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Pledge of Allegiance

John Chapter 2. Let’s read this and let the word of God just wash over us to quiet everything else in our minds and hearts and see what John the Apostle is saying about Jesus in this chapter:

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”
“Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”

David Stockton
Series: John
Chapter 2

(Starting at 1:50)

John Chapter 2. Let’s read this and let the word of God just wash over us to quiet everything else in our minds and hearts and see what John the Apostle is saying about Jesus in this chapter:

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”
“Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”
They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”
What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days.

This is the word of the Lord. This is John writing as he’s thinking back, as he’s accounting the life of Jesus and the interactions he had with Jesus in the flesh, in the body, in Israel at that time. And John is at the end of his life. He’s been through a lot. He’s probably around 85-90 years old. He’s writing up close to the end of the first century. He’s recounting and writing to us, trying to give an account for why he believes in Jesus.

There is debate as to who he was writing to or who he had in mind. To me it seems that he might have had Hellenistic people in mind. Both the Greco Roman world that he was probably interacting with up in Ephesis and the way that he starts out calling Jesus the Logos, which is a Greek word. It’s more than a Greek word, it’s a Greek concept. It has a lot of depth and meaning in the Greco Roman world. So you can check last week’s message if you want to know more about that.

He introduces Jesus as the logos and he goes on to talk to us about this guy John the Baptist. John the Apostle, which we’ll call John A, then you’ve got John the Baptist, exhibit John B. John the Baptist was this really neat individual who, in his day and age was able to exemplify walking in the world but not of the world. I mean, in some drastic ways. John was wearing camel skins. He was eating locusts and honey. He lived out in the wilderness as far as we know. He was baptizing people. He was calling people to come out of the religious system of the day. He was calling people to come out of the greed, out of their selfishness, out of all of the different things that are sinful. He was calling them out and saying, “Please come and return to God.”

And amazingly, this wild haired, wild guy had a lot of people coming out to be baptized by him, to hear what he had to say. Jesus called him a prophet later on. His prophecy, the words that he spoke, were able to cut through the confusion of that day and really land in people’s hearts. It was drawing people out of the worldly systems, out of all of that into kind of a more fresh beginning with God. Even these people that were steeped in religious things in the Jewish world.

I’ve been praying that we’re going to have a lot more John the Baptists rise up in our time, in our day, as we have so much noise, dissension and actual pain and confusion. We really need the prophetic voice to come on strong and cut through it all and speak to our hearts so we’ll know how to be in the world but not of the world—how to navigate this challenging dynamic that we’re in, with all of the political tensions, with all of the shouts and screams. Even with deciding how we’re going to navigate these racial issues and this racial pain. And other things as well.

I love the John Baptists. We talked about him last week as well. He was a fighter. He stood up in the face of injustice, oppression and immorality. His intense morality and simplicity gave his message intense credibility and clarity. I’m praying for some more of that in our day and age as well.So now we’re moving on to John Chapter 2. I want to spend a little time unpacking a few things here, but really focus on verse 11.

I was a camp counselor one summer, actually a counselor in training. They gave us camp names. They called me Spelunk. Spelunk is obviously referring to cave exploration because I had done a little of that in my time. It’s always fun to go exploring in caves. You through maybe a little hole, crawling through and it’s not that good; but then it opens up into kind of a bigger cavern. And you can go and there are lots of different places to explore. There are lots of places that, as you go through it, it opens up into these broad things.

As you’re reading the book of John, he has so many phrases that you could spend the rest of your life just chewing on and diving into. So, as we read here in Chapter 2, it’s just like that.

As we go on, I want to talk to the kids for a second, that are still awake, that haven’t left the room, that may be upside down on your couch by now—I totally understand that. No problem. But, kids, if you would draw me a picture of what it looks like to explore a cave, a spelunker. Someone who is going into a cave, exploring. That would be a fun drawing for me to see this week. Thanks for the ones that have been coming. Make sure you put your address with them so that I can make sure something shows up in your mailbox. There you go kids: Spelunking. That’s what you’re going for today.

So let’s dive in and do some exploration in John 2. Here are some phrases. He starts out chapter 2 with “On the third day.” Now, for those of us who know about the resurrection of Jesus, for John, who obviously did, that phrase “on the third day” is such a big deal. He uses this phrase and we don’t know if he’s talking about the third day that he had been with Jesus as one of his disciples. We don’t know if this is three days later from when he had that interaction with Nathaniel. Or we don’t know if he’s just kind of saying, “Hey, on the third day Jesus always does cool stuff.” We’re not sure. Again, loaded question. We don’t have time to unpack too much.

He talks about going to a wedding in Cana. A wedding in this day and age is a very big deal. A wedding for the Hebrew people is a very big deal. There’s a year-long lead to a wedding. There are all these traditions, all these things that happen, it’s a real communal thing, getting people together. When you are a people who are being oppressed, when you are a people who have no privileges, no rights as Roman citizens, it was a really big deal to have these moments where people could come together and have this special time of rejoicing and feeling human in the midst of all of this. So this was a wedding that Jesus was invited to and it was in Cana.

Now we don’t know where Cana was or anything like that. It’s a town that didn’t make the cut in a lot of ways for our maps. It was such a small village and very insignificant in a lot of ways. But here it is that John is mentioning Cana as a place where Jesus did something really cool. I just love that about Jesus. I love how different he is than our day and age. Anything we do cool we make sure and post it and make sure everyone knows how we cool we are and all these things. But when Jesus was doing the first miracle, the first time he was really revealing to humanity who he was, he was doing it in a way that very few people were going to know about it. In fact, really just his family, his village and his disciples.

That’s the emphasis we’re trying to make as we go through all of this. What are we going to do to heal the world, to bring real change into our world? I think the Jesus model is to just first take care of the ones that God has given you. I think that’s the most important thing. In addition to that, make sure you’re taking care of the ones he’s asking you to give yourself to. Not just the ones he’s given you, but the ones he’s asking you to give yourself to.

So that’s what Jesus was doing here. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him… so there’s this other phrase. Jesus had this interaction with his mom. She said, “They have no more wine.” We don’t have time to dive into it. But I wonder what made her think Jesus could do something about this. What in the thirty years of her living with Jesus made her think Jesus could do something about this, that we don’t know about? The only thing we know Jesus did between zero and thirty was he spent the night at church one time and was asking some questions when he was twelve. So I just think it’s so interesting to think about their relationship there and what is being implied in this.

His answer to her is, “Woman, why do you involve me?” He’s basically saying, “Hey, you’re not really in line with what I feel like my Father is telling me to do here.” And he says, “My hour has not yet come.” He knew there was a timing to his life. He knew there was moment where he was supposed to step out. But at this point he knew it wasn’t time to do that. And yet still he does in a small way show his glory to those that were there.

And then a bunch of things go on. But I want to focus in on verse 11. Verse 11 says, “What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory and his disciples believe in him.”

So again, John is writing, end of his life, probably trying to speak into the Greco Roman world that he was feeling like an evangelist towards, or feeling a mission to go and preach to. And he was sharing about what sign Jesus gave him in his process of believing, and the disciples as well.

This is the first of seven signs. In the gospel of John there are seven signs. There are seven miraculous things that Jesus does that are sometimes included in the other three gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. Sometimes they are not. But here they are:

The changing of water into wine.
The healing of the royal official’s son.
The healing of a disabled man.
The feeding of the five thousand.
The walking on the water.
The healing of the man born blind.
The raising of Lazarus.
And, obviously, the resurrection would be another sign as well.

These are the signs that John gives us in his gospel. And I feel like John’s probably letting us know these are the most significant moments in his journey of faith as he was interacting with Jesus and coming to a full understanding of who this man, this small town man really was. And that, ultimately, he was the Son of God, or as we talked about, he was the logos. He was God’s who plan, agenda, politic. He was everything. He was there in the beginning.

So John went from a place of just interacting with this person who was kind of John the Baptist for all he knew, to ultimately seeing Jesus as God in the beginning. Forever. And writing about that.

So this was the first sign. This was a significant sign for John. And I like what he says here. He says that Jesus revealed his glory in this way and his disciples believed in him. John’s trying to do something significant there. We know that the whole theme of the book of John , again, we talked about it last week, John chapter 20 says that “Jesus performed many other signs [than the seven or eight that I’ve given you], in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written so that you may believe in him. So that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Life in his name.

Basically John is writing this whole book so that you and I will believe in him, will believe in Jesus. So that’s our whole goal. As we read this, we will continue to believe in Jesus. Those who don’t believe in Jesus, or don’t have any kind of connection with Jesus, that after reading this, they’ll take start to take Jesus seriously and they’ll begin a relationship with him. For those of us that have a relationship with Jesus, that this will foster and build and nourish our faith so that we’ll continue to believe in Jesus, even against all of the other shouts that come our way and all of the other things that are trying to demand our affections, our attention, and our belief.

I want to start to unpack what it means to believe. All of my life I was raised in a Christian home. My parents believed in God and believed in Jesus and they had their own reasons and they would share some of those testimonies with me from time to time. I remember one time actually it was interesting, but it was really significant because I know who my dad is. My dad was this big, strong guy. My dad did not like to rely on other people, did not like to make other people have to help him. He was very strong. He was very stout and he helped a lot of people all over. It was a very tough thing for him to allow someone to help him.

He told me a story about when he and my mom were first dating. They actually went to this Christian conference of some sort. There was someone there speaking and he had spent time growing up in a home where his mom and dad were very Pentecostal, like, “Hey, Jesus is the best.” And telling people about Jesus and really believing in miracles. But my dad had grown up and became maybe a little jaded in that direction. He had spent a lot of time living in the world. Then when he met my mom and my mom started actually came into full faith in Jesus, he started to think more about it again.

He said they went to this conference. At the end of it, they were going to pray that people could receive the Spirit of God. He was watching people being slain in the Spirit. Please don’t get caught up in “slain in the Spirit,” this is not the point of this message. I don’t see it in the scriptures and all of those things, so I’m not trying to make it a proponent of when the Spirit shows up. I’m just telling you a story that my dad told me of an experience in his life that helped him believe.

So he and my mom went forward. He, again, was this big, strong football player guy and there was this little lady that was praying for people. It wasn’t that everybody was falling over when she prayed for them. But he was just standing there, and when she prayed for him, he fell over. Again, this is not the important thing. Please don’t get caught up on this. But for my dad, it was the Lord showing up to my dad in a significant way saying, “Hey. I am here. I am real. And I do have a plan for you.” It was something that helped my dad believe. It helped my dad go, ‘Okay.” And my dad never talked about being slain in the Spirit and didn’t start thinking this important. But he did really start thinking it was important to believe in Jesus.

I think it’s interesting, however we come to this concept or this phrase “believing in him.” We all come with baggage. Some of us come with stories in our life of Jesus’ faithfulness that have been passed down for generations and maybe even shown up in our own life. Awesome. Wonderful. Hallelujah. That’s great. Some of us come to this message and this moment right now—you’ve never seen Jesus do anything. In fact, the times you’ve prayed, or the times you’ve tried to lean in and say, “Okay, God, I need you,” nothing has happened and nothing’s shown up.

So we all come to this phrase differently. I understand that. What I’m trying to do is just to show you the way John is sharing this is what’s helped him believe. And yet I need to unpack this word believe a little bit for us Faith is a hard word to conceptualize and make practical and embody. Belief is the same thing.

So believing in him. I want to start out to tell you what I think John the Apostle is trying to communicate when he says that “I began to believe in him.” A picture of that, I think, comes where, in the book of John, John never uses his name but he refers to himself as “the disciple that Jesus loved.” And he refers to himself as “the one who leaned against Jesus’ breast,” particularly on that night of communion he was kind of leaning on Jesus.

When I would try to encapsulate what John the Apostle would define faith as, I think he would define it as complete trust—or trust over time is another phrase that I have heard. It’s the idea of just kind of leaning on Jesus because you know he’s got you. And John, for whatever reason, it’s interesting because he was originally called one the of the Sons of Thunder. There was something about him and his brother James that was just passionate and wild, and maybe abrasive ,and maybe explosive. They were fighters. They wanted to call down fire on people at some point. But as we see John who has spent time with Jesus and been formed into the image of Christ, later in life we see John as this one who just wants us to love one another. He writes so much about how important it is that we care for one another, that really the law of God is fulfilled when we love each other.

So here one of the Sons of Thunder has been totally formed into this trusting, caring, compassionate person. I just love what Jesus can do in our lives. That’s what John is saying. We need to trust him. He leaned on his breast. Totally at ease because of Jesus’ sovereignty. What I want to do is to bring to us that concept today. Where are we? Are totally at ease in the knowledge of Jesus’ sovereignty when our world is getting shaken, or our own souls are getting shaken, when our community is getting shaken, when our nation is getting shaken, when our health is getting shaken?

What Jesus wants to prove to you and demonstrate to you is that he really is sovereign. You can completely trust in him. It’s not a blind trust, but a trust over time and time and time again. Jesus showing up. It’s the substance that shows up for the things you’re hoping for, as Hebrews would say.

So that’s John’s definition. It’s a complete trust. When John is referring to this miracle that happened at Cana in a small town, small village way, he’s saying that that was the beginning of my complete trust in Jesus. I think that’s where we need to start walking with Jesus and seeing where our complete trust is these days.

Secondly we have Paul. Paul the Apostle wrote most the New Testament. He’s actually called the Apostle of Faith like John would be called the Apostle of Love. When Paul defines faith, it’s more of a pledge of allegiance in a lot of ways. It’s Independence Day weekend, where we celebrate the freedoms that we have as Americans, and those who have brought us to this point, and the fight to continually maintain these freedoms for all people. It’s good and right. We have this pledge where we make our kids do, where they put their hand over their heart and they pledge allegiance to this country and all that.

For Paul, faith is really a pledge of allegiance. He refers in Romans 10 that we need to confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and we need to believe in our heart that he rose from the dead. In some ways, to sum that up, Paul is speaking about this confession of our mouths and this pledge, believing in our hearts that we confess that he is sovereign over creation. He is Lord. We believe in our hearts that he is the only one that can save us from death. Or the only one that can give us God-life. That is who we believe in for the resurrection.

So for Paul it really is this kind of allegiance. It’s not just a moral or intellectual ascent of like, “Oh, I say the right things, now I’ve got it.” But it’s this pledge of allegiance. “For the rest of my life, for the rest of my days, for the rest of my breaths, I’m going to do what is in the best interest of Jesus and his kingdom.” It’s basically coming out of one kingdom and pledging allegiance to another kingdom.

It’s basically, “Denying the citizenships of all of my life, that I’ve always been, all the identities that I’ve ever had prior,” and now saying, “There’s one identity, one citizenship that I really am pledging allegiance to, and that is the kingdom of Jesus Christ, both now and forever.”

There is this author, Matthew Bates, that I’ve been reading a little bit about. I like what he says. He breaks it down into three different sections. He says faith, or believing, is a mental assent. There is a reality there. There is sworn fidelity. That’s this kind of allegiance concept of really kind of changing where we did have allegiance and making a new allegiance and being faithful to it consistently over time. And he also talks about embodied loyalty. I like that because now it’s the word becoming flesh. Now it’s faith and works. It kind of brings the whole thing together. Where our faith should cause our feet and hands to do different things. Our faith should cause us to go different places and be with different people that, maybe without faith in Jesus we wouldn’t have.

I like that. Mental assent, sworn fidelity, embodied loyalty. Mental assent. We need to take care of what we read and listen to and watch and fill our minds with. Absolutely. We live in the information age, not the truth age. Don’t forget that. Our saving faith comes by the hearing of the Word of God. That’s what Romans teaches. As we take in information, knowledge, understanding, it creates faith. It might create faith in Jesus, or it might create faith and allegiance to other things besides Jesus. Sometimes those allegiances can be a challenge where the Bible teaches we can’t really serve two masters. So we have to watch what comes in because it can produce faith and allegiance in a wrong direction.

Sworn fidelity. We need to take care what we pledge allegiance to. No one can serve two masters. There are powerful political forces clamoring for our attention and devotion. We need to make sure our allegiance to Jesus is not compromised or in competition with anything else.

As I was praying this morning about this message, the image of Revelation 18 came to mind. In there, again, I don’t want to go real deep into it, but in there you have this call from the angels of God at the end of this kind of shaking that’s gone on in the world. And it says, “I want you to come out of her.” And it’s talking about the whore of Babylon. The world system. The world’s order or whatever it might be. It’s this call to the people of God at that time to come out of her. She is going to be ruined and exposed and destroyed. And you need to come out of her. Speaking to this challenge for Christians that we need to be in the world but not of the world. We need to serve this world and care for this world and try to bring healing to this world, but we’ve got to make sure we don’t get caught up in worldly ways in the process, or become worldly in the process.

Embodied loyalty. Your calendar, your phone usage app, your banks statements, your family—they are all proof to see where your loyalties lie. For most of us, it’s not that we are loyal to bad things, even though it’s tricky these days. You know, the devil shows up as an angel of light, we’re told. And marketers can make things look so good these days that we do have to watch out what we’re becoming loyal to.

The other thing I want to address is that, not only are we loyal to bad things, but sometimes we’re just so passive to God things. God’s callings on our life. God’s guidance. We need to make sure our faith actually is embodied in some way. It shows up on the ground. It shows up in practical life. It shows up in this world. It shows up in our relationships with those around us. It shows upon the way that we use the resources that we have. It shows up in those places.

So there you have mental assent, sworn fidelity and embodied loyalty. So just to wrap up how it’s working its way in my life right now. I was sitting in a direction team meeting. We’re obviously trying to figure out what to do as a Living Streams organization. I’m always trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do as just a follower of Jesus, as well. We just spent some time listening. I could picture Jesus there, like, in front of me, looking at me. And he was just kind of ready to say something. I was, like, “Jesus, just say it. Just say what you want me to do and—bam—we’re going to do it. We’re going to go all out. It doesn’t matter what anyone says. We’re just doing it.”

And I really had a sense—I wrote about it in my weekly email—this is what Jesus said, “I don’t want to tell you what to do. I want to see what you’re going to do. I’ve invested in your life. I’ve taught you my ways. I’ve given you my Spirit.” It was almost like he had this joyful anticipation. Like a father who in some ways knows his children are going to do something great, like he’s excited to see. He was just, “I just want to see what you’re going to do.”

I felt that message was helpful because it freed me up from feeling like I might make a mistake. It made me start wanting to do things that I know Jesus is going to think is beautiful. That’s really my challenge to each one of us. Twofold:

1) we’ve got to figure out how to make sure we’re not getting caught up in the world, or secular humanism, or some sort of Marxist approach. We’re going to have to make sure and not get caught up in this world and the world systems. We’ve got to realize where we are already caught up in the world systems and we’ve got to figure out how to pull out, how to come out and be separate—being in the world but not of the world.

2) At the same time, we’ve got to figure out then how we can serve this world, how we can walk in this world in a way that gives our Heavenly Father a lot of joy. I’ve shared some of those ideas. We’ll share some more of those ideas at the Congregational Meeting July 9 at 6:30. Don’t miss it.

That’s really what it’s all about. As we sit here as Americans. As we sit here as whatever ethnicity we might have, whatever political party we have. I think it’s really important to make sure that, above it all, first and foremost, every day our affection, our devotion and our allegiance is to the One who conquered death and showed us how to live. To really be there first and foremost. And then to go into this world and engage in society’s pain. Absolutely. Do the things that really do help bring changes in our world like John the Baptist did and like we need to today.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

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