Are We Blind, Too?
John chapter 9. Let’s jump in. This is a wonderful story. John, sometimes they’re long chapters and sometimes he kind of speaks in a way that is a little bit hard to process and understand. But this is just so good right here.
Series: John
John 9
David Stockton - September 20, 2020
Are We Blind, Too?
(Starting at. 6:07)
John chapter 9. Let’s jump in. This is a wonderful story. John, sometimes they’re long chapters and sometimes he kind of speaks in a way that is a little bit hard to process and understand. But this is just so good right here.
1 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
So Jesus noticed this man who was blind, and as he noticed him, his disciples’ attention went to that person, as well, and they asked this question.
3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
Jesus noticed this guy. And, obviously, there’s something different about him. He’s blind. That has a whole bunch of connotation both in today’s world as well as that world. In this moment, the disciples actually say, “Oh, Jesus is looking at the blind person. Jesus is thinking about the blind person.” So they wanted to add to that and kind of show him how much they know. They say, “Was it this person or his parents’ sin that caused this blindness.” Because that the was the thought. The debate was not whether this was a result of one of their sins, this is like judgment of God. It was, was it the parents’ or his that caused this because he was born this way?”
And Jesus, as he always does, answers in a way that is from a completely different perspective altogether. And he says, “No. You’re totally wrong. All of the answers you think are right are wrong.” Which is a funny thing to hear. It’s kind of how I felt in some of my math classes at times.
It’s like Jesus is saying, “You’re totally focused on the wrong thing.” He actually says this: “This was done so you would know the works of God.”
Now again, for those of us who know Jesus and have read this story, we’re like, “Okay, cool, yeah, Jesus is going to heal the guy.” That ’s the works of God. But that’s not what Jesus was saying. He hasn’t healed the man yet. He’s wanting his disciples to understand, and wanting this blind man to understand, that God is up to something. God has purpose. We don’t need to just focus on cause and origins. We need to focus on purpose. And God has purpose in this. And then he goes on and talks about how we need to work the works of God while we can because it’s going to get more difficult.
6 After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.
There’s no way that people who can see could ever know how dramatic a moment this would be. All his life he has never seen anything. And in one moment he comes out of this water and he’s flooded with light, color, contrast, depth, I don’t know, art people say the other words that I’m trying to say. I mean, all of it! He could see it all in this moment. So he’s pretty pumped.
8 His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some claimed that he was.
Others said, “No, he only looks like him.”
But he himself insisted, “I am the man.”
10 “How then were your eyes opened?” they asked.
11 He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.”
First of all, the disciples are with Jesus and Jesus’ attention goes to this person. And they say, “Oh, is it this guy who’s horrible or his parents who are horrible?” Political correctness wasn’t really working in the system at this point. And he goes on and this guy is actually able to see now. He’s walking around and he’s going, “I see you. I see you. I see you…” He’s seeing all these people that he’s never seen before. And they’re like, “Is this the guy that used to sit and beg all the time?”
“No, that’s not the guy.”
He’s like, “I’m the guy.”
And they’re all divided about it. They didn’t get it because they always saw him as a beggar. They always saw him as a blind man. He has no voice. And he’s there and he’s like, “I am him! I used to be blind. I can see. Do you understand what’s going on?” And they don’t. They don’t at all. And this is what they do:
12 “Where is this man?” they asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. 14 Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. 15 Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.”
It’s getting more and more concise. You can. understand the frustration. He’s like, “People, do you understand what’s happening in my life right now?”
And they’re like, “Mmmm, I don’t really think you were blind. Let’s take him to the Pharisees because they’ll know what to do about this.
16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.”
You can only imagine what’s going on in this guy’s mind right now. “Are you serious? You’re mad at this guy?”
But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided.
John’s making that very clear. Right? Jesus was very popular. They wanted to make him a king just a few chapters ago. In a few more chapters they’re going to want to crucify him because they hate him so much. There is a lot of division about Jesus still today. There are a lot of opinions about Jesus still today.
And John tells us that the reason there are all those opinions is because people who see don’t really want to see. They prefer the darkness to the light. And that’s true in our world today. People want to suppress the truth because they don’t want to have to make changes. They don’t want people to see the truth about them. As long as they are in that space they can never be healed.
There is a lot of division about Jesus once again.
17 Then they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.”
The man replied, “He is a prophet.”
“He’s from God. That’s all I know. He’s got to be because I couldn’t see stuff and now I see everything.
18 They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents.
Are you getting how frustrating this must be for this guy? He’s like, “Yeah, I was blind.” And his friends are like, “Nah. We don’t think it was him. Let’s take him to the Pharisees.”
And the Pharisees were like, “Were you blind?”
He’s like, “I was blind.”
They’re like, “Nah. Let’s get his parents.”
So now his parents come.
19 “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?”
20 “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. 21 But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” 22 His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. 23 That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
24 A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”
25 He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”
“I was blind and now I can see. I don’t know how to not see now. I just can’t help seeing. Every time I open my eyes—bam—everything is there. I used to be so good at not seeing. I used to the be the best at not seeing. I used to be awesome at it. And now, no matter how hard I try, I just keep seeing. Even when I close my eyes, I see the back of my eyelids when the light is coming through. I just see it all the time. I was blind but now I can see. I cannot deny. I cannot go back. Jesus has changed everything.”
26 Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?
27 He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”
He spent his entire life blind. Rejected. Judged—that either he is evil or his parents were evil and that’s why. He’s been ridiculed, shamed and left out. He’s had to beg just to survive. Even his parents have created some separation from him. He’s not afraid of some insults or some ridicule. It’s all he’s ever known in this life. Not to mention, he can see now. So he’s not afraid of what these people are going to do. He’s like, “I can see. If you try to punch me, I can see it coming now!”
He can see. He’s so pumped. He’s so excited. And these guys were trying to rain on his parade.
I lived in a school of ministry one time. There were a bunch of guys and we all lived in this house. And it was so funny. Sometimes guys would come home and they had just been with a girl they liked. They had been on a date or they were hanging out and sometimes we could even see them. It was at a church, and we were like, “Ha. He likes her.” And they would come home, and we would joke that they would come home with this girl glow. And no matter what you said to them, they would be like, “That’s funny.”
Literally, sometimes we would go, “Watch. I’m going to go punch him and he’s going to be happy about it.” And sure enough, we could go punch him. And he would be so excited because he got to hang out with that girl. And he’s so excited, and you punch him, and he’s like, “Ha. That’s cool. Don’t worry about it.” And you’re like, “This is so weird.”
But this guy is glowing. He can see now and these guys are trying to rain on his parade. It’s not going to work. So he’s messing with them.
28 Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! 29 We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.”
This is a consistent theme in the book of John. But John makes it clear in chapter 1. “In the beginning was the Word (Jesus) and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” He was with God in the beginning. John is trying to make it very clear. These guys don’t know where he came from, but John made it very clear where he came from. He’s God. He’s the Alpha and Omega. So that’s what they say, “We don’t even know where he comes from.”
30 The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes.
Here’s someone doing the work of God and you don’t even know anything about him.
31 We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. 32 Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
34 To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.
That’s a junior high response, right there.
35 Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
Do you believe in the Messiah? Do you believe in the one? That’s what he’s saying. Do you believe that God is sending someone into the world to take away the sins of the world? That’s what John said about Jesus. He was declaring that Jesus was the Messiah. John the Baptist said, “Behold the One who takes away the sin of the world. Behold the One who is coming to undo all the damage that sin has done.
And now he’s saying this one, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
36 “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.”
37 Jesus said, “You have now seen him;
He’s like, “You’re looking at him. You know those eyes that used to not see anything? Right now they’re seeing the Son of Man.”
That makes so much sense, that Jesus had marked this day on the calendar before the foundation of the world. This was not a surprise. This was not a moment. This was not something that just kind of happened. But this was God setting up a moment in a man’s life who had known nothing but frustration and pain, now being able to see the salvation of God.
And this is way bigger than his eyes. And that’s what Jesus is trying to say here. He goes on:
37 Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.”
38 Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.
39 Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”
40 Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?
41 Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.
So Jesus is trying to do something here. John is trying to help us understand what Jesus was trying to do. This was not just about healing. Does God heal? Yes. Has God healed? He’s continuing to heal. But all of those healings are not to show us God heals every disease in the moment, immediately. But each one of the healings we receive in the natural is basically something that is supposed to help us understand the work of God and what he’s going to do in all of the world. Does that make sense?
Track with me here. Let’s go back to the beginning. Jesus said this was not about the sin of the parents. This was so the work of God could be revealed. Because what is the work of God? The work of God is to undo the damage that sin has done. That’s the work of God in the world. That’s the work of Jesus sent by God. That is the whole thing.
So whenever we someone healed, that’s awesome and wonderful. And we should pray for people to be healed. All of those things are good. But we need to understand that’s a sign, that’s an indicator, that’s an appetizer (so to speak) to help us know the work that God has promised to do for all of creation forevermore.
When we go back and start processing this, it’s so cool. Jesus saw this blind man. He saw him. And God can see every infirmity. He can see the result of sin. And it is true. He says that, “It wasn’t this man’s sin or his parents’ sin.” But it is sin that brought this about. It was just Adam and Eve’s sin.
There was no disease or disorder in the world in the garden. “Behold, all things were good,” the Bible says. But when mankind decided, “You know what? I think I know better than God. I think I’m going to go against what God said,”—when mankind was deceived and they took and ate of that fruit—sin entered the world. And what happened was, sin and death came in. Disease and disorder came. And now, we as humanity, we’ve been living under the shadow of death ever since. Sin and death reign in our mortal bodies. True or false? True! Ever wake up in the morning and, “Ooooh. What was that?” That’s sin and death going, “Ha ha! We got you.” The fact that 100 percent of the people die is proof that sin and death reign in our mortal bodies. The fact that there are blind people, the fact that there are people with other diseases is proof that sin reigns in this life.
And Jesus sees every single one of the diseases and disorders that we have. Diseases our children have. Diseases that we might have. Diseases that our loved ones have. Jesus sees that. He sees all the disorders that we have. Maybe it’s a disordered desire where we long for something that is evil or wrong. And yet, it is so in us that it’s such a painful thing to try to resist. He sees that. He knows that.
When the question comes from our own hearts about something we’re facing, or the question comes to somebody else’s heart that’s looking at someone. “What’s the problem? What’s the sin? What’s the cause of this?” What Jesus is trying to do is to help his disciples, to help us get our minds off the cause. Sin is the cause. But what’s the purpose? What’s the purpose? Why would God allow for sin to reign and death to rule? Why would God allow there to be pain in the world?” And, depending on your theological background, “Why would God cause all these things?”
And that’s what Jesus is saying, “So that you can understand what the works of God are. So that you can know the glory of God.” This is very deep stuff. This is some deep, deep stuff right here.
The first thing we’ve got to understand is that Jesus is calling us to see people, to engage with people. What our motto here at the church is, “We want to put God’s glory on display, we want to build courageous people, we want to engage in society’s pain.” And that’s led us to do a lot of stuff with foster care in year’s past. This summer it’s led us to really figure out how we can get involved with the black community and what’s going on there, because they’re crying out with pain and frustration. So we’re trying to learn what we can do, and we’re trying to link arms. And I’ve sat at the feet of some awesome black men that have really been able to teach me a lot of neat things. I’m going to steer the USS Living Streams into some of those things.
But we’ve got to see people. And I was reading this passage, and studying it, and I was like, “Wait a second. Every day I drive past the Center for Blind Children on Northern, right there.” Super cool building. But I drive right past it. And I’m like, “I don’t really know what’s going on there.” But that’s a part of our community.
One of the things I learned this summer is that at your church, or your table, should reflect your community and who the Lord’s calling you to serve. And I thought about it, and we have a guy, Frank, who’s been in our church a long time and he’s blind. So I called him up and I said, “Hey, Frank, can we talk? I’ve got to ask you some questions about what I can learn, or what you would want us to know in regards to how we can link arms with you. Get our shoulder under the burden you’re carrying. You could teach us some things.”
And he said, “Let’s not do it over the phone. Let’s do it in person.” So we’re going to meet up.
I texted one of the guys who is in the service right now. I said, “Hey, your job is to help blind people find jobs. Can you tell me some things?” And he told me some things.
We’ve got to see people. We’ve got to see what’s going on. We’ve got to engage in society’s pain. I have a daughter who was born with spina bifida. She was born without being able to feel from her hips down. So she can’t walk. When we found out, it was heavy news. But it’s been so interesting because she turned eleven yesterday, which his awesome.
We have one family that we go to their house sometimes. And they’ve bought a bunch of ramps. So they have ramps all over their house. Whenever we come, they put out the ramps. We come in and Bella is going around all over. It’s awesome. I’m not saying everyone here should get ramps. “Don’t invite me over if you don’t have ramps.” I’m just saying that it’s a way they’ve decided, “Let’s get involved. Let’s just join in.”
Another family that our daughter is friends with, they actually bought their daughter a wheelchair so that when they go out, they can go to the mall and they can wheel together. It’s pretty cool.
That is just engaging. We’ve got to be careful we’re not judging, obviously, and pity is not a good thing either. It’s saying, “How can we actually join our lives together?” That’s what I love. It’s not just in the temple. It’s got to be at the table. It’s got to be real. It’s so easy for us to pretend in this place. But it’s got to be real.
I love this. So Jesus saw them, and he’s helping his disciples to see those people. But then he’s trying to get them to move from judgment and pity to really understanding the beautify and the glory of what God’s doing. He’s trying to get them to move in their understanding toward these things. So he starts to talk about, you know, it’s not cause, it’s purpose. He starts to talk about that this is all so that ultimately the glory of God, the work of God can be displayed.
And it brings to mind with this understanding that Tim Keller brought forth in one of his books. What he says is that the gospel has the audacity to claim that what God is up to, the work of God in the world is he is trying to make everything sad come untrue. I love the way that is phrased. It’s really intense. God’s plan is to make everything sad come untrue.
So here he is giving these guys a taste of something sad coming untrue. But this isn’t the way he does it every time. He’s doing this over all creation. This is a taste of what he plans to do over all of creation in time, as he returns to restore everything. So this gives us hope. This is the appetizer. That we’re all headed toward this time where everything sad will come untrue.
But then, Tim Keller adds this, “But somehow it will all be better for having once been broken.” Whoa. It is true. The gospel declares in the face of all opposition that God is going to make everything sad come untrue in time. But the wonder of it all is that somehow it will be better for having once been broken. And that is a heavy thing. It’s a different way to view pain. It’s a biblical way to view pain, not an American way to view pain.
Americans, we think pain is bad. We avoid it all cost. We try to insulate ourselves from all pain. And then, when we’re nervous that we might actually have to use some of the reserves we’ve saved up, because of some of the trouble… we look to the government. The government gives us the PPP.. So then we don’t even have to use the reserves we’ve stored up. The insulation that we desire is so intense. And I’m not making any political claims about PPP’s. But I’m saying this is the mindset of Americans. How do we insulate ourselves so that we never have to deal with pain? That is not a theology of pain that comes from the Bible.
Jesus actually said, “If you follow me hard enough and long enough, you’re going to end up at the cross. Not just as a bystander, but you’re going to be the one on the cross.” But that cross leads to resurrection. Sin and death have all of our lives, everything we’ve ever known, we get to the end of the day and they’re high-fiving each other. “Did you see all that pain we caused? Did you see all the dissension and division–all that hatred?” They’re just high-fiving each other all day long. “Look what we did!”
At one point there came this Jesus guy. Jesus was healing people and sin and death got a little nervous, because they’re like, “What’s this guy about?” And Jesus was actually saying he was taking on sin and death, that he was going to defeat sin and death. They were getting a little nervous. But when they saw Jesus on that cross, and that blood coming at them, and they watched him get weaker and weaker, until finally he gave up, then they started high-fiving each other again, saying, “We still reign over all of humanity.”
And then about, I don’t know how many hours later–I was going to try to do the math, but it’s not going to work–there was an earthquake that woke up sin and death and everything else. Then there were some angels that showed up. Then there was a big stone rolling around. Jesus rose from the dead. And sin and death’s power was broken.
What happened was, now Jesus is that first fruits of resurrection. He was the first sad thing to come untrue forevermore. He was the first thing to go from corruptible to incorruptible. He was the first one to experience resurrection life, a life that can never die. And then he looked to all of his followers and everyone who would hear him and said, “You want to follow me? Because though it is true that you will go to a cross, you will also step into resurrection life. You will become incorruptible. And everything sad will come untrue.”
This is the gospel. This is what Jesus was trying to get everyone to learn. This is what John wanted us to catch from this healing of the man. I’m not trying to take away from healings. Healings are wonderful. I’m praying they’re happening all the time. We’ve seen healings in this church. It’s wonderful. A guy got healed in the middle service, the 9:30 service. And that’s wonderful. But all of that is really just a finger pointing to the full restoration that God has planned for us, where we’ll all be healed. Everything sad will come untrue. But then we’re actually going to see with eyes. We’re going to see with resurrection eyes. And we will be like this blind man and we will be seeing for the very first time.
Listen to this:
The gospel declares that one day we will all have the scales of our fleshly world perspective fall off. And we will see for the very first time how good and right and beautiful and true God is. And everything that he has ever willed and done and allowed is also good and right and beautiful and true. Even all the crappy stuff.
The transformation, the radical moment where this guy went from never seeing anything to being flooded with all of that, pales in comparison to what it will be like for us who are so blind right now to the things of God, so blind to the full reality of who God is and what he’s doing in the world. When we actually either get Jesus to come back and get us, or we go to be with him, it will be like the first time we will be seeing. We will be flooded with the heavenly perspective, and it will be so much more intense than what this guy experienced. That is the gospel. That is the truth. That is the God that we’re dealing with. We cannot make God temporal. We cannot try and fit him into our worldly paradigms. He’s outside of this.
When we see from his perspective, we’re going to see that every single pain was not on accident, but actually, somehow makes things better for having once been broken. This is our great hope. This is why Jesus died.
First Corinthians 13:12 says:
12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face…
Like this guy who could never see. And now the first day that he’s seeing, he sees God incarnate, right? That’s pretty good.
…Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
We’re going to know God fully, even as we are fully known. It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be awesome.
Lord Jesus, we do thank you for your plans, for they are good, and they’re way more than good. And I pray that you would help us to hold on, to trust you, to believe, to patiently endure until that day where we get to see it clearly, Lord. And I pray that you would help us to see who it is you’re looking at right now in our communities, and that we would be able to see them and not be judgmental, but be able to love them and link arms with them. Lord, I pray for those who are really, really at wits end with the disease and disorders in their life. I pray that today you would wash them over with love and peace, and if so be Lord, that you would even give them the healing they’ve been praying for. We trust you, Jesus. We look to you in this time of uncertainty. We look to you and pray that you would lead us and guide us to those green pastures and still waters.
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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.
Who Holds the Power?
We’re going to be in John chapter 8. We’ve been tracking with John. John the evangelist, as he’s called. John the apostle. John the best friend of Jesus, as best we can say. John was a guy that we don’t know exactly how old, but he’s probably late teens, early 20’s, somewhere in there, when he came across this guy Jesus. When he and his brother were fishing, Jesus said, “Come, hang out with me.” And they said, “Okay.” And they did.
(Starting at 3:30)
We’re going to be in John chapter 8. We’ve been tracking with John. John the evangelist, as he’s called. John the apostle. John the best friend of Jesus, as best we can say. John was a guy that we don’t know exactly how old, but he’s probably late teens, early 20’s, somewhere in there, when he came across this guy Jesus. When he and his brother were fishing, Jesus said, “Come, hang out with me.” And they said, “Okay.” And they did.
They started following him and became like students of his, apprentices of his, disciples of his and through that next three years, John went from being someone who was following this guy who had some interesting teaching and words, and was willing to invite John and his brother into this kind of rabbinic tradition—and John thought that was great—to believing that he was the One who made the world. That’s interesting, right? He watched Jesus eat. He watched Jesus sleep. Not in a creepy way, probably. He saw Jesus have to go to the bathroom. I mean, it was just so real, right? They were hanging out.
But through this time three years and then continuing on for the next sixty years of his life he became convinced that that guy, that young, Jewish man that was walking around poor, oppressed, all of that, was actually Messiah, was God who came into this world to save the world from all their sins. And as Jay said, basically to restore everything forevermore. It is fascinating.
And John is writing this gospel so that we, who were not there, would also begin the same journey. Right? That we would begin to trust Jesus. That we would begin to follow Jesus. That we would apprentice our lives to this one named Jesus. That we would be able to recognize that he is not just some historical figure. But he really is God, forevermore alive. Savior of the world. And that John would kind of help show us the journey.
With John it was trust over time. That’s the phrase we’ve been using. That we would believe means to trust more and more over time. As you continue to test Jesus in some ways. As you continue to lean on Jesus and find he is worthy, find he is stable, he is solid. He does what he says he would do. He is faithful to his promises. That you will begin to trust more and more over time and find the riches that are there.
So that’s what the book of John is about. And as we see, John has shared that Jesus, basically from the beginning, he was turning the water into wine, he was feeding five thousand men, he was healing people, he was doing all these things, and people just started to think “This guy is awesome.”
Now, in first century Israel, it was not a great time to be a Jew. It was a tough time. They were under Roman oppression. They were poor. They had this kind of aristocrat class of Pharisees and Sadducees that seemed to do well, but they were oppressive as well, making everybody feel guilty all the time. It was a really tough time. Taxes were unbelievable. It was a really tough time.
So here comes this voice, this figure, this Jewish man that was able to say things that their hearts would burn within them as he spoke. He seemed to speak not as the Pharisees, but as one who had authority. What he said seemed to make sense. It seemed to cut straight to the quick. It wasn’t just propaganda or rhetoric. It was so precise, so powerful and true. And then he would follow it up with healing somebody. So it felt so powerful and real. But then it would actually produce something beautiful and powerful and real.
We’re all professionals at powerful rhetoric these days, right? We get it left side, right side. We get it front side, back side. We get it all over the place. America—that might be one of the best things we do. Powerful rhetoric. Right? You’ve got all that stuff made in China. Well, all of that powerful rhetoric—made here in America.
But what we are all longing for, what the cry of the American heart is, we don’t want rhetoric anymore. We want justice. We want truth. We want righteousness. We want peace. We want unity. These are the things we long for. And the words just, we don’t trust them as much anymore. There are too many words going too many different ways. So we have this cynical heart rising up within us.
And that was the people in that day. Except for Jesus was this weird exception. He was holy. He was righteous. He was acting and living in such a pure way that it seemed very different. But then there was power and authority and substance. So all these people started following him.
And then that moment—the end of John chapter 6 is kind of a culminating moment. Where John he Baptist just had his head cut off by a jewish official that had been given power by the Romans. He cut his head off. And the people lost it. They wanted to do something so they marched out to where Jesus was, out in the wilderness, grieving the loss of his cousin, and grieving the depravity of humanity.
And they came out to him, five thousand strong, five thousand men, and they tried to make him king by force. Which, again, I don’t quite know how that goes down. Like, “Be a king, man. Be a king.” I don’t know. It just sounds weird. But, basically, they were coming, and it was kind of a mob format. And they were saying, “We need a king. We need to go deal with Herod and you’re going to be our king.” And it says Jesus withdrew from them.
Then, at that moment we have chapter seven, chapter eight, chapter nine. We keep going. And it’s Jesus at this point of total popularity, where they want him to rule over them. They want him to lead them to where we get to ten chapters later, and the same crowd, the same group is gathered together and they’re shouting, “We will not have this man rule over us! We will not have this man rule over us!” And Pontius Pilate is saying, “I find no fault in him.” And they say, “Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him!” It very well was a lot of the same people.
So John is just showing us this interesting perspective of Jesus, how he’s so beautiful, so right, so true, and yet so rejected by the human heart—the ones he made, the ones he came to save, the ones that he shined his light on.
My question to us today is, where are we at in this? What is the authority of our lives? What are we trusting in these days? What rules over the thoughts in our heads and the actions of our lives?
And this chapter right here, I really do think is Jesus’ answer to anyone who might say, “Why should I give you authority over my life? Why should I let you be in control over my life? Why should I give my life to you?”
I think that’s what the Pharisees are saying to Jesus in this moment in chapter 8. So he gives them an answer. So we’re going to go through seven answers as to why Jesus should be the authority over our lives, why Jesus should be your boss, why you should follow him, why you should commit everything to him, even if it costs you your own life. This is the answer.
John 8. But before we get there, we actually have to read John chapter 7 verse 52, because it sets it up.
[The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36, John 21:25, Luke 21:38 or Luke 24:53.]
1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
That’s kind of the way 7:52 ends and begins chapter 8. Now, just a little bit of history for us. The Bible was written—Old Testament was written in Hebrew, New Testament was written in Greek with a little bit of Aramic mixed in there. The chapters and verses weren’t in there when they were written. John didn’t write, “Okay, I’m going to put these chapters in there.” John just wrote this as a letter, something that could be circulated throughout the churches—something that could be shared with people. It was basically like if you were to sit down and write why you believe in Jesus. And then you had people in mind that you want to send this to. That’s the way John was written.
And John was written well after the other gospels were written. The other gospels had already been written and circulated. So John is towards the end of his life. He’s living probably in Ephesus. He’s out in a Greco-Roman world, a little bit out of the Jewish context. And he just decided he can’t not do this. He knows the other gospels have been written: Matthew, Mark and Luke and some others. But he’s like, “I want to write my point of view. I want to write my letter to the people I have in mind.” So this really is his evangelistic letter that he is passing out to the world, his take.
It’s interesting here because it says that the early manuscripts and many other witnesses do not have the story. So it’s a short story many of us are familiar with, where a woman caught in the act of adultery is brought to Jesus and it’s kind of a trap that’s been set for him by the Jewish leaders.
So I just want to make note that the Bible here is trying its best, the NIV writers are trying their best to just give you where all this is coming about. So it’s actually in italics, if you noticed. Basically what they’re saying is, "This has shown up in some of the manuscripts that we have, the ancient manuscripts that we’ve been trying to discover and find. But it doesn’t show up in all of the early ancient manuscripts like everything else.”
So they’re giving you this footnote. They’re kind of saying, “Hey, this one, we’re putting it in here because we do think this actually does pass the test that we give it to make it into this. We do see it show up enough to think, eh, we better not leave it out because I think it is true and valid. However, it’s different from all the other stuff. So we just want to put a footnote so that everybody’s clear, everybody knows what’s happening so you can decide what you want to do with it.”
What if the media was like this? What if the media today was only telling us stories that were so verified by so many manuscripts, by so much testing…and anytime there was anything shady or shaky or not 100% verifiable, would we have any news? I mean, how short —would it be all commercials? I don’t know.
What I’m trying to say is the Bible has so much integrity, you don’t even understand. I can’t get into it like I want to, but you should look it up. If you have any question whether the Bible is a reliable authority in your life, do some work, please. Please. Especially you younger generation that has been told for so long that the Bible is oppressive or antiquated. Please! Do some work.
I mean, just to tell you all the other acceptable works of antiquity. They basically have anywhere between one hundred kind of artifacts or manuscripts. Maybe five thousand if you want to find like Homer’s Iliad or something like that. The Bible has over 25,000. It’s not even a contest. If you believe that Caesar was a real person, you’re going on so much more faith than it would take to believe the Bible and the stories they’re saying. The historicity of the Bible is unbelievable. It’s not even a question at all. The only parts of the Bible that they’re still like, “Well, we don’t really know this…” It’s because they don’t know yet. So many times they’ve been like, “Ha! The Bible’s wrong here. The Bible’s wrong here.” And then a hundred years later they’ll find something and, “grumble grumble. Well, it’s was right…” So anyway, please do some work.
But we’re talking about authority today. The Bible is such a good authority. It has withstood the test of time. This is not new stuff that our society is facing. The Bible has handled this generation after generation after generation after generation. And it’s proven itself to be true. And those who doubt it or those who live without it do so to their own demise. No doubt about it.
Let’s continue on:
1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
Now, again, this is a horrific situation. This is religious leaders doing exactly what religious leaders have done often and are continuing to do. They’re abusing power. They’re trying to get what they want through without really caring about people. And it happens all the time. And it’s sad and it’s horrible. And that’s what’s happening to this woman. I’m sure they set the trap for her so they could make sure and find her. And now they’re bringing her to Jesus. And this is a woman who has a mom and a dad, probably some siblings. And this is a horrible situation.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
11 “No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
It’s a short story. A real quick instance of something that happened in Jesus’ life. A trap that was set for him. And the trap basically goes between these two things. The Jewish law says, yes, a woman caught in adultery should be stoned. And there are also laws for the man and where’s the man? There’s a mess here. But it is true that that was a law. God is deadly serious about sin, no doubt about it.
But then, on the other hand, the Romans had a law that they alone were able to issue capital punishment. So if the Jews would have done this, they would have been in violation of the Roman law. So Jesus was caught in that trap, not to mention the trap between, “I thought Jesus would love people and now he’s issuing orders to kill a woman,” versus, “I thought Jesus was about the truth and now he’s not following…” So you can see all of the traps that they’re setting for Jesus here.
And yet, Jesus, knowing everything, he stoops down and just starts writing. We don’t know what he was writing but I think he was probably writing the ten commandments. Just be like, here’s the ten commandments, and then “Who is without sin? You cast the first stone.” I don’t know what he was writing down. But then it’s weird because it says they left, oldest to youngest. That part I don’t know. Because he stooped back and down and was writing. Maybe he was kind of writing their names down next to one of them. “Just in case you weren’t getting it.” Maybe he was writing a date down or whatever. I don’t know. But it was enough for these guys to be like, “All right. I’m out.” Oldest to youngest.
Then Jesus looks at this woman and says, “Where are your accusers?” And she says, “They’re all gone.”
And yet Jesus couldn’t stop there because there was one who was worthy, who was without sin, who could cast the first stone, and that was him. And he said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way and sin no more.”
And that’s the first one. Why should you make Jesus the ultimate authority in your life? Because he knows what you’ve done. He has the right to punish you forevermore. And yet he does not condemn you. This is a fascinating thing.
Romans 8:
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
Guess what? If you are not in Christ, there is condemnation for you. If you want nothing to do with Jesus, God will grant that to you forever. It’s called utter darkness. It’s called hell. To be without the love and light and peace of Christ, that’s the scary thing. There is condemnation. God does have wrath against sin. If you are still in your sin, there is wrath for you. But whoever comes to Christ, whoever is in Christ, hidden in Christ, the wrath of God is staid because Jesus took it all. There is no condemnation because you’ve been robed in his righteousness. He doesn’t condemn you.
Now, here’s the deal. He will convict you. Christians live with convictions. “I want to go…oh, better not do that.” “Oh, that’s pretty cool—oh, probably shouldn’t look at that.” You know? We’re walking around with these convictions. But these convictions are guiding us more into the light, further into the grace of God. And so we live with these convictions, but these convictions are not condemnation. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
If you feel that guilt and that shame in your life from the sin that you have done, if you don’t feel guilt and shame that’s a whole ‘other problem, but for those who understand that you are a sinner, you have hurt people, you have done wrong, and you feel that guilt and shame, come to Jesus. Because he does not condemn you. He will actually do away with that guilt and shame and you can live in freedom. You can live as a beloved. It’s so amazing. Anybody here ever gotten free of their condemnation, guilt and shame? Come on now!
Okay. So that’s number one. Let’s keep going.
12 When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
13 The Pharisees challenged him, “Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid.”
14 Jesus answered, “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going. 15 You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one. 16 But if I do judge, my decisions are true, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me. 17 In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is true. 18 I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.”
19 Then they asked him, “Where is your father?”
“You do not know me or my Father,” Jesus replied. “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” 20 He spoke these words while teaching in the temple courts near the place where the offerings were put. Yet no one seized him, because his hour had not yet come.
If you’re asking the question, “Why should I have Jesus rule over my life—be the authority of my life?” Because he won’t condemn you—which is fascinating—even though you do wrong. It’s amazing.
The second reason Jesus should have ultimate authority over your life is because he stands with the Father. He says that, “I know where I’ve come from and where I’m going.” He’s come from the Father, he’s going to the Father. He’s standing at the Father’s right side.
This is so interesting because all of this kind of back and forth picking sides that’s going on in our nation right now, in lots of different ways, where you’re at with COVID, where you’re at with racial relations, where you’re at with politics, where you’re at with church, open or closed, there are just so many ways that we can divide ourselves right now and pick a side.
Early on in this, I felt the Lord was bringing to mind that story where Joshua was just about to fight the battle of Jericho. He was off by himself one night, and all of a sudden he sees this shiny figure, this angel-type person dressed as a warrior approaching him. He stands up and he says, “Are you for us? Or are you for our enemies? Are you on our side or are you on their side? And the warrior answers and says, “No. Neither. I’m the commander of the army of the Lord of Hosts and the place you are standing is holy.” It’s like, “Don’t even try and put me on a side.”
Here’s the deal. Humanity is on the wrong side. They’ve got a lot of different sides over there, but they’re all wrong. Anything of human origin is ultimately going to leave you empty. But the goal of your life should be to get on over to the Lord’s side. But the goal of your life should be to get on over to the Lord’s side.
It’s not a matter of “Are you on our side or are you on their side? God, pick a side. God, join a side.” He said, “No, I’m not going to join a side.”
We’ve already seen Jesus is like, “I’m not going to submit myself to human opinion. I’m not going to submit myself to the polls” (so to speak).
So why should we have Jesus be the ultimate authority in our life? Because he’s on God’s side. He stands with the Father. He’s on the right side. If we stand with him, we’re going to find ourselves, no matter what circumstance we are in, to be on the right side. The right side. That’s where Jesus said we should stay. And he is right now sitting at the right hand of the Father.
Let’s continue on:
21 Once more Jesus said to them, “I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come.”
22 This made the Jews ask, “Will he kill himself? Is that why he says, ‘Where I go, you cannot come’?”
23 But he continued, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. 24 I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.”
25 “Who are you?” they asked.
“Just what I have been telling you from the beginning,” Jesus replied. 26 “I have much to say in judgment of you. But he who sent me is trustworthy, and what I have heard from him I tell the world.”
So the next thing: Jesus should have ultimate authority over your life because he is not of this world. It’s similar to being on God’s side. It kind of meshes here a little bit. Jesus is not of human origin. Jesus is not here today and gone tomorrow. All the faith and trust we put in human leaders and human figures, they will let us down. Even if they never let us down, they die. It’s a let down.
But Jesus is different. He’s the only one that said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” There have been many people who have said, “I know the way. I know the truth. I know the life.” And you can go visit their graves. But there’s one who claimed to be the way, the truth and the life and you just can’t find his body. It’s just not there. Because he is risen from the dead. The true enemies of humanity are not each other. It’s sin and death. And Jesus conquered them forevermore.
And that brings us to the next point. Jesus should have ultimate authority over your life because he rose from the dead and is coming back again.
Jesus is just continuing to set the stage for this moment. He says, “If I be lifted up…” But I always thought that was on the cross. If he is lifted up then everyone would know. I think he’s referring to the cross, but maybe even more so, “When I’m lifted up out of the grave then you will know that I am who I say I am.”
27 They did not understand that he was telling them about his Father. 28 So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. 29 The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” 30 Even as he spoke, many believed in him.
And then he goes on and says:
31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
33 They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”
34 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35 Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are looking for a way to kill me, because you have no room for my word. 38 I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you are doing what you have heard from your father.”
39 “Abraham is our father,” they answered.
“If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do what Abraham did. 40 As it is, you are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.
So now Jesus is kind of bringing it home a little bit. He’s talking about his authority from being with the Father, authority that, “Once I’m lifted up you’re going to see what authority I have when I’m raised from the dead.” And he then he starts saying, “And you guys are trying to kill me.”
They don’t deny it now. Remember last chapter they were like, “Why is he saying this? Are you crazy?” This time they’re not denying it. And he says it twice.
And here’s the next thing. Jesus should have ultimate authority over your life because he knows the evil in humanity’s heart. He’s not deceived. He’s not fooled. And it’s hard these days to not be deceived or fooled. It’s really hard these days because the rhetoric is so powerful. Yet, if you make Jesus the Lord of your life, he’s not swayed by popular opinion. He’s not confused.
A good way that I’ve heard people talk about is that we’re in this parade. The parade is coming by and here we are standing on the sidewalk and we’re watching the parade. We can see what’s happening in front of us. If we’re really wise, we can see what’s coming. And then we can also maybe kind of figure out what’s been that can help us a little bit. So we have a little perspective. The Zeitgeist of history can help us understand where we are today, but we can’t really understand our own time. Maybe some of us can see what’s coming a little bit.
But God’s perspective is like he’s up in this blimp above the whole thing. He’s not limited to just seeing a section of time. He can see it all, start to finish. He knows where it turns. He knows where it straightens out. He knows every part of history. He sees it all perfectly. And he can see into the human heart. He can see the selfish ambition. He can see all of the power plays. He can see all the manipulation. He can see all of that. He’s not fooled by that.
It’s not just out there. It’s in ourselves. Sometimes we can’t even see our own. I remember that was a big deal for me in my marriage early on. I was very persuasive. Again, I grew up and my brothers and parents called me the tyrant. I was the youngest and I guess it was the only way I could get things done. I was very persuasive. My dad said I should have been a lawyer. I was good at arguing. Now I’m a preacher. I just say what I say and nobody can argue with me. No—just kidding.
But I was very persuasive. I got married and, again, I was altruistic in my persuasion, as far as I was concerned. But I remember one time Brittany looking at me and saying, “I need you to stop talking.” I said, “What?” She said, “Because I know something’s wrong but if you keep talking I know you’ll convince me you’re right.” It broke my heart. It crushed me because she was right.
I was not just saying the truth to her. I was always trying to spin it a little bit. Even though I wasn’t trying to hurt her, I was trying to get her to see it and feel it the way I saw it and felt it, instead of letting her decide how she sees and feels it and then we work from there. This was a major moment. She couldn’t name it, but she could sense it. And I had a lot of repenting to do in a lot of areas of my life.
And this is the beauty of Jesus. He sees straight through it. You can’t sway him. You can’t convince him of something that isn’t right and true, because he knows. He’s an awesome authority. So different from anyone else that we could authority to. ”
48 The Jews answered him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”
49 “I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. 50 I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. 51 Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.”
52 At this they exclaimed, “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. 53 Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?”
54 Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. 55 Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. 56 Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”
57 “You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”
58 “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” 59 At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.
This is a big moment. Still people say that Jesus never claimed to be God. Yes, he did. Yes. And he did so so often and so clearly that they kept trying to kill him, and ultimately did.
So why should Jesus be the authority of our life? Because he is the I AM. If you read the scriptures of what that means. Basically it means that he’s the Alpha and Omega. He is what you need. He is what the world needs. Again, he’s not the Jesus we want all the time. He’s always the Jesus we need.
Right now, what the world needs is Jesus. Right now, what you need is Jesus. And amazingly enough, he has made an offer to you that you can join him. You can follow him. You can be a part of his family. And the authority that he brings is not an oppressive authority. It’s an authority that sets you free.
I watching a little bit of Braveheart last night. It was on TV. Basically, Robert the Bruce, who was king of Scotland, he was talking about William Wallace, who was basically the hero of Scotland. He was saying, “I don’t want men to follow me because I punish them if they don’t. I want them to follow me like they follow William Wallace. His life, his words, his actions inspire people to follow him.”
And that’s the difference. The Pharisees would punish the people or speak judgment from God to them if they didn’t do what they wanted them to do. Jesus spoke in a different way and lived in a different way. He inspired people to follow him. Because he was the truth and he had the truth and he spoke the truth and he acted in truth. Even to the extent of dying and arising from the dead.
Again, if you want to study the historicity of that act of resurrection, there’s more proof about the resurrection than almost any other event in human history, because it’s been a focal point, for sure. But Jesus is a trustworthy authority. He’ll lead you to life.
One last little analogy before we close. We had a guy speaking there on Tuesday, and he was talking about how he used to own a car wash in New York. In that car wash he would have the little signs and instructions when people would drive up. He was talking how, in his life, that’s what it has meant to trust Jesus, to give him authority. He has to put the car in neutral, put his life in neutral—like come to the Lord and say, “Okay, Lord, I’m here and I’m letting go.” A
Then he needed to take his hands off the wheel. Just take your hands off the wheel. And he needed to take his foot off the brake. It’s like, “God I’m going to give you control. I’m going neutral. God, I’m taking my hands off the wheel. Whatever you say, we’ll do. All right God, what are we doing? We’re going there? Okay.”
I love a quote by Pope Francis. “Ask God what he wants you to do and then be brave.” I think he could say, “Ask God what he wants you to do and then take your foot off the brake.”
Right now, as Christians, it’s very important for us…this is my three things:
Consecration. If we really want to have the authority in this moment to be able to speak in a way and live in a way that other people will find Jesus, we need to consecrate ourselves. We need to come out of some things. We need to unsubscribe some things. Consecration is a very important thing right now.
We need to intercede. Intercession is so important. Make sure your prayers are not just about you right now, please. Don’t just pray about your stocks and bonds. Don’t just pray about your needs. This is a time for the church to pray for others. I’m not saying God doesn’t care about your needs. Pray about those too. Just make sure your prayers include others. It’s time for intercession.
And it’s time for evangelism. We’re going to talk some more about that in the coming weeks. There’s nothing that makes Jesu happier than when you tell someone about him. Nothing makes him happier. Nothing.
And Jesus, we do ask that you would consecrate us. That you would pull us close to you. Show us where we’re entangled in the world. Show us the sin and weight that entangles us and help us to pull away from that, Lord. I pray you show us and teach us how to intercede in this time, that we would get to see mighty things happen because of our prayer life. And Lord, I pray that you would give us opportunities this week to tell people about who you are and what you can do. I pray all this in your name. Amen.
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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.
Disappointment with Jesus
It’s exciting to be back. We’re going to be in John Chapter 7. I thought the best way to start this next phase of our church was with a teaching called “Disappointed with Jesus.” Some snickers there. John Chapter 7 is where we’re going to be.
There’s a guy named John Cheever. He says, “The main emotion of the adult American who has all the advantages of wealth, education and culture, is disappointment.”
Series: John
John 7
David Stockton - September 6, 2020
(starting at 1:49)
It’s exciting to be back. We’re going to be in John Chapter 7. I thought the best way to start this next phase of our church was with a teaching called “Disappointed with Jesus.” Some snickers there. John Chapter 7 is where we’re going to be.
There’s a guy named John Cheever. He says, “The main emotion of the adult American who has all the advantages of wealth, education and culture, is disappointment.”
And Ravi Zacharias—who actually passed away this summer—says, “The loneliest moment in life is when you have experienced or achieved that which you thought would deliver the ultimate and it has let you down.”
All of the things that we though were solid and stable this year, obviously have been shaken and we’re all left with a little bit of confusion, a lot more uncertainty, and it’s very, very possible that many people in this room, or many people that you associate with, are dealing with severe disappointment with Jesus right now. Because often, the Jesus we want is not the Jesus we need. People are finding that out in the book of John right now in a serious way.
Before we jump in there, I felt so inspired during our worship time—we’ve been focusing on prayer. We felt that that is where we are supposed to be. The reason we did one piano, one singer, was intentional. It’s not just that everyone’s on vacation this weekend. We just feel like the hand of the Lord is heavy on us to be humble, to walk slow, the word “contrite” comes to mind. That’s the posture and position that we feel like Jesus is really calling us to right now. So we are trying to kind of walk slowly and carefully, paying close attention to what he’s doing.
We don’t want to get running. We don’t want to get in a hurry. We don’t want to just go back to the way things were. We want to go forward into the things he’s leading us into. So bear with us. If you’re like, “Hey, I’m good. I’m ready to dance and sing and all of that.” There are a lot of people who are saying, “I really want to be still. I really want to be quiet before the Lord and really hear what he might be saying because I’m a little unsure.”
While we were praying I just really felt the need to pray and intercede for the black community. So if you’ll join me in that:
Lord, we come before you, Maker of heaven and earth. And I just really want to pray that you would be with our black brothers and sisters, especially in Phoenix, that are processing so much right now. They’re having this frustration, this pain, this anger that is legitimate. And they’re trying to figure out what is the right thing to do. And at the same time, they are being offered so many solutions.
And, Lord, I pray that you really would help them find the truth in it all. That you would help them to teach us all. You would raise up leaders and teachers and new John the Baptists, and prophets in the black community that would really be able to help guide us through this confusing time and uncertain time. And Lord, I pray that you would diminish all the voices that are not helping, that are not actually trying to help, and don’t have your truth.
Lord, I thank you that I’m in contact with so many that are giving me so much encouragement, so many black men that are teaching me and guiding me. I just pray for more. I pray that this would be a really beautiful time in the black community. That they would come out of this and be more rooted in truth and love and freer than ever before. I pray you would show our church what we can do.
Lord, I pray that you would show us how to pray, how to love, how to care, how to listen. Lord, I pray for the predominantly black churches in our city, that they would really experience your strength, your favor, your clarity, your joy, your peace and your provision. And that, Lord, we would work together and walk together, as I know it would please you. So I thank you, Lord, that you’re on the move. And we just pray that we would be with you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
John Chapter 7:
1 After this, Jesus went around in Galilee. He did not want to go about in Judea because the Jewish leaders there were looking for a way to kill him. 2 But when the Jewish Festival of Tabernacles was near, 3 Jesus’ brothers said to him, “Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. 4 No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” 5 For even his own brothers did not believe in him.
Now, this is a moment in time where John, who was with Jesus during all this time, and then when Jesus left, basically continued to walk with Jesus in the Spirit for the rest of his life, until he was old. He was probably in his 80’s or 90’s, maybe even kind of late 90’s. We don’t know exactly. John seemed to keep on living. So he’s writing this as he has processed a lot. This is not just his first take at this thing. All of this stuff about Jesus, all of these memories have really gotten into his system. He’s been living them out and proving and testing them.
So he’s writing these things. And what he’s writing here is this moment of confusion that was going on in Jerusalem. There were all these different groups of people. In this chapter, there are 52 verses. Here are the groups that he mentions. In these two verses that we read he talks about the Jewish leaders and Jesus’ brothers. But he also mentions the disciples who stayed with him and the disciples who left. That’s a reference to chapter 6 at the very end. Jesus basically had 5,000 men. We know about 120 disciples and they were all there at this moment, trying to make him king after he had fed the 5,000 with just those loaves of bread and fish.
And there was this major moment, and Jesus teaches them that he’s not really interested in their movements. He’s not really interested in just feeding them bread so they don’t get hungry. He’s actually a lot more interested in building a kingdom that’s not of this world. He’s actually a lot more interested in feeding their spiritual needs than their physical needs. He’s way more interested in their spiritual formation than their national aspirations. And people were like, “Come again? What did he say? You see what Herod just did to John the Baptist? He took his head off! How could we not march on him right now?”
And Jesus was like, “I’m sorry. This is just not what I’m about.”
It was an intense moment. And then he goes and says, “Actually, if you really want to be a part of me, you’re going to eat my body and drink my blood.” It’s not a real cool thing to say at a moment like that. And so they all left. There were only twelve that remained. And Jesus said to them, “Are you going to go, too?” And they kind of said, “No. We want to stay with you.” But they also kind of said, “We really don’t have anywhere else to go.” It’s kind of a combination. They were like, “You have the words of eternal life. We know that what you’re doing, even though we think you really messed it up right now. We think you know what you’re doing and you’re going to accomplish the good that we really, ultimately long for.” And it was a real moment for them.
There were disciples who left, disciples who stayed. Some other groups: there were the crowds, there were the jews, there were some of the people that believed in him, there were Pharisees, temple guards that went to arrest him but after they heard him speak they were like, “I never heard anybody speak like that. I don’t know what to do.” And then we have the chief priests and Nicodemus.
All of them have a different opinion about who Jesus is. It’s very confusing. Lots of disappointment. Lots of confusion about who he is. And we’ll go through this, but before we do, I want to introduce you to this, in case you didn’t know. There is this Bible translated in kind of like a Hawaiian Pigeon English called The Jesus Book. And I just love it in this passage, in particular. It says this:
Afta dat, Jesus go aroun inside Galilee. He neva like go aroun inside Judea, cuz da Jewish leada guys ova dea stay looking fo him, fo kill him. Now, almos time fo da spesho religious time, wen da Jewish peopo rememba da time dea ancesta guys wen walk all ova da boonies, an stay inside shacks, long time befo. Den Jesus bruddas tell him, “Go way from hea, an go Judea side, so da peopo you wan teach can see da kine stuff you stay doin. If one guy like everybody know bout him, he no goin do stuff wea nobody can see him, yeah? You stay doin all dis kine stuff, so, let everybody all ova da place see ya doin um! You know, even Jesus bruddas neva trus him.
I love it. There you go. Jesus’ brothers never trust him. That phrase really sticks out to me because, first of all, Jesus had brother—and sisters probably. So that’s just wild to think about. Obviously they didn’t have the same dad—virgin birth and all of that—but they had the same mom. So these are his half-brothers. Jesus was the oldest and he had all these brothers. And his brothers, the ones who grew up with him, they don’t trust him. They don’t believe in him. They’ve seen the things he’s done. They’ve heard the things. And everybody else is getting caught up in this Jesus train, and they’re not buying it for a second. They don’t believe him.
I grew up as the youngest of three boys. And my brothers, they don’t believe me. They didn’t believe me. They don’t trust me. They called me The Tyrant. Somehow, I was so small, but I was like a dictator. And they would beat me up all the time. And I never trusted them. My mom would say, “All right. What happened? Who broke that?” Everything was broken all the time. Including my body parts sometimes. Broken arm. Broken collar bone three times. Whatever.
My mom would say, “So, what happened?” And we would all have our own opinion and story. It just so happened every time I told the story it was really good for me. Made me look good. Same for them. So we knew that all of us were liars.
But here’s the trick with Jesus. When Mary would come and say, “Okay, what happened?” everyone knew who was going to tell the truth. Everyone knew what the truth was. Jesus was like, “Well this is what happened.” And his brothers were like (grumbling sound). It was kind of a rough situation. But they didn’t trust him. They thought he might be crazy at this point.
But two of them, for sure, that we know—James, who wrote the book of James in the New Testament, who became the lead pastor of the first church in Jerusalem—went from never trusting him to believing that he was God sent from God to be the Lamb who was slain for the sins of the world. What a trip to go from this moment all the way to that place where James actually was killed because he so believed that Jesus was Lord. His brother was Lord of all, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And then Jude—the guy who wrote the epistle of Jude at the end of the Bible, he also was a brother of Jesus that came to faith that Jesus really was the one he said he was. After the resurrection, they were kind of like, “Uh, all right. That one’s pretty good.” And they believed him. But what a trip that is.
That was their journey. So let’s continue on. It says that Jesus told them, when his brothers were saying, “Go up…”
6 Therefore Jesus told them, “My time is not yet here; for you any time will do. 7 The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil.
And here, Jesus, again, he’s sharing with his actual brothers. His disciples are there with them. There’s this debate about whether he should become a public figure or not, and he’s saying, “You don’t understand. That’s not what I’m here for. That’s not what I’m about.” And he says, “You guys can come and go as you please, but I need you to know that the world hates me.”
Now, at this point, it didn’t seem like the world hated him. They were all a little disappointed. They were all a little confused why he didn’t want to become king and do what they wanted him to do. But, “Hatred? You’re crazy. I don’t understand.”
But Jesus was teaching them something that it’s very important for him to teach, something important for his disciples to understand. And he continues to go back to this time and time again with his disciples. John 15:18 says this:
18 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 20 Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.
So this is later on in the book of John, as the tension is rising, as the heat is rising. Jesus is saying, “Don’t forget. I told you before that if they hate me they’re going to hate you. But let me remind you that if they persecute me, they’re going to persecute you.”
There has not been a nation in human history that has continued to give favor to and believe in the ways of God. And here in America, we have experienced favor as Christians, no doubt about it. Hallelujah. Thank you for all of those who fought for that and are still fighting for that. It’s wonderful to be able to gather in a place like this. But this isn’t true in a lot of the world. And if you follow human history and nations that rise and fall, it’s not going to be true in America forever.
Now am I saying we are about to be persecuted and everybody hates us? No. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I don’t want us to be unaware of what Jesus is teaching his disciples. If you call yourself a disciple, basically Jesus says, “You’re on your way to persecution. You’re on your way to being hated. You’re on your way to death.” I’m not saying it. Jesus is saying it.
Welcome back to church. Isn’t it good to be here? How disappointing is that? Wait Jesus. You just turned water into wine, you healed people of diseases, you fed five thousand. We were into that. We liked that Jesus. That was great! That’s all we need. And now you’re telling us that’s not what you’re about? That’s not ultimately the most important thing to you? We were becoming popular. People were loving us. And Jesus says, “Just wait. Just wait.”
Again, this is Jesus preempting this thing. It hadn’t actually flushed out in public that everyone was trying to kill Jesus or hated Jesus, but it becomes that way. Jesus saw it coming before it showed up.
He says:
8 You go to the festival. I am not going up to this festival, because my time has not yet fully come.” 9 After he had said this, he stayed in Galilee.
10 However, after his brothers had left for the festival, he went also, not publicly, but in secret. 11 Now at the festival the Jewish leaders were watching for Jesus and asking, “Where is he?”
12 Among the crowds there was widespread whispering about him. Some said, “He is a good man.”
Others replied, “No, he deceives the people.” 13 But no one would say anything publicly about him for fear of the leaders.
You can see that even in our day right now. You have to be so careful what you say in our society these days. Like, am I allowed to pray for the black community in church? There’s part of me going, “That feels dangerous.” You’re praying for people? That should not be dangerous. But these people are all nervous. There’s tension.
14 Not until halfway through the festival did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. 15 The Jews there were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?”
16 Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. 17 Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.
This is a key moment right here. And again, Jesus is speaking to his disciples, as well as he is speaking to the crowd. He’s probably actually on that temple mount. He was a rabbi. His disciples were there and he began teaching them, some other people came. Jesus is kind of the buzz word these days. Probably more people came. But there were probably other rabbis sitting with their disciples, teaching them in this moment. There’s a whole bunch of people in Jerusalem.
And Jesus is telling them, “Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or from man.” Because there was debate as to whether what Jesus was saying was true. And I love this because this is so classic John. We’ve talked about John. John’s premise for writing his book, the Gospel of John, is so that you would believe.
And we spent time talking about the difference of what that means “to believe.” To John, it clearly means “trust over time.” We talked about, for Paul, faith kind of means “pledge of allegiance.” I’m going this way and I’m forsaking everything else. But for John it means trust over time.
Because John was just a fisherman. Out fishing by the Sea of Galilee when a guy came up and said, “Hey, you wanna hang out?” And John was like, “Okay.” And they started hanging out and next thing he knew he was at a wedding with this guy and the guy turned water into wine. And John was like, “All right! I’m with this guy right here.”
And then John saw him heal people and feed five thousand and he heard the teachings and he watched the life that he lived. John was more and more convinced over time that the words that Jesus spoke were true. All the way to the point at which John saw Jesus up on that cross. All the other disciples had forsaken him. John was the only one that was there because he had begun to trust that Jesus was everything he said he would be and more than John could ever comprehend.
And then, when John heard the whisper that Jesus had risen from the dead, he ran to that tomb. And, once again, his trust was deepened and deepened and deepened. And that’s why John is writing these stories, so that you will begin to trust in the name of Jesus, in the words of Jesus, in the way of Jesus. And as you begin to walk in it, you will find that it is true.
When I first started really following Jesus, trying to really practice the way of Jesus, it was great. It was like “This all makes sense.” But then my dad took his life. And there was this moment where I had to say, “Okay, God, I guess right now I’m going to see if this stuff really works.” And it did. And it does.
Shortly after that, me and some friends, one of them is sitting right over there, we decided that we were going to go to Ireland for three months. Just buy a ticket and go to see what the Lord might do. Some stupid young man idea (or young woman, I don’t know. You probably have bad ideas, too.) But it was just like I needed to see. “Okay, Lord, I want to see what you’re going to do. I want to see if you’re going to show up.”
So we did. We just got on a plane and flew over there. And I had, like, a hundred and fifty dollars. And he had, like, fifteen cents. And within three days we had a place to live, we had jobs, and we were going all over Northern Ireland to tell people about Jesus. And then my little bit of faith just got a little bit bigger. And it was just this trust over time.
And then I married this lady named Brittany and she’s like, “Let’s go to Belize where there’s no running water and be there for a year and see what the Lord might do.
It’s like, three months Ireland? Okay. Nine months Belize? Gasp. With a one-year-old? Gasp. And yet the way that the Lord met us in that place was trust over time.
And Jesus is saying, “Look, it’s going to get tough. It’s going to get hard. But if you will do what I’m saying to do, if you will walk with me, you will see that my words are not coming from man.”
And there are a lot of words coming from mankind right now that are not to be trusted. But Jesus is trustworthy—more than we’ll ever know, until that final day when we’ll get to really see that everything he’s done has been righteous and true. Even though the Jesus we want is oftentimesnot the Jesus we need—even though we go through lots of times of disappointment with Jesus, he’s still trustworthy.
Let’s continue on:
18 Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him. 19 Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me?”
20 “You are demon-possessed,” the crowd answered. “Who is trying to kill you?”
Remember, Jesus is saying, “They’re going to hate me,” but it’s not really prevalent yet. And he’s saying that they’re gong to try and kill him, which is true, but not everybody knows that. So they’re saying, “You’re demon possessed.” That’s what people think about him.
21 Jesus said to them, “I did one miracle, and you are all amazed. 22 Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs), you circumcise a boy on the Sabbath. 23 Now if a boy can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing a man’s whole body on the Sabbath? 24 Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”
This is an important word for Christians today. We’ve got to be careful how we’re judging things. We’ve got to pray enough so that we can see clearly enough. Because there are a lot of powerful solutions being offered to people right now that are of human origin and will leave us high and dry. It’s so important that we really take this seriously.
In my weekly email this week I talked about a couple of things that I think are things that have some good but they’ve been mingled with things now to where they are actually very dangerous. And we, as Christians, we have to be very careful that we don’t try and link something that is in our world, our agenda, an idea or political party and try and link it with Jesus. Jesus made it very clear in his day and age (and still today) that his kingdom is not of this world.
Now, politics and social reform—all of those things are good things that it’s good for us to do what we can. But we have to be very careful to not ascribe Jesus to one of those things. Christian nationalism is a dangerous, dangerous thing. I want to read to you what the German Christians in 1934 were saying:
We are full of thanks to God that he, as Lord of history, has given us Adolph Hitler, our leader and savior from our difficult lot.
The German church, the German Christians were praising God for his sovereign providence in bringing a leader like Adolph Hitler to save them. And yet, there were some Christians—we know Bonhoeffer, we know Bart and many others, Corey ten Boom—they weren’t missing it. They were about the Father’s business, the Kingdom of Heaven, in the midst of such an atrocious moment in time.
And I just want to be those Christians. I don’t know how to be. That’s why I’m praying all the time. That’s why for nine weeks you guys came to an hour service and I was here for four hours. And it took the Lord tricking me into a four-hour prayer service, because it’s my job, to get me to actually do it. But, boy, was it rich! Four hours four the last nine Sundays, I’ve just been here, trying to hear from the Lord and it’s been awesome.
We need to be gathering in parks with our neighbors and friends, just saying, “Let’s just go and pray.” I heard about a group doing that. We need to just be getting people together, “Hey, let’s hang out and let’s just pray and see if we can get any idea what we’re supposed to do with our lives and our families right now.”
This church should be a house of prayer. I really want us to not be on the wrong side of this moment. I think we can, but I mean, the Spirit of God wants to lead us into all truth. But we’ve got to listen. We’ve got to be careful we don’t start associating things that aren’t there.
Now, in the first service, people thought that I was saying that Trump was Adolph Hitler. No way! I will name who I thing Adolph Hitler is today. No, I won’t. I’m not even going to try. Give me a break. I don’t know. If I knew it, I would say it. But I’m not saying it because I don’t know. I just know the spirit of anti-Christ, John told us later on, is alive in our world today. And I do know things that are very anti-biblical that are becoming very popular. And we’ve got to be careful and just say, “Okay, let’s see how this rolls out.”
So, please, don’t think I’m saying something I’m not saying right now. You could send me an email and be like, “You were talking about this…” And I would be, “No, I wasn’t talking about that guy!” So, are we clear on that?
But I’m bringing up the German Christians because they got it wrong. And they were calling themselves Christians. And here is Jesus, way before them, saying, “Hey, don’t get this wrong.” There is truth and there is not truth. And Jesus is about the truth. That’s why he’s trustworthy.
So we continue on:
25 At that point some of the people of Jerusalem began to ask, “Isn’t this the man they are trying to kill? 26 Here he is, speaking publicly, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities really concluded that he is the Messiah? 27 But we know where this man is from; when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.”
28 Then Jesus, still teaching in the temple courts, cried out, “Yes, you know me, and you know where I am from. I am not here on my own authority, but he who sent me is true. You do not know him, 29 but I know him because I am from him and he sent me.”
Now, those of you who don’t think that Jesus ever claimed to be God, you don’t speak Jewish. What Jesus said right there, if you were a first century Jew, that’s blasphemy, unless it’s true. He’s saying, “I’m from God.” Basically, he’s saying, “I am God. I’m the whole deal.” How do I know that? Look:
30 At this they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come. 31 Still, many in the crowd believed in him. They said, “When the Messiah comes, will he perform more signs than this man?”
And then, as he goes on, it’s kind of leading up to this moment:
37 On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” 39 By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.
On this great moment of the festival—now every day for seven days they’ve been celebrating their wilderness wanderings and how God provided for them there. They actually built tents and booths and they would sleep in these things during the month. They would pour out this water every day from the Pool of Siloam, remembering how God provided water out of the rock in the desert. And there was this one day where they wouldn’t pour water out. It was kind of a climax. Almost like they were saying, “We’re longing fo the day when God once again visits us.” And it was at that moment that Jesus stood up in the crowd and said, “Let all who are thirsty for that moment, let all who really long for God to come again, let all who really long for the loving presence, the satisfying water of God, to come. Let them come to me and out of their innermost beings will gush torrents of living water.” That’s a moment right there.
That’s a moment that Jesus set up, where he was saying, “Everybody can come. Anybody can come and I will give you the water that your thirsty soul needs. And what I bring is not of human origin. It’s not temporal. It’s not going to leave you high and dry in the end. What I bring will begin small, but as you begin to trust and walk, it will keep growing and growing until it just starts pouring out of you forevermore.”
That’s the promise of Jesus.
I want to read a couple of things to close:
Church, don’t be surprised when evil prospers and things with demonic origin and agenda become popular. At the same time, don’t be surprised when doing the right thing, holding on to the truth and submitting your life to the authority of scripture becomes unpopular, hated and even persecuted. Don’t let your disappointment with the Jesus you want lead you to be deceived. Remember that the Jesus you want is not often the Jesus you really need. And the problem is your perspective is not his.
Remember what Philip Yancey says in his book Disappointment with God:
Why the delay? Why does God let evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive on this planet? He holds back for our sakes. Re-creation involves us. We are, in fact, at the center of his plan. The motive behind all human history is to develop us, not God. Our very existence announces to the powers of the universe that restoration is underway. Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like a tolling of the bell, and a faith like Job’s reverberates throughout the universe.
Every time you and I act in the truth, act in faith, it’s like this reverberating gong that goes throughout all of the cosmos and creation, that the restoration has begun. That what Jesus died to purchase is already beginning to play out. And if it plays out day in and day out, eventually it’s going to grow. The kingdom of heaven will grow. Like that mustard seed it will grow and it will ultimately fill everything. Then, at that moment, our perspective will be clear. And we will say, “Righteous and true are your judgments, O God. Thank you to bringing us to a place where every sad thing has become untrue.”
The restoration has begun in each of us. The kingdom has already begun. And if we will walk out with Job-like faith, we will be a part of that restoration and we will be with Jesus. But here’s the deal. Job-like faith is not an easy thing. Don’t listen to this. Don’t listen to these Bible verses. These are not fun. Okay? I’m just warning you. So, if you’re still listening, it’s your fault.
Job’s faith—he lost everything. He wasn’t just shaken or disrupted. He lost everything. And yet, he says in the face of God, “Though you slay me, yet I will trust you. Because I’m so convinced that you know what is right and you can accomplish it, that, though you slay me, I will trust you.” Because I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will one day stand on the earth. Though my body is destroyed, I will see him person and he will make it all make sense.”
Trust over time.
Let’s pray:
Jesus, wow. You know what you’re doing. You knew what you were doing and you were doing it. And it was amazing and it was wild, and it was confusing for people. Yet, it was beautiful and strong and brought about truth and salvation forever. And here, in our time, Lord, we know you’re alive. We know you know the way. We know you’re at work. But it’s hard to see. I pray that you would strengthen our faith for whatever may come, that you would develop our trust over time. Show us your way and your will and teach us to walk in it. And Lord, we pray right now that all this tension in our society would be released to renewal and revival. But if the tension gets released in another way, we pray that you would just help us to be on the right side of history, of your story—and you’d help us to rescue and save as many as we can, no matter what happens, because we’re so thankful that you rescued and saved us.
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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.
Cleansing and Zeal
Well, we’ve got 2020 still going on. In 2020 we’ve got the COVID-19, the death toll, the quarantine, the Donald Trump, the liberal, the conservative, the Black Lives Matter, the cisgender privilege. We’ve got riots, defunding police, it’s 115 degrees out there sometimes, and Disneyland is closed!
God is Good, Evil is Real, and the Devil is a Liar
David Stockton
Series: John
Chapter 2
Well, here we are again. Welcome, Living Streams! It’s good to be with you. I want to say a prayer real quick as we jump into this. It’s kind of a wild world out there. Sometimes it dan be a wild world inside our own bodies. Let’s take a little moment and pray.
Lord Jesus, we do thank you for today. Lord, we want to hear from you. We need your word. We don’t need anymore words from mankind. We just need to hear from you—truth. We need heaven’s perspective. Lord, we’re hungry for your word. We don’t live by anything but the words that come from your mouth. We want to live, Lord. We don’t want to just exist. So please come speak to us.
Thank you for your Spirit that can speak to us. Thank you for the scriptures that have so clearly laid out for us your plan and how you work within humanity. Be with us, Lord, I pray. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, we’ve got 2020 still going on. In 2020 we’ve got the COVID-19, the death toll, the quarantine, the Donald Trump, the liberal, the conservative, the Black Lives Matter, the cisgender privilege. We’ve got riots, defunding police, it’s 115 degrees out there sometimes, and Disneyland is closed!
So. Yeah. All of those words probably make you kind of catch your breath a little bit, or lose a breath, or your heart pace quickens a little bit. I understand that and I want to end that kind of wildness that we’re all experiencing day in and day out.
I want to say these words. This is 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 from the Message. Just let this wash over you:
The world is unprincipled…
As my grandpa used to say, “God is good, evil is real, and the devil is a liar.” And that’s an absolute truth.
The world is unprincipled. It’s dog-eat-dog out there! The world doesn’t fight fair. But we don’t live or fight our battles that way—never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity.
You remember that commercial that used to just go, “Ah, the power of cheese.” When it would talk about satisfying your hunger, I just feel like reading the scriptures these days has been just like, ‘Ah, the power of God’s word to just come in and satisfy a weary, thirsty or confused soul.”
And I just love this verse. We’re going to get into a whole bunch more verses. But right now, as this message is going on, as you’re listening to this, in our Sanctuary, there is what we’re calling kind of a “worship attack” going on—a “prayer attack” going on. That sounds kind of weird. I understand that. But basically, the concept is we’ve been opening like we said in the announcements, our sanctuary for in-person, on-campus gatherings for a limited capacity of people that are coming. The whole point is they are coming to just pray. They’re coming to intercede. They’re coming to engage in spiritual warfare as the Bible teaches us. They’re coming to kind of see what we can do. Like Moses, Aaron and Hur, to lift our hands to turn the tide of the battle that’s going on in our society, and to make sure that all of the division and corruption that is in our society doesn’t find its way seeping into our church, let alone the Church of God as a whole.
So I’m so excited about what’s going on there. And with the homeless stuff that’s going on. I had some great conversations with some homeless brothers and sisters that have been coming. They’re very thankful for the relief. They’re very thankful for being able to kind of take a nap and then wake up without some startling thing where someone’s kind of hitting them, telling them they’ve got to get out of here. Or someone’s trying to steal their stuff. They can wake up in peace. They keep mentioning, “It’s just so quiet in here. So comfortable in here.”
It’s been a real blessing to be able to spend time with those men and women and to see maybe if there are some ways we can help them in a more longterm way.
We’re going to jump into John Chapter 2 here. We’re going to start in verse 13.
When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”
They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, many people saw the signs he was performing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people. He did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person.
And so here we have again this concept that God is good and evil is real. Mankind has a problem. It’s got this depraved nature within us. And then we have the devil and the deceit that comes from that regard as well.
So Jesus is here in the temple courts and he does something fascinating. He does something wild. He’s watching this gathering take place. It’s the Passover time, so there are probably close to two million Jews that have gathered in Jerusalem. So the city is just bustling. And there at the temple, which is the central focus, people are coming to make sacrifices. According to Judaism that’s what was required. A sacrifice needed to be made to kind of show penance—to get forgiven of your sins. That was the deal that God had made with the people.
So they would come to the temple courts with some sort of offering. That was to admit that they had been guilty, they had sinned. It was to admit that God is good and God is right, and they want to be right with God. And they were thankful that they could do something to actually make themselves right with God. So they would come and offer these sacrifices. And they would come with a dove. Or they would come with a cow. Or they would come with sheep, or whatever it might be.
What they experienced as they got there, though, was the people who were running the temple, the priests, all those, had realized that they could make some money off of these people. So one of the things that was required is your animal would have to be perfect. It would basically have to be inspected by the priest. And if there was any fault found in it, they would not let them sacrifice that. So what the priests did was, they came up with their own kind of priest-inspected cattle, sheep and doves. So, if you wanted to come and purchase one of those, you wouldn’t have to carry an animal from wherever you came from. You wouldn’t have to worry about the unscrupulous priests who would come and find fault. You could just come and pay for an already-approved animal to sacrifice. The only problem was, it was a lot more expensive. There was quite a service fee added to it.
So Jesus was watching this take place. And not only that, but the money changers that Jesus was dealing with, they would also say, “We as the priests, we can’t receive that money that has Caesar’s image on it because it’s not holy money.” So they actually made up their own money. So not only did you have to purchase a priest-approved sacrifice, but you would also have to exchange your money into priest-approved money so that you could purchase your priest-approved sacrifice. Basically, people were just getting totally, totally ripped off.
So Jesus has come with his family. Jesus is thirty years old. Jesus has not gone public with his ministry. We talked about two weeks ago in John 2, at the beginning, really the first kind of revelation outside of his own family structure was to his disciples and to the people at the wedding at Cana when he changed the water into wine. That’s how John introduces us to Jesus. The first miraculous, first revealing of his glory wasn’t in some grand standing way. It was a very small town.
So now, here’s this other kind of revelation that’s happening, where Jesus is revealing a little bit more of who he is and the authority that he does have. So he’s just pulling out this whip as he’s watching person after person getting ripped off. Maybe he was getting to the front of the line. Maybe he was just thinking of his own mom and what she has done as she has come and been ripped off. We don’t know what it was that finally just kind of broke free in him. But he actually went over and found a cord and made a whip. And he just started making a scene. He was wild. He was whipping…I don’t know if he was whipping people or just kind of cracking the whip. We don’t know.
We know he was throwing the tables over and he was just really attacking this whole enterprise that was going on. He was driving all the animals out, kind of causing all of that commotion. People running out watching for the stampede. He comes over to those with the doves. I guess he didn’t want to just let them go, so he just pushed them all out, got them all out. He threw the tables over, got the money changers out. He just basically went on a rampage.
Then, when it all settled, or whatever happened as he was walking out, we don’t know exactly when security came. We don’t know exactly what happened, but they said, “What authority do you have to do this?” Like, “Who do you think you are coming in here and doing this?”
Obviously they didn’t know—no one knew at that point, but Jesus just says, “You have turned my Father’s house into a den of thieves. Get out of here. Stop turning my Father’s house into a market.”
So he’s saying, “My Father’s house.” He’s starting to allude to this connection that he had with God that was very offensive to the people. What John writes here is that, he remembered later on as he’s kind of remembering the scriptures, in Psalm 69, in talking about this Messiah, it’s a messianic Psalm. It says that the zeal for his house will consume him. So they’re kind of putting these pieces together, that something is happening, that something more than meets the eye is going on with this Jesus guy. And he’s fulfilling these messianic prophecies. Zeal for his house and what takes place there. Righteous indignation and this rising up to stand against oppression. And to stand for the people of God.
I think about the times in my life where I’ve probably been most zealous, where I’ve been most enraged. As a grownup I don’t feel like I get enraged real easy. It takes me a while. But as a young boy, I had two older brothers and I don’t know if they loved picking on me, or if they loved seeing me lose it. I’m not sure which one they loved more. But they loved one of those very much. There were many times, as the smallest, and scrawniest of my clan, my brothers would pick on me and pick on me and pick on me. Ultimately, I would get to a point where I would just scream. I would just start throwing fists and they said it didn’t hurt bad, but my tiny little fists would hurt them, so they would go running as I was throwing my fists everywhere. I remember one time my brother locked himself in the bathroom. I was so mad that I got a butter knife and stabbed it through the bathroom door. I was so enraged. So enraged.
Obviously Jesus was not losing it in that regard. He was still under control. We see where he kind of comes to the birds and those people and he’s able to say, “Hey, you need to go off this way.” So he was still in control. But he was so filled with this outrage. Zeal is the word used in the Bible. Actually, in the Greek the word is zelos. It really is kind of righteous indignation. It’s jealousy, but not in the sick way, but basically like a husband and someone is coming to take his wife, or maybe even to rape his wife, and the amount of angst, the amount of rage that would be built up in a husband in that situation. It’s protective. It’s standing against. It’s this zeal that Jesus shows in this moment.
For you kids, real quick, before we go on. This is the picture that I would love to see you draw. It sounds kind of interesting to draw a picture of Jesus with a whip. But I think it’s important because I want you to understand this aspect of God. That he will fight for what’s right. He will stand against evil. So go ahead and try to draw a little temple, and maybe a picture of Jesus holding a whip. I think that would be a fun thing for me to see. So if you do that, go ahead and email it to me at david@livingstreams.org and I’d love to see that. Again, whoever kind of wins the day will get something in their mailbox. Some of you should be receiving some of those things if you haven’t already.
That’s what’s taking place. That’s the story. It’s so interesting to me because John introduces Jesus in John Chapter 2 as someone who turns water into wine, as someone who brings this conversion from water to wine. And then in the very next breath he shows Jesus as this one who cleanses.
In the commentary I was reading, they were talking about how that’s the way of the Lord. We don’t get cleaned up before conversion. First we come to Jesus and we are converted. And then as we walk with him we start to find the temple of our own lives cleansed. It’s so important to remember that.
And if you are someone that has not surrendered to Jesus, if you have not given your life to Jesus, if you have not said, “Jesus, I need you, I need you, please come and save me from myself. Wave me from my world. Save me from my family history. Save me from whatever it might be. Save me from my anger. Save me from my greed.” Whatever it might be. If you have not called out to Jesus and allowed him to come and convert you into one of his own children to transform your mind and heart, to help you be born again as Michael was talking about from John Chapter 3 last week, like Nicodemus.
It’s not enough to just try. It’s not enough to just fight, We actually need conversion. We actually need to be born again. We need the Spirit of God to come and dwell in us, to overcome our own sinful nature. It’s the only way we can go forward. As we do, as we make that pledge, as we make that pledge of allegiance to Jesus, as we put our trust in him, as we receive him into our life as Lord and surrender ourselves to him, then what happens is cleansing begins. That’s what happens in John 2, as well.
I want to talk a lot about the cleansing today. The cleansing of the temple. There are a couple of quotes here that I think are really helpful in helping us understand Jesus, which is the whole goal of every time we preach. To understand who God is. And understand a little bit of how this message can apply to us today.
But first I want to put up a quote from G. K. Chesterton. He is just someone who is really good with words. Here’s what he says about Jesus in regards to what he has heard about Jesus and what he reads in the scriptures. He says:
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament, I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not of a person with parted hair in the middle, or hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry God—and always like a God. The diction about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; It is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. … Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other.
I love the song that we were singing this morning, talking about there’s nothing stronger than the love of God. There’s nothing stronger than the love of God. And it is so true. God’s love for you is the most fierce, powerful thing the world has ever known. It is absolutely true. But at the same time, God’s desire for justice rages just as strong. In God we have this razor’s edge where he is perfectly loving and kind and good; but at the same time, totally, totally given to destruction of evil. And that’s in Exodus Chapter 34. We see the image of God. He is abounding in love and faithfulness to thousands of generations, but he will not leave the guilty unpunished,
Sometimes in our gospel message, sometimes in the reading of our scriptures, and sometimes in today’s preaching, we hear about the love of God. And it’s good and it’s right and it’s wonderful, but it almost becomes in exception to the justice of God, the zealous and jealousy of God for his nature, for his righteousness, for his people. And how angry and how wrathful he becomes when evil is allowed to prosper. Or when we play flippantly with sin. It’s very upsetting to him. Exactly what’s happening here. And the zeal of God… so it’s both together.
The words here, inside God, the dualistic nature, the opposite passions are love and justice. Or, as John Chapter 1 says, Jesus came with grace and truth. He came with eternal mercy and everlasting judgment. Both are valid. Both exist. Both are real.
It’s this razor’s edge that we find in the nature of God. So please don’t ever forget about Jesus with the whip. At the same time, don’t forget about Jesus turning water into wine. AT the same time, don’t look at the cross and forget about what wrath was being poured out. What suffering Jesus was going through. That the scriptures would actually say it pleased the Father to punish the Son. Those are hard, hard verses. But it’s the justice of God saying, “I need to deal with sin. I have to punish sin.”
And that’s what’s so amazing about Jesus. He stood there and said, “Then punish me, Father. Put it all on me so that David, and so that all those people at Living Streams Church would not have to feel the full vengeance of your wrath, your righteous indignation.”
So when you look at the cross, you’ve got to know it’s the love of Christ being poured out for us, absolutely. But it’s also the wrath of God being poured out and satisfied in the sacrifice of the Son. Some very important things to remember. So don’t forget about Jesus in this regard.
Another quote here comes from a guy named Alan Scot. He is saying about this cultural moment we’re in:
There is something about this national moment that is resetting the altars of our lives. It feels poignant. Everything is stripped back. It’s like a cleansing of the temple. God is resetting worship.
The reordering of worship overturns the current popular practices of worship. It delights those who value covenant above commerce.
Which is so true of these Pharisees and these religious leaders here, these priests.
It throws off everything not aligned with the heart of the Father.
Jesus is trying to bring them back into alignment with the heart of the Father.
It moves worship from he focus upon the horizontal to the vertical.
And then he does on to talk about how:
Every platform to man removed. Every effort at popularity removed. Every idol of promotion removed. Using ministry to gain wealth removed. Using ministry to increase visibility removed. Every exploitation of people to fulfill our dreams removed. Every ignoring of the poor and seeking the friendship of the powerful removed. The cleansing of the temple has never been more necessary. The idea that Jesus would be impressed by what we have built to make him famous, or that he would leave our models of worship intact is vain, We are too timid to tear down the temple ourselves, too afraid to confront the excesses, edifices for our own importance born from our ego rather than by his Spirit.
The cleansing of our modern temples has begun. It will continue with great acceleration.
That’s what has been so interesting about this COVID 2020, especially this summer. It’s not something that the church has to watch the world have to navigate. But it has drastically and dramatically affected the way that we go about our church services, our interactions with each other, our worship times, our prayer times. And that’s why we’ve spent the last two months trying to emphasize taking ownership for your own spiritual formation. If you’re whole religious activity, if your whole Christianity was based on that one hour a week of meeting at church, there is nothing left for you.
I love it because I’m hearing story after story about Living Streams’ people and how there is a lot of meat on the bones, even though we’re not meeting that one hour a week on Sunday morning. The life groups are thriving and meeting still, and ministry is happening here and there from our interns and other people volunteering here and there. And the evangelism that’s going on. And the care. Some of our police officers are seeing so many opportunities down at the police force to share the hope that is in Jesus, because they’re feeling pretty hopeless these days. And the outreach toward the black community and the kind of pain that they’re navigating right now, and all the messages they are being filled with, and helping them and loving them and making room for them. It’s just been awesome to see. I’m so encouraged. I’m so proud of you, Living Streams Church. But we are not through this thing. We have got to ramp up even more and let the zeal of the Lord fill us for more and more, as we go forward.
I want to talk to you quickly as we’re coming to an end here. The biblical concept of zeal. If you read in the Old Testament about zeal, it and be troubling. One of the main stories is this guy Jehu in 2 Kings 10. What he does is, he uses the sword. He actually is filled with the zeal of the Lord and he goes and he attacks people with the sword and he kills people. And he tears down idols and he comes against Baal worshippers. Obviously it’s a completely cultural lens that we’re looking through versus what they were. It was a dog eat dog world, way more so in that regard. Yet, the zeal of the Lord was causing him to want to come and fight to the death against the things that were set up against God.
Then you think of David in that moment where this Philistine giant is speaking evil of the name of the God of the armies of Israel. David just can’t take it anymore so he runs after this giant. And he hurls this stone at him and takes him out. He says, “You will not be able to sit there and defy the name of my God.”
He was filled with this zeal. Even to the point when Goliath falls, he goes over and he chops off his head and he carries it back to Jerusalem. This is gruesome, heavy stuff, especially from our cultural lens. In that day and age it probably would not seem that far-fetched. But the zeal of the Lord was causing people to rise up and stand up against the evil that was trying to pervade, trying to overcome.
Realizing that what Jesus said is “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence.” The evil is not unwilling to be violent or aggressive, and those who are of God need to understand that “the violent take it by force”, that we advance by enthusiasm, by aggression.
Again, now please hear me out. Please hear me out. Because this is Old Testament context and we’re talking about the life of Christ and he pulls out a whip. He didn’t kill anybody. He didn’t hurt anybody that we know of. But he was definitely causing a scene. He was definitely inflamed and he was making people really upset and challenging what they were doing and standing against them.
But we even times like when Hitler was on the rise. There was a guy named Bonhoffer. He’s definitely worth reading and studying about. He was a Christian. He was wrestling with this same thing. What is the church’s role in the face of this evil? Millions of Jews were being killed and others. It was so clear that it was evil. And yet most of the church just kind of stood aside and was passive in the face of it. Some of them were even complicit.
And yet Bonhoffer knew this was not right. And he actually ended up putting together a plot to assassinate Hitler. It didn’t work, but he got found out and he ended up losing his life because of it. But as he wrote, it was a really hard thing to wrestle with. But he knew evil had come and he needed to stand up against it. So he did what he could. He did what he thought was right. Only history can tell whether it was right. Only heaven will reveal what was really right,
I think of Rosa Parks sitting on that bus. And she just was so filled with indignation about what was happening in the society around here. She says, “I will not give my seat up. I’m not going to just play along anymore. I’m going to stand against, no matter what it costs.” The zeal of the Lord consumed her. And something beautiful was brought about. A shift was made because of her courage. And she suffered for it. And many others did, as well.
So we have these times where God calls us to stand up. I just really feel like this is a moment where our church, we need to not be passive or complicit. When there is all of this swirling around us. Evil, I really do believe is trying to come in to America, to our society and to our church. It’s coming in the forms of deceitful divisions. It’s wanting us to vilify the other, no matter what we do, and to put ourselves in different camps that aren’t necessarily Christian. We’ve got to stand against it. We’ve got to know better.
Romans 10 talks about zeal. Paul was talking about these Pharisees, these people that he was with. He said they had so much zeal but without knowledge. They were just pledging allegiance to all kinds of things that were not of God. So we need the zeal, but we need it to be with knowledge.
Here’s what I think we need to be zealous for right now. Please hear me out. I don’t think we need to go around and kill anybody. I’m not saying anything like that.
What we need to get zealous for is real simple. It’s always the same. We need to get zealous for prayer, We need to get zealous for God’s word. We need to get zealous for morality. We need to get zealous for evangelism. Church, it’s our time. This is what we need to apply all of our energy towards.
First of all, prayer. Prayer is listening to Jesus, worshiping Jesus, letting our attention, our affection be on Jesus, and interceding for others. Please schedule it into your week. Schedule it into your day—times for this. Don’t be caught with your hands down while the battle is going on. That’s that Moses, Aaron and Hur analogy.
We need to get zealous for God’s word. This is study the Bible. Don’t have zeal without knowledge. Don’t listen to all the different things happening the media, and social media. Don’t let them tell you what the Bible says. Read the Bible for yourself. Get to know this thing. Get solid in it, because if you don’t, you will be washed away by the cunning and craftiness of the deceitful schemes that are being perpetrated in our world. You’ve got to know the Bible. It’s our anchor. It’s what’s going to keep us steady in the storm.
Recognize Jesus’ voice among all the other voices and revelation from God’s Spirit. Seek for him to speak to you. I’ve been hearing some cool visions. I shared about it in the weekly email, something that God was speaking to me.
We need to get zealous for morality. We need to uproot the compromises we’ve been making in our lives, and uphold the personal convictions God has given us. I had someone tell me, “Now, you know what? I love Jesus. I’ve been doing great. But I’ve been allowing alcohol to have too much of a place in my life. I just need to take it seriously.”
We’re not going to get away with loose compromises and loose living, playing games with sin. It’s time for us to shore up. Like John the Baptist who had such intense morality and simplicity, but it caused his word and message to have such intense authority and clarity.
We need to take ownership of our own spiritual formation, as well.
Lastly, evangelism. There is nothing that makes Jesus more proud of us than when we tell people about him. There’s nothing that fills his heart more. There’s nothing that puts a party on in heaven like when one sinner repents.
We need to engage in society’s pain. Find out who’s hurting and go be with them. Try to find a way into their lives through hospitality and kindness and generosity.
We need to defend the truth of our faith. Don’t let people come and tell us we have to prove we’re not a racist by compromising our biblical values. That’s ridiculous,
Lastly, we need to proclaim the good news of God every day. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be a message. But continue to just let people know that Jesus is the answer. Jesus has the answer. The gospel of Jesus is the power of God to actually bring about salvation. And everybody wants to be saved.
We’re going to have a time like we’ve been trying to do for you at home to take some ownership of your own spiritual formation. To practice being the priesthood of believers. Whether you’re at home by yourself or if you’re in a group, we’re going to put up a slide and we want you to just take communion in your home. If you’re in a group, have someone who’s supposed to lead, you can all just look at that person right now. And be like, “I think he’s talking about you.” And that person, you can go ahead and lead everyone in this communion time. We’re going to put up the slide and take three or four minutes for you to do that at home.
Slide:
Jesus, we pause to remember and thank you for the intensity of your love and justice towards the world.
Now we hold this bread and cup to remember the cross, when the fullness of your zeal for love and justice came together.
As we eat this bread please fill us with your zeal for love and justice. (Take and eat Jesus’ body broken for you.)
As we drink this cup, please cleanse the temple of our lives from greed and pride and deceit. (Drink the cup. This is Jesus’ blood shed for the remission of your sins.)
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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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Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson
Jesus Teaches Nicodemus
You can come to Jesus at any time. Nicodemus came a nighttime. For any reason. Jesus says, “Come to me all of you who are weary or burdened.” If you’re burdened, come to Christ If you are weary, or tired come to Jesus. Whatever your situation or circumstances, at any time of day, at any part of your journey, come back, come to Christ.
Michael Johnson
Series: John
Chapter 3
Starts at 0:41
John Chapter 3. The title of my sermon today is Jesus Teaches Nicodemus.
Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
Let’s stop here for just a moment. You know, let’s think. Why did Nicodemus come to Jesus? Was he attracted to his kindness? Possibly. The bible says in verse 2 he was attracted to the miracles. That Nicodemus saw miracles. Maybe he wanted some new wine. Maybe he was seeking God. You can come to Jesus at any time (Nicodemus came at nighttime), for any reason. Jesus says, “Come to me all of you who are weary or burdened.” If you’re burdened, come to Christ. If you are weary, or tired, come to Jesus. Whatever your situation or circumstances, at any time of day, at any part of your journey, come back, come to Christ.
Nicodemus was very significant. It says that he was a member of the Jewish ruling council. Nicodemus was a religious leader. He was a well-to-do man. He was probably pretty wealthy. He was intelligent. He was a professor of religion, mostly likely. Well, for sure he knew and he taught the law very well. He fasted regularly, probably. He most likely gave ten percent.
But Jesus Christ says to Nicodemus, “That’s not enough.” He says, “You must be born again.”
It’s interesting that he says this. This is something that’s going to come through that I’ve found throughout this entire teaching and talk with Nicodemus. That God is trying to show Nicodemus that God has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Nicodemus had his religion but he needed to be born again into a relationship. Religion is one thing. Relationship is another.
Nicodemus really missed the mark, didn’t he? He called Jesus Christ Rabbi—a teacher. But Jesus Christ is the Son of God. As David previously preached, Jesus Christ is God. And Nicodemus, was missing that .That was a big problem. That’s why Jesus says, “You cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus wasn’t seeing Christ for who he really was.
Who do you say Christ is? Is he a teacher to you? Is he a person of historical fact? Or is he your God? Is he your “abba”? Is he the Son of God? Who is he to you? Think about that.
Jesus talks about this “born again.” I looked it up and it means “to be born from above.” We’re all born from below. But have you been born from above? Being born again is described in other ways and other places in the Bible.
Ezekiel says an old heart to a new heart. I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you.
The Apostle Paul says an old creation to a new creation. Those who are in Christ are a new creation. The old is gone and the new has come. Old to new.
Peter talks about darkness to light. But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation., God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who calls you out of darkness and into the wonderful light.
St. John, says from death to life. Okay.
Back to Nicodemus. He wasn’t seeing Christ for who he was. I’m going to give an illustration. I work in the seeing business. I help people to see better. One of the major reasons people don’t see well is because they have a cataract in their eye. A cataract is something that everyone gets. A cataract grows inside your eye. The Bible says everyone sins and sin is inside of our hearts. And Jesus knows your heart.
I had a recent encounter with a man and he said to me, “I can’t drive legally.”
I looked into his eyes and I said, “You’ve got a cataract in your eye. We’ve got to get that out.”
And he said to me, “I can see just fine. I don’t need to get it out. I can see cars. I can see street signs. I can see the road just fine.”
I had to remind him that, didn’t he just come from he Motor Vehicle Department? “Didn’t the DMV just tell you that you failed your test?”
He said, “Yeah. But…”
I said, “This is what the law says.” I put up the eye chart. I put up the law of the requirement for driving legally. I said, “Go ahead and read those letters.”
He said, “I can’t do it.”
I said, “Okay, that’s because you have a cataract inside your eye and you need to have it removed. Otherwise you’re not driving.”
The BIble says that the law of the Lord is perfect and it revives the soul. It converts the soul, the King James Version says. Sometimes people think that they’re good, that they’re okay. But they’re not until they look at God’s perfect way, which is to love God and to love one another. Until they look at God’s perfect law, they don’t have a realization that they have a sin problem. They don’t know.
How about you? Do you think that you’re a good person? I would say that you probably are pretty good. But are you absolutely perfect? Have you ever stolen or lied? Have you ever coveted your neighbor? The Bible says that all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God. That sin has infected all people.
Let me tell you, this person, when they go get their cataract removed, they are happy. They say, “I can see the trees! I can see the leaves on the trees! I can see faces much better! I can see things completely different. There’s more light that comes in.” And they have a testimony, right? And they are singing and praising the surgeon.
The same is true when someone is born again. They are telling people. I was in a conversation at a lunch and we were just talking about our faith. And someone walked by, because he heard us talking, he said, “Guess what? I’ve been born again!” And he was all excited. This is what happens.
Jesus says back in John Chapter 2 that he didn’t need any testimony about mankind because he knew what was in each person. The lying, the stealing, the greed, the vulgarity, the prejudice, the pride, the anger, the fear. All of that is causing war with God and strife and war with each other.
It all started with Adam and Eve, right? Adam and Eve were in this garden and the sinned. Right? And then their sin was passed to the next generation. Cain and Abel, where Cain murdered his brother. And then the next generation received sin, the next generation, and so on and so forth—right to you and right to me. I’m a sinner. I admit it.
Do you admit it? That’s what God wants. He wants us to come into agreement with him. And then he wants us ultimately to thank him for what he’s done. Because, once again, God has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. The Bible says that sin and death have entered the one man, Adam, but forgiveness for sin and life has come through the one person of Jesus Christ. Your body may be alive, but inside you’re dead. Your soul and your spirit are dead. And you’re searching in the wrong places. You may be searching in the wrong places, like sex, right? For fulfillment. Or money, or position, or power, or material things. All those things cannot fix you. You need Jesus Christ. You have to come to the cross. You must be born again.
Now, in verse 4, Nicodemus asks this question:
“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.
“You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.
He told Nicodemus who he was. But Nicodemus still is not seeing Jesus Christ for who he really is. He’s asking these questions. “How can this be? How can someone be born?
You don’t have to know everything about God to come to God. No one is going to know everything or know God completely, ever. You have to trust God. You have to come like a little child. The Bible says unless you change and become like a little child you won’t enter into the kingdom of God.
I have a three-year-old son. He is learning how to swim. He will come to the edge of the pool and he will jump to me. And guess what? If I don’t catch my son, he’ll die. He trusts fully in me. He comes. By faith, I say, “Come on, son.” And he just jumps right into the pool.
That’s how we have to come to Christ. You don’t think about it. You don’t have to have everything explained. You don’t have to figure everything out. You just come to Jesus and Christ and you trust him for what he’s done for us. You trust him that he died for your sins. You trust him that he came back back to life. Just like a little child. Come to Jesus Christ.
We don’t have any trouble using these cell phones, do we? I don’t understand how this thing works. I don’t understand how this camera works that I’m looking at right now. You can see me and you’re looking at your phone, or you’re looking through that computer. But I’m trusting right now that you’re looking right at me. We just trust. You put your faith completely all in Jesus Christ. Trust Christ and Christ alone.
Why couldn’t Nicodemus understand Jesus Christ? Jesus is talking about the Spirit. He says you have to have the Spirit to be born again. The Spirit does the work. Once again, Jesus is saying that God has done something for us that we cannot do for ourselves. He’s telling Nicodemus about the Holy Spirit. His Spirit. So I’m going to talk a little about the Spirit.
The Spirit convicts people of their sin, the Bible says. When the Spirit comes he will prove to the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement. The Spirit empowers us to live the Christian life, to resist temptation we have to have the Spirit. The Spirit teaches us moment by moment. The Spirit lives inside every believer. If you’re not a believer, he wants to live inside of you. Do you not know that your bodies, you Christian believers, are a temple for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit wants to fill you up. Do not be drunk on wine, the Bible says, which leads to debauchery. But instead be filled by the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit wants to flow through you.
This verse is our church verse, right? Look at John 7:38 for just a moment:
Jesus says, “Anyone who believes on me, just as the Scripture said, streams of living water will flow from within.”
What flows from within is the fruit of the Spirit: the love, the joy, the peace, the patience, the kindness, the goodness, the faithfulness, the gentleness, self control. And I would even say sharing your faith, sharing Christ with others, having a desire to read your Bible, your prayers. You know what? The world around us needs those things.
Jesus is teaching Nicodemus that you have to have the Spirit, that the Spirit does this for you, makes you born again. The Holy Spirit is responsible for the conversion.
I found here the condition of the natural man. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians that the person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, but considers them foolishness. Jesus Christ, God, is having this conversation with Nicodemus, who does not have the Spirit. And Nicodemus is not getting it because Nicodemus does not have the Spirit.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone, and you put out there on the table something spiritual and they just don’t get it. Or they even tell you, “That’s crazy.” Or, “That’s foolishness.”
I’ve had all those interactions. The Bible says that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but for us who are being saved, it’s the power of God and that God delights in the preaching of the gospel. The preaching that is foolishness to the world, God delights in. So I’m here knowing that I’m a delight to the Lord preaching what the world would say is foolish. And you know what? I don’t care because Jesus Christ is my Lord. He’s the one that I live my life for. I don’t live my life to please man. I’ve been called many things. Foolish is one of them. Crazy. A crazy zealot for God. But I have had a powerful experience with the Lord many times and I know deep, deep down that Jesus Christ is alive, and that Jesus Christ is in me and he’s working through me, and the angels in heaven really do rejoice when people come to Christ. They will for you today when you come to Christ if you do.
We’re going to look at verse 14. Jesus continues to tell Nicodemus:
Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”
Jesus is saying a story that Nicodemus knows about and that he’s read many times. Remember he was a teacher of the Law. He was a professor of religion. He knows this story. Nicodemus is listening to the story about when Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery and they are in the desert. The Israelites at this time are complaining about the food, about the water, and then God allows them to go through a patch of venomous snakes, snakes that, if they were bitten by one, they would die. And then they started dying. So Moses prays to God and God instructs Moses, “Make a snake out of bronze. Put it up on a pole. And anyone who looks up at that pole and believes will not die but will live.”
That is a foreshadowing of what happens with Jesus Christ. He was buried but he came back to life and anyone who looks to Jesus Christ and puts their trust on Christ and Christ alone will live, will have eternal life. Once again God has done for us something that we cannot do for ourselves. Could those Israelites put some mud on their wounds and live? No. Could they go to Urgent Care? There was no Urgent Care back there. Could they go to the doctor for their wounds. No. God only had one provision. He said, “Look to that bronze snake and believe. And if you do, you’ll live.” There was not other way.
Jesus Christ says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one gets to the Father except through me.”
I think there’s only one way because he makes it simple for us. Simple, even a chid can understand. It’s simple but it’s so difficult. Christ is the stumbling block. He’s the cornerstone.
Why would God do such a thing? Why would he make a provision for humanity? Because he loves you. It says it right here in John 3:16. This is pretty much the whole gospel in one verse. It says:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Nicodemus is getting an earful, isn’t he? Jesus says:
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
You don’t have to be afraid to come to Jesus Christ. He’s not going to condemn you. He wasn’t sent to punish you.
Sometimes I ride the light rail. It’s interesting because, when I’m on the train going down Central and the authority comes on the train, you see people scatter. They just jump off the train because they’re afraid. They know they didn’t buy a ticket. Then the authority walks around and says, “Show me the ticket.” So people that don’t have a ticket are gone! The people that do say, “Here’s my ticket.”
The point is that you can come to Jesus Christ. He’s not like the authority on earth. He’s not going to put you in jail. He’s not going to condemn you. The Bible says God didn’t send his son into the world to condemn the world. He came to save the world. You can come to Christ how you are. You don’t go and clean yourself up and then come to Christ. You can’t. Christ cleans you up.
If you’re an addict to pornography, if you’re a drug addict, if you’re self-righteous or prideful, you can’t go and try to get all clean and then come to Jesus Christ. No. It doesn’t work that way. You have to come to Jesus Christ first, put your trust in him, believe on him that he’s alive. He comes into your heart and he starts cleaning you up from the inside out. He’s the Great Physician, by the way.
When he called Levi he said, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor. It’s the sick. I’ve not come to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance.”
You come because you’re drawn by his kindness. And when you’re with him, you want to stay with him. You put your trust and believe on him, he cleans you up from the inside out. Let’s continue on in verse 18:
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.
Remember Nicodemus came to Jesus at nighttime. He’s probably a little bit embarrassed of his homies, right? The other Pharisees in the Jewish ruling counsel. He probably didn’t want theme to see. But you know what? Jesus doesn’t condemn him for that. He doesn’t shame him. He sits with him. But in the same token, you can come to Christ.
Whenever you come to Christ you come to the light because Jesus Christ is the light. He says, “I am the light of the world.” He says, “Anyone who walks after me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”
You come to Christ, you’re in the light.
Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
I just want to spend a couple of minutes in sharing the gospel. Nicodemus was a worker. He was a very hard worker. But we’re not saved by works. We’re saved by mercy and we’re saved by grace. Listen to this verse in Titus 3:5-6:
…he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior,
You Christians have heard this before. Ephesians 2:8-9
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.
Listen, I say it this way. If a generous person came to you and he said, “I’m going to forgive all of your debt, past, present and future.” Wouldn’t you be grateful? I know I would. I still have mortgage. I still have student loan debt. I’ve got a wife and five kids. I would be grateful. But I would say, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” I go down to the bank and I say, “Has my mortgage been paid?” And they'd say, “Yes, Mr. Johnson, your debt has been paid.” I wouldn’t go at that point and give the bank another thousand dollars. They would say, “What are you doing? Your mortgage has been paid!”
That’s what you’re doing if you’re not putting your trust in Christ alone. If you’re putting your trust in religion or being good, you need to repent from that. Or putting your trust in other gods, in addition to Christ, you need to repent from that as well. Trust in Christ—in Christ alone. He did it all.
The Bible says it this way—Paul says, “I don’t set aside the grace of God. For if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” He did it all, folks. He paid it all.
I’m going to end with an illustration. Bear with me. Here we have three types of people. We’ve got the natural man like Nicodemus. On the outside he looks like he has it all together. But on the inside, he has sin. He has pride. Just like all of us. The Bible says that we’re born into iniquity. We have sin in us. So here he is. And he’s in our world.
Then suppose that he put his trust in Christ and he became born again. Here we have a person who has been born again and so instead of being filled with sin now, they can be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Both of these guys are in the world together. This guy, the natural person, we see it all the time, in our world, is kind of spewing off what comes out of his heart. The sin, the greed, the strife, the vulgarity, the anger, resulting in domestic violence, not taking care of your kids, family breakdown, the denial of who Jesus is. The disbelief.
Then you have the guy who is filled with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is flowing through him. Love, joy, peace, all around the world, patience and kindness and goodness, so on and so forth. God continues to pour into this guy. God’s grace is endless. His mercies never end, the Bible says. More love and more joy and more peace. He gets filled up again and he overflows. This guy is a living streams Christian right here, okay? God just keeps on pouring his grace right into him and into our world.
But I want to talk to you guys, because I believe a lot of us are like this guy right here. This guy, the born again Christian who is led by his flesh. The Bible describes him as the carnal Christian. He’s got the Spirit in him. He’s been born again. But he’s also got sin in him and look at him. Sometimes he’ll be in church. And maybe after church someone will cut him off and he’s got the finger.
Sometimes he really wrestles with his identity. He may have depression. He may at one moment be praising God and the next moment he may be having an idol. He’s pouring out also.
And this guy over here, the natural person is looking at the carnal Christian saying, “We’re no different. You’re a hypocrite.”
So how does the carnal Christian get to the Spirit-filled Christian? How do we get from here to here? The Bible says that we come to Jesus Christ. We come to the cross just like Nicodemus did and we confess our sins. And God is faithful and just. He forgives us of our sins and he purifies us from all unrighteousness. And here we are again and God is pouring through us faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and so on and so forth.
I’m going to be quite honest with myself and with you, that I go back and forth. I have my moments. I say, “Wow, that was the Lord in me.” And then I have my other moments, “That’s all Michael right there. Lord. Michael.” But as time goes on, God wants us to be more of the Spirit-led, Spirit-controlled, born again Christian. Because we have to, guys.
Listen. I was a product of the Arizona Child Foster system. I grew up in very dysfunction. My dad was an alcoholic. Long story short, he beat my mom. He beat us. I was adopted. The adopted dad was committing adultery against my mother . They got a divorce. My younger brother, alcoholic, died. Me, myself, I have a lot of sin to talk about as well. It’s not that we’re all black men and this is the product of the systemic racism, or this is a product of the white man putting their thumb on the black man. No! It’s a product of sin. We all have sin.
It took me until after I was born again to realize that. I always wondered, “Why am I this way? Why did all these things happen to us?” And God gave me the answer. When Jesus looked down at our world and looked at our world, it’s pretty messy. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
If you’re up to no good, if you’re led by your flesh, guess what? Expect bad things to happen to you. If you’re a Spirit-led Christian and you have yielded to Christ, fully surrendered to Christ 24/7, but you live in this world, guess what? Expect bad things to happen to you. If you’re a carnal Christian. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you live in this messy world, expect bad things to happen to you.
The gospel message is that Jesus Christ, once he comes inside of you, he never leaves you. He’s always with you. And you have eternal life that you won’t lose. If you could lose eternal life, it was never eternal in the first place. That’s very good news and that gives me peace today. If I die this afternoon, I know where I’m going. And I have peace inside. All around me it’s chaotic. But the peace of the Lord dwells richly inside of me and I’m able to overflow that peace into the hearts of others around me: my wife and my children, so on and so forth.
I’m going to end this message by asking you guys: which of these three best represent your life? Are you the natural person who’s never believed on Christ? Are you the Spirit-filled Christian soho is overflowing love and joy and peace, so on and so forth. Or right now are you this carnal Christian who’s got some sin in your life. You’ve got the Spirit, you’ve been born again, but you need to come to Jesus.
If you are the natural, come to Christ today. Believe on him. If this made sense to you, not like Nicodemus—not making sense—but if it does to you, guess what? You’ve been born again. You believe. Tell someone. Send an email to Pastor David. Tell someone in your house right now. “Hey, that makes sense. I believe on Jesus Christ.” Then begin to grow in your faith. Read your Bible and keep coming to church,
If this is you, the carnal Christian, again, come to Christ. Confess your sins and live, not bound by sin, but live in the victory of Jesus Christ.
That is the message for today. I just want to thank you and thank Pastor David. I’m going to end by just saying May the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you always.
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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.
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.
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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.
God's Politic
(Starting at 2:22)
I’d like to try to give some context to our cultural moment that we have here. I’d like to begin to show us what God’s politic, or God’s agenda or vision or what God wants to see happen in America. Then I also want to try to keep us from being puppets pulled by the strings of the devil, the world and the flesh. This is always a challenge for us, but it seems to be very challenging right now as we’re all disrupted and uncomfortable and kind of grasping in some ways what we’re supposed to do.
David Stockton
Series: John
Chapter 1
(Starting at 2:22)
I’d like to try to give some context to our cultural moment that we have here. I’d like to begin to show us what God’s politic, or God’s agenda or vision or what God wants to see happen in America. Then I also want to try to keep us from being puppets pulled by the strings of the devil, the world and the flesh. This is always a challenge for us, but it seems to be very challenging right now as we’re all disrupted and uncomfortable and kind of grasping in some ways what we’re supposed to do. We have these powerful internet trolls or powerful marketers and we have people that really are trying to put forth deceitful schemes right now. We need to be very aware as believers. Like Jesus taught us, “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” So I wanted to keep us doing that.
With that being said, we’ll jump into these three different sections. First of all, our cultural moment. We humans, every single one of us, no matter what ethnicity, no matter what socio-economic part of the scale we’re on, we are all closet critical theorists. Basically, critical theory is this: It’s the reflective assessment and critique of society and cultural in order to reveal and challenge power structures.
That’s the philosophical term for what a critical theorist is. And it’s true that we’re all doing that. In other words, we all have an opinion on what is wrong in society and whose fault it is.That’s basically what critical theorists do. And so we’ve all been closet critical theorists all this time. But as this disruption of COVID and the social unrest and racial unrest—all this stuff is stirring up so much in us. We’re not so much closet theorists anymore. We’re coming out and we’re shouting. We’re feeling these things and there’s emotion attached to all of them. We’re posting them and hearing other people’s posts and it’s really causing this major stirring within our soul. We know things are not right. We know things don’t feel right. And so we want to know what we can do or whose fault it is and all of that. Just be aware of that. That’s not a new reality. That’s something that we all kind of have all the time. It’s something that philosophers have been studying for a long, long time. It’s just our moment to manage this. Our moment to decide how we’re going to handle disruption, discomfort, the challenges that the world has faced all over the place for a lot of years.
Every week I’m on this call with pastors from around the Valley. Ever since COVID hit and we had to start to shut down our churches, we started getting together to really kind of encourage each other and talk with each other. It’s been a really beautiful thing to see the churches in Phoenix and some other parts rally together. It’s been very encouraging. This last week one of the guys was talking about critical theory and some of that. He was saying that what he has seen is that everyone in our churches seems to be falling into three different camps.
The first camp is the people denying that COVID is a real thing or that it’s something that shouldn’t disrupt our lives at all. It’s not real. It’s not a big deal. There are some people in that camp saying that racism isn’t something new or something we should really alter or change. It’s just going to always be there. So there’s this kind of a denial camp. A lot of people aren[t really saying it, because it’s really unpopular. Some people are definitely in that camp.
Then you have the people who are admitting there are some things that are really wrong. There are systemic realities that are wrong, both that COVID has revealed and the horrors of racism that have popped up have revealed; but also our political unrest as we’re going toward another election. All those things have stirred all those things. So we admit there is a problem. And we’ve decided to pledge our allegiance to one specific solution. Whether it be political. Whether it be some sort of human rights solution. Whether it be some sort of medical thing. Depending on how you apply it. And we feel that we’ve found something of an agenda, something of a social movement that we can jump into, we can pledge allegiance to and we can run with it. So that’s another camp of some of those people.
And then there’s another camp. And this is where I think a lot of people in the church might be finding themselves in. We admit there’s a problem and we want to do something to help. We want to figure out what to say, what to do. And yet we really don’t feel like anything we’re hearing, anything we’re seeing really does solve the problem. Whether it be how Trump wants to do it, or Biden wants to do it, or Black Lives Matter wants to do it, or some other agency wants to do it. Nothing really seems to really encapsulate what we feel is a good solution.
So we’re challenged in that regard. And I’m not saying good or bad on all of those entities. I’m sure there are a lot of people trying to do good things. But we’re just left feeling a little uncertainty. We’re left feeling a little unsure. We’re left feeling a little lacking in all of the different movements and things that we see. That’s where we’re at.
That’s what brings us to the book of John. What I love about the book of John is John was writing this book toward the end of his life. He’d been there and he’d done that. He had tried a lot of things. He’d seen a lot of things. And now, he’s probably around 90 years old as he sits to pen this gospel account of the life of Jesus. The other three gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke had already been in circulation. The Church was not brand new. The Church was a few decades old at this point. It was established in Jerusalem and some other places and it was starting to get established in farther reaching places. John, who had walked with Jesus—literally in the flesh for three years—and had seen the Spirit of God come and fill the Church and begin to overcome obstacles and do miraculous things, and see people’s lives changed, and see it take root in the Roman Empire against all odds and against persecution and oppression in major ways.
John was both a Jew and a Christian, which, basically, there was nothing worse you could be in the Roman Empire during his time. And yet, John was continuing to go through his life and continuing to let the message, the gospel of Christ, filter into his life; continuing to develop and form into the image of Christ. He took seriously his own spiritual formation, even now that Jesus was gone. He took seriously the evangelism that Jesus was calling him to. And he was going around the world telling people how to love one another and sharing about the love of Christ.
And this was John. He had experienced very, very severe persecution. Church history tells us he was actually dipped in boiling oil as they tried to kill him. But he survived that. They didn’t know what else to do with him so they exiled him to Patmos, a prison island. And he survived that as well. Now he’s just old enough to where they thought he couldn’t do any damage. So he’s brought back and he’s able to sit down and pen these words to tell us what he would say Jesus’ life and message really were all about.
As he says in John 20:30 and 31:
Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
This is why he wrote these words. So that we would understand and see that Jesus is the answer. He’s God’s solution to anything we could ever go through. And that, if we find ourselves in him, if we follow in his way, if we receive what he has to give us, it will create life in us. The kind of life that death cannot overcome. The kind of life that doesn’t just feel like existence and going through the motions. The kind of life that gets us free from all the strings, all the puppet strings of this world that are trying to control us and tell us how we’re supposed to live, or what life really is.
So, for you kids, real quick, as we go forward. This idea of a puppet on the strings. This is the image I want you to draw and send to me. So draw a puppet and draw the strings trying to control he puppet and move the puppet.
Because that’s a reality in our world. We are controlled by something. We think we’re Americans and nobody controls us. But we have marketers telling us what to do and what life really should look like. We have the social media and all the other media telling us what’s important, what’s valuable and what’s not. We have all these things, even in our own soul, dividing us and telling us which way to go and what to do. So what we really want to do is figure out how not to be a puppet attached to those strings, but people who are living the life that God has called us to live. Because that’s really what the world needs. It needs for each one of us to figure out what he’s designed us to do and then live into that fully.
So that’s what John’s going to teach us about here as we get into this. So let’s read, John 1:1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Here’s some important words as he uses this word Word to describe Jesus. He could have used a lot of different words but this is what he says: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. And then he goes on:
He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. [John the Baptist] He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John is writing this. We have seen it. We have touched it. We watched it day in and day out. The glory of God made flesh in the person of Christ.
(John [the Baptist] testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
Here it is. John is writing at the end of his life, after he’s seen it all, done it all, experienced all of the world, experienced all of the life of Christ inside of him. He sits down to write. And he says, “What am I going to call Jesus? What word can I use to describe who he is or what God did in his life?”
And he uses this word logos. And it is an extremely powerful word. It has so much depth and connotation both in the Greek world, the Roman world and we have the word word for it. Which is kind of a let down in a lot of ways. Basically, in the Greek world, as John was writing this, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos ordering it and giving it form and meaning. This is basically what all of the philosophers were trying to figure out. What is behind everything? What is really what causes everything? What is the motivation for everything? What is the purpose of everything? They kept trying to peel back the layers and all the noise in society. All of the guesses. All of the thoughts. All of the assumptions. They were continuing to try to peel everything back to get to the core. The true reality of the cosmos. And that was the word that they used.
So John is grabbing this word that is so intense and powerful and provocative and only really belongs to a certain segment of philosophical society. And he grabs it out of there and he says, “Hold on. This is who Jesus is. In the beginning was God’s appeal. God’s politic. God’s agenda. God’s plan. God’s design. It was there in the very beginning and it was with God. And it was God somehow.”
Then, at some point, he says, “And then that plan, that design, that theory, that vision, whatever it might be, it became flesh and walked among us.” And John is saying, “And I got to see what it looked like and felt like and sounded like as I walked with Jesus.”
God has an agenda. God has a politic. God has a plan. God is very, very intricately involved in every single thing that happens in our world. There is nothing he does not allow. There is nothing he does not control. And it’s very hard for us to process this. That’s why in the prophets it says, “Your thoughts are not my thoughts.” They’re too high for me. They’re too confusing for me. I don’t understand your purposes and intentions all the time.
But what Jesus is, and why we’re going to spend this year maybe, or at least the next few months, in the book of John is because I want us to get a really clear picture of what God’s agenda is, what God’s message is. And there’s no better place to look than Jesus Christ. He is the whole thing. He’s God’s plan. He is God in the flesh. He is the glory of God, which is really what we long for. All of the discomfort we have, we’re longing for the reign of Christ ultimately. Because his reign is truly good. It’s truly glorious.
Everything that we do ends up being human. It ends up being temporal. It ends up being good for some and bad for others. That’s all we can come up with. And yet God has come in the flesh. God has dwelt among us. God has now left his Spirit to be among us so we can know the plan of God. That’s what he says at the end there:
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
We can know God’s plan, God’s politic. And it’s found in the logos. It’s found in Jesus Christ.
We’ll skip down to this next part. What do we do? How can we keep from being this puppet on the strings of society or the gravity in this world that’s pulling us into superficial and artificial busyness to where we think we’re helping, but we’re not really helping. We think we’re doing something but the next thing we know we’re wanting to run over here. And then that person says “This is better.” And we’re kind of in between all these things. And we all know with the internet you can get any kind of substantial media or substantial video or information to support whatever side you might be on in any spectrum of any discussion. And you watch something one day and it really compels you to go this way. Then you watch something the next day and it compels you to go this way. It’s exhausting and frustrating.
So how can we be people that are not puppets on a string? That’s where I want to talk about John the Baptist. We’re going to talk a lot about Jesus and how he reveals to us God’s plan and what he did. It’s going to be fun. But John the Baptist is the next person that John the Apostle introduces here. I think there are some key things coming from the way John introduces us to him that will help us know how to move forward. Or how to apply or how to get involved in the agenda of God in our world.
The first thing is that we need to realize that you nor no other human is the answer to the world’s problems. Now this is made clear in John 1:19, where it talks about John. It says:
Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”
Here’s the deal. Here’s what we have to begin with. We have to start at this place where we realize humanity cannot accomplish the work of God in and of themselves. And I know this feels a little funny, because sometimes it’s confusing. And the second point I’ll make will make sense a bit.
But I want you think of the tower of Babel. The tower of Babel. The flood had come and wiped out people. People were freaked out. They were unsure of what to do. They were nervous. Over time they began to have this idea that we could really come together and we could build this tower and maybe it would help us to ascend to know what God knows. Or maybe it would help us to have this thing that was high enough that, if the flood waters come then we’ll be above it and God can’t even wipe us out. In some ways there is something in humanity that, basically, we think we know better than God.
And really, it comes from a place where we’ve been let down by God because of pain in our life, or struggle. And eventually we begin to say, “Okay, God. Forget you. I’m going to figure this thing out on my own.”
And we become self-reliant. And it’s a subtle way that it comes in. Even in the Garden of Eden, that’s where it began. The serpent came and said to Eve, “Do you really need God? Does God really know what’s best for you? Maybe you should decide for yourself what’s best.”
We’ve got to find a way to humble ourselves as a nation, as a city, as a people. To humble ourselves before God and say, “All right God. We’re not going to say another thing. We’re not going to make another move until you speak and you lead us.”
This is the way that John the Baptist did it. John the Baptist went outside of society. John the Baptist was eating locusts and honey. John the Baptist was trying to find out what God wanted him to do. And then he was compelled by God to do the things that he did. And then when they asked him “It seems like you’re doing something good here, John. You’re drawing people back.”
He said, “Look, Im not the answer. I’m just here to help people connect with God. Because God is the answer.”
And I think that’s really important for us as we go forward.
Secular Humanism. Any humanistic effort is going to fail. It’s going to fail. It only is the work of God that’s going to produce the kind of goodness and beauty we want to see in our world.
So, first of all, realize it’s not us.
The second thing that we need to do is realize that God loves to share his glory with the world. He loves to share his glory with the world. He wants everyone to know him and his plan. And he loves to do it through you and me. So this is where it flips a little.
First, realize that it’s not you. It’s not in you. It’s not something you can come up with to solve the world’s problems. But God, who has a solution, who can actually solve the world’s problems has decided that his favorite tool is you. The favorite way that he wants to move in the world and express his glory and help people know his plan and actually experience the goodness of his plan is through. It’s through the Church.
The scripture that supports that comes from John 1:33. It says:
‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down [this was John saying this] and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’
John is saying, I could baptize you in some water and it could be this sign of you saying no to what society has you doing and kind of you getting freed of the puppet strings, so to speak. And it’s you now being governed by God. It’s you submitting to God. I can do that for you. But it’s not really going to empower you in any way. But he’s saying there’s one coming, the one who you see the Spirit come down on. He will baptize you with the power, with the Holy Spirit, with the presence of God that will help you actually overcome your own sinful nature. That will help you overcome the sinful nature of those around you. The sinful nature of your parents or those who have hurt you. He’s going to give you the power.
So that’s the second thing. We need to realize that, first of all, the power is not in us. It’s not something that we can achieve if we just work hard enough. It’s something that we have to find God’s power to do. So first of all, it’s not in us. And like John, we need to realize that Jesus has given us the power. And if we come to Jesus, he has the power. And he loves to use us. To fill us with his Spirit so we can go forward and speak the word of God that actually brings healing. And do the things of God that actually help people and lift people up, instead of just create by-products of other oppressions in some way. It’s so important for us to realize. And John was a master of this.
And the third thing that we have to remember is that the Word became flesh. I think this is so amazing. That our God, the God who made us, the God who knows everything about us, the God who was rejected by us, the God who has been betrayed by us—he came. And he became one of us. He became flesh. He didn’t just say what we should do. He didn’t just tell us from afar. But he came and entered into our pain and struggle—entered into our own sin. He took all of humanity’s sin upon him on that cross. He became flesh. He associated himself with us in order to really set us free and to show us how much God loves us. And God has a plan for us.
So, for us, we need to do just like what John the Baptist did. John 1:35-37:
The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!”
When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus.
I love this about John. First of all, John the Baptist is like, “Look, this is not in me. I don’t have the answers. I’m not the answer. Don’t look to me. We need to look for the one who has the power. The Holy Spirit.” And so he would say, “This is what we need to do.”
But he knew that the Spirit was able to empower him to do some good. And so he did baptize. He did disciple people. He did speak the word of God. He did speak out against oppressive and abusive leaders. Absolutely he did those things. He let the word of God become fresh. And he didn’t try to bring people to himself. But here he says to his disciples, “That’s the one that you should follow.”
And so they left him. They were following him and then they left him and followed Jesus. And this is Andrew and a guy named Peter. John was not holding on tightly to everything. He was doing the work of God. Speaking words out and meeting people where they were at and helping them find God. But he didn’t try and hold all that in together. But he continued to just point people to Jesus. Point people to Jesus. Point people to Jesus.
This is such an important factor. Some of the experience I’ve had—and this is one of the things we felt like God told us to do when we went to live in Belize. We needed to go and stir up the pot and try to help people find Jesus, and help disciple people. But then we needed to leave as well. Part of that strategy we felt the Lord was saying was we needed to make sure people connect with God and not with us.
It’s been so encouraging to see these guys like Orelle and Kenny and then the people they’re hanging out with—the work that they’re doing. It’s completely disconnected to us. Because they have now connected with God the Father. They don’t need what I can help them with. They need Jesus himself. They need his power in their life.
It’s so important that we connect people to God, we connect people to his strength and his life. And we need to make sure we’re not connecting them to us.
So this is a little funny when you have a church. But we want to be a sending church at Living Streams. We’ve said this before. Living Streams, you have never needed us. You’ve never needed me. Not one day of your life have you needed me. You’ve got to connect your life to God. You’ve got to find a way to be in relationship with Jesus, follow him, hear his voice. Then walk in the power that he gives you in the direction that he leads you. This is so important.
In some ways, God has kind of shut down the Church world in some ways in our city and in our nation. And I think this is one of the things he is wanting to teach all of us. That it is our time. Individually. In our own spheres and circles. We need to connect to God and we need to walk in his power. The priesthood of believers that we’ve been talking about. You have been sent, we’ve been talking about. That God really does want to share his glory with the world. And the way he wants to do it is through you. In your own families. In your relationships. In your friendships. In your workplaces. In missionary endeavors. Whatever it might be.
It’s funny because, at the beginning of the service I was thinking about saying, “Hey, we’ve postponed a couple of weeks. We’re looking at July 12. But if you’re really in a place where you want to be with God’s people and you really need that, I know Church for the Nations down the street is open, Bethany Bible is open, I know New City shut down for a couple of weeks. North Phoenix is postponing just like us. But go to places. We’re all in this together. No one needs to be connected to one individual or one church. We need to be connected to Jesus and go where he is sending us.
For me, Living Streams is where God has called me to be and to care for people. I hope he’s called you to be that way too. But, ultimately, we need Jesus. We need to be led by him. And right now the world is shouting a thousand different things that we should do. We need to find a way to quiet ourselves, and get with Jesus, and make that connection stronger than any other connection. And there’s only one person that can do that for you. And that’s you.
As a little bit of response time for you, whether you’re alone or you’re in a group, we’re going to put a little slide up and we’re going to pray these things. Take a moment to still our heart and then pray through these and write some of those things down and then share them with the group that you’re in, or maybe text somebody if you’re alone.
But take some time and really allow God’s word to kind of wash over you, and then God’s Spirit to speak from within you and give you some guidance for this week. So in the quietness of your own space, take minute and pray through these things.
Take a moment and ask Jesus to quiet your mind and help your soul be still.
Then take a couple of minutes to ask Jesus these questions:
Where have I been prideful and relying on my strength or wisdom instead of God’s?
What things have I pledged time or allegiance to that may be limiting what God wants to do through me?
Now ask Jesus to tell you what action he wants you to focus on this week.
(Listen for his still, small voice, and don’t be suprised if it is something simple)
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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.