I will invite you to turn to John chapter 20. I've just finished a series of preaching through John over the last year or more, and so that's the reason for selecting this. I hope that it doesn't communicate to you that you get to skip the rest of the book. It's just been reminding me what a wonderful book this is. So I hope that some meditations today on John 20 and then this evening, Lord willing, on chapter 21 are just an encouragement to return to the good news of this gospel. As we pick up in John chapter 20 at verse 24, we've passed through the climax of the story of Jesus Christ. He's done His public ministry, His teaching, His miracles, and then He has gone to the cross. He has died on the cross for the sins of His people. And he is risen from the dead. And he is now revealing himself to his disciples. He has appeared throughout John 20. We read of different appearances, including appearing to the disciples as a group. Although at that time, Thomas, one of the disciples, was not present. And as we'll read as we begin here, Thomas was not convinced by the other disciples that Jesus had, in fact, risen from the dead. And so Jesus appears again and leads Thomas to believe. And as John explains to us in doing that, he leads many more to believe as well. So let's give our attention now to God's holy word. John chapter 20, verses 24 to 31. Now Thomas, one of the 12, 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. 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 and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe. Thomas answered him, my Lord and my God. Jesus said to him, have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name. Again, this is God's holy word. Well, writing is hard. We have here the inspired word of God, scripture that comes to us not just from a man, but through the Holy Spirit himself. But that doesn't mean we believe that John fell into a trance and an hour later he woke up and was holding the gospel of John. We believe that God used him as a human with his personality, his abilities, his talents to write this gospel. And writing is hard. And John would have faced the same sorts of questions all writers face. What should you include? What should you leave out as you write your story? What should you use as the right word choice? What should you select? Maybe writer's block. Maybe distractions. Needing to come back to it and to continue working on it. All these sorts of things. John would have faced all of that. And just like any writer, John would have needed to know his reason for writing. There has to be a good enough reason to keep going and not just to stop. And John tells us here in this passage why he wrote. He says, here's the thing that kept me going, that kept me putting these words down. I wrote so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name. Why did John write? John wrote for you. You're the reason John kept writing. Now, of course, he didn't know you personally, but he knew some things about you. He knew you would come into this world that we live in, a world of darkness, a world of death. John knew that you would be a sinner. Someone born in sin and someone who lived out your sin, who broke God's law, John knew that you would suffer like all people, with shame and with guilt. He knew that you would not be able to solve that problem on your own. That if you lived this life on your own, you would never have a hope that was stronger than death. You would live an imperfect life, marred by sin, ending in death and leading to eternal judgment. John knew these things. And so John wrote for you to tell you about Jesus. To tell you Jesus is risen from the dead so that you may have life in His name. And my call to you today is to listen to John. Listen to what John has to say, not just John as a man, but John writing by the power of the Holy Spirit. Listen to God Himself telling you that there is a Savior for your sins, and that if you believe in Him, you will have life in His name. So I want to look at this passage from the perspective of how John is leading us to believe. John is writing, first of all, so that you would know the truth about Jesus. That's how he's going to lead you to believe first. He wants you to know the truth. And so, in this final story about, in John 20, of these first resurrection appearances, John presents us with Thomas, a man who does not know the truth. In fact, Thomas has a huge disconnect with the truth, because there's a man who is alive who Thomas thinks is dead. Big mistake, right? Now, we can understand where Thomas is coming from. In fact, Thomas' position is what would appear to be the most rational position you could take. If you know that somebody has died, you are on very solid ground to believe they continue to be dead. From that perspective, Thomas is taking the rational position. I should not believe that Jesus is alive. And so Thomas says, when the disciples say, we have seen the Lord, he says, I need to see his hands with the marks. I need to see his side. I need to see for myself Jesus alive before I would ever believe something like that. Otherwise, I will not believe. And so Thomas gets his famous nickname, Doubting Thomas. Thomas who says, I will not believe. We can understand where he's coming from and how he might see things, but I hope as we see Thomas' experience in this story that we will also be able to understand why Thomas was wrong. Why Thomas needed his perception of reality to be adjusted. He needed to know the truth about Jesus. And in fact, Jesus himself takes the initiative to make sure Thomas knows the truth. Verse 26, Jesus appeared eight days later. Now, that would mean one week later. Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week, Sunday. And the way that they would have counted the days, eight days is Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So eight days, we would call it one week later, he's appearing on the next Sunday as the disciples are again gathered together. This time, Thomas is with the disciples. Jesus greets his disciples the same way that he greeted them a week ago when he appeared to them. He uses the words, you can see this back in verse 19. Peace be with you. uses the common greeting of the people of the day. And yet when he is saying that, of course, it means so much more. When someone has risen from the dead and they say to you, peace be with you, they're communicating something more than I hope you have a nice day today. This is the good news. that he has dealt with sin, that he has defeated death. He is on the other side of it. And so he can proclaim forgiveness. He can proclaim hope. He can proclaim eternal life. Peace be with you. Jesus still says these words to his people. So Jesus says that to his disciples and he goes straight to Thomas. And it's really just a story of Jesus' mercy. Because Thomas, of course, doesn't have the right to make demands of Jesus. Jesus, I'm not going to believe in you unless you meet these criteria that I've set out before I'm willing to believe. But Jesus comes to him and says, let me offer you exactly what you asked for. Verse 27, put your finger here. See my hands. Put out your hand. Place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe. Now we don't actually know if Thomas did every one of those actions or not, but we know that he obeyed the final command. When Jesus says, Believe, Thomas replies, My Lord and my God. And we should give doubting Thomas credit here as believing Thomas. for making what may be one of the clearest professions of faith recorded through all the Gospels. As the disciples who followed Jesus were slowly coming to realize who it was that they were following, Thomas says, my Lord and my God. Now the word Lord has been a common title for Jesus that people address him. It's a word that could have been as simple as saying sir when you refer to him. It can have a stronger meaning, something like master as a title of respect and obedience. But the way Thomas is using it is clearly even more than that. Jesus is the Lord God. Jesus is the one true God, the one who is worthy of all worship and all praise. He is my Lord and my God, that kind of Lord. And so Thomas worships Jesus Christ as he makes his confession of faith. We'll look in just a moment at what Jesus says in response, but I want to point out before we do that what Jesus doesn't say in response. Jesus doesn't say, slow down, Thomas, you've gotten a little carried away with your excitement. That's what anyone who's not God and who has any sense of who God is will do. You can think of the angel in Revelation, that John falls down to worship him because he's so overwhelmed, and the angel immediately says, don't do that. You don't worship anyone other than the one true God. So don't fall down and worship me. That's what the angel says, a glorious angel. Jesus Christ is worshiped as the one true God. And he receives the worship. Because that's the truth about Jesus. That's who Jesus is. Thomas does not need a rebuke because Thomas has come to see the truth better than he has seen it before. He is recognizing Jesus as truly man and a remarkable man, a man risen from the dead, a man who has the marks of having been crucified. But Jesus is also the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, worthy of worship. And if we want to understand the message of the gospel of John as a whole, that's really what we capture here. We have Thomas' two words, and then John is going to add two more words. Why is he written? He's written so you can hear Thomas say it in these words, my Lord and my God, and then in verse 31, Jesus is the Christ and the Son of God. What is the truth about Jesus that you are to believe? You are to believe that Jesus is God, the one true God. You are to believe that Jesus is the son of God. He is the second person of the Trinity. Believe that Jesus is truly man. Christ is the anointed one, the promised king, the son of David who was to come. Believe that Jesus is that promised one. Believe that Jesus, risen from the dead, is the Lord of all. That's the truth about Jesus. It's a lot of truth. It's a big truth to wrap our minds around. And maybe we can relate to doubting Thomas. That's a lot to take in. That doesn't check all my natural boxes of the way I think things work. But that is the truth. And again, I hope that we follow Thomas and relate to believing Thomas and saying, this is what I need to confess to my Lord and my God. So John wrote for you to know the truth about Jesus, but he did more than that. He also wrote so you would know the evidence of that truth, the evidence that supports the truth. Jesus responds to Thomas in verse 29. He says, have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. As we read this, I think we should be careful, first of all, not to think that Jesus is assigning Thomas a place as a second-class citizen in heaven. Thomas, you have this sort of belief, and that's great that you've done that, but I have a blessing over here for other people who believe in this sort of way, and that's even better. No, Thomas is blessed. Thomas has all the spiritual blessings that Christ gives us. Jesus doesn't have tiers of Christians that he calls or something like that. Jesus calls his people together. And there's certainly a gentle rebuke of Thomas here. He could have believed sooner. But Jesus is not saying Thomas is in some way not blessed. He's not discouraging Thomas. Actually, the target for these words is not Thomas himself at all. The target for these words is the people who are not in the room listening to the words. The disciples are going to hear what Jesus says, and they need to report it later for our sake. These words are an encouragement to us, not a discouragement to Thomas, because Jesus knows most of those who believe will not see him in person. Most of those who want this blessing, who want to have life in him, are not going to see him in person like Thomas had. And so Jesus pronounces this blessing. Jesus also calls us to trust based on the truth that we know, the evidence that fits with it. That's another way this passage has been read sometimes, I think, is to say that seeing without believing is some sort of blind faith, and that is what we are supposed to have. If Thomas had believed during the past week, it would not have been blind faith. Thomas would have been listening to these people he knows and trusts who have seen Jesus, who have seen the evidence, and he heard it reported. He has credible testimony, and so he believes. So there's no blind faith in the picture here. Rather, Jesus is saying, Thomas, you needed to do this in person. but many people are not going to see the evidence in person. They will hear the credible testimony, and they will still believe. And that's what John does immediately after this. He shows that he has been writing in a way that builds up our belief, not as a blind faith, not as something that we simply leap into the dark, but this is coming to see the light. And so John says, verse 30, that Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples. And he chooses this word sign instead of the word miracle, which is consistent with what John does. He doesn't use the word miracle, he uses the word sign. Now, miracle's a good word. Miracle has the idea of power. And you can think of the things that Jesus did, even that John records. Things like turning water into wine, healing an official's son, feeding 5,000 men with five loaves and two fishes. Certainly these things are powerful, miraculous things. But John uses the word sign because he wants us to recognize that these powerful displays that Jesus did were not just magic tricks to impress people. These are evidence to establish the truth. John has given, or excuse me, Jesus has given these signs, he has performed these signs so that when he speaks and says who he is, when he receives worship, that we know God has authenticated him. God has given signs. God has given evidence. And John says, you know, there could be a lot more things I've written down. Jesus did a lot. But I've written enough here so that you can see there is a track record of evidence, of proof about who Jesus is, ultimately climaxing in a resurrection from the dead and eyewitnesses seeing him and being able to report that. And so these things are written so that you may believe. I think that's helpful for us to remember as we think about how God works in this world today, as we think about miracles in this world today. Is it appropriate to say God does miracles? I think it is. Anything that is powerful and beyond my ability to explain that we see God at work, we can call a miracle. But we don't have a miracle worker doing specific miracles over and over to show their credibility. Because that was a one-time thing. That was something that Jesus and then his disciples had to show us the truth about Jesus Christ. And so that's where the signs happened. So is God still at work today? Yes, he is, certainly, doing remarkable things in our world. But the way that we believe now is not by looking for the most remarkable thing we can find happening around us today. John says, here's how you believe. I've written them down. I'm the eyewitness along with other apostles. We saw all these things and we wrote them down for you and you have it right here in God's word so that you may believe. And so he points our attention to what God has said so that we will know the evidence of the truth about Jesus. So John wants you to know the truth. John wants you to know about the evidence for the truth. And then finally, John writes, he wrote, so that you would have an abiding trust in Jesus. An abiding trust in Jesus. I like the word trust to help capture what true belief is. Where is it going? And the idea of abiding, I take first from this observation about Thomas. I don't think this is Thomas' conversion story. This is not Thomas going from, I never believed anything about Jesus before to now all of a sudden I believe about Jesus. This is Thomas in the middle of a process. This is Thomas who not long ago was saying, Jesus wants to go to Judea and it doesn't look good, it looks like we're all gonna get killed, but we should follow him. Thomas was a loyal disciple. He said, let's go and let's die with him. This is a man who already had faith But that faith was not mature. And so Thomas was brought to a maturity of faith, a greater faith than he had before as a believer. He was called up into more trust and belief. And it's interesting to think about this idea of belief, and commentators will actually debate when John says, this is written so you may believe, is that he wants to convert people, or is that he wants people to keep on believing, who have already started believing? And then some say, and this is the position I would agree with, why pick? We don't need to pick between those two ideas. John writes this so that if you don't believe in Jesus right now, he wants you to start believing in Jesus. He wants you to do it for the very first time. And John writes this so that if you are believing in Jesus right now, he wants you to keep doing that. He wants you to keep on believing and he wants you to grow in that faith as a follower of Jesus Christ. And I think the way he shows this is by connecting belief using the same theme that Jesus himself so often used in John recorded. He says this belief is connected to life. Belief is connected to life. If you believe, you have life in Jesus' name. And so believing means having correct information. It means knowing the truth. That's certainly a part of belief. It means recognizing that this is how the evidence works, that there's a rationality to what we're doing when we affirm Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. That makes sense. Belief includes that. But belief doesn't reach its completion, its fullness, unless a person has life in Jesus' name. So what does that mean? What does it mean to have life? Well, you're all doing it right now, so you have some sense of having life, right? You are breathing, your heart is beating, there's an energy inside of you, you have some ability to move, to think, to plan, to hope, to dream. These are all the things that life is made of. But of course, the life that all of us do and that everyone in this world is doing right now who's living, this life has this shadow over it called death. It has this point of ending that we know it can't just keep on going. I can hope for a while, and I can dream, and I can have energy for a while, but I can't keep that going forever. And John writes, and he says, I want you to have life. And he knows about the life you already have, but he's saying, I want you to have something more than that. Eternal life. Eternal life. A life in Jesus Christ. A life in the risen Lord. A life that's not going to go away. A life that's not going to change. And that's why believing needs to be connected to this idea of endurance. It's a trust in Jesus that keeps on going. Because you don't enter into eternal life, a life that can never go away, and then you step back out of it and be done with it. That doesn't make sense. If you enter into eternal life, you keep on believing, keep on having life, you keep on going. And it never ends. So what does that look like? What does that feel like? That's where I like the word trust. because it's depending on Jesus Christ when we have needs. It's treasuring Jesus Christ in our hearts. It's having a love for Jesus Christ above all other things. It's worshiping him as the one true God. It's being able to rest in Jesus Christ because we know that he has given us life and we don't have to earn it for ourselves. It's being able to find forgiveness through Jesus Christ. My sins, I don't have to deal with them. Jesus dealt with them on the cross. And so I trust him with that. And that's the life John wants you to have. That's why John wrote. not just so that your heart can keep beating for however many years that's going to happen and your lungs can keep working for however many years that will happen, but that you may have eternal life and the hope of resurrection from the dead because Jesus himself is risen from the dead. Abiding trust in Jesus. And that's the application question of what John wrote here. Do you trust in Jesus? Do you trust in Jesus? Do you believe? Do you have that right information, that truth? Do you understand some of the evidence? But have you turned yourself over to Him and worship Him as the Lord and the Savior? Thomas wrote because, or sorry, Thomas didn't write, John wrote. John wrote because He wanted to see that story told over and over again. And as a storyteller, he told us about Thomas. And we can relate to Thomas in certain ways and the progress that he needed to make. But what's wonderful about the Gospel of John is that even as it finishes the story it has to tell in so many words, it opens up so many new stories. And as I was studying this passage, that's where it started to lead me to think, what are all the stories that have been written throughout the centuries because of this truth, because of this good news? And there are so many and they're so different. I started thinking of some of the stories I've read or heard of. There's the story of Jeanette Lee. Maybe some of you know that story. A young girl in China heard of Jesus for the very first time being cared for in a missionary hospital and almost immediately began to believe and to pray. Just a miraculous change in her life as a child. There's a man named Augustine going way back many centuries. He had a mother who was a believer who prayed for him, but he rebelled for years. He went through all sorts of intellectual wrestling about how truth works and what was right. But he says one day he read a passage from the Book of Romans and he says, as he read the last words of the sentence, the light just turned on. It's like suddenly I could see Jesus Christ. Another dramatic change. And then there are the stories that are not dramatic at all. C.S. Lewis has a fascinating story, another intellectual who wrestled with many different ideas along the way. But he says that his journey to belief was concluded on a trip to the zoo. He says that, I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And when we reached the zoo, I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought nor in great emotion. But he believed. And there's so many more stories. What's your story? Do you trust in Jesus? Do you believe? Your story will have its own unique elements. But John calls us all to come together in the Lord Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, and to believe. And by believing, we know we will have life in his name. Let's pray together. Our Lord, what a remarkable gift you have given us, to know that our sins deserve an eternal punishment. but you in your mercy call us to believe. Lord, what remarkable patience you show with each one of us, each one of us with our own struggles and questions and faults. We thank you for the patience you showed with Thomas, who very stubbornly declared that he would not believe. And Lord, you met him and you changed his life and you grew him up and affirmed him in belief. Lord, we thank you for the way that you have done that for so many of us. Lord, if there's any here who does not believe, I pray that you would write that story, even today, to give faith in your name. Lord, and for those who do believe, I pray that you will help us to abide in trust, to know that full experience of having life in your name, a life that never ends, because you were risen from the dead. And so I ask this in your name, amen.