Unbelief is common these days, but it’s different from doubt. Thomas knew all about doubt. This isn’t a bad thing, though, because God gave us minds to think and reason. Faith is truly a gift, intended to work together in harmony with reason.
The Lord appeared to Thomas to lead him from unbelief to faith: ‘Do not be faithless but believing’. Through seeing the Risen Lord, Thomas came to a profound faith, and his confession of faith should be on the lips of every believer: ‘My Lord and my God’. However, faith is often tested and tried, and we struggle with doubts. We doubt that God loves us. We doubt that he has a plan for our lives and will take care of us. We doubt that he can change certain areas of our lives, especially those with which we have struggled for years.
We, like Thomas, need Jesus to lead us from doubt to faith, from unbelief to belief. Paul wrote, ‘So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the preaching of Christ’. We tend to understand a text of Scriptures like this to mean that the Gospel should be preached by a bishop, priest or deacon, but we must first learn to preach the Gospel to ourselves. We must learn, if you like, to be the bearer of the Good News to ourselves and to the situations and challenges we face. We need to let the Gospel enter us and change us.
