Jesus Is Greater Than Doubt - Archie Coates | HTB Live Stream

well very very warm welcome again from me and morning and uh to everybody as well watching online it's fabulous to have you just getting my props uh ready I we'll do a little bit of work with this flip chart in a bit thanks Maddie so we um are in the middle of the little series we' been doing since Easter uh looking at some of the resurrectional appearances of Jesus so we've looked at confusion we looked at fear and next week we're going to look at the topic of failure so cheerful topics and uh today we're

going to look at the topic of doubt if you've ever been here on a Sunday morning and everybody else seems to be like really into it like arms in the air and singing loudly but like you're not feeling it I chatted to somebody in the week who has been here for many years and actually served here as one of the team and he was saying you know when I am at htb at the moment I feel like it's all going on around me I feel like I'm in the middle of it but I'm not feeling

connected to it if you've ever had questions about faith and have taken yourself off to Alpha but in doing so you've discovered that your faith is being more dis deconstructed and you end up with more questions than you started with if you've ever found that your life is not turning out as you'd hoped or imagined I thought I'd be married by now I thought my child would be better by now I thought I'd had that job by now but I begun to wonder really whether God exists at all then this morning and this message is

for you we're going to talk about doubt one of the most famous places of doubt in the New Testament comes in one of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus with a disciple called Thomas and you may be familiar with this story but let me remind you of it or read it for the first time says now Thomas also known as dimus one of the 12 was not with the disciples when Jesus came so the other disciples told him we've 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 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 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've seen me you've believed but blessed are those

who have not seen and yet have believed doubt is part of the normal Christian experience sometimes people think that doubt is the opposite of Faith but that's not actually true if I put a word up here courage and ask you what is the opposite of Courage the answer is cowardice and fear sits in the middle fear is a normal human emotion which either nudges us what we do with it is either towards courage or towards cowardice if I put here Faith the opposite of faith is unbelief and what sits in between faith and unbelief is

is a normal human emotion called doubt and when we have doubt what we do with it will either push us towards Faith or towards unbelief the word doubt is from a Latin word jupitar means literally to it's to hover between two places and doubt is not anything that we should be ashamed of so unbelief is when you take an intentional deliberate decision to close yourself to God or with our doubt we nudge towards Faith which is trust in Jesus one of the stories in the gospels uh Jesus is with a man whose son is ill

and the man says to Jesus I believe help my unbelief he's putting himself in this category here but Jesus responds by healing his son I think it's his way of saying very kindly that actually what you think of yourself as being of unbelief is not actually that otherwise you wouldn't be here would you you wouldn't even ask me but what you have is just very understandable doubt which is nothing that you should be ashamed of and we all find ourselves in doubt from time to time I think because of one of three reasons what I

would call perplexity pain and people perplexity that we have real intellectual questions about the claims of the Christian faith or about needing the sense of more proof and evidence that's the issue that Thomas in our story has perplexity of questions second is pain that when we look at all the news and the world around us we can't help but think how come God allows all this innocent suffering if he really is good and loving and that can cause us to doubt pain also happens not just on that Global level but also on a personal level

if you've ever found yourself thinking that when life doesn't go quite as I think it should that can be really challenging John orberg said scratch the surface of any cynic and you'll find a wounded idealist underneath and then there's people yeah how come if faith in Jesus is so transformative why is it then that people with Faith seem to behave so badly sometimes while people who don't have faith often seem to be more understanding more caring more sincere more loving and maybe you've been let down by Christians or by church or you know others that's

why the moral failure of Christian leaders in particular is so damaging and all these things uh can get in the way perplexity pain people o of our faith a couple of weeks ago uh you may have picked up that there was an eclipse of the sun which could be seen in America my sister-in-law and her family were lucky enough to be in America for the eclipse and they put on the family WhatsApp some really poor photos but I found this one on the internet of the eclipse that happened a couple of weeks ago and you

know what an eclipse is uh eclipse is when the moon gets in the way of the Sun so it obscures our view of the Sun for a while and it shuts out the light now please understand nothing's happened to the sun nothing's gone wrong with it it hasn't disappeared it it is still there there but something has obscured our view of it for a bit and so it is I think with our faith that Jesus is still living still risen from the dead but sometimes he's eclipsed sometimes things get in the way of our view

of him things like perplexity or people or pain and it obscures our view clouds our view of him and leads to to doubt and when we find ourselves in this period of Doubt H how can we nudge ourselves towards Faith rather than towards unbelief that's the question and in this story with Thomas there are two things that do that the first is stay in community I like how we find Thomas in this story still with the other disciples even though he doesn't believe their account of the Resurrection because I think it would have been many

ways easier to have when we doubt we think I better not be around other believers or the church I mean I I I don't want to be a downer that I don't get it like they do I don't want to be kind of negative negative presence and also there can be a bit of a gap between their faith and my doubt and I feel it's a bit awkward it's like I'm a party that I'm not in the mood for so what I'll do is I'll just withdraw sort myself out get over my doubts and then

when I have done that then I'll come back to connect group or back into the church start going again on Sunday but when you have doubts you're not being hypocritical or dishonest it it's part of being in the Christian Community it's part of the normal Christian experience and I would encourage you with your doubts to stay within the Christian Community partly because according to the story it's as Thomas keeps meeting with the other disciples in community it's in that place that Jesus comes and reveals himself aresh to him in that Community but also don't remove

yourself because the Christian Community really needs you you know before Sam and I came to htb1 18 months ago uh we were leading a church in Brighton and when we planted that church for 14 years ago after we've been there a couple of months or so I remember having a conversation I've never forgotten with a young man in his 20s and he said to me at the end of one of our Sunday Services he came up to me and said can we have more doubt in our church and in our service and in the preaching

in the way that we set up can we have more doubt please and I've often reflected and thought about that conversation and maybe what he was trying to get at which is that every Community every church needs a place and a space where people can explore doubts I don't know whether personality profiling existed in Thomas's time but I wonder if he ever got to do the Myers Briggs test and if he did I think he would have come out as sens ing sensing types are people who have an emphasis on physical reality uh evidence facts

it's just like their makeup it's just how they are and both the other occasions when we meet Thomas in two other stories in the gospels John 11 and John 14 we haven't got time to look at them in depth now but in both those occasions what we see in Thomas is a questioning of Jesus Jesus he seems to have the kind of personality that goes deeper and further than some of the other disciples and it's how God made him it's part of his makeup and his approach Thomas's approach which is basically no sugar coating S

as it is is actually a real gift to the church one time it's his question of Jesus that leads Jesus into one of his greatest Revelations when he says I am the way the truth and the life that comes out of Thomas's doubt and question sometimes expressing your doubts what you think is a bit awkward or unwanted or a bit of a curse is actually a blessing because it gives other people permission to voice their doubts as well John D the 16th century poet he said the churches are best for prayer that have least light

churches are pressed for prayer that have least light in other words that churches that leave room for mystery that don't pretend to know everything they are places that allow people to explore their doubts and their questions and their faith for themselves there's a wonderful verse in the very seldom read shortest letter in the New Testament Jude and it just says be merciful to those who doubt be merciful to those who doubt I think that's part of what it means for a church to be a safe place that it means uh people can come into htb

and it' be okay to hide behind a pillar or to sit and choose to sit right at the back of the balcony htb needs to be a church where it is okay to be not okay otherwise how will we ever become a community of compassion for one another and for London you know unwavering Assurance about everything can sometimes come across as a little bit arrogant or smug vulnerability and humility are generally much more attractive it may sound strange but sometimes churches and people are better as in more empathetic more compassionate more understanding when they have

more doubt and I think that's why Thomas is included as one of the 12 disciples that's what I love about Alpha because Alpha is a safe place to stress test our faith in the context of Community Helping on an alpha small group is the favorite part of the job that I do I've been already collecting people for the small group that I'm going to be running the next Alpha starts on May the 15th I met uh a man last week after one of our services I've invited him and his girlfriend to come join my group

he said I've Been Around Church all my life but with all that's happening right now I'm really beginning to wonder and I was able to say come and joy let's explore this in the context of community so don't be a lonely doubter you however painful it is for you however much everything is crying out in you to withdraw stay in the Christian Community and church be merciful to those who doubt when you come across somebody who's doubting go out of your way to give them a particular Embrace stay in community the second thing that you

see in this story as to how when we're in doubt we nudge towards Faith one is stay in community the second is to move towards Jesus you know when we're in doubt we tend to do one of either two things either we put and keep Jesus at arms length or we decide that we're going to bravely try and move towards him and after he missed out on Jesus's first appearance it strikes me that the easiest thing for Thomas to have done would have been to keep Jesus at arms length he could have stayed away but

instead he kind of gets over himself and decides that he's going to move towards Jesus and I want you to notice something very beautiful that happens in the interaction that Jesus has with Thomas you you see earlier when Jesus has appeared to the disciples but Thomas hadn't been there Thomas had said to them look unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and my hand into his side I'm not going to believe a week later when Jesus comes and talks to Thomas he uses the exact same

words that Thomas had expressed to the other disciples put your finger here see the nine nail marks put your hand in my side now tell me how did Jesus know that that's what Thomas had expressed to the other disciples how did he know that that was what Thomas needed do you think it's because in the intervening week one of the disciples had gone and Found Jesus and said hey Jesus we got a problem heads up when you see Thomas you're going to need to talk about the fingers the nail marks and the hand and the

side because that's what he needs to see no no no it's because Jesus had been risen from the dead have been with Thomas all along walking alongside him unseen so that when Thomas expresses that to him he he he already knows without him telling him exactly what he'd said and what he needed and this is the point of the Resurrection that if at any point in your life you have put your faith in Jesus then Jesus lives inside you walking with you working in you through his holy spirit imagine for a moment that your your

life is a house and as you go through your life you have encounter various experiences and emotions uh pain uh anger uh disappointment uh maybe unforgiveness uh maybe doubt and these things keep on buffing up against your house knocking on the front door of your house but you're thinking well I'm a Christian I'm not meant to feel maybe pain or disappointment or anger or unforgiveness so you shut the door you don't open the door of your house to those emotions and those doubts and maybe they try and come around the side to a back door

or a window that's open but you shut those as well but what you should do when you have these negative emotions like doubt or anger or disappointment or pain what you should do is you should throw open the front door of your house of your life come on in Anger well welcome pain welcome doubt how good to see you because in the middle of your house in your heart lives the Lord Jesus and when these things come into connection mingle with the life of Jesus who lives in Us by his Spirit they get reordered and

healed and recalibrated you see what you actually need is not evidence but encounter what you need in your life is not proof so much as a person what we really want in all the unknowingness of our world is to know someone and to be known Jesus is that person he says never believe in my arguments but rather he says follow me your doubts will never be fully satisfied through a theological textbook or finding an answer to the problem of pain or discovering the perfect church but only in the Risen Living Lord Jesus Jesus is standing

in front of you today just as surely as he stood in front of Thomas and he invites you as well he said see the marks in my my hands put your finger your hand into my side Gaze on my wounds well don't you see I died for you I love you I am forever as much with you whether you feel it and know it as when you don't when you are full of Doubt or full of faith I am with you and when Thomas sees that he says my God and my Lord finally I'm not

a great fan of the nickname that's sometimes given to Thomas doubting Thomas as though doubt is his identity no doubt is just a place that we visit from time to time time in our journey of faith it never is what defines you Thomas is not a doubter but he doubts but it's not his permanent reality or Identity or destiny his identity and Destiny and your identity and reality and Destiny is not doubt it's Faith because your faith does not depend on how strongly you hold on to Jesus but it depends on the grace and the

mercy with which he holds on to you sometimes we think that our faith is as strong as we feel it is strong but your faith is strong if Jesus is holding on to you which he is and if you're just just about trusting him which you are and now we see only in part a poor reflection the Bible says like like in a mirror one Corinthians 13 says but one day we will see him face to face and now I know only in part one Corinthians 13 says one day I will know fully even as

I am fully known amen should we stand to pray [Applause] let's take a moment as we stand uh to put our our trust in the Lord Jesus he's here we can't see him but he's here by his living Holy Spirit The Same Spirit that J raised Jesus from the dead and lives in us and what I want to do in leading you in prayer for a few moments and then we'll have time to worship again as well I want first of all to invite anyone who's here who's maybe not yet a Christian that you've never

taken that step of putting your faith in Jesus and receiving him into your heart into the middle if you like of your house I want to give you an opportunity to do that as we pray today it may be that you have done that but with everything that's gone on in life you kind of lost sense of that and so you want to be completely sure today so I'm going to lead you in a prayer very simple prayer a Prayer by which you put your faith in Jesus and invite him to live in your heart

I got a prayer prayer which has a thank you sorry and please and anyone can pray this uh quietly in your own heart so let pray Lord Jesus thank you for your presence thank you for coming to die for me in my place I'm sorry for all the things that I do wrong in my life that would otherwise separate me from knowing god I thank you that on the cross you died for all those things so that I I could be connected with a heavenly father and that through your Resurrection you defeated all the sin

and all the separation that would otherwise exist between me and God I now receive your gift of forgiveness please come into my life and live in Me by your holy spirit amen