We can be inclined to delay approaching God, too busy obsessing on our doubts to come, much like Thomas in John 20. But Thomas did come and so should we.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the metaphors of delayed coffee, flat soda, and expired pudding to illustrate how we often wait for the “perfect moment” to come to God. How do these analogies challenge the idea that we need to “get our lives together” before approaching Jesus? What are practical ways we can apply this principle in our own spiritual journeys?
Thomas is described as a “committed skeptic who is committed to Jesus.” What is the difference between this kind of doubt and doubt that keeps us from faith altogether? How can we tell the difference in our own lives?
The sermon emphasizes that Thomas was not alone in his doubt—all the disciples initially doubted the resurrection. Why is it important to recognize that doubt existed among Jesus’s closest followers? What does this tell us about the nature of faith, and how might it change the way we view our own seasons of questioning or the doubts of others?
The pastor contrasts two approaches to Thomas’s story: one that celebrates him as a hero simply for having doubts, and one that shows Thomas moving from doubt to deep belief and transformation. Why does the pastor consider the first approach “sad”? What does genuine transformation in faith look like according to this sermon?
How does the principle that “Jesus meets us where we’re at” differ from the idea that “it’s okay to stay where we’re at”? Where in your own life might God be calling you to “brew the coffee” or “try the pudding” by responding to Him without delay, and what practical steps could that involve?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, here’s the thing that we need to remember. We’re talking about people like us. We’re snakes. We go on twisty paths that aren’t what God wants us to be on. Yet, God redeems us.
Now, last week we thought about Nicodemus, someone who was the hider. Right? He came in the dark initially. Tonight we’re gonna be thinking about Thomas. And Thomas didn’t hide, but we all know what he did, because how do we refer to him? Doubting Thomas, right? Can you imagine being known for eternity? “Oh, you’re doubting Thomas!” And yet, I believe because of what happened to him, he probably would say, yeah, I am.
And let me tell you what happened. Here’s something that’s beautiful about Thomas. Leo is anxious for us to dig into God’s word, and that’s good. We should. But before we go there, let’s think about preparing for things. I like to prepare for my coffee.
Now, anyone of you that knows me, you know I love coffee. Jeff and I were just talking about coffee before the service. Now, I’ll take it hot or cold. Jeff said he will only take it hot. But I’ll take it hot or cold. Here’s what I don’t really want. I don’t want lukewarm. I want it to be hot or I want it to be cold. I feel like Revelation, but that’s another day.
And so here’s what I’ve come to plan out. My coffee maker has one of the little timers on it where you can prepare it at a time. And so what I’ll do is I’ll often have a few minutes and I can get my grounds out, maybe grind some beans, put the grounds in, get everything ready, make sure there’s enough water in it, all that sort of stuff. But I know it’s going to be a little while before I can drink the coffee. And what I used to do is I would go ahead and brew it, and then you come and you get held up a little longer, and it ends up being, oh, two hours later and the coffee isn’t warm any longer. And you’re like, eh, am I going to microwave it? I don’t know.
So here’s what I started to do. I wouldn’t brew it yet. I’d use that little delay function. I’d go in and I’d try to estimate how long it’s going to be before I can have the coffee, turn the little knob to get the time set just right, push it on, and I know that coffee is going to be ready when I’m ready for it. So I do some of the preparation, but I don’t go ahead and brew the coffee.
Now if you’re not a coffee drinker, let me translate. It’s sort of like if you’re a soda drinker instead, and you just love your soda. Most of us like fizzy soda, right? We don’t want it to be flat. And so you don’t pour the soda two hours before you’re going to drink it, right? Because it’s going to be flat. It’s going to be awful.
I think sometimes we think that’s the way it is as we approach God, that we’re going to come to God, and we’re not going to have everything ready yet, and we’re going to get held up, and we’re going to be struggling to get there. And so what are we going to do? We’ll just wait until it’s all ready.
This is why I think that Thomas would love that we know his story, because Thomas isn’t all ready, and yet he comes. Turn to John chapter 20, verse 24, here’s what we read.
Now Thomas, one of the twelve called the twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, we have seen the Lord. But he said to them, unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of his nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.
That sounds definitive, doesn’t it? He really was doubting. But we’re going to see Thomas as a story of redemption. And all of us, wherever we are, if we’re holding back because we feel like we doubt too much still, and we’re not going to pour the soda yet of our lives, we’re not going to brew the coffee yet, we’re going to wait, and wait for that time that we can really be enjoyed by God, because we don’t feel like we’re there yet, let’s pray tonight that God would speak to those areas in our hearts, and help us to understand how he’s calling us right now instead.
Will you pray with me?
Father, we do struggle. We struggle because we think that we need to make everything right ourselves. We need to come perfect. You do indeed call us to come just as we are, because our hope isn’t in getting everything right. It’s not in being perfectly ready. It’s not in answering all of our doubts and then coming. The answer is coming to you. And Lord, we pray that you would help us to understand that and to live that this day. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Here’s something that we can see in the life of Thomas in this segment very clearly. Thomas is a committed skeptic. He is skeptical. He has 10 of his friends that he’s spent years of his life with who say they’ve seen Jesus resurrected. Hey, that thing that we didn’t understand that Jesus talked about, you know what? It actually happened, and he’s here. And Thomas looks at them and says, I don’t care that 10 of you say that. If I don’t see it, forget it. If I don’t feel it, not even just see it, I know that the mind can play tricks. I have to feel the wounds of Jesus or I’m not going to believe it.
I like what Kenneth Gengel says. He says that Thomas is the original show-me-man from Missouri long before there was a state. And that’s exactly what he is. He says, if you want me to believe, you’re going to have to show me, because this is ridiculous. I know people don’t come back from death, except for the people, you know, Lazarus. Yeah, Jesus did do that. But you know, Jesus did that. Jesus is dead now. Who’s going to raise him? I wasn’t born yesterday, guys, and whatever trick you’re trying to play, it’s not funny.
Now we can come down really hard on Thomas because of this and say, look at this skeptical guy. Why did Jesus even let him be amongst the disciples? Because there are others believe, Thomas doesn’t. Why would God allow this doubter, unbeliever, horrible man, why did he allow him in here? But here’s something that we should see as well. Thomas isn’t just a committed skeptic, he’s a skeptic who’s committed to Jesus.
And I think that’s a really important thing. He doesn’t understand, but he hasn’t ever understood as he was following Jesus. And as he didn’t understand, he loved Jesus anyway. Back in John 11, it says, so Thomas called the twins, said to his fellow disciples, let us also go that we may die with him. There’s a motto for a ministry, right? Later on, Thomas said to them, Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way? Thomas has a history of kind of being dismal. He’s the Eeyore disciple. It’s always wrong, and his tail is always falling off. It’s just, you know, I love Jesus, so yeah, he’s going to get us all killed, but okay.
We’re going to die somehow, might as well go. But he went. I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved Eeyore, right? Because yeah, he’s the donkey that’s always, always, always assuming the worst, but he’s the donkey that always, always is there too. Thomas is there. He doesn’t quite get it, but he’s there. He doubts the future, what it means to follow Jesus, but he loves Jesus.
You’re going to get me killed, Jesus? Okay.
Oh, well, it was more than that, even. Go back to where Thomas is being skeptical in verse, excuse me, in chapter 11, verse 15, we just looked at.
Look at this again. Jesus says, I am glad that I was not there, and this is when Lazarus died, so that you may believe, but let us go to him. And it’s in that context, when Jesus said, we’re going to go and see the dead Lazarus, and you’re going to see the resurrected Lazarus, because it’s going to help you believe, and it’s in that context that Thomas says, let us also go, that we may die with him, and we focus on Thomas, and we say, oh, well, see, yeah, Jesus said, we’re going to go see Lazarus, I’m going to do a resurrection miracle, I’m going to do that, and Thomas is being dismal, but notably, Jesus says this so that they can believe, not so that Thomas can believe.
Thomas is vocalizing it, but Thomas isn’t alone in the doubt, and he isn’t alone in the doubt on the resurrection itself either later on, because notably, what do we see? When Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus and goes back and tells the disciples, they don’t believe. Luke 24, verse 10, now it was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. Now note, when Jesus encounters the apostles, they’ve already heard from Mary Magdalene.
When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side, then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. So the women go and tell them, and what do we see if we were to go on in Luke 20, verse 10, there’s verse 11, it says, they thought it was nonsense. But when they actually see Jesus, they’re glad to see the Lord. So in other words, for all the times we talk about doubting Thomas, it’s really doubting disciples. They all did.
When none of the disciples were there, the male disciples, and Mary Magdalene, and the other women, they get the first word of the resurrection, and Mary comes back, and she’s just so excited, and they’re thinking, yeah, Jesus definitely pushed her over the ledge. She’s cuckoo. And now what are we going to do with her? What do we do with this woman that’s traveled around with Jesus, that’s been part of our larger expanded band for all this time, and now she’s really kind of going crazy. What do we do with her? It’s not until everyone but Thomas encounters Jesus, then they rejoice.
So for all that we give Thomas trouble, all the doubting that we talk about, it’s really that all of them are struggling, but Thomas is willing to admit it. And I think one thing with that is that a lot of times when we’re struggling, a lot of times when God’s leading us and we’re reading His Word and trying to understand it, you know the problem that we run into? The problem that we run into is that we don’t even want to say where we’re struggling so that we can help each other as the body of Christ.
Why? People will think less of us if they know that we’re struggling. So I’ll just keep it inside. We have to prove that we get it. People who don’t get things aren’t at the same level as those that do, right? I remember in college I was one of those people going in that thought, I don’t know what’s wrong with these silly people that go to college and then change majors. Why do they change majors? Just make up your mind and go and do it. It’s easy.
And then one day I was sitting in line with the change of major form, and I changed from being an MIS major to an English major. And I remember those early days as an English major that as I went into the classes, and I loved the classes, they were great, but it was a little intimidating because there were all these other people that went into college intending to be English majors, and they’re talking about this theory or that theory, this book or that book that I hadn’t read, and it’s sort of like, whoa, wait a second here, and you just kind of nod and try to say something intelligent because you don’t want them to know that, wait a second, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I was an MIS major. I was working with computers.
But you know what happened, it didn’t take very long, I realized that, yeah, all of us were gathering little bits that we knew and so on, but none of them knew everything. And then it was really pretty obvious that we were all trying to prove that we knew a lot of stuff, and there were an awful lot of things none of us knew. And that I wasn’t really like the outsider that didn’t know anything, I was just one of the many that didn’t know, and that’s actually why we were in the program, right, to learn it.
When you think about the Christian life, a lot of times it’s sort of like that, where we feel like especially maybe you didn’t grow up in church or you didn’t pay attention and you remember Sunday school as a kid mostly for the snacks, and you look at these other people around you and they rattle off a verse reference that’s just right for something, or they bring out a $20 theological word and you think, yep, yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. And you don’t want to say otherwise, why? Because you don’t want to be the one who doesn’t know. You don’t want to be the one who still has questions and wonders, because then maybe you aren’t really up to snuff to be in the church, you aren’t really up to snuff to be a valued member of the church family.
It’s okay not to know everything. And while some of the disciples put on a better face at times and look brave, and Thomas is just brooding on how Jesus was going to get them all killed, and actually, you know, interestingly, he wasn’t wrong. They were going to die for the faith, not maybe how he imagined. It wasn’t some hopeless cause, but it was going to be deadly for them as they stood for their faith. He was willing to say it.
And he gave all of us a gift in that, that we can see Thomas struggling, wrestling, trying to understand this and say, wait a second, Jesus picked for his inner circle a man who struggled and wrestled and often thought, this seems hopeless, but I love Jesus and I’m going to follow anyway. And he wasn’t so worried that people were looking at him and saying, well, you know, I’m a whole lot better than you, Thomas. I don’t declare that Jesus is just going to get us all killed. He was just very present.
Here’s a little secret. If you’re newer to the church, maybe you jumped on the live stream tonight and you haven’t been in church in years and you think, I don’t even really want to say anything in the chat. I don’t want to show up in the building. I don’t want to do that. Why? Because everyone else is going to have it more together than I do.
Well, there’s two things that you really should know if that’s what you’re thinking. And the first one is that it doesn’t matter. If you are the person who walks into this church or becomes a part of our online church family who has the least together, you’re entitled to just as much of God’s love as the person who has the most together.
If you believe in Jesus, if you trust in him, if you confess your sins and say, I need you as my Lord and Savior, Jesus doesn’t care if you still are in Thomas’s shoes or worse. What he cares about is whether you follow him. And so that’s the first thing.
But then here’s another little thing that you need to know, which is that those other people have it more together. No, they don’t. None of us have it together. It might look a little different for each one of us how we do and don’t have it together, but we don’t have it together. And sometimes we may have it together a little more than sometimes we don’t. The batteries may go dead.
Sometimes we don’t have it together, we just need to sing about Jesus’s love, right? It’s good to live the illustration sometimes. So we don’t have it together, right? And sometimes we think we do until the batteries go dead, and then we realize we don’t. So it’s okay not to have everything together as long as we know that Jesus loves us, as long as we know that the Bible does tell us that.
But then there’s a second thing that we need to catch here. We don’t want to stay there. Following Jesus means following him to the answers to our doubts and our struggles.
Verse 25, 26, eight days later, his disciples were inside again and Thomas was with them. All of the doors were locked. Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” And he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”
Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God.”
A week before, Thomas is absent and then hears this story. And the way it’s written, it sounds like the disciples, the other ones, they’re just chattering away. They’re just pounding with it. Thomas, you have to believe. And he says, I’m not going to believe. And he sees Jesus and he immediately believes.
I think one of the remarkable things that you see here, that sometimes we pass up, is that he doesn’t believe when he actually does put his hand in Jesus’ side. He sees Jesus and he believes. He wants to believe. He’s just struggling. He’s not trying to be hard. He’s just struggling. But notably, when he sees, he does believe.
When God works to show himself to him, he believes. He doesn’t say, well, okay, that’s a nice parlor trick, Jesus. You’ve shown up inside the building and you seem to know what I demanded, so let’s see if it’s really real. No, he gets enough and he responds.
And one of the challenges sometimes we have is that God answers prayers, maybe not as fully as we’d like. Maybe he reveals things, but not as fully as we’d like. And we say, well, I’m still not going to believe.
But notably here, Thomas’ skepticism is a skepticism because it’s so, he’s just struggling. He’s just trying to get there. It’s not because he wants to be skeptical. He’s not proud of his skepticism. He doesn’t want to live in a land where he doesn’t believe.
And that’s the crucial other side of Thomas’ life, that he doesn’t just say, you know, I’m going to be the cool disciple that always questions everything, that always has a reason it can’t be. He doesn’t want to be there. He is there. He’s honest about where he is, but then he’s also ready to move on from it.
Jesus meets us where we’re at. He comes, and if you come to him tonight and say, Jesus, I’ve never prayed to you before. I have no idea what this even really means. Jesus is going to meet you. He’s not going to just leave you high and dry, but be ready to actually hear, dig into his word with us.
Thankfully, in this day and age, you don’t even have to ask for a Bible if you don’t have one. We do have some. We’d love to give you one, but if you don’t have one, you can open your phone. You can open your computer. You can get to the Bible instantaneously.
Nowadays, with AI, you type in something that even remotely looks like a Bible passage into one of the search engines, and it pops up the passage. I mean, it’s so accessible.
If you’re saying, I want to know about God, but I just don’t even know where to begin, you can begin so easily, and we would love to help you do that. And if you say, well, I’ve gotten partway there. I am a believer, but I’m just kind of stagnant, likewise, you don’t have to stay there.
Avail yourself of all the opportunities God provides, and that’s the thing here. Thomas avails himself of the opportunities. He doesn’t want to be a non-believer. He doesn’t want to be even a believer who’s in a dark place. Thomas wants to be a believer who understands and experiences the Lord.
And because he wants that, he responds as the Holy Spirit speaks. You can see this beautiful inner working of the Holy Spirit in his heart, and he keeps moving, and that’s where God is urging all of us to be, wherever we are, whatever aspect of Christian life and discipleship and growth that we’re in right now, God’s calling us to be those who are ready to respond.
Batteries go bad, and I just say, okay, well, you know, silence is good. Now, no comments if you were thinking that, but, you know, I just keep talking, but our online church family can’t, they can just try to read lips, because I’m okay with this state. That isn’t where we want to be. We want to be desirous of something better.
Thomas says some things that we normally wouldn’t say, but he says some things, some other beautiful things that people normally wouldn’t say either, at least not Jews, not people who believe in the God of the Old Testament, because what do we know about God as he reveals himself in the Old Testament? There’s only one God, and if you believe that, and you should, if you believe that, and there’s this person that you’ve been spending a few years with learning about the teachings of Scripture, but suddenly you encounter him, again, your first impulse isn’t going to normally be to say that he’s God, because you didn’t think there were a bunch of gods.
Now, others in society did. The Roman emperor liked to claim the title of Lord and God, for example, and the Romans were obliged to worship the emperor at times, but if you were a faithful Jew, you had studied God’s word, and you understood what God said, you knew that wasn’t the case, and so the remarkable transformation of Thomas from someone who says the things that we say when we’re struggling to says the things that we say when we most fully encounter the Lord is really remarkable.
I mean, that journey is just incredible. We go from the one that we know as the doubter to the one who makes the most full, beautiful confession that we’re going to find in the Gospel of John. Jesus isn’t just Lord, he’s God. Thomas says, I’ve been studying unto you, Jesus, I’ve seen the application of God’s word, I’ve seen the prophecies come to life, and here’s the thing I now know as I encounter you. You aren’t just a great man, you aren’t just a good teacher, you aren’t just some superhuman being that’s going to show up in a cinematic universe someday. You are the very God that I’ve been reading about in Scripture. I don’t need anything more to know that.
Thomas doesn’t get there quickly, but he wants to be there. And in that whole process, he gives us a wonderful gift at so many levels. He invites us in our uncertainty, and he also invites us to know just what happened. Because how many people, as they’ve tried to cast doubts on the resurrection, will say, well, maybe Jesus came back as a spirit, or maybe the disciples sort of felt the presence of Jesus. And Thomas says, I don’t want any of that stuff. I know the books are going to write 2,000 years from now, I don’t want any of the stuff they’re going to write about. I just want to know if Jesus is really alive or not. Is he physically resurrected or not?
And so in his expressing of his doubts and the answers he receives, we also get a very, very clear punctuation point. It’s not just a period, it’s an exclamation point. Yes, Jesus is not only alive, he’s physically alive. He’s the only one who came into this earth as both God and man. He experienced death, but he triumphed over death completely, fully. And now we have the evidence written down of a man struggling with that and encountering him. He is being willing to move along with what happens.
Aldi has a lot of great things. I’ve got my Aldi socks on today, the colorful A logos on it, talking about the wonders of that little grocery store. And one of the things they have, they have these little puddings put in glass bowls imported from Belgium, I think. They look really good, and I’ve gotten them several times. They look really, really good.
Now, you might say, why do they just look good if you’ve gotten them several times? Well, the problem is for me is I’ve gotten them several times, and they look really good. They look kind of special, and they don’t have them all the time, so you set them aside, right? You put them in and think, well, when I can really enjoy, when I’m not rushing, when there’s not a lot to go on, I’ll try this.
And if it hasn’t happened multiple times, the expiration date on those puddings has come and gone, and I haven’t tried it. So it still only looks good to me. Trying to find the perfect moment, the perfect moment to try it, I end up not trying it at all, and I have to wait now again, this happened a few months ago, I have to wait again until they come out, and someday, maybe I can come back here and tell you if they really were good.
Sometimes with our pursuit of Jesus, we say, well, it’s my pursuit, it’s my work, so I’m going to wait until I have it where it’s the perfect moment, and then I’ll be able to taste the pudding and see if it’s really, and find out if it’s really good with Jesus. But the problem there is that it’s putting it on us, and it’s saying, I’m going to get it to that perfect point, and the expiration date is going to come first.
It’s never going to be perfect. What Jesus is saying is, try the pudding now, because I’m offering it to you, you don’t have to have it perfect first. Now is the time.
Here’s the key thing. We see a transformation in Thomas’ life, he doesn’t just stay at doubt, he doesn’t just stay at uncertainty. And because he doesn’t stay at doubt and doesn’t stay at uncertainty, he instead encounters the fullness of the love of Jesus, and he can testify to that.
What about us? Are we staying back and not fully committing to Jesus? Are we living the Christian life, but living it still with those assumptions that it’s not going to probably work out so well anyway? We’re like the psalmist we looked at earlier, where he’s jealous of the people who aren’t trying to do good, because at least it seems to be working out for them.
We look at passages like Psalm 110 that Rob opened us up with and think it doesn’t make any sense to me, so I guess I’ll just do enough, I believe that Jesus is God, but I’m not going to really let him transform you that much, because I’m going to say, Jesus, I want to be all in.
I heard a really sad sermon a number of years ago. It was from a pastor. She was talking about her experiences as a young woman. She was preparing for ministry, and she had all kinds of doubts, and then she realized that Thomas was her hero, because he had doubts.
I say it’s sad, because it wasn’t that he was her hero, because he had doubts and came to believe it was because he had doubts full stop. It’s okay if we don’t get it, and we don’t believe it, and we’re not really sure if it’s even true, is her point. It’s okay if my life doesn’t actually change to look more like what Jesus calls me to, because if I don’t have it all sorted out, well, you know, Thomas, it worked out.
It was such a sad, sad sermon, because it didn’t point to any transformation, to any genuine hope. It pointed to, it’s okay if you just dwell in the uncertainty, and it’s just uncertain, and it’s just dark, and you just do whatever you want, because, you know, if there’s a God, he’ll eventually make it work out.
That is not the story of Thomas. Thomas is a story of a man who earnestly follows Jesus, even as a skeptic, who wants to know Jesus, and as Jesus shows his love to Thomas, Thomas responds, and that’s where we’re called to. It is a move from uncertainty, it’s a move from the sin that we’re in to the rejection of sin. It’s a move from that uncertainty to the certainty of living in him, and it may not happen all at once.
She was right to acknowledge that sometimes we’re not where we should be, but that’s not an affirmation that somehow that we should be there. It’s a call that God is there ready to carry us out of it.
How do we follow Jesus? We don’t wait until it’s the right time to eat the pudding. We don’t put the coffee machine, the coffee maker on delay for 10 years, we brew it now. Jesus wants our lives as they are now, he wants us just to follow him now. We start, that’s how we follow Jesus, and then once we start, we keep on, not on our own strength, but in the strength he gives us, just as he gave it to Thomas.
Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, would you help us not to be those who get stuck in doubt? Lord, you don’t tell us the story of Thomas to prove of living in eternal doubt, but rather to say that you are there with us as we find ourselves in doubt. You want to rescue us from it. You want to strengthen us and help us to get together things that aren’t yet together. You want to bring us closer to you, and Lord, would you help us to want the same thing? Wherever we are, Lord, would you help us to pull the pudding bowl of your love off the shelf right now and consume it, because it’s there for us right now. You are there for us right now, and you will always be there for us as we come back again and again and find new ways to mess up and need your hope again.
Would you assure us of that, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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