Engaging with God

Issues of faith and doubt and who Jesus is and how we should respond to him are not new – they go back to the beginning, in fact to the first day after Jesus' resurrection.

Thomas was a somewhat dour character, from the few lines he speaks in John's gospel, and he seems to be a practical realist. When the other disciples excitedly tell him about their encounter with the risen Jesus, he is unwilling to reengage his disappointed hopes .

There is a form of doubt that seems to only seek a reason not to believe, to justify not ever making any sort of commitment of faith. But integrity calls us to engage with the truth claims of Jesus Christ, to search and to understand as best we can.

The purpose of John's entire gospel is that we would come to believe. As the final verse of this chapter goes on to say, this is "written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name."

We cannot separate being Christlike from being a Christian, we cannot divorce being like Jesus from believing in him. True belief is what the gospel is all about, because true belief means entering into a relationship with Jesus; it means proclaiming Jesus as Lord and God; and it means entrusting our lives to him – both our lives in this world as well as our eternal lives.