Believe and Go
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Last week, we wrestled with the question, “Who am I seeking?” and saw that we should be seeking the Risen Savior.
Today, we are going to see what happens when you have encountered the Risen Savior.
As we look at some of the times Jesus appeared to his disciples, we will see that, once we understand who Jesus is and what he has done for us, we have to respond by believing and going.
Now, we are going to flip the order of the passage around a bit when we talk about it, but let’s start by reading the entire thing.
The reason for that is because we need to be sure of what believing looks like before we can be ready to go.
That will make more sense as we go along, so hang with me.
As we read the passage, it is a little lengthy, so I would encourage you to follow along in your Bible or the Bible in the back of the pew in front of you.
Start reading with me in verse 19-29....
Let’s start in this second section and see that, once we realize who Jesus is and what he has done, we must...
1) Believe.
1) Believe.
As we have worked our way through John, we have seen that belief is an incredibly important part of following Jesus.
We saw last week where John saw the empty tomb and believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, and now, ten of the disciples have believed because they saw him.
Then, there’s Thomas. This is where the term “doubting Thomas” comes into play.
As we watch Thomas struggle with unbelief, we get a picture of what it really looks like truly to believe in Jesus.
Pick up again in verse 24-25.
Thomas had heard the stories, but he felt like he needed to see it for himself.
You may have been or even still are in the place where Thomas was— “If God is real, then why doesn’t he just show up right here and then I could see him. If he did, I would totally believe.”
Here’s the interesting thing: God did that several times in the Old Testament, and people would get scared and believe for a bit, but then they would turn right back to their old ways.
The same would be true of you. If we drove out in the parking lot and saw someone who claimed to be Jesus and could say and do miracles, you would still say that this guy was likely some kind of charlatan or scam artist.
Isn’t that what the Pharisees did? They thought Jesus was possessed by a demon, and that was how he was doing the miracles he did.
You may not go there, but you still wouldn’t believe.
You see, at its core, belief has to involve faith.
It isn’t blind faith because we have the testimony of what God recorded in the Bible and thousands of years of testimonies of how God has worked.
None of us are perfect, but we are fortunate enough to have people all around us who are following Jesus, and we can tell you stories of how he has worked in our lives.
There is a basis to our faith, but it is still faith.
That’s what Jesus gets at in verse 29...
The disciples had the privilege of believing what they saw.
We have the blessing of believing their testimony.
Now, back to the idea of believing. What does belief actually look like?
Thomas had said he would have to see the scars and touch them himself to believe.
Hear again what happens. Pick up in verse 26-28.
Thomas saw Jesus, and Jesus knew what Thomas had said when he wasn’t around.
For Thomas, that was enough to settle his doubts—he didn’t have to touch the scars.
The essence of our belief is bound up in Thomas’s response to Jesus in verse 28 - “My Lord and My God”
First, you will notice that there is a personal response. Thomas wasn’t just acknowledging that Jesus was a Lord and a God, he was personally identifying with Jesus as his Lord and his God.
Be clear here, though. Thomas isn’t simply expressing “his truth” by calling Jesus “my Lord and my God”.
He is personally accepting what is universally true, not simply expressing something that may be true for you but not for everyone else.
Philippians 2 tells us there will be a time when every creature in all creation will acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, but that doesn’t mean that they are all going to be right with God. Instead, that will be the time when they see Jesus as he truly is and cannot help but acknowledge that he really is the Lord over all of creation.
Instead, Thomas is declaring that from this moment on, he will live a life where he willingly submits to Jesus’s lordship and recognizes him for who he is.
It isn’t enough to simply believe Jesus is Lord and God in some impersonal sense; you have to receive him and acknowledge his control over your own life.
This personal expression of belief recognizes two major aspects of Jesus’s work.
As Bible commentator John Phillips states, acknowledging Jesus as “my Lord” means recognizing his control over the throne of your heart.
He is the one who holds the highest affection in my heart, he is the one to whom I owe my allegiance and my life, and he is the one who calls the shots for me. My life is no longer my own; I am his servant and he is in charge.
That is coupled with the acknowledgement that Jesus is also my God.
Phillips explains that acknowledging him as my God means that I recognize his control over the throne of the universe.
He isn’t just a good moral teacher outlining an ethical framework that I should live by. Instead, he is the God of the universe, the one in charge and the one working his plan throughout every aspect of the universe he made.
You can’t just have one or the other. Belief requires a heart-level acknowledgment of his rule over my heart and over the universe.
Like we said, it isn’t enough to simply say “He is my Lord,” in the sense that he is the expression of my truth I choose to follow. He is also God, the sovereign Lord over all creation.
On the other hand, it isn’t enough simply to say “He is God,” and recognize his control over the universe without surrendering your own life to his control and following him.
Belief is both. In faith, saying “He is my Lord and He is my God.”
Have you come to the place where you have believed Christ this way?
If not, then you aren’t right with God, but you can be today!
Paul expresses it a little differently in one of his letters, but God says:
If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.
Believe, have faith, that Jesus is your Lord and your God, and confess that with your mouth, and you will be saved.
By the way, if you are here and you are saved this morning, are you still remembering that he is your Lord and your God?
Did your week look like you believe him to be your Lord and your God?
You see, that’s going to take us back to the first part of the passage.
If he is our Lord and our God, and we have believed in him, then we must also...
2) Go.
2) Go.
When the disciples believed, they were immediately sent out into the world.
Go back up to verse 21...
Slow down for a minute and catch what Jesus is saying here, because this is actually really important.
We have seen a few other times where Jesus has told us that our relationship to the world is supposed to be like his relationship to the Father.
Remember when we talked about his love back in chapter 15:9? We said that Jesus showed us the same love that the Father showed him, and then called us to show that same love to others.
Now, we see clearly that you and I are sent into the world just like Jesus was sent into the world by the Father.
This has been a major theme throughout the book. John has referred to the Father sending Jesus over 35 times in this book (I believe 38 not counting this verse).
In fact, the Father sending Jesus is so crucial, John says in his other writings that it is how God chose to show his love for us:
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
God the Father sending God the Son to earth to die in our place is absolutely essential for our understanding of God’s love.
Jesus prayed something similar to this back in his prayer before he was arrested:
As you sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.
So, if we are sent, what are we sent to do?
Let’s take a few ideas from what Jesus told Pilate:
“You are a king then?” Pilate asked. “You say that I’m a king,” Jesus replied. “I was born for this, and I have come into the world for this: to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
He was sent into the world to testify to the truth.
As we saw all the way back in John 1, he came to make the invisible God visible to us.
Now, let’s be clear: Jesus’s ministry was unique. He taught differently than we do, he did miracles we won’t typically be able to do.
However, we should be testifying about the one who sent us at every opportunity we get.
Like Jesus, we should be showing people what God’s grace looks like and means for them. We should be teaching the truth that Jesus came to save the world, and that people need saving!
There is a really subtle note in the Greek tenses John uses here that actually communicates something important to us.
In English, it sounds like God sent Jesus, and now we are taking over for him as he goes back to earth.
Interestingly, John uses a tense here that implies that God’s sending of Jesus is ongoing, and now the disciples are being sent out as well.
That means the work God is calling us to do isn’t us trying to do it on our own; rather, this is the work God sent Jesus to do, and he is still doing it alongside, in, and through us.
Remember, we aren’t doing this in our own power. When Jesus commissioned the disciples, he also breathed on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
It reminds us of when God created Adam. If you remember, he formed Adam from the dust and breathed life into him.
Now, he is breathing new life into the disciples.
This isn’t the full coming of the Spirit that we will see later in Acts 2, but the Holy Spirit comes to them to give them what they need in order to understand and obey for the next 50 days or so until the day of Pentecost.
For those of us on the other side of the events of Acts 2, the Holy Spirit comes and lives inside us from the moment we get saved.
We saw in John 16 that one of his main roles is testifying to the world about Jesus, and we said then that he is doing that through us!
Here’s what I want to drive home with this: every single believer is called to go tell other people about who Jesus is and what he has done.
Every single Christian is called to live a life of belief, claiming Jesus as their Lord and their God, and every single Christian is called to testify to the world about Jesus.
Why? Because he is God, and he is an incredible God who is far better than we could ever imagine on our own.
Let’s talk for a second about verse 23...
There has been a lot of confusion about this verse throughout church history, and I will be honest that I still have a little question as to exactly what Jesus is saying here.
However, here’s what he is not saying: He is not saying that the disciples, nor pastors or priests, nor any other human have the ability to forgive or withhold God’s forgiveness. Other passages, like 1 John 1:9, make it clear that that is God’s responsibility and not ours.
The best way I have been able to understand what Jesus is teaching is that, as the church faithfully proclaims what the Bible teaches, there will be times where we can affirm that someone has been forgiven based off what we see in their life and how it lines up with God’s word.
In the same way, we can also say that a person’s sins have been “retained”, or not forgiven, because of that same testimony: their life and God’s word.
Again, we are not the final judge; that is God’s job.
However, let’s be clear that there is an incredible responsibility here.
What I teach, and what we teach in our Sunday School classes or small groups or even in our own hearts, matters.
If we don’t hold the line and call sin “sin” where the Bible does, we are not fulfilling our calling.
In the same way, if we don’t extend grace and forgiveness where God does, we are falling short.
In both, we are dangerously misrepresenting the God who sent us just like he sent Jesus.
So, as we go, we need to take this seriously.
When is the last time you intentionally went into a conversation and asked God to help you talk about Jesus or even just to represent him well?
What about us as a church? This is an area God has been convicting me about recently. What are we doing gets us out of these walls and into places to tell people about Jesus?
Again, this isn’t to make ourselves feel better or to make others feel bad.
It’s to testify to the truth that there is a God who will one day hold everyone accountable and punish sin.
Yet that very same same God loves the world so much that he sent us his Son to die in our place and rise from the dead.
Now, anyone who will acknowledge that he is both their Lord and their God, believing in him, can find forgiveness and strength and new life.
Then, those who have received grace continue to go out and tell others about him, so God receives the glory he deserves and people receive the grace they so desperately need.
Do you believe?
Where is God calling you to go?