How We Believe

  

Text: 1 Peter 1:3-9

Focus: believing

Function: to help people live by faith

^3-5What a God we have! And how fortunate we are to have him, this Father of our Master Jesus! Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven—and the future starts now! God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all—life healed and whole.

^6-7I know how great this makes you feel, even though you have to put up with every kind of aggravation in the meantime. Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine. When Jesus wraps this all up, it’s your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory.

^8-9You never saw him, yet you love him. You still don’t see him, yet you trust him—with laughter and singing. Because you kept on believing, you’ll get what you’re looking forward to: total salvation.

Good morning to the beloved Children of the living God!

This Sunday after Easter, we look at the appearance of Jesus when when he revealed himself to Thomas.

From last week, we learned that the 11, actually 10 of the 12 disciples were in the room when Jesus appeared. Apparently Thomas was somewhere else.

And Thomas didn’t believe the report of Mary, the 2 disciples who were with Jesus on the road to Emmaus and the 10 who saw him in the room where they were hiding.

Thomas declares that in order to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, he must see for himself and if it is true, then he wanted to inspect the wounds to see if they were real. Hence, we call him Doubting Thomas.

Jesus is patient with him and appears again to the disciples, the 11 this time, with Thomas in the room. And before Thomas has a chance to ask, Jesus informs him that he knew his doubts already and offers to let him inspect the wounds.

Thomas believes and again confesses Jesus to be his lord and God.

And Jesus answers with the joy that Thomas believes now, but then says that others will be blessed by believing without seeing.

I believe he is talking about us. We take the resurrection as true based on the testimony of these witnesses we have here in scripture.

And Jesus calls us blessed for that.

And that leads us to today’s text. Peter is speaking about how he was privileged to be one of the actual eye witnesses to Jesus’s resurrection.

Peter, the author of this letter, celebrates what it means that God has raised Jesus from the dead and given to us a new life.

He focuses on the new life we have in Christ. It is led by the Spirit of God and it lives in the peace of Christ as it rests in God’s love for us and for others.

We rest in God’s love.

And Peter describes this blessing of rest in two ways. We have God’s promise of healing and restoration here in earth and the promise of heaven in the future.

And all of that is because God provided a way for us through the cross of Christ and the power of the resurrection.

Peter has great hope in the truth of salvation since he is a witness to the fact of the resurrection.

Thomas wanted evidence to believe. Peter had evidence and was convinced. His conviction was a powerful witness.

But we have a different approach to believing. We don’t see Jesus raised.

In Acts 1, we read that Jesus ascended into heaven after the resurrection.

When he ascended, he commanded the disciples to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit to give them the power to live the Christian life.

50 days later,at the feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came in a visible way and filled the now 120 believers who were waiting for the promise.

It was the birthday of the Church and it came by the power of God’s Spirit .

The way we have to believe is by the witness of the Holy Spirit toward us. God calls each and every one of us. Being in the Church, having a Christian environment around us helps us become aware of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives.

We believe by the power of the Spirit of God.

In Kairos, we depend on the Holy Spirit to do the work of transformation in the lives of the residents to whom we minister.

We have this phrase that we drill into the team: “Listen, Listen, Love, Love.”

Imagine that with me. When we are listening to prisoners, sometimes we hear some pretty bizarre things and ideas. Many of these guys are searching for answers and not necessarily in the Christian tradition, we have Muslims, Wiccans and a lot of white guys who worship the Nordic Gods as part of their affiliation with Neo-Nazi gangs.

We hear some bizarre things from them and our job is to point them to the God of Love, who manifested that love through the presence of Jesus on the earth.

We Listen to them with a poker face so that we don’t look shocked when they say something off the wall. And we don’t argue with their beliefs, we just simply keep pointing back to Christ Jesus and his love for them.

It takes a lot of listening, so we emphasize listen, listen first. And we listen without judgment, without thinking of a response, but we are trained to listen to them and reflect back what they say so that they know that they are heard and valued just as they are.

By listening to them, in whatever they say, we prove to them God loves them.

A new guy on the team, as we were going through this training yesterday asked us when we get to tell them the right thing to do to set them straight and correct them.

And we reminded him the second part of that phrase listen, listen, is Love, Love. By listening, they know they are valued by God who cares enough for them to get to know them.

So, our answer to the new guy on the team is the answer to the question posited by the Title of the Sermon: How we believe. My answer was trust the Holy Spirit to lead them into this new life.

We don’t need to press our hands into Jesus’s side, hands and feet, we believe by the power of the Holy Spirit leading us to faith.

So we have this text which I believe is a sort of prophecy of blessing to us about what it means for us to believe by the power of the Spirit.

Let us let the Spirit lead us into belief. Keep on listening for the leading of God in your lives.