself. I wonder: Just what kind of love could draw me to the point whereby I was willing to endure a torturous death for someone I did not know?

Could or do I have that kind of love within me?

We reckon ourselves as heroes, I imagine. I imagine that all of us could see ourselves giving our lives to save a loved one, but Jesus does it for strangers. He does it for the people who loved Him and mourned His death as well as those who plotted His judicial execution.

From the cross He said: Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

What kind of love drives a person like that? It must be divine. And when Paul says that he wants to know, to understand, Christ and all of that mystery, I feel the same way.

Can I love like that as well?

How do we love like that?

We, I believe, as Paul says in this passage, do it by faith.

I believe that when Jesus asked the Father to forgive them, He was appealing to the Father’s superior knowledge of justice and fairness.

When evil happens to us, our natural reaction is defense and we generally want retribution, or at least we want to be vindicated.

Jesus was vindicated by the resurrection. The resurrection of the dead trumped the injustice and unfairness of His murder.

But Paul presses on to the knowledge of what it means for him to be the servant of Christ.

I want to have that kind of love inside of me, inside of all of us.

Paul wants to grab a hold of the love that drove Jesus to the cross so that he can experience the resurrection of the dead. He is willing to give up everything in order to be considered upright in God’s eyes. I am glad that Jesus made the command simple when He said for us to love one another. At the same time, Just like Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross, our love can be our own sacrifice in faith to God.

We need to make loving others the priority in our lives so that we too can obtain the resurrection of the dead.