Brand New | Navigating Doubt in the Light of the Resurrection | John 20:19-31 - Clint Leavitt

Sermon Resources: 1. “We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.” -Dallas Willard, "Renovation of the Heart" 2. “Do you love your faith so little that you have never battled a single fear lest your faith should not be true? Where there are no doubts, no questions, no perplexities, there can be no growth." -George MacDonald, "The Curate’s Awakening" 3. “We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose of doubt, not with genuine intellectual method and character.” -Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing A Conversational Relationship With God 4. “I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Last Notebook | 1880-1881 5. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” -Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means 6. “What we have to remember is that our eyes are not all we have for seeing with, maybe not even the best we have. Our eyes tell us that the mountains are green in summer and in autumn the colors of flame. They tell us that the nose of the little girl is freckled, that her hair usually needs combing, that when she is asleep, her cheek is flushed and moist…But all these things are only facts because facts are all the eye can see. Eyes cannot see truth. The truth about the mountains is their great beauty. The truth about the child is that she is so precious that without a moment's hesitation we would give our lives to save her life if that should somehow ever become necessary. It is not with the eyes of the head that we see truths like that, but with the eyes of the heart.” -Frederick Buechner, "The Seeing Heart"