SABBATH SCHOOL GUIDED EXPOSITION
Thomas, the Honest Doubter
A Guided Exposition on the Gospel of John
John 11:14–16 · John 14:5–8 · John 20:24–29 · John 21:1–2
KEY VERSE
“Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.”
John 20:27
Sabbath School Lesson 9 · August 1, 2026
Contents
Introduction: The Making of an Honest Doubter………………………………………………. 3
“Let Us Go Also, That We May Die With Him” — Thomas at Bethany………… 5
“I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” — Thomas in the Upper Room………. 7
The Refusal to Believe — Thomas Absent from the Upper Room………………….. 9
“My Lord and My God” — The Wounds and the Confession……………………….. 11
Fishing in the Dark — Thomas by the Sea of Tiberias……………………………………. 15
Practical Application and Conclusion — Becoming Honest Doubters………….. 17
Introduction: The Making of an Honest Doubter
The Gospel of John moves steadily toward Calvary, and the story it tells us here begins in the shadow of an open grave. Jesus has just withdrawn from Jerusalem, where the religious leaders had recently taken up stones to kill him[1], and word now reaches him that his good friend Lazarus of Bethany is gravely ill. What follows is far more than the account of one man’s illness and recovery. It is a carefully staged revelation of the glory of God, so overwhelming that even those closest to Jesus will find it almost more than they can bear. And it is here, at this hinge point in the Gospel, that a disciple named Thomas steps forward and speaks for the first time.
Bethany lay only about two miles from Jerusalem, close enough that returning there meant walking back into danger. The disciples understood this. If the rulers who had tried to kill Jesus once found him again within reach, they would not hesitate a second time, and if Jesus fell, the small, fledgling movement he had gathered around himself would very likely fall with him. It is against this backdrop of very real fear that Thomas speaks his first recorded words in any Gospel, and they tell us at once that whatever else may be true of this man, he was no coward.
Thomas appears at three further moments in John’s narrative, and each one adds a stroke to the same portrait. In the Upper Room, on the night of his betrayal, Jesus will tell the disciples that they know the way to where he is going, and Thomas alone will have the honesty to admit that he does not. After the resurrection, when the other ten testify that they have seen the risen Lord, Thomas alone will refuse to believe it without proof. And by the Sea of Tiberias, in a scene almost too ordinary to notice, Thomas will simply be there, one of seven tired fishermen waiting again for Jesus to show himself. Taken together, these four scenes trace a single trajectory: a man moving, not always gracefully, from honest doubt to honest faith.
It has become customary to call him Doubting Thomas and leave it there, as though one hard week in his life were the whole of his character. The label is not wrong so much as it is incomplete, and incompleteness of this kind can be its own form of unkindness. A man who was ready to die alongside his Lord, who dared to ask Jesus the question the other disciples were too proud or too frightened to ask, and who in the end made the boldest confession of Christ’s deity found anywhere in the four Gospels, deserves a fuller hearing than a nickname allows.
This study will follow Thomas through each of these four scenes in turn, tracing what his fear, his questions, his refusal, and finally his worship can teach us about the difference between honest doubt and dishonest doubt, and about the patient, wounded hands of the Christ who meets both kinds. Thomas was, in the end, very much like us. That is precisely why his story matters.
“Let Us Go Also, That We May Die With Him” — Thomas at Bethany
John 11:7–16 (KJV)
7 Then after that saith he to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea again. 8 His disciples say unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again? 9 Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. 10 But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him. 11 These things said he: and after that he saith unto them, Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. 12 Then said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. 13 Howbeit Jesus spake of his death: but they thought that he had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. 14 Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead. 15 And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him. 16 Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellowdisciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him.
The disciples’ alarm in verse eight is entirely understandable. They had just watched Jesus slip away from a mob with murder in its heart, and now he was proposing to walk straight back toward it. Their objection was not unbelief so much as ordinary human self-preservation, the kind any of us would feel with our hand on the door of a room we knew to be dangerous. Jesus answers them, characteristically, not with reassurance about the danger but with a statement about the nature of time and light: there are twelve hours in the day, and a man who walks in that light does not stumble. He was speaking of himself. His hour had not yet come, and until it did, he would walk forward without fear, because he was the light his disciples were straining to see by.
Then comes one of John’s quiet, deliberate wordplays. Jesus tells the disciples that Lazarus sleepeth, using the ordinary Greek word for taking rest[2], and the disciples, taking him literally, answer that if Lazarus is merely sleeping he will surely recover. Jesus has to abandon the euphemism and tell them plainly: Lazarus is dead. It is a small moment, easy to read past, but it captures something true about every disciple in every generation. We hear the words of Jesus and, more often than we would like to admit, we hear them wrong, filtering them through what we expect rather than what he actually means.
What Jesus says next is easy to misread as coldness. I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe. He is not indifferent to Lazarus’s death or to the grief of Mary and Martha. He is telling his disciples, in advance, that what is about to happen will carry them to a deeper level of faith than they have yet reached, and that this deepening was worth the delay. Jesus is not merely willing to raise Lazarus from the dead; he intends the whole sequence of events, sorrow included, to become a window through which his disciples will see the glory of God more clearly than before.
It is into this charged silence that Thomas speaks. He does not offer an argument, and he certainly offers no assurance that everything will be fine. Let us also go, that we may die with him. Whatever fear lived in Thomas’s heart in that moment, and there was surely plenty of it, loyalty spoke louder. We might justly give Thomas low marks for faith here; he clearly does not expect this journey to end well. But we owe him a high mark for courage, and courage of this kind, the kind that moves forward without the comfort of a good outcome, is not a small thing to bring to the feet of Christ.
So the question worth sitting with is not really about Thomas at all. Where do we stand, when faith and courage are weighed side by side in our own lives? Some of us trust easily but flinch at the first sign of real cost. Others will walk into danger for someone we love but struggle to believe God is present in the walking. Thomas shows us that Jesus does not wait for either quality to be perfected before he calls us forward; he simply calls, and asks us to follow with whatever faith and whatever courage we currently have.
“I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” — Thomas in the Upper Room
John 14:1–8 (KJV)
1 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. 4 And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. 5 Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? 6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. 7 If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. 8 Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.
This scene unfolds in the Upper Room, at the Passover meal that would be the disciples’ last with Jesus before the cross. He had already washed their feet, modeling the servant’s posture he expected of them, and had already sent Judas out into the night to complete his betrayal. The atmosphere in that room was heavy, though the disciples could not yet have named why. Jesus speaks of his coming death as his glorification, a word that must have sounded strange set beside the grim events already in motion, and he commands the disciples to love one another as their defining mark once he is gone.
Rather than dwelling on his own approaching suffering, Jesus spends these last hours comforting the men who will need that comfort most in the days ahead. Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. He promises them a future secured in his Father’s house, a place he is going to prepare, and a personal return to bring them there himself. It is a breathtaking assurance to offer on the very night of his arrest, and it reveals where his attention truly lay even as the darkness closed in.
It is at this point that Jesus says something that catches Thomas off guard: whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Peter, so often the first to speak, says nothing. It is Thomas who breaks the silence, and what he says is not a statement of unbelief but an honest confession of confusion. Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Thomas would risk looking foolish rather than nod along to something he did not understand, and in doing so, he opened the door to one of the richest statements in all of Scripture.
Jesus answers him directly: I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. This is one of the great I am sayings in John’s Gospel, echoing the divine name God gave to Moses at the burning bush[3], and it is as exclusive a claim as has ever been made. Jesus does not present himself as a way alongside other ways to God, one option among many equally valid paths. He presents himself as the way, the only way, so that no other person, philosophy, or religious system can carry a soul into the presence of the Father. It is a hard claim in an age that prizes many paths over one, but it is Jesus’ own claim, and the honest reader of Scripture cannot soften it without changing what he actually said.
Each of the three titles adds its own weight. He is the truth, standing in direct opposition to the deceiver whom Jesus elsewhere calls a liar with no truth in him at all. He is the life, not merely the giver of information about how to live but the source of life itself, come that we might have it abundantly. To know him, Jesus will say a little later in this same discourse, is eternal life itself, not merely the entry ticket to it. Thomas’s honest question, in other words, unlocked one of the most important doctrinal statements Jesus ever made, and every reader since has been the richer for his willingness to ask it.
Philip, perhaps encouraged by Thomas’s boldness, adds his own request: Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus’ reply is gentle but pointed. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. The full weight of that statement is almost too much to take in. No one has seen God at any time, John will remind us elsewhere, yet the only begotten Son, who dwells in the Father’s own bosom, has now declared him fully in the flesh. We should not pretend to have exhausted this mystery; the relationship between the Son and the Father remains a depth the church has spent two thousand years exploring and will spend eternity exploring still. What we can say with confidence is this: to be in Christ is to be, already, in the Father with him, and no greater assurance than that is needed.
The Refusal to Believe — Thomas Absent from the Upper Room
John 20:24–25 (KJV)
24 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
By the time we reach this scene, the resurrection has already begun to break in on the disciples from several directions. Mary Magdalene had come running from the empty tomb with the news that she had seen the Lord. That same evening, Jesus had appeared to ten of the eleven remaining disciples behind locked doors, breathing on them and speaking peace into their fear. Thomas alone was missing when that happened. Scripture does not tell us where he was or why, and we do well not to invent an explanation Scripture withholds; grief, in the days after a trauma, does not always keep people in the same room, and Thomas’s absence need not be read as a sign of anything worse than a wounded man needing to be alone.
What we do know is how he responded when his friends found him and told him what they had seen. He did not simply doubt; he set conditions. Unless he could see the nail prints himself, put his own finger into them, and place his own hand into the wound in Jesus’ side, he would not believe. It is worth noticing what Thomas is asking for here. He is not asking for a different kind of evidence than the other ten had already received; John’s Gospel makes clear that Jesus had shown them his hands and his side as well. Thomas is only asking to be met on the same terms as everyone else.
It is easy to hear Thomas’s demand as cynicism, but a closer look suggests something closer to a wounded heart refusing to be talked out of its grief by secondhand testimony. He had watched Jesus die. He had, quite possibly, expected to die alongside him not long before, back at Bethany. To be told now that all of that had somehow been undone, based only on the word of nine excited friends, was more than his heart could absorb without a foundation firmer than hope. This is doubt with a reason behind it, not doubt for its own sake, and Scripture treats it with more patience than the label Doubting Thomas usually allows.
There is, however, a real difference between honest doubt and doubt that has gone sour. Belief can be marred by fear, by a closed mind, by pride, by simple laziness, or by an ingratitude that refuses to notice the evidence already at hand[4], and when it is marred in these ways it curdles into something closer to unbelief than to honest searching. The same is true of doubt. An honest doubter remains open to being persuaded; what he asks for is not certainty in advance but an open heart that has not shut the door on belief. Jesus, for his part, does not require perfect faith from anyone at the outset. What he asks for, and what he will go looking for in Thomas, is precisely that kind of openness[5].
It is worth pausing to notice, too, how differently God meets each of his followers in this chapter. Mary Magdalene believed the moment Jesus spoke her name; that was reason enough for her. The ten believed because they saw Jesus alive and standing before them, and they never thought to ask for more than that. Thomas would need something more specific still. None of these paths was inferior to the others, and none of them was demanded of everyone equally. God does not manufacture identical proofs for every honest heart. He meets each of us where our particular doubt actually lives, and Thomas’s story is proof that he is willing to wait as long as it takes to do so.
“My Lord and My God” — The Wounds and the Confession
John 20:26–29 (KJV)
26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. 27 Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. 28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. 29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
A full week passes between Thomas’s refusal and this scene, and it is worth noticing what Thomas does with that week. He does not storm off from the other disciples in his unbelief. He stays. Whatever doubt was churning in him, it was not the kind that isolates a man from the fellowship of believers; he remained in the room with the very people whose testimony he had just rejected, still hoping, perhaps without admitting it even to himself, that there might yet be something to their story. That is itself a quiet lesson. Honest doubt keeps a place at the table. It does not walk away.
And then Jesus is simply there again, moving through a locked door as easily as through an open one, and speaking the same greeting he had spoken the week before: Peace be unto you. But this time he does not linger with the group. He turns immediately to Thomas and addresses, one by one, every condition Thomas had named. Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side. There is no rebuke in this, no impatience at having been doubted. Jesus does not ignore what Thomas said the week before; he meets it directly, and in doing so quietly sets Thomas’s wounded heart at rest[6]. It is a peace that costs Jesus nothing to extend and yet means everything to receive.
And here the story turns. Thomas, offered exactly what he had demanded, does not take it. He does not touch the wounds at all. He simply falls before his Lord and says the words that stand, still, as the boldest confession of Christ’s full deity anywhere in the Gospels: My Lord and my God. Not a great teacher restored to life. Not a beloved friend returned. God himself, standing in the room. Whatever slowness had marked Thomas’s journey to this point, once he arrived, he arrived completely, further and faster than any of the disciples who had believed a week earlier without needing to ask for proof at all.
The wounds themselves deserve our attention here, because they did not disappear once their evidentiary work was finished. The risen Christ was no ghost, no memory conjured up by grieving friends[7]; he was flesh and bone that could be touched, and the marks of the nails and the spear remained visible in that glorified body, not as blemishes to be healed away but as a permanent testimony. Even now, seated at the Father’s right hand, Jesus carries those scars, and Scripture tells us that when he returns to judge the earth, those same wounds will still be seen, still speaking of the mercy that put them there[8]. We might have expected a glorified body to be smoothed of every trace of suffering. Instead, God chose to carry the marks of the cross forever rather than trade them for the appearance of an unmarked perfection.
Jesus’ final words in this scene reach past Thomas and land on every reader who was not standing in that room. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. This is not a rebuke of Thomas for needing to see; it is a blessing extended to everyone who comes after him, everyone who will never have the chance to place a finger in the print of the nails and must instead take the testimony of Scripture and the witness of the church at its word. That blessing includes us. It is, in fact, the very reason this Gospel was written down at all.
Honest Doubt, Honest Faith — Why We Should Not Call Him a Doubter and Leave It There
Step back from the details of the narrative for a moment, and Thomas’s story becomes a remarkable arc in miniature: from discouragement, to disbelief, to a wounded outcry against his own friends, and finally to a confession of faith that has never been surpassed anywhere else in the New Testament[9]. It is tempting to file this away as an unusual case, a hard week experienced by one particular disciple two thousand years ago. But Thomas is, in the truest sense, an Everyman. His doubts are recognizable because they are close cousins of our own.
All of us carry some measure of doubt, and not all of it is honest. Doubt can be marred by fear that refuses to look evidence in the eye, by a closed mind unwilling to be corrected, by pride that will not admit it was wrong, by simple laziness that never bothers to investigate, or by an ingratitude that overlooks what God has already shown. This kind of doubt is common enough in the modern world, including within the church, dressed up as reasoned skepticism when it is really something closer to a refusal to be moved. Honest doubt is different. It wants to believe. It is often carrying real pain and asking hard, legitimate questions of a world that has not been gentle with it, and it deserves better than answers that are too easy to be true.
One writer, reflecting on Thomas’s honesty, put the matter simply: he was a man who loved his Lord too much to confuse what he believed to be true with what he only wished were true[10]. That is a fair description of honest doubt at its best. Thomas was not willing to talk himself into a comforting story simply because the alternative was almost too painful to bear. He needed proof, not because he loved Jesus too little, but because he loved him too much to settle for wishful thinking. And here is the encouraging truth beneath all of this: God is not troubled by that kind of honesty. He would rather we brought him our real doubts than a performance of faith we do not actually feel. He wants our minds as well as our hearts, and he is not afraid of the questions we bring him, because he already knows the answers will hold.
There is a sober warning folded into this same lesson. In the parable Jesus told of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, a story distinct from the Lazarus of Bethany though it bears the same name, the rich man in torment begs Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his brothers. Abraham’s answer is chilling in its honesty: if they will not be persuaded by Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded even if someone should rise from the dead[11]. Dishonest doubt of this kind is not really waiting for better evidence at all; it will find a reason to reject whatever evidence arrives, because the resistance was never about the evidence in the first place. Honest doubt, by contrast, remains teachable to the very end, and Thomas is proof that Jesus is patient enough to wait for it.
So the label so often hung around Thomas’s neck deserves to be set down. Yes, he doubted, and doubted stubbornly for a week. But he doubted honestly, with an open heart, in the company of believers rather than apart from them, and when the evidence finally came, he did not hedge his confession or qualify it. He gave it all. If we must call him anything, we might do better to remember him as Thomas the Honest Doubter, or better still, simply as Thomas the Believer, since that is what he ultimately became.
Fishing in the Dark — Thomas by the Sea of Tiberias
John 21:1–2 (KJV)
1 After these things Jesus shewed himself again to the disciples at the sea of Tiberias; and on this wise shewed he himself. 2 There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples.
After the drama of the Upper Room, this final scene with Thomas is almost startling in its ordinariness. The sea of Tiberias is simply another name for the Sea of Galilee[12], and it is here, on the familiar shore where several of these men had first been called, that seven of the disciples gather to wait for Jesus. Simon Peter announces, without much ceremony, I go a fishing. The others, Thomas among them, answer that they will go with him. It is a small, human moment: having witnessed the risen Lord not once but twice, the disciples still find themselves filling the waiting with the old, familiar work of their hands.
There is something worth pondering in that choice. After everything they had seen, one might expect the disciples to have thrown themselves immediately into proclaiming the resurrection to the world. Instead they went fishing, and caught nothing for their trouble. It is a picture, whether the disciples intended it as one or not, of how little our own labor accomplishes when it is not directed by Christ. They knew the sea. They knew their nets. And still the whole night produced nothing, until a stranger’s voice from the shore told them where to cast.
That stranger, of course, was Jesus, though the disciples did not recognize him at first. Children, have ye any meat? he called out, and when they admitted they had none, he told them simply to cast the net on the right side of the boat. They obeyed, not yet knowing it was their Lord who had spoken, and the net came up so full they could hardly haul it in. Obedience, offered before recognition, is itself a kind of faith, and it is worth noticing that even the disciples who had already seen the risen Christ still needed him to interrupt their fruitless labor and show them, once again, where the fish actually were.
It is in this same setting that Jesus turns his attention to Peter, asking him three times whether he loves him, and each time instructing him to feed the sheep and lambs entrusted to his care. The threefold question mirrors, deliberately, Peter’s threefold denial on the night of the arrest[13], and Peter, grieved at being asked a third time, can only fall back on what he knows to be true even when his own record gives him little to stand on: Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. It is a scene about restoration as much as about doubt, and Thomas, silently present in that boat, would have watched his friend rebuilt in real time, love answered not with a lecture but with a commission.
The question Jesus puts to Peter is, in the end, the same question this whole study has been circling. Do you love Jesus? Not merely, do you believe certain facts about him, but do you love him enough to be sent by him, to feed whatever sheep he places in your care, even after your own record of faith has been uneven? That question does not stay safely in the first century. It is being asked of every reader who has followed Thomas this far, and the honesty of our answer, like Thomas’s, may say more about where we stand than any doctrine we could recite.
Practical Application and Conclusion — Becoming Honest Doubters
Thomas’s story offers no shortcuts, and that is part of its value to us. He did not arrive at My Lord and my God by suppressing his questions or by pretending a confidence he did not feel. He arrived there by being honest about his doubt, by staying near the people of God even while he wrestled, and by remaining open to whatever proof the risen Christ chose to offer him. That is a pattern worth imitating far beyond the particular question of an empty tomb. Whatever a reader’s own doubts may be, about prayer that seems unanswered, about suffering that seems unexplained, about a faith that once felt vivid and now feels thin, Thomas’s example suggests that the way forward is not to silence the doubt but to bring it, honestly and without pretense, into the presence of Christ.
This is not a license to remain permanently unconvinced. The honest doubter is not a closed person; his very doubt, rightly examined, is meant to be doubted in turn, and he remains open to receiving the gift of faith when it comes. Fear, close-mindedness, pride, laziness, and ingratitude are not honest companions for doubt; they are the very things that curdle it into something Scripture has no patience for. The invitation here is not to doubt endlessly but to doubt honestly, on the way toward faith rather than as a permanent replacement for it.
It is also worth asking, in the quiet of application, whether we are still living behind locked doors. Are we still fearful, still somewhat lazy in our pursuit of God, still too proud to admit what we do not understand, still closed off from the very evidence that might move us forward? Are we, like the disciples the week before Thomas’s confession, huddled together in fear rather than living as people who have genuinely met the risen Christ? The fruit of honest doubt is not permanent uncertainty; it is a faith that has been tested and found solid enough to say, and mean, My Lord and my God.
So we return, finally, to Peter’s question by the shore, because it turns out to be everyone’s question. Do you love Jesus? Are you prepared to answer as Peter did, resting not on your own consistent record but on what the Lord himself already knows about your heart? The measure of an honest doubter is not that his doubts vanish overnight, but that they lead him, in time, toward the wounded hands of Christ rather than away from them. Thomas took a week to get there. Some of us will take longer. But the same risen Lord who came looking for Thomas in that locked room is patient enough to keep coming for us as well, until every honest doubt in us has been met and, by his grace, answered.
[1]See John 10:31–39, where the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem took up stones against Jesus shortly before this episode; the danger of returning to nearby Bethany was therefore fresh and specific, not a vague or general risk.
[2]Greek kekoimētai, “has fallen asleep,” a common New Testament euphemism for death (compare 1 Corinthians 15:6). Jesus intends the euphemism to be understood figuratively; the disciples, taking it literally, assume a full recovery is underway. “Didymus,” Thomas’s other name in verse 16, is simply Greek for “twin,” as Thomas is the Aramaic equivalent.
[3]Exodus 3:14, where God reveals his covenant name to Moses as “I AM THAT I AM.” Each of Jesus’ “I am” statements in John’s Gospel deliberately echoes this divine name.
[4]Compare Charles Hoffacker, “Honest Doubt, Honest Faith” (sermon on John 20:19–31), SermonWriter, © 2007, which names fear, close-mindedness, lack of trust, pride, laziness, and ingratitude as the marks of belief and doubt alike when either has gone sour.
[5]Hoffacker, “Honest Doubt, Honest Faith,” SermonWriter, © 2007: Jesus “does not require perfect faith from the start,” asking instead for “an open heart, one not closed to belief.”
[6]Compare Charles Hoffacker, “Other Resurrections” (sermon on John 20:19–31), SermonWriter, n.d.: Jesus “does not ignore the past, but graciously moves beyond it,” extending a peace that sets the disciples’ distraught hearts at rest.
[7]Compare Charles Hoffacker, “What the Wounds Reveal” (sermon on John 20:19–31), SermonWriter, © 1994, describing the risen Christ as “not some insubstantial spirit or spectre, some hallucination or memory.”
[8]Compare Hoffacker, “What the Wounds Reveal,” © 1994, on the permanence of Christ’s wounds and their testimony of mercy at the final judgment.
[9]Compare Hoffacker, “Honest Doubt, Honest Faith,” © 2007, which traces this same arc — from discouragement and disbelief to Thomas’s confession of faith.
[10]Compare the sermon “Thomas” by Sylvester, SermonWriter, which describes Thomas as a man who “loved his Lord too much to confuse what he believed to be true with what he only wished were true.”
[11]Luke 16:19–31, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus — a different Lazarus from the brother of Mary and Martha at Bethany. Abraham’s reply in verse 31 is paraphrased here; compare the full KJV wording.
[12]“The sea of Tiberias” (John 21:1) and “the sea of Galilee” are the same body of water, called by two names in the Gospels. “The sons of Zebedee” (v.2) are James and John.
[13]Compare Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus in John 18:15–27, on the night of the arrest, which this threefold restoration deliberately mirrors.