Matthew 28:16-17

“Doubting Faith”

(Video Clip - “Couple tells of life’s struggles and doubting God)

“Where are you God?” That’s the question we often ask when we are faced with life’s difficulties and tragedies. In light of the tragedy that occurred at Virginia Tech two weeks ago, perhaps many of us have been asking that question. It is in the midst of tragic moments like this that our faith is challenged and often shaken, because they leave us with big, unanswered questions. Like, “Come on God! You’re an all powerful and loving God. We need you to have our children’s back. When our children leave home or when they mess up, we need you to be there God. Where are you?”

Often, these questions and challenges to our faith come in the midst of these kind of life and death issues. But our faith is also challenged in everyday challenges, like the couple we saw in the video. In our own community here, we all know of people who have been laid off or lost their jobs … people in their 50’s & 60’s who have been with their company for years. Businesses have relocated and people’s lives have been affected dramatically. We all know of people who have experienced tragedy and if you’ve lived long on this earth, you have experienced tragedy, hardship, and challenges. And what I want to say to you today is that, Resurrection Faith is lived in this kind of tension. We have all been reminded of this in a vivid way, when right after we celebrated the Good News of Easter … the good news of God’s triumph over evil and death … the horrible news of the massacre at Virginia Tech rocked our nation. Yet, this is where Resurrection Faith is lived out … in the real world.

And so, I think we can all relate to the Scripture reading that we have before us today. After the Resurrection, Matthew tells us, “The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” After worshipping the Resurrected Christ, “some of them doubted.” Boy, we can relate to that, can’t we? If we are honest here today, most of us have been among those who have doubted, at one time or another.

I have found myself among those who have doubted at times. In fact, the scripture that I best relate to during my life as a Christian is found in the 9^th chapter of Mark. It’s where a dad comes to Jesus because his son is suffering from life-threatening strokes. So, this dad comes to Jesus and says, “Jesus, I don’t know if you can help or not, but if you can do anything, please heal my son.” And Jesus says, “What do you mean, ‘if I can do anything’? Everything is possible to the one who believes.” Now, that tells me that the quality of my life and the outcome of my life are directly related to the amount of faith and trust that I have in God. So, in order to maximize my life’s potential, I need to grow in my faith and in my trust of God.

But it is the dad’s response that I can best relate to. This is what he said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” I don’t know about you, but that’s my life’s theme. “I believe; help my unbelief!” Resurrection Faith is lived between this tension of belief and unbelief, but it is acting on your belief, not being paralyzed by your unbelief. Did you get that? Resurrection Faith is acting on your belief, not being paralyzed by your unbelief.

And when it comes to living by faith, Jesus talked about something called “Mustard Seed Faith”. His disciples came to him and said, “Lord, increase our faith.” And isn’t that why we are all here today? We want Jesus to increase our faith, right?

You know, I assume and I expect that those of you who gather here on Sunday mornings are here because you want to grow in your faith. Our mission as a church is to help people to grow in their faith and to equip people spiritually, so they can become more deeply committed disciples of Jesus Christ. Some folk complain that preacher preaches too long or he teaches too much. And I say, that those who are coming to increase their faith don’t have a problem with that. Because that is what we are to be about as a church … to be shaped by God’s Word and His Holy Spirit, so that we can become more deeply committed Disciples of Jesus Christ. And that is what we’re going to be about.

So, the Disciples come to Jesus and say, “Lord, increase our faith” and here’s what Jesus said. “Truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed…” Now, I wanted to know how small that was, so this week, I got the brilliant idea of taping a mustard seed to each one of your Sermon Note inserts. That’s a real mustard seed. I needed to know how much faith I needed in order for miracles to come forth from my life. And there you have it. It took two and half days to tape all those mustard seeds to your inserts. That came out of an inspiring moment that I had on Tuesday morning.

Jesus said, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” Now, a lot of us in this room today may feel like we don’t have much faith. But as you look at that mustard seed, Jesus says, “It doesn’t take much!” The key is, not to worry and focus on what you don’t have, but rather act on what you do have.

A great book for you to read is by Francis Collins, who is one of the top scientists in America. He is the number one gene expert in America. He heads the Genome Project and he discovered the defective gene for cystic fibrosis. And what I love about Collins is that he is a scientist and a believer. I find it wonderful to see that those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can be both a scientist and a believer.

Well, Collins has written this great book called, God Language. And if any of you saw CNN last week, you heard it talked about and it’s on their website. He claims that our brains are literally wired to believe and to have faith. He claims that it is in every human being’s DNA to have faith. And this backs up what the Bible says, when it says, “To each one of us is given a measure of faith.”

So, you may be thinking to yourself, “God didn’t give me much faith, because I struggle every day with unbelief.” But Jesus says, “It doesn’t take much!” Just use what you have been given. Act on what faith you have and you’ll experience miracles.

Now, Jesus not only talked about Mustard Seed Faith, he also talked about “Childlike Faith”. In Mark 10:15, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Now, Jesus is not talking about going to Heaven here. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he does so in two ways. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God is both a present reality that we can experience here on earth and a future reality that we hope experience more completely in heaven. “The Kingdom of God” in this passage, is about the activity of God and the miracles of God that are experienced in our lives today.

In other words, you can live all of your life, die and go to heaven, and still miss the power of God and the miracles of God in your life here on earth. So, unless we become like a little child, we will miss the power of God in our lives.

Well, what does Jesus mean here? A teacher asked her class, “What is faith?” And a kid raised his hand and said, “Faith is believing in something you know isn’t true.” Folks, that’s not faith! Faith is not being naïve or believing in fairy tales. Every child knows that faith is based in relationships. Faith is based in trust. What does a child have faith in? A person that they trust, right? You see, faith is based on the credibility of the person making the promise.

Last year, I went on a field trip with my daughter to Kiroli Park. And of course, for Preschoolers, the attraction there is the playground. They have some really cool playground equipment, but some things are a little challenging and scary for preschool age children. Like the monkey bars. Most preschool kids can’t reach them. And if they do, they may get one or two bars, but then they just hang there, crying for help. Being one of the few men on the field trip, most of my time was spent helping kids across the monkey bars and other apparatuses.

One of the popular attractions for the kids was “the pole”. Once you get up on the playground equipment, there is this pole you can reach out and slide down on. Now, for the older kids, there’s nothing to it. But for a preschooler, that gap between the platform and the pole seems like the Grand Canyon. My daughter got to the edge of the platform and was suddenly overcome with fear. The thought of letting loose of the security of the platform in order to jump to the pole was more than her faith. She froze with fear.

It was at that point that I stood down at the bottom of the pole and tried to coax her to let go of the platform and jump to the pole. This quickly became a battle of the wills and she was winning, because she was convinced that she would fall and hurt herself.

I hated to see her defeated by her fear, so I sat down with her and said, “Honey, do you believe that I love you?” She said, “Yes.” I then said, “Do you think I would let you fall and get hurt?” She wasn’t as quick to answer that question. Preschoolers aren’t as dumb as we think sometimes. She knew where this was going. I was trying to convince her that she could trust me to catch her if she fell.

Finally, with her daddy standing at the bottom of the pole and holding out his arms, she made the leap and experienced the thrill of sliding down the pole. Now, I don’t think she was able to comprehend all that was going on within her that day, but you see, the difference was the trust that she had in her daddy who loved her. This is the basis of our faith in God. That is childlike faith. She was able to embrace that life adventure, knowing that all she had to do was to trust in her daddy who loved her. You see, trust is based on the credibility of the person making the promise.

And this childlike faith nurtures, what I call an “Ageless Spirit”. Did you know that you were created to live with an ageless spirit? But you know what? Some of us are getting old! I’m 47 years old, but a lot of you are older than I am. I know some 25 year olds who are a lot older than I am. Do you ever notice how a child has a light in their eyes? I mean, you ask a little child what they want to be when they grow up. I’ve never heard a child say, “I want to clean out horse stables and shovel manure when I grow up.”

You go into even the poorest areas and little kids will tell you that they’re going to be president, doctors, and scientists. I mean, they shoot for the moon! But the older we get, we tend to not nurture that childlike spirit and enthusiasm, and we begin to downsize our dreams.

I see this in a lot of young people. When I ask those in high school and college what they are going to be, they say, “I want to be a neurosurgeon or I’m going to be a school teacher and I’m going to change the world.” They’ve got this light in their eyes! They know that they have been created for greatness. But then, you graduate and you go out to teach in the public school system and you deal with the demons in children for three years. We meet with the skeptics and we meet with resistance, and soon, we begin to loose the light in our eyes. We begin to quit believing in miracles. And we resign ourselves to just living to get by.

But this is what I love about Moses. Listen to what it says in Deuteronomy 34:7. “Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; but his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone.” Even at 120 years old, after putting up with those “stiff-necked Israelites”, Moses had that “ageless spirit”. He still had the light of a child in his eyes. He lived with a passionate enthusiasm toward life.

You see, it is not about how little faith we think we have. We all have faith. We have all been wired to believe. What we have to do, in order to experience the power of God’s Resurrected presence in our lives is to “activate our faith”. We have to exercise the faith that we have been given.

Now, there are three dimensions that make us uniquely human. Do you know what those three dimensions are? It is our mind, our body, and our spirit. And in order to maximize who God has created us to be, we have to continually exercise our minds, our bodies, and our spirits.

Those who study how to maximize our quality of life mentally, claim that it is important that we continually learn new things. By learning new things, experts claim that we can delay and maybe miss entirely dementia. Those in their 70’s and 80’s who read fervently and who enroll in college classes, who are always striving to learn new things, they are experiencing this. By exercising your mind and learning new things, we create new mind patterns.

The same is true physically. As we age, we loose muscle strength and bone density. And the best way to delay that and to maximize our physical health is to exercise. We all know this … it is just putting into practice that we have trouble with.

Now, there is a lot of emphasis on these first two dimensions. The most overlooked dimension for us as human beings is our spirit. Most people are missing a growing experience with God in their lives, because their spirit is the most underdeveloped part of their lives.

For example, if coming to church for one hour a week is the only time you are exercising your spirit, do you see how limited your ability is to grow in your relationship with God? So, here’s my question … we know how to exercise our minds and we know how to exercise our bodies, even though most of us don’t like to … but how do we exercise our spirits?

Well, there are two clues that Jesus gives us after the Resurrection. Here’s the first. After the Resurrection, Jesus has a conversation with Peter. You remember when he finds the Disciples fishing and he calls them to the shore. When Peter gets there, Jesus asks him three times, “Peter, do you love me?”

Now, to varying degrees, I don’t think any of us would be here today if we didn’t love Jesus. We know what our answer is to this question, but this was Jesus’ response. Three times he said, “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.”

Now, what did he mean by that? Jesus said, “Peter, I am going to go away. I’m ascending into heaven. But to exercise your spirit, in such a way that you will be able to experience my Resurrected Presence with you always, you have to serve God’s purpose. You have to serve me.” And folks, we need to hear this. We are never closer to the presence of Christ than when we are serving the poor … the broken … the widow … the orphaned … the hungry … the sick … the imprisoned. As Jesus said, “When you do it to the least of these, you do it unto me.”

It is when we step out in service to others and pursue God’s purpose in this world that we exercise our spirits and experience Christ’s Resurrected presence. Do you see how this is an exercise of our spirits? To do this, requires taking risk and stepping out in faith. Like my daughter making that step to let go of her security in order to slide down the pole … serving God requires a step of faith. It requires trusting in God. And when we do this, we experience the power of his presence and we see miracles happen.

Our spiritual eyes grow dim, and cynical, and critical, and short-sighted when we don’t exercise our faith through service. I like how John Ed Matheson puts it, “Those who pick a nitch, don’t have time to nit pick.” When we’re focused on serving God and pursuing his purpose, our eyes are aglow and our spirits are renewed with an ageless enthusiasm for love of God and love of others. And in that, we experience God’s Kingdom here on earth.

The first way we exercise our spirits is by serving God’s purpose. The second way, is “to connect to a community of belonging”. When Jesus was on this earth after the Resurrection, he was with the Disciples for 40 days. On the 40^th day, he ascended into heaven. Before he left, though, he made sure that his disciples and followers were closely connected in a belonging kind of community.

We read that 10 days after Jesus ascended into heaven, he returned in the form of the Holy Spirit. We call this the Day of Pentecost. And here is what we read about this in Acts 2:1, “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Foks, this is how we experience the Risen Christ today. He appears in community. Jesus said, “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in your midst.”

And connecting to a belonging community is more than just attending church. A healthy church is made up of many smaller communities of believers. This is what the United Methodist Church was founded upon. The people called Methodist met regularly together in small groups called “Classes” and “Societies” for the purpose of growing together in Christ … to care for one another … to encourage and pray for one another … to hold one another accountable spiritually … and to serve together.

After Pentecost, Jesus’ followers began to meet together regularly. In Acts 2:42 we read, “They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

It is in community that we experience the Risen Christ. And it is by being in Christian community with others that we exercise our spirit. I’m not talking about groups that exercise their mouths or self-interests. We’re not talking about fellowship groups or social clubs here. I’m talking about a group that is focused on growing together in Christ and building one another up in Christ. This is what all of our Sunday School classes and small groups should be about.

So, the question is, “Are you connected to a belonging kind of community?” “Are you a part of a community of believers with whom you are sharing life’s ups and downs together, and seeking to grow together in Christ?” If not, then you are missing out on one of the greatest blessings of life. You will never experience God’s Kingdom and Resurrected presence here on earth as God intended and you will never maximize your spiritual life. If you’re not a part of such a group, let me know and we’ll either find you one or help you to start one.

The truth is, we were created to be in community. As God said at the beginning of creation, “It is not good for man to be alone.” We have to connect to a community of belonging, because we cannot live the life of faith alone.

You see, Resurrection Faith is lived in this tension between belief and unbelief. And the key is to act on your belief and not to be paralyzed by your unbelief. In order to do this, we have to exercise our spirits, by serving God’s purposes and staying connected to a Christian Community of belonging.

You see, Christ is risen and he does live today! He still has the power to overcome evil and death, even tragedies like the senseless slaying of college students at Virginia Tech. As you turn your attention to the video screen you will see images of the prayer vigil that was held at Virginia Tech on April 17^th. As you look at these images of people acting on their faith … even though they may not have felt like it and surely they had questions and doubts … and you see people coming together in Christian community to encourage and support one another … see if you can see the presence of Jesus alive and at work in our world today.

(Video – Virginia Tech Prayer Vigil)