He Lives to Bring Me Peace

He lives to bring me peace!  That is the cry of the Christian on this Doubting Thomas Sunday.  The second Sunday of the Easter season is a redo of everything that happened the week before.  This Sunday is all about peace.  Jesus didn’t have to come back and show himself to Thomas.  The other eleven disciples weren’t making the story up.  Jesus lowers himself to Thomas and to us in his mercy.

Last week on Easter we heard about Peter and John who found that Jesus was missing.  Mary met Jesus; he revealed himself to her by simply calling her name.  She believed.  But there was another small group of people who realized that Jesus was alive. These were the guards who “became like dead men,” the Bible tells us, when they saw the angels who rolled the stone away from the entrance of the tomb.  11 While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened.  The soldiers acted like little evangelists.  They told the chief priests what happened.  These Jewish leaders knew without a shadow of a doubt that Jesus had risen from the dead.  But they refused to believe.  How?  Why?

The Gospel for the Sunday after Easter is about doubt, there is no peace in doubt.  Our lesson from 1 Peter is about removing any doubt from your minds.  3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  I asked the questions how and why do people refuse to believe the great things that God has done?  One thing’s for sure it wasn’t for lack of evidence.  Faith or lack thereof isn’t necessarily about logic and making sense.  How and why can anyone doubt what God has accomplished?  The Jewish leadership for example placed their hope in a dead Jesus.  They had killed him!  But he wasn’t dead.  He had risen.  No matter how many times they saw Jesus walking down the street they refused to believe.

The sinful human heart is convinced by God’s Spirit that the gospel is true.  Hear the truth and believe.  The gospel carries with it the power to convince the hearer that it’s true.

Beat down by hardships?  We offered this song by the MLC choir – full of Easter comfort.

Want to hear more?  Watch this Easter’s sermon taken from 1 Peter 1 – He Lives to Bring Me Peace!