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Today’s message is about second-hand faith, meaning faith that rests on other people’s experiences of God, rather than on our own. 1 John 1: 1-4 presents such a faith. John emphasises his and the other disciples’ first-hand experience of Jesus, using words like see, looked, appeared, heard and touched a total of nine times in just a few verses. And he concludes by saying that we must believe him, and through believing him, who knows God, we get close to God. We are given a second-hand faith. Most of us don’t want a second-hand faith! We want our own, first-hand faith!

John 20:19-25 has a similar narrative. The disciples – minus Judas, who was not there – have a first-hand encounter with the risen Christ, who shows them his hands and his side. When Thomas joins them later, they say, “We have seen the Lord!” and expect that Thomas will be satisfied with this second-hand account. But Thomas says, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Thomas wants simply what everyone wants – he wants to know first-hand that Jesus is risen. He wants to see and to touch. And Jesus meets this need.

We also want a first-hand faith. We want to know for sure and for ourselves that Jesus exists. We want to see him. We want to touch him. Where can we get such first-hand experiences? Three places: (1) We get them from the Scripture, where we read first-hand accounts of others and have confidence that their testimony is true. We can tag these accounts for future reference. (2) We rely on what others in our community tell us about God’s grace and working, and have confidence that their testimony is true. We can tag these accounts also for future reference.

(3) And we rely on our own experiences of God working in our own lives. We may not have many such experiences of our own, and they may not be particularly spectacular. But they are first-hand – they are OUR experiences and we KNOW them. These are the experiences we need to recover and treasure. We can tag them, because they are our first-hand encounters with God. They are the touchstones or reference points that we turn to when our faith gets shaky.

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