There are ten accounts in the Gospels and 1 Corinthians of appearances of the risen Jesus during the forty days between the resurrection and the ascension. When Jesus came to the disciples on the first Sunday, he showed them his hands and his side to prove that he was the crucified and risen Lord. He commissioned them to carry on his work: "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." He gave them the life-giving power of the Spirit and the authority to proclaim the gospel of forgiveness. They were overjoyed. They had seen the Lord, and they had received the inner reassurance of the Spirit.

This encounter must have been life-changing. Doubt and fear must have been banished and replaced with faith and confidence. But their experience was not sufficient to convince Thomas. We cannot transfer our experience to others. They must experience the Lord for themselves. Just because it is true for me does not make it true for someone else. Thomas needed to have the same experience or something like it in order to believe. He needed concrete evidence. He could not take his friends word at face value. I can imagine the rest of the disciples spending a week trying to persuade Thomas to believe. It took Jesus having to confront Thomas with his wounds before he would believe. Thomas capitulated and surrendered. He acknowledged that Jesus had become his Lord and his God. He also, was radically transformed.

Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." St. John tells us that Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples and that he had written down enough so that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing we might have life in his name. This written record is meant to persuade us, even though we have not seen his resurrected body. We see him through the experience of the disciples. We form our conclusions from their experience. We have to trust the testimony of the disciples. (1 John 1:1-3) They wrote down what they saw and heard and believed. Like them, Jesus breathes on us and we receive the Holy Spirit, who confirms their experience to our hearts and minds. Their experience becomes ours. We have not seen, yet we believe. The Word and the Spirit supply the evidence appropriate for faith in Jesus: the Word which transmits the testimony of the apostles, and the Spirit which confirms it in our hearts. Doubt is a troublesome pest. It rears its head when we least expect it. It is difficult to eradicate. It attacks us and worries us when we are most vulnerable, when we are tired, or depressed or sick, or discouraged. We must be on our guard against it. We need the shield of faith to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

If you are still seeking and still have many questions and doubts, you need to resolve them, find answers, and extinguish the doubts. Don't let them continue to trouble you when you can defeat them. Don't let doubt rob you of the life that Christ came to bring you. Read Lee Strobel's trilogy: The Case for Christ, A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus; The Case for Faith, A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, and The Case for a Creator, A journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Toward God. For much of his life Strobel was a skeptic. He considered himself an atheist. He thought that the divinity of Jesus was nothing more than the fanciful invention of superstitious people. Then his wife became a Christian and her experience of Christ challenged him to begin a spiritual journey of two years to investigate the claims of Christ. He interviewed thirteen leading scholars who have impeccable academic credentials. He used his experience as a legal affairs journalist to look at numerous categories of proof - the chapter headings use the same classifications that you would encounter in a courtroom: The Eyewitness Evidence, The Documentary Evidence, The Corroborating Evidence, The Scientific Evidence, The Identity Evidence, The Psychological Evidence, The Profile Evidence, The Fingerprint Evidence, The Medical Evidence, The Evidence of Appearances, The Circumstantial Evidence. He asks his readers as the jury to weigh the evidence and reach a verdict. You can't have one-hundred-percent certainty, because you can't have absolute proof about anything in life. But you have the responsibility to reach a verdict.

In 2002 I preached a series of messages entitled Reasonable Doubt, Reasonable Faith, in which I tried to deal with issues of doubt and faith. I later published them in my book Buried Treasure, along with a series I did on the content of the Christian faith in the Apostles' Creed. In it I deal with Reasonable Doubt, A Working Definition of Faith, the Risk of Faith, Stages of Faith, Questioning Faith, Choosing Faith, Reasons for Faith and the Gift of Faith. I concluded with Why I Believe in Jesus Christ, which we provide as a separate copy in the entrance, and which we have to continually reprint because we run out of it all the time. If you have doubts or questions about Christ, and the Christian faith let me challenge you to read one of these books. Don't let doubt deprive you of the joy of the apostles and the risen life Christ has come to bring.

Over the years I have encountered many doubters, many skeptics, and have read their arguments. I have never been persuaded by them. Intellectually I find their positions to be illogical, and deficient. I have tried to listen carefully and respectfully, but their perspective seems to be colored by prejudices that prevent reasonable discussion. I often wonder what would happen to their arguments if they experienced an encounter with Christ, a miraculous sign they could not explain by their categories? Life has no meaning for me apart from my belief in Christ. The inward testimony of the Holy Spirit is so much more powerful than the intellectual pretensions of doubters. When Jesus comes to encounter me through his Word, through the witness of the apostles, through his Spirit, I have to respond. I have to stop doubting and believe. I have to fall on my knees and acknowledge him as my Lord and my God. What other options do I have: rejection, denial, or indifference. Do I embrace him and the life he brings, or do I flee from his presence? Those are the choices before me. That is my experience. What is yours?

Doubting Thomas stopped doubting and believed. What will you do?

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