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Thinking about Thomas’s story should encourage all of us as we struggle with doubts throughout life. Join Pastor Tim as he shares a message from John 20:24-29 on Thomas and Jesus’s love for the disciple even in his doubts.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor describes Thomas as having a pattern of “despairing faithfulness”—he keeps following Jesus even while assuming the worst will happen. When have you experienced this in your own life? What does it look like to follow Jesus while wrestling with doubt at the same time?
Thomas demanded tangible proof before he would believe. What kinds of “proof” do we sometimes demand from God today, and how does Jesus’s gentle response to Thomas reshape the way we think about those demands?
The sermon argues that we have “far more testimony to the resurrection than to many things we take for granted in history,” yet we still doubt. What are the practical obstacles that keep us from trusting the evidence we have? How is doubt different from a lack of proof?
Looking at Thomas’s earlier moments in John 11 and 14, how might a lifelong pattern of cautious or Eeyore-like thinking prepare the ground for bigger doubts later—and what healthy habits could interrupt that pattern? Can you think of specific areas where accumulated small doubts have affected your faith more than one big crisis?
Jesus came back specifically for Thomas rather than leaving him behind. How might we, as a church or small group, better show up for people whose doubts make them feel left out—and how does leading with God’s love rather than arguments change the way we help someone who is struggling?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening and welcome to Steadfast at Little Hills Church. We’re so glad to have you here tonight, and I’m so glad to get to dig into the second part of our new series, Closed Doors, with you. Tonight we’re thinking about doubt, and that’s not necessarily the most cheerful topic; it’s not necessarily a topic that we maybe get excited about, and yet it’s a topic that speaks to something we all struggle with. I think probably all of us at some point have had to deal with doubt and uncertainty, and we live in an uncertain time, so perhaps you’re dealing with it right now.
And so let’s go ahead and pray, and then we’re going to dig into God’s Word for encouragement about how he loves us even when we doubt. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your goodness. Thank you for your love. Thank you for loving us even when we doubt, even when we’re uncertain. Thank you for being the God who we can be confident in at every single point in our lives. Lord, would you be with us tonight as we consider Thomas and his story, and most of all how Jesus loved him and loves us. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
As I said, we all struggle with doubt. I have to confess, I struggle with doubt when people talk about fried chicken. You see, I love fried chicken, but I’m very picky about my fried chicken, and one of the things that I’ve struggled with over the years is that people have recommended different kinds of fried chicken. They say, “This is amazing. You should really try this fried chicken.” And I go there and I try it, and what I find is the breading is limp, or the chicken isn’t very flavorful. So many times I’ve started to believe someone telling me something about the good news of some fried chicken, and it turns out to be nothing more than another piece of not-so-great fried chicken.
So I struggle a lot with doubt when it comes to that, and struggle to believe when people say that they’ve found really good chicken. And there’s so many, that’s a silly example in a way, but how many times in life do we find the same thing? We have experiences of being let down, of things not happening, and so when someone says something has happened, we doubt.
And that’s what we find tonight in John chapter 20, as we go to verses 24 to 29: Thomas is struggling with doubt. He, like us, has surely had many disappointments in life, and one thing he has seen consistently in life, well, not quite consistently, but mostly consistently in life, is that people don’t come back from the dead. He did get to see Lazarus, but even then, that’s unusual. And now the one who brought Lazarus back to life himself is dead. How could Jesus be resurrected? That is what Thomas struggles with.
Let’s go ahead and read Thomas’ story, John chapter 20, verses 24 to 29. It says, “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 the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.’”
But what do we see that happens? It says, “Eight days later, his disciples were again inside, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then 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.”
What a beautiful confession. And Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
What an amazing story if you think about it. You go from someone who is totally convinced that Jesus couldn’t possibly be resurrected. He’s hearing all these reports and he says, “No, no, I don’t think that could possibly happen. I won’t believe it. I’m not going to believe it.” And by the end of that little interaction with Jesus, what does he say? “My Lord and my God.” He recognizes who Jesus is.
Doubt often sneaks up on us, and I think that’s what we see here with Thomas. Thomas didn’t set out to be a doubter. I’m sure if at the beginning of the Gospels, he’d been told, “By the way, Thomas, for the rest of world history, people are going to think of you as Doubting Thomas,” I don’t think he would have been particularly excited about that. I think later in life, perhaps he’d look back and see it almost as a good thing that people would remember how imperfect he was as he truly recognized what Jesus had done. But I’m sure he never set out in life to think, “I want to be known as the world’s greatest doubter.” No one would want that.
But doubt sneaks up on us. We don’t want to doubt, certainly not things that are true. And here it is — you have the disciples, the other disciples that were there, the ones that we looked at last week; they were fearful. They were afraid of the world. They were afraid of God. And yet they encountered Jesus. Jesus says, “Here I am here. You can stick your hand in my side. You can touch my hand and feel the wound from the cross. You can see it’s me. I’m here with you and I bring you peace.” And they say, “Wow, Jesus is with us and they’re restored and prepared to be sent out.”
But Thomas wasn’t there. And now they’re telling him, “Thomas, you just got to listen to us. I know you don’t believe it. I know that we didn’t believe it when the women told us earlier, Jesus is alive.”
Now, I don’t think Thomas’s doubt all comes at that point. That would be hard enough. But we see throughout Thomas’s story a bit of a struggle. And that starts in John chapter 11. And then we see it again in 14. We’re going to look at 14 first, actually, verse five.
If you recall, John 14 is where Jesus is instructing his disciples before the crucifixion. It’s in the upper room, the night of the Last Supper. And Jesus is explaining how he’s going to prepare a place for all those who believe in him. And as this is going on, Thomas interrupts him and says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” It’s a reasonable question. Yet here it is that Thomas is being told the promises of what Jesus is going to do for him. And he says, “Well, wait a second. Wait. I’m trying to believe this. But how am I supposed to? How am I going to know how to follow you?”
Before that, even as he was literally following Jesus to the resurrection, ultimately of Lazarus, Jesus is calling his disciples to go and see Mary and Martha and to visit Lazarus’s tomb. And Thomas’s reaction is he’s going to follow Jesus. But listen to how he says that in chapter 11:
“So Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’”
In a way, a very commendable reaction. He says, “If Jesus says I need to go, if we’re going to go and see Mary and Martha and the other people that want to kill Jesus, we know that. We know this is dangerous, but we’re going to go.” And it’s too late to heal Lazarus because he’s dead. But Jesus says to do it. “OK, let’s do it.” That’s what Jesus said. That shows faith. And yet there’s this defeatist attitude as well, if you think about it, because he doesn’t say, “Well, let’s go and see what wonderful thing Jesus is going to do.” He says, “Let’s go so that we can die with him.”
Thomas is struggling here as he wrestles with the fact that, yes, Jesus is leading them and he’s seen all these miracles. And yet Lazarus is dead. Why should he follow Jesus to go see a dead man when other people want Jesus and his followers dead? It’s totally understandable.
And yet I’m sure we think, “Well, if I were in Thomas’s place, I would have gotten it,” because I would have seen everything Jesus had been doing the previous part of his ministry for the years before that. And I get it. I’m afraid to say, at least for myself, that I probably would have been right with Thomas at best. At least he’s willing to go.
Nonetheless, we see these things. Thomas sort of has this Eeyore-type personality. He wants to follow Jesus, and yet he’s always kind of seeming to miss a little bit where Jesus is leading, sort of assuming the worst. And so that builds into this doubt, I believe, that he has as the disciples say, “Thomas, Jesus is alive. We’ve seen him.” Maybe part of it is that he’s starting to think about that meeting where he was not there, and he’s thinking, “Well, how could it be that Jesus appeared then? Why would he appear when I couldn’t be there? I’ve been following him for years. I’ve been willing to die back when we went to Lazarus’s tomb. Why would he go and be with the disciples without me?” Maybe a little of that was in his mind.
Or maybe he was thinking, “I know exactly what you’re thinking, guys. I don’t want to think that Jesus is dead either.” For all of us, I think we’ve had that experience where we don’t really want someone to have died—someone who’s a loved one who’s passed on. So we just feel like, “Well, if I just go over to someplace they always were, they’re going to be there again.” And of course, we know that’s not the case.
Maybe Thomas thinks that they’ve sort of deluded themselves a little bit. It could be any of these things. And yes, he had seen Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead. But I think even if you’d seen someone raised from the dead, it’s still so incredible. It’d be hard to believe it could happen again. And it’d be even harder to believe if the person who had raised Lazarus from the dead himself had been the one killed.
If Jesus could raise himself from the dead, why did he go to the cross? All these things that are going to be explained, and yet Thomas doesn’t understand them yet. And he just finds himself all this stuff swirling around and that doubt sneaking up, just like we often feel.
I think about what Thomas is feeling here. He’s fearing the worst. He’s seeing all the ways that what had been promised by Jesus couldn’t have happened. How often do we do that? How often do we think about what God has promised? We see God working in our lives and yet we still fear the worst, and we still doubt his promises. I think all of us go through that and that’s part of what’s so wonderful about Thomas’ story. We see someone being very human here. Thomas is just like us. And just like us, he doubts. He falls into what seems to be a despairing faithfulness. He’s still faithful to Jesus. He still loves Jesus. But he can’t help but wonder if maybe what Jesus had promised didn’t really happen.
Maybe the coronavirus situation has shaken your faith. Maybe you’re wondering, how could God allow this to happen? I think all of us, whether it’s in this present circumstance or other parts of life, inevitably are going to have times where at best we feel like we have despairing faithfulness. Even if we thought we believed, maybe we even start to question if we’re faithful at all.
That’s why this next part is so important. If we start looking at verse 26 and following, we see that Jesus cares for us in our doubts. Let’s look there again.
“Eight days later, his disciples were inside again and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then 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, my God.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’”
Look at that. Think about this interaction. Most of us are probably really familiar with it, but really think about it for a moment and what amazing things are happening here. What it does most importantly is that it reassures us that Jesus cares about the doubters. That’s what Thomas experiences here.
Jesus had already appeared to the other ten disciples. He appeared to them, he’d shown the proof to them, even when they didn’t ask for it. He’d offered them peace and commissioned them to go out and fulfill his mission.
But he comes back for Thomas here. He speaks directly to him. And so Thomas gets to experience something incredible, which is that Jesus is faithful when our faith is shaken.
I think so often we’re used to in this life that quid pro quo, you scratch my back, I scratch yours sort of attitude that if I’m faithful, maybe God will be faithful to me. But here we see someone who’s saying, if God doesn’t do a miracle here and doesn’t allow me to actually touch Jesus and see—not just see, but to feel that he is truly resurrected—I’m not going to believe. He’s stubbornly denying the resurrection, even as the ten disciples and the women are all testifying to Jesus’s resurrection.
What does Jesus do? He comes and speaks directly to Thomas. I think that is so important to understanding how Thomas can go from that disbelief to that wonderful, beautiful confession, “My Lord and my God,” because Thomas is able to experience who Jesus is by the very way that Jesus appears to him and loves him.
You see, Thomas had enough proof. If we’re surrounded by people that we know are trustworthy, people that aren’t prone to believing crazy things, and they’re all saying, “Guess what? We were despairing too, but Jesus is alive,” what’s the logical thing to do? When you’ve seen Jesus do all these miracles, when you’ve seen Jesus raise other people from the dead, when you’ve been with him and seen who he is, the logical thing is to respond, to hear them saying that and saying, “Oh yes, that’s what Jesus promised way back during his ministry throughout. This is what the scriptures have promised for all time.” As God revealed himself to his people, what did he promise? He promised these things. We’re seeing them fulfilled.
That’s the logical thing, but we’re human beings. We’re not often logical. Thomas had enough proof. We have enough proof. Yes, we can’t touch Jesus’s side. We can’t touch his hand, but what can we do? We can look back in history and look with confidence. There is far more testimony to the amazing miracle of the resurrection than there is to so many things we take for granted as happening in history.
We’re told thousands of people saw Jesus resurrected. We saw lives changed and we saw people willing to die for the resurrected Lord. They believed, they saw, and they testified so that we can believe too, far more confidently than we can even believe that Caesar existed. We have more confidence in what Jesus said and did than in what Shakespeare wrote. So we have the proof, and so why do we doubt?
I think it’s the same thing that Thomas experiences. It’s all those creeping little things, those times that things don’t seem to be going right. Those times we don’t understand, just as Thomas didn’t understand when Jesus was instructing them. And all those things erode away at our confidence, even though we have the objective proof. It erodes away like rust, and then we get hit really hard with something like a pandemic.
We doubt. We wonder, how can a loving God leave us in this place? What did Jesus do? He doesn’t—he offers the proof again to Thomas, but what does, what happens here? What does Jesus really do? Yeah, he offers proof, but more than that, he offers Thomas his love. He appears to him, and despite everything Thomas was saying, despite all the ways that Thomas was doubting, he offers Thomas the chance to escape his doubt, and that, I believe, is what transforms Thomas.
Thomas sees the God of the universe caring enough for him. He can triumph over death. He can go through walls. What is he bothering to do? To look to this disciple that just can’t quite get it right, and say, “Thomas, it’s time for you to believe.” Jesus cares. Thomas had enough proof; he needed to feel Jesus’ love in that moment. That’s the same love that Jesus offers you in your moments of doubt.
Maybe you’ve been doubting him all your life, and you think, “I just can’t quite believe,” and we could spend hours going over all the reasons why you can look to scripture and feel that it is trustworthy and true, but here’s the one thing you absolutely need to know, and that’s that Jesus loves you, and that you can be a doubter. You can be a doubter who thought for a long time your faith was really strong, and suddenly you’re feeling shaken, and you’re thinking, “Maybe I, even if this is all true, how could Jesus ever love me if I can doubt in this moment?”
You can know that Jesus is faithful when our faith is shaken. I think we’ve all had times with friends and family that they tell us something and we doubt them. You’ve probably had times where you’ve been researching something, you’ve been looking into something. Maybe you’ve been researching where to buy a car, for example, something kind of basic like that, and you tell a family member and they say, “Well, can you send me some information so I can look into that?” And you’re hurt, because you say, “Well, don’t you trust me? Don’t you know that if I’ve looked into this and I’m telling you that you can trust me?” We’ve been on both the receiving and the giving end of those sorts of moments of doubt, and oftentimes they hurt us even after we move past them.
And it’d be so much easier to think, “Well, Jesus, if I’ve doubted you, if I’ve heard all of your promises, if I’ve heard who you are, if I’ve seen you work in my life and yet I doubt, how could you ever love me?” And it starts to become more than just doubt, it becomes more right back to that fear we talked about last week, and we start to think, “It doesn’t matter if I ever get past this doubt or not, God’s going to be mad at me. If I can’t be faithful to him, how can he be faithful to me?”
And yet here we see in Jesus’ interaction with Thomas the answer, that Jesus is faithful when our faith is shaken. That’s true for Thomas, but it’s true for me too when my faith is shaken. That’s true for you too. That’s the good news we find in here, that God is patient and kind and he loves us. And whenever we find that creeping doubt, the first thing we need to turn to is not trying to somehow turn to the proof—that’s a fine thing—but we need to start with the basis that God loves us.
That’s written throughout all of history. As you think about God’s word tonight, remember that he revealed it out of his love for you and for me, that we can know who he is, we can relate to him and be a part of his kingdom.
Would you pray with me please?
Father, thank you for loving us even when we doubt. Thank you for being with us when we’re scared. Thank you for being patient with us when, like Thomas, we have different experiences that keep chipping away at our confidence, and so when we finally, finally are called to believe in the midst of something really hard, we have a hard time doing it, we struggle because we just lose sight of who you are. Lord, tonight you help each of us to remember who you are and whether we’ve believed in you for year after year, but tonight we’re wrestling with whether we should believe. Would you remind us of your love? Would you help us all the more to be faithful? For you are the God who is faithful when our faith is shaken. We thank you for that, Lord. We pray in the matchless name of our Savior, Jesus, amen.
It’s been so good to have you here once again for Steadfast, and we’re going to continue our series Closed Doors next week. Next week we’re going to look at what God does with those who are fearful and doubting. We have this wonderful crew here, right? We have those who were busy fearing for the leaders, the religious leaders and the civil leaders, and we have those, or the one, Thomas, who just outright doubts. What’s Jesus going to do for all of them? He’s going to give them the Holy Spirit so that they can go out and testify to his goodness. He’s going to take all these broken, imperfect people and send them out.
And so I really hope you’ll come back next week, because what do we know about ourselves? We’re broken, imperfect people too, and God sends us out as well. So please come back next week, 7 p.m., every Monday night. Be good to have you here for that.
Also, our men’s Bible study is this Thursday once again. We’re going to look into Isaiah 52 and 53, some of the most beautiful, wonderful verses in Scripture, verses that speak to the love that Jesus has for us, even when we don’t deserve it. And so I’d invite all the men that are listening, that are maybe looking for a nice place to plug into a Bible study while we still shelter at home and await getting past this phase of fear, to turn to the one whom we never have to have our faith shaken in, because he is always faithful, and hear about the servant who took on our sins.
So that’s Thursday night, also 7 p.m. Be great to have you here for that.
Once again, thank you for joining us tonight at Little Hills, and as we close, let me just remind you, if you haven’t already, if you’d like, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can stay up to date on what we’re up to and hear more as we prepare to launch fully as a church in the future. I hope you’ll continue to share our posts and let people know about this short little time digging into God’s Word. I hope it was an encouragement to you tonight, and I pray that you have a wonderful and blessed week. See you next week.