The Difference between Resurrection Belief and Resurrection Life.

The sermon of this article was preached by a visiting preacher Rev. Chris Siriweera to the Ashburton Presbyterian Church. Rev. Chris Siriweera is also the National Director of Australian Presbyterian World Mission.

The sermon centres upon John 20, especially John 20:24–29, and is framed around the movement “from doubt to belief.” Its opening questions are strong: Why celebrate Easter? Why believe in Jesus Christ? What is the main message of the Christian faith? 

Rev Siriweera answers by pointing to the glory of the resurrection as the message Christians proclaim to the world. He acknowledges Christ’s redemption on the cross, but then speaks of “a greater work” in “the glory of the resurrection.” As we will see though, this “glory of the resurrection” remains a mystery after this sermon.

The sermon’s movement is clear. It begins with the empty tomb and Mary Magdalene’s grief, moves to the disciples behind locked doors, Jesus’ word of peace, 

Thomas’s absence and doubt, Christ’s later appearance to Thomas, and finally Thomas’s confession of faith. The sermon concludes that the bodily resurrection of Jesus proves who He is, that believers today are blessed even though they have not seen the risen body of Christ, and that faith in the risen Christ gives peace, comfort, assurance, and hope of heaven.

Thus, there is much to commend. The sermon clearly affirms the physical resurrection of Christ. It does not reduce Easter to a symbol of hope, renewal, or inspiration. The preacher insists that Thomas struggled to accept that Christ had “actually physically risen,” and this bodily reality remains central throughout. That is no small strength in an age when resurrection is often spiritualised or sentimentalised.

The sermon is also pastorally warm. The section on Mary Magdalene captures the personal tenderness of the risen Christ. The preacher notes that Jesus knows His people by name and speaks personally to Mary. He connects this with the security of believers whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life and “signed by the blood of Christ.” This is perhaps the sermon’s strongest Reformed note, and it is welcome. The sermon also gives a necessary warning against resting in church attendance, service, eldership, ministry involvement, or denominational standing as grounds for entering heaven. When asking why someone would enter heaven, the preacher rejects such religious credentials and says, “It’s not going to work.” That warning is especially needed in a church context where nominal confidence can easily be mistaken for saving faith.

A Great and Powerful Illustration

Yet there is a central weakness to this sermon; that it repeatedly arrives at gospel doorways without walking through them. It says true things about resurrection, peace, faith, and heaven, but often does not explain why these blessings flow from the resurrection of Christ. The result is a sermon with orthodox conclusions but underdeveloped gospel logic.

The clearest example is the Rolling Stones illustration. The preacher quotes the famous line, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” then adds, “where there is no satisfaction, there can be no peace,” and asks, “What’s satisfaction? What does it actually look like?” This was perhaps the sermon’s strongest evangelistic opportunity. Once the question of satisfaction is raised, the preacher is standing at the doorway of a profound biblical diagnosis of the human condition.

Why can the world not find satisfaction? The song the preacher quoted, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones, gives us a glimpse of the world’s failure at this very point. The song portrays a restless soul surrounded by the promises of pleasure, consumerism, sex, and status, yet still unable to find lasting fulfilment. What a doorway for gospel proclamation! The sermon’s answer was that satisfaction is hindered because life is hard, the world is chaotic, and circumstances are often painful. Those things are true, but they are not ultimate. The deepest reason is sin. Man was made for God, but sin has alienated him from God. The heart is restless because it seeks life in the creature rather than the Creator. There can be no true satisfaction where there is no peace with God, and there can be no peace with God while sin remains unforgiven.

The sermon nearly says this, but not quite. It moves from dissatisfaction to peace and then to Jesus as the Prince of Peace. It says that the privilege of the gospel is that the Lord Jesus says, “My peace is now yours,” before turning to the world’s need for peace amid wars, danger, and chaos. But the central gospel question remains insufficiently answered: How can guilty sinners have peace with a holy God?

The preacher gives an edifying word study of shalom, ad he does say that shalom ultimately points to “peace with God.” But the explanation that follows leans heavily toward peace as wholeness, contentment, tranquillity, and strength in the chaos of life. These are real blessings, but they are not the foundation of peace. The foundation is that Christ, by His blood, has made peace through atonement. The risen Jesus can say, “Peace be with you,” because the crucified Jesus has borne sin, satisfied justice, exhausted condemnation, conquered death, and risen as the accepted Mediator.

The same weakness appears in the treatment of Thomas. The sermon presents Thomas chiefly as a man struggling to comprehend the physical resurrection. He “refused to believe” the disciples’ testimony and wanted physical proof. The preacher even imagines the medical difficulty of resurrection: how organs could start working again, how a heart could pump blood again, how someone dead could live again. This is not wrong, but it is too narrow. Thomas’s problem is treated mainly as an evidential and psychological struggle rather than as a theological and soteriological crisis.

What is Going on for Thomas in John 20

Thomas’s crisis was not merely, “Can a dead man live?” It was also, “Was Jesus truly the Christ? Was He truly the way to the Father, John 14:6? Was He truly the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?” The hope announced in John 1:29 stands behind the whole Gospel: the disciples needed more than a teacher, miracle-worker, or political deliverer; they needed the Lamb of God who would take away sin. When Thomas later sees the risen Christ with the wounds of crucifixion, he is brought to confess not merely that Jesus lives, but that the crucified and risen Jesus is “my Lord and my God.” To miss this is to flatten John 20.

Several sermons in this Series have misunderstood John 20:28. Thomas had followed Jesus. He had heard His words. He had hoped in Him. Earlier in John, Thomas is willing to go with Jesus toward death. Later, in the farewell discourse, he admits that he does not know where Jesus is going or how to know the way. Jesus answers him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” So, in John 20, Thomas is not simply confronting the possibility of resurrection as a miracle. More deeply, he is confronting the vindication of the crucified Christ as the only way to the Father. This reading best explains the force of his confession: “My Lord and my God.”

That is why the wounds matter so much. The risen Christ says, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side.” The preacher helpfully says that the hands point to the cross and that Jesus died and was raised “for you.” But this should have been developed further. The wounds declare not only that Jesus is the same person who was crucified, but that His crucifixion was not defeat. The Lamb has been slain, but the Lamb now lives. The sacrifice has been accepted. Sin has been dealt with. The way to the Father stands open. Peace is not sentiment; it is blood-bought reconciliation.

Thomas’s confession, therefore, is not merely the cry of a convinced sceptic. It is the worshipful confession of a disciple brought face to face with the wounded and risen Mediator. He sees that the crucified Jesus is indeed the Christ, the Son of God, the Lamb of God, the way to the Father, and the giver of life. His movement is not merely from doubt to certainty, but from unbelief to worship, from shattered hope to full gospel assurance in the redemption Christ has won for him.

This is where the sermon needed to connect John 20 more explicitly with John’s stated purpose: that readers may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing they may have life in His name. The sermon does speak of apostolic testimony and says that those who believe without seeing the physical resurrected body of Jesus are not lesser disciples than those who saw Him in the flesh. That is true. But believing in John is not merely believing that Jesus rose. It is believing that Jesus is the Christ: the promised Redeemer, the Son of God, the Lamb who takes away sin, the crucified King, the revealer of the Father, the giver of the Spirit, and the source of eternal life.

The Final Appeal Remains Stillborn.

This also affects the sermon’s final appeal. The preacher asks where hearers will spend eternity and rightly dismisses church activity as a basis for heaven. He then says the answer is “because of my faith, your faith,” and connects Thomas’s movement “from doubt to belief” with trusting in Christ. Again, this is not false, but it needs theological precision. Faith is not the meritorious ground of entry into heaven. Christ is. Faith is the empty hand receiving Christ. A stronger answer would be: I enter heaven because Christ died for my sins, rose for my justification, clothed me in His righteousness, united me to Himself, and brought me to the Father by grace through faith.

This is also where the doctrine of the new birth should have emerged as the sermon’s natural conclusion. If the world cannot find satisfaction because it is alienated from God; if peace comes only from the wounded and risen Christ; if Thomas must not merely examine evidence but confess the Lamb as Lord and God; and if John writes so that sinners may have life in Christ’s name, then the sermon should press the hearer toward the necessity of their regeneration.

The risen Christ does not merely offer emotional peace to troubled people. He gives life to the dead. Easter is not only proof that Christianity is true. It is the declaration that the old creation has been judged in the death of Christ and that new creation life has begun in His resurrection. Therefore, the hearer must not merely be reassured, comforted, or persuaded. He must be born again.

This, then, is the sermon’s central weakness under the protocol governing this New Birth in Exile series evaluation. The sermon is orthodox, warm, and sincerely evangelical. It affirms the bodily resurrection. It honours Christ. It warns against religious self-confidence. It calls for faith. But it does not sufficiently explain the gospel logic by which resurrection produces peace, satisfaction, forgiveness, assurance, and eternal life. It announces resurrection benefits without fully preaching the resurrection gospel that secures and applies them.

The sermon’s best material could have led naturally to a sharper conclusion: You cannot find satisfaction because sin has separated you from God. You cannot have peace unless your sins are forgiven. But behold the risen Christ, still bearing the wounds of the Lamb of God. His death has taken away sin of all who have been given to him. John 1:29 declares Christ to be the Lamb who takes away sin; John 10:11, 15 specifies that he lays down his life for his sheep; and John 17 identifies those sheep as the people given to him by the Father. His resurrection declares that the sacrifice has been accepted. His word of peace is therefore not empty comfort but blood-bought reconciliation. Merely believing that the resurrection happened places you on the same rung as the Devil. Unless you are born from above, you cannot truly see or enter the kingdom of God; therefore come to the crucified and risen Christ. Come with Thomas to the wounded Lamb, and confess before His nail-pierced hands: “My Lord and my God.”

A full copy of the sermon is available at The Reformed Pastor's YouTube channel

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