Conviction… what kind of sermon title is that the week after Easter? Aren’t we done with all that talk of trials and death and all that stuff? Well, it’s not that kind of conviction. It’s the kind of conviction that has to do with how a person lives their life. This is talking about life convictions and how those things guide our actions.
I’m handing out to you the work of Edward John Noble. Noble is the man responsible for a few things in your life. One is the lifesaver candy the other is the candy display at restaurant checkout counters. In 1913 a candy maker named Crane, in Ohio had to come up with something to help his business during the summer months. Summer was hard on him because it meant his chocolate candy couldn’t be sold because it wouldn’t hold its shape in the heat. So he decided to develop a line of hard mint candy.
He went to a pill maker to with his recipe for the mints since his own machines were set up for chocolate. The pill maker was having trouble with his machine and every batch that came out had a hole punched in the center of the mint. When the candy maker, Crane, saw this, the pill manufacturer apologized and said he’d work on getting the machine fixed. Crane said no, leave it the way it is, they look like little… lifesavers. Suddenly he had a name for his mints.
He developed a paper tube to package the mints in and sold them to candy stores. One day in New York City, Edward Noble bought a package of the mints and loved them; he came to the conviction that these were a great idea. He came to Ohio and tried to get Crane to buy advertising for the mints. Crane was a chocolate maker and didn’t think much of his mints other than a sideline and suggested Noble buy the lifesaver brand and he’d even throw-in the defective pill making machine.
Noble took him up on it. Nobel discovered however that the package of mints he’d bought in New York City were fresh mints and hadn’t been in the tube long. It was found that after the mints were in the tube for two or three weeks that they ended up tasting more like the tube than mints. Because of his conviction that the mints were worth it, Noble, rather than give up, found that if he wrapped the mints in foil first they remained fresh for a long time.
Now he had solved that problem and then, because of his belief in the candy, he thought, why sell it only in candy stores? He took it to drug stores, barber shops, saloons… and restaurants. He told them to put a sign up near the register saying, mints 5 cents and to be sure that when they gave back change to include a nickel. It worked and people started to buy the mints.
As a result even today at checkout counters and restaurants you can find lifesavers mints and all the other flavors they now make. Because of his conviction about this product, Edward John Noble’s lifesavers have sold more than 44 billion of these little round tubes.
Conviction goes a long way. In fact conviction is about the only thing that will motivate someone to action. Only by conviction does a person alter their behavior. If you hold the conviction that airplanes aren’t safe, no matter what, you won’t get in one. It takes a lot to overcome someone’s convictions. However once a conviction is firmly in place, as it was for Noble regarding the mints, then personal action will follow, based on that conviction.
Consider what happened in the reading today from the book of Acts. Peter and the others had been teaching openly and publicly the truth regarding Jesus. As a result of this teaching they were put in jail. When the whole assembly of the religious leaders gathered to decide what to do with them, it was discovered they had been freed from jail and were again publicly teaching the truth about Jesus.
As a result of this the leaders again had the disciples arrested and brought before them and charged them not to teach any more in Jesus name. Read with me please from verse 29 of the reading from acts read just the portion of verse 29 that where Peter and the other apostles replied, they said, “We must obey God rather than men!
We must obey God rather than men. The disciples were given the gift of conviction from God, and it was this that they had to obey. It was God who had raised Jesus from the dead and nothing would move them from this conviction, not jail, not threat and not even death. Look at the next verses and listen to them again.
30The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. 31God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel. 32We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him".
They were witnesses to the things God had done. Do you ever wish you were? Do you wish you’d been there also? Do you think your level of conviction would rise if you’d seen what they had?
After all, it was this assurance that gave them the strength of character to face up to persecution, peril and sword. It seems to us from this distance of time, that that would be easy to do if we only had the same conviction, the same certainty as they did. Again, what did Peter say what they witnessed; that Jesus died on the tree and God the Father raised Him and He is now the Savior. The result of this is that in Jesus alone comes forgiveness of sins to all who repent.
The disciples lived in that repentance and forgiveness because they had seen Jesus die. And they had seen Him alive again. So because, Christ is risen… He is risen indeed, Alleluia! Their conviction was firm and strong because of that. But as we read in the gospel lesson, not all of them learned the truth of God raising Jesus from the dead at the same time.
My namesake, Thomas, wasn’t there with the rest when Jesus showed Himself to them. The only difference between Peter with the others and Thomas was a matter of time. A matter of time. Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus showed up that first Easter evening and Thomas asked the questions you and I would ask.
Thomas did for us what we can’t do. He spoke for us when he said, that he wasn’t convinced. He didn’t share their conviction that Jesus was truly raised from the dead. He didn’t believe them, just as many today don’t believe the written record of the gospel writers. We said that we felt we wish we’d been there to see Jesus raised from the dead. That’s more or less what Thomas said, only in the negative. He said he wouldn’t believe unless he saw with his own eyes. Isn’t that what we said earlier we’d like? To witness Jesus risen from the dead?
It’s like the children’s lesson today; you have to see it to believe it. And that is what happened with Thomas. He saw and believed. He saw and his conviction, like the other disciples became rock solid. In fact Jesus lived among them for many weeks and so removed any doubt that He was alive. There’s no doubt that Jesus was raised from the dead.
That conviction that the apostles spoke of to the religious leaders in Jerusalem that day in Acts that we read about hasn’t changed. We share their conviction. We have had Thomas to stand in for us and bear witness to what we wish we had seen. But our conviction regarding the resurrection of Jesus is based not a feeling or on our wishes. Our conviction, like theirs, is based on the truth; the truth that’s revealed in the record of the eyewitnesses to these events.
Again recall Peter’s words, ‘we are eyewitnesses of these things’. And from the time when Jesus ascended into heaven until their time on earth ended, each of the disciples lived and acted on the conviction of what they had seen. This was not something they played at. This wasn’t ‘week-end warrior’ stuff for them. This was what they lived and breathed every day. It was what guided and dictated their life.
For us it’s no different. We’re guided by our convictions also. We also live life based on the gift of faith, given us by the risen Lord Jesus. Christ is risen...He is risen indeed, Alleluia! And because we know and believe that He lives, we know and believe that we too shall live. That conviction guides our lives.
It’s important to know that most all of the apostles died because of their preaching the gospel. Most all were martyred in one fashion or another. The apostle John is the one known to have died from old age on the island of Patmos somewhere around 90 AD.
But the others were all martyred, that is, killed for their convictions. St Peter is said to have been crucified, but that he wished to be crucified upside down as he felt he unworthy to be crucified in the same way in which Christ died. St Thomas is an interesting case. Most traditions say he carried the gospel into what is today, Iran and even further east into India. It’s documented that there is group of Christians in the west of India who use a liturgy based on Syriac, which is consistent with what St Thomas would have brought with him.
As to his martyrdom, Thomas is believed to have been run through with a spear or spears. Some stories have it that after bearing witness to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, to the wife and son of one king in that region, who converted as a result, St Thomas was run through with 4 spears as he was praying.
But the manner of death is not as important… as the manner of living. These people all lived out their conviction based on Christ having died and been raised from the dead for their sins. And that is the conviction we share with them. That is the life we share with them. By grace through faith in Jesus we too have been given new life in Christ and by God's grace we have been given this same conviction to live by.
Mr. Noble had a conviction, a conviction that other people needed to know about lifesavers. Because of that conviction he acted; how small a thing to act on, a broken pill machine.
What we possess to act on is the only true life saver. We possess the conviction (that the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, has risen from the dead) to base our lives and our actions on. We move and live and have our being because we share the same conviction with the disciples, that Christ is risen...He is risen indeed, Alleluia!