Philippians 3:7-11

⁷ But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸ Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— ¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

John Stott is a wonderful Christian writer and theologian.  He is also an avid birdwatcher. In his last book, Stott tells the story of the late Roger Tory Peterson, famous birdwatcher and artist.  In particular, he tells the story of how an encounter with a bird changed Roger Peterson’s life as a boy:

On a walk in the country at the age of eleven he spotted a flicker (a species of wood-pecker).  It appeared to be just a bundle of brown feathers, clinging to the trunk of an oak tree.

Gingerly I touched it on the back.  Instantly this inert thing jerked its head around, looked at me with startled eyes, then exploded in a flash of golden wings, and fled into the wood.  It was like a resurrection – what had appeared to be dead was very much alive…

Elsewhere Peterson described this as “the crucial moment of my life.”  “I was overwhelmed,” he continued, “by the contrast between something that was suddenly so vital and something I had taken for dead.”[1]

It occurs to me that some of you may find yourself in the same position in which Roger Peterson found himself at the age of eleven, when, out for a walk in the country, his life was forever changed.  Perhaps you have come this morning not knowing quite what to expect.  Perhaps some of you have come out of a sense of duty.  Perhaps you have come because you feel that it is expected of you.  Perhaps it is expected of you!  Perhaps subtle pressures have been administered to get you here.  Or maybe you were just passing by.

Either way, I suspect that some of you may view Jesus and the gospel of Jesus in the same way that Roger Peterson viewed this flicker.  Perhaps you have come – for whatever reason – to draw near, but, in reality, you have come to look at something that you think is a dead thing.  Maybe you even want to touch it, just to see.

If so, I want to caution you:  this Jesus is not dead after all.  In fact, when you draw near to touch Him, you will find that He is very much alive, and He will shock you with His vitality.

This Jesus did die.  He was, in fact, dead.  But when the women drew near to touch His dead body, they were shocked by the amazing beauty of resurrection.  In fact, for over two thousand years, believers in Christ have been shocked by the dazzling beauty of resurrection.  Or, to use Roger Peterson’s words, for over two thousand years, believers have been “overwhelmed by the contrast between something that is suddenly so vital and something [we] had taken for dead.”

My prayer for you this morning is that you, too, will be overwhelmed by the contrast between something that is suddenly so vital and something you had taken for dead.

The women who came to the tomb that first Easter morning were overwhelmed.  The eleven hiding disciples were soon overwhelmed too.  So was one of Jesus’ late-coming disciples, a man we know today as the Apostle Paul.

Paul was transfixed by the resurrected Christ.  His heart’s desire was to know this Christ, but knowing Christ would mean being drawn into His death and resurrection.  Let us hear again the amazing testimony of Paul concerning His desire to know Christ from Philippians 3:

⁷ But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸ Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— ¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Knowing Christ: The Most Valuable Possession

Paul was a man of no small accomplishments before he met Christ on the road to Damascus.  He was brilliant, for one thing.  He was learned and schooled and had a sharp and penetrating mind.  Also, he was considered a righteous man, a keeper of the law.  In the Jewish world and mindset, Paul would have been considered a man who had it all.  In fact, he rehearses his prior credentials in the verses immediately preceding our text.  Begin in the middle of Philippians 3:4:

If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: ⁵ circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; ⁶ as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

So Paul had it all, as far as righteous Jews were concerned.  Then, one day, on the way to Damascus to persecute the Christians there, the resurrected Jesus confronted Paul with power and glory, and Paul’s life changed forever.  What he valued before did not matter at all, and what he despised before became the most valuable possession of his life.  Listen to his amazing testimony of concerning his change in values:

⁷ But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

Do you see?  The sterling reputation, the scholar’s mind, the sense of his own righteousness:  none of it mattered now.  Why?  Because he had encountered something infinitely more valuable!  What did Paul find?  Listen:

⁸ Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Why did Paul now despise what he once valued above all else?  Because he now knew “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Knowing Christ, for Paul, changed everything!  A church in Rochester, NY, put the following words on an invitation to their Easter services a couple of years ago:  “This changes everything.  This change is everything.”

This was Paul’s position as well.  Knowing Christ is, for the believer, the greatest and most valued possession in life.  Not only did Paul come to value Christ above all else, he was willing to lose it all for Christ as well.  He continues in verse 8:

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

And what did Paul get in return for what he was willing to give up?

⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith

What he received was a righteousness that he did not have before.  He received the righteousness of God by grace through faith. The righteousness he had previously trusted in – his own – had proved to be nothing but pride.  The righteousness he had previously despised – Christ’s righteousness – now became for him his only hope and salvation.

Knowing Christ changes everything for the believer!  In His amazing prayer from John 17, Jesus speaks of “knowing God” as salvation:

¹When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, ²since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. ³ And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

So, to know Christ is to know the salvation of God.  To know Christ is to have the greatest possession in the world!  Knowing Christ changes everything for the believer.

The magazine, Commonweal, once had the following words on the cover: “Easter: Has It Made a Difference?” The subtitle on the article said: “The Evidence is Mixed.”[2]  How utterly absurd!  It is not mixed for the believer.  For the believer in Christ, Easter has made all the difference in the world.

Let me ask you a question this morning: what do you value most?  What would you say is your prized possession?  Is it some thing?  Is it a relationship?  Is it a career?

None of these things, in and of themselves, are sinful or wrong, but they become so when they are elevated above the greatest good of having and knowing Christ.  For Paul, knowing Christ was the greatest possession of his life.  Hands down, it won the prize!

How about you?  Do you know Him today?  Do you treasure Christ Jesus?

Knowing the Power of the Resurrection

But Paul did not merely want to know about Christ.  Neither did he wish to have a mere acquaintance with Christ.  There is more:

¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection

Paul wanted to know Christ “and the power of his resurrection.”

Let us make no mistake, the resurrection of Jesus Christ involved a staggering divine power that trumped all of the naturalistic expectations that come with death.  Dead men don’t come back to life.  They don’t, that is, unless some power greater than death exerts itself on the dead man raising him to life again.

The scriptures speak often and consistently of God having raised Jesus from the dead:

“This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses.” (Acts 2:32)

“let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well.” (Acts 4:10)

“if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

This involved an astounding display of divine power.  God worked a staggering miracle in that tomb, and the Son rose again.

Even more staggering, the same power of God that resurrected Jesus is open to believers today.  In Romans 8:11, Paul writes that “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you.”

Paul wanted to know this power.  Please note, however, that Paul wanted to know this power not so that he could acquire and posses it himself.  The thought of claiming divine power for himself was nowhere on Paul’s radar.  No, Paul wanted to know the power of Christ’s resurrection simply because he knew that the same divine power that raised Christ Jesus from the dead was his only hope as well.  Furthermore, Paul wanted to be so drawn into the life of Christ that he, too, would be drawn into and nourished and strengthened by the reality of God’s power working in his own life as well.  Paul wanted to rest in Christ Jesus, and that meant resting in the power of God in which Christ walked.

Paul also spoke of resurrection power in Colossians 2.

¹¹ In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, ¹² having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.

We are raised with Christ “through faith in the powerful working of God.”  We see, then, that the resurrecting power of God is also one of the worthy objects of our faith.  We believe that God has raised Christ from the dead, so we dare to believe that He can raise us up as well.

Sharing Christ’s Path to Resurrection

Paul wanted to know Christ and the power of His resurrection, but that’s not even all.  He has yet to make his most shocking declaration:

¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Simply astounding:  “and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead”!

It is astounding because this sounds so utterly foreign to our way of thinking, doesn’t it?  “Share in His sufferings?!”  We are tempted to say, “What can that possibly mean?  Why on earth would I want to suffer with Christ?  I want the blessings of His sufferings, but I do not want to suffer myself.”

But that is not what Paul said, is it?  Paul wanted to “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”

This means many things.  It means, on a practical note, that the suffering Paul was going through when he wrote this letter made sense when he viewed it alongside Christ’s sufferings for him.  Christ had suffered for Paul, in other words, so it was an honor to suffer for Him.

Furthermore, it is a statement of recognition that if a person claims to know and follow Christ, he cannot distance himself or herself from the Jesus’ central saving act:  the cross.  To know Christ is to take up your cross and follow Christ.  Jesus said the very same in Luke 9:

²³And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. ²⁴ For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

But Paul also wanted to share in the sufferings of Christ because Paul knew that he must reach the end of himself and truly be willing to give his life, his everything, to Christ.  This explains verse 11 of our text:

¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Paul is not saying that one must die a violent death to be saved.  Paul is not saying that he contributes to his own salvation through personal sacrifice.  Rather, he is saying that he has not truly trusted in Christ until he has been willing to give it all for Christ, even to the point of dying with Christ.

Church, Paul understood that the resurrection of Jesus meant that Jesus, not Paul, was truly Lord!  Paul did not merely want the glorious benefits of resurrection.  He was willing to know Christ even in the path that led to His resurrection, namely, Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

Paul was a man on fire.  He was, as we say, “all in.”

What a deep, deep tragedy that we have divorced the resurrection of Jesus from the path that brought Him to the resurrection.  Brothers and sisters, you cannot have the empty tomb without the cross! You cannot rise with Him if you have never truly died for and with Him!

Are you willing to embrace Christ resurrected?  Very good!  But what about Christ crucified?  Are you willing to embrace Christ crucified?  Are you willing to “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death”?

We live in a consumer market as it pertains to God.  People simply want to visit God like they are visiting a supermarket and take from Him what they desire.  But the Lord Jesus came to offer you a life, not merely a service.  Jesus came to lift you from your sins, not merely give you the blessing of eternal life.

The blessings of the resurrection of Jesus Christ are yours:  His power, His victory over sin, death, and Hell, and the hope that the resurrection brings.  But His cross is yours as well:  yours to embrace and yours to imitate in your willingness to give everything to God as well.

I pray for you this Easter the great joy of resurrection.  But I will do more.  I pray for you as well the great joy of suffering for Christ should He call you to do so.  I pray for you and for me the privilege of the cross that leads to resurrection.

I pray that we will embrace Jesus and His gospel, all of it, the blessings and the burdens, so that we might truly know the beautiful Savior.  To follow Christ is to know true joy, whether it be the joy of giving all for Christ or the joy of His empty tomb.

Come to Him today.

Mark 11:1-11

¹ Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples ² and said to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it. ³ If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.'” ⁴ And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street, and they untied it. ⁵ And some of those standing there said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” ⁶ And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go. ⁷ And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. ⁸ And many spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. ⁹ And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! ¹⁰ Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!” ¹¹ And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

One of my favorite writers is the late Flannery O’Connor, the great Southern short-story writer from of Milledgeville, Georgia.  She was a fascinating, odd, and insightful writer whose stories were often shocking in making their points.  She was once asked why it was that she wrote such unsettling things.  She responded that when one lives in a world of deaf and blind people, one has to shout loudly and draw startling pictures.

There’s a lot of truth in that:  in a deaf and blind world, one has to shout loudly and draw startling pictures.

The prophets of Israel understood this well.  They knew that merely saying something to people seldom was enough.  So, under the inspiration of God, they moved to act out the truths of God in shocking ways.  For instance, the prophet Ezekiel laid on his left side for 390 days and then on his right side for 40 days to highlight the sins of God’s people (Ezekiel 4).

To illustrate the coming exile into foreign lands that would befall the people of God, Ezekiel dug through the wall of his house with his bare hands, crawled out with a bag of belongings, and walked out (Ezekiel 12:1-7).  He also baked cakes over a flame fueled by cow dung (originally it was supposed to be human waste) in front of God’s people as a symbol of Israel and Judah’s sins against God (Ezekiel 4:12-13).

Isaiah walked around barefoot and naked for three years “as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush” (Isaiah 20:3)!  Can you imagine what his deacons thought?!  “Is that…oh no…!”

I would like to propose this morning that Jesus, when he decided to enter Jerusalem to initiate the events of the week of His passion, was standing firmly within the prophetic tradition.  In other words, he decided to enter in such a way that the manner of His entering said as much as the fact of His entering.  For the way He entered was shocking indeed.

Jesus’ triumphal entry, in other words, was Him shouting loudly and drawing a startling picture without even saying a word.  His entry into Jerusalem said something about His kingship, and what it said was startling indeed.

I. Jesus’ Kingship Was Marked by Divine Commission (vv.1-3)

To begin, Jesus’ kingship was marked by divine commission.  There was, in other words, a purpose behind it.  This week will culminate in Jesus laying down His life, but even this was part of a meticulous divine plan.  There was nothing happenstance or haphazard about Jesus’ kingship.  It was kingship of divine intent and commission.

Notice the details of the passage:

¹ Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples

No detail of the events of this amazing, miraculous week was by chance.  Jesus’ kingship was marked by divine commission.  He came to do the will of His Father, and it was the will of the Father that the Son go up to Jerusalem.  In Matthew 16, Jesus explains this to the disciples:

²¹ From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

The disciples struggled to understand the divine commission that lay on Jesus’ life.  As if Jesus were merely making this up as He went, Peter scolded Jesus for the very thought of going to Jerusalem:

²²And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.”

Many of you will recall Jesus’ amazing and painful response to Peter at Peter’s rejection of Jesus’ plan to go to Jerusalem:

²³But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

It is a crucial point:  Jesus is not following man’s plan, but God’s plan, and the devil always opposes the plan of God.  So, Jesus goes to Jerusalem.  Let us get back to Mark 11:

² and said to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it.

Jesus’ plan rested on divine commission, on the perfect will of God Father, even down to the detail of how Jesus entered Jerusalem.  He knows what village the disciples are to enter and He knows precisely where the colt (“the foal of a donkey,” as Matthew tells us in Matthew 21:5) is tethered.

Some commentators struggle with this amazing display of knowledge.  How could Jesus have known where this young donkey would be?  But, come now!  Jesus repeatedly reveals His own divine knowledge.  He knows what is in the hearts of those He meets before they even say it.  He knows details before people reveal them.  It is not surprising that Jesus would know exactly where this donkey is.  Once again, we see that Jesus’ is operating in the midst of a divine plan.

And we see the divine commission also in the detailed instructions that Jesus gives His disciples:

³ If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.'”

Indeed!  “The Lord has need of it!”  It’s as if He is instructing them to say, “Even this detail, the use of this donkey, is necessary.  Even this is part of the divine plan, part of God’s salvific blueprint to offer salvation to the nations.  The Lord has need of it!  Do not mind us taking the donkey for a moment.  This, too, is part of the plan.”

Jesus’ plan was intentional, deliberate, and meticulous.  He never had to guess what was going to happen.  Jesus was not Napoleon.  Do you know what Napoleon’s approach to war was?  Napoleon said, “Engage, then see what happens.”  In other words, make a move, watch the result, then improvise and formulate your next move.  Jesus never said, “Engage, then see what happens.”  Jesus knew precisely what was going to happen.  His plan was known from the beginning.

I once took a college class on Napoleonic warfare.  The professor had written a book entitled, Blundering to Glory.  His thesis was that Napoleon’s genius rested in his ability to engage, observe, then act.  He suggested that Napoleon was less a great strategist than improviser.  But Jesus was not an improviser.  Jesus did not react.  Jesus acted.  He walked resolutely in the center of the Father’s will.  Napoleon blundered to glory, but Jesus did not!

Jesus was not Indiana Jones.  Do you remember in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when Indy and the group are trying to escape the Nazi archaeological dig site?  Indy is asked what he’s going to do next and he responds, “I don’t know.  I’m making this up as I go along.”  Jesus never said that.  He never made it up as He went along.  He knew what needed to happen, and He knew how it would play out.

Jesus was not Forrest Gump.  One of the truly funny things about the movie “Forrest Gump” was how Forrest just happened to stumble on and off the major cultural and political stages in modern history.  He just happens to run across a football field when Bear Bryant is in the bleachers.  He just happens to be in Washington, D.C., and is pushed onto a stage where Abbie Hoffman is leading a huge anti-war rally.  Lt. Dan just happens to invest his money in Apple stock.  He just happens to give John Lennon some of the lyrics to “Imagine” on the Dick Cavett show.  He just happens to be thrust onto the stage of ping pong diplomacy with Communist China in the early seventies.  On and on it goes.  Forrest happens to stumble onto pretty much every significant cultural and political stage during his lifetime.

But hear me:  Jesus never stumbled onto the stage.  Jesus built the stage.  Jesus wrote the script.  Jesus’ kingship was marked by divine commission.  It was a known, embraced, sure plan.  He knew what He had to do, and he did it.  Life, for Jesus, was never like a box of chocolates:  He knew exactly what He was going to get!

Dear church, I think we can take great comfort in the meticulous nature of God’s plan and the Lord Jesus’ fulfillment of it.  Your existence and your salvation, if you have trusted Christ, are part of a divine plan.  Your presence here this morning is part of a divine plan.  Some of you this morning are hearing the gospel for maybe the first time.  I believe that the Lord God knew before He created the heavens and the earth that you – you! – would be right here right now in this sanctuary.  He has you right where He wants you.  This, too, is part of His plan.

I believe the Lord is calling out to you this morning.  I believe He is calling you to Himself.  You are no accident.  The events of this week are no accident.  This service is no accident.

I believe the Lord know that some of you, this very morning, are being drawn into Christ and will take His hand.

II. Jesus’ Kingship Was Marked by Shocking Humility (vv.4-7)

Jesus’ kingship was marked by divine commission.  But there’s more:  it was also marked by shocking humility!  Note the manner of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem:

⁴ And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street, and they untied it.

By “colt,” the Bible means here “young donkey.”

⁵ And some of those standing there said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” ⁶ And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go. ⁷ And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it.

To be sure, donkeys were not viewed with the derision with which many people view them today.  They were not the punch line of jokes in the ancient world.  But neither were they the expected mode of travel for kings.

I recall being in high school and seeing Elizabeth Taylor’s movie, “Cleopatra.”  Many of you have seen this movie as well.  Do you remember the amazing scene where Cleopatra enters Rome?  The Roman royalty are seated on a dais awaiting her arrival.  The great gates open and an entire pageant of sights and sounds come through:  marching soldiers, exotic animals, trumpeters, dancers, smoke of differing colors, etc.  Finally, seated atop a huge black Sphinx being pulled by a large number of rhythmically marching slaves is Cleopatra and her son, regal and majestic, towering above everybody in the watching audience.  Even royal Rome seems awed by the display.

I recall watching this for the first time and think, “Now that’s how royalty should enter a city!”

Compared to the pomp and circumstance of such an entrance, Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem seems almost comical.  Again, I believe Jesus is standing in the great, odd, and venerable prophetic tradition in which the prophets act out the truths of God.

Jesus came lowly, seated on a donkey.  The very manner of His entry seemed to say:  “The Kingdom of God is not like the kingdoms of the world.  The kingdoms of the world vie for power and prestige.  In the Kingdom of God, however, the King comes lowly and humbly.  The kings of the earth come to remind you that you are lowly.  The King of Kings comes lowly to lift you who are low up and out of your sins.”

There is something wonderfully subversive about the way that Jesus enters Jerusalem!  In coming in this manner, He is exalting humility as a cardinal virtue.  He is saying:  “This is what God treasures!  This is how the world will be won!  God works through the meek, the humble, and the lowly!  The world will be won not by powerful armies, but by a Suffering Servant.”

In speaking of the triumphal entry of Jesus, St. Augustine called Jesus, “the master of humility.”[i]  I think that is very well said, indeed.  His people are to be masters of humility as well.

I remember reading an account by Muhammad Ali about a meeting he had with Billy Graham some years back.  Muhammad Ali flew into an airport where he expected to be picked up by one of the great evangelist’s assistants.  Nobody came.  He was looking for somebody with a sign.  Nobody was there.  Finally, he went to the curb and there sat Billy Graham himself.  Muhammad Ali expressed his amazement that Graham came to pick him up himself…in a station wagon!

There’s something very Christian about that.  Humility is in the DNA of God’s people because Christ Himself was the very definition of humility.  He entered Jerusalem on a donkey, and He enters human hearts today only through the door of humility.

Humility marked the life of Christ, and His kingship.  It marked His birth in Bethlehem, His life, and, especially, His death on the cross.  On the cross, Christ glorified humility as the true birthright of the people of God.

D.A. Carson once asked the great Baptist theologian Carl F.H. Henry how he managed to remain so humble in the face of all of his monumental accomplishments.  Do you want to know what Dr. Henry said?  He answered:  “How can anyone be arrogant when he stands beside the cross?”[ii]

Christ is King, and He defined His kingship in terms of humility.

III. Jesus’ Kingship Was Marked by Misunderstanding Followers (vv.8-11)

His kingship was also marked by misunderstanding followers:

⁸ And many spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. ⁹ And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! ¹⁰ Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!” ¹¹ And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

The word “Hosanna!” does not mean, “Praise to God!”  What it really means is, “Save us now!”  We must understand this in order to understand how even the shouts of joy from the crowd reveal that those calling the name of Jesus misunderstood His person and His mission.

“Save us now!”  They cry.  This is an explicitly political statement, and we must understand this to get what is happening here.  They are crying, “Save us, Jesus!  Save us now!  The Roman foreigners have oppressed us too long!  The armies of Caesar have walked out streets unchallenged for too long!  Hosanna!  Save us now, Jesus!  Drive the filthy Romans out of God’s holy land!  Raise up an army!  Muster the troops!  Start the revolution!  Save us, Jesus!”

It is often asked how it can be that so many in this crowd who shouted, “Hosanna!” would cry, “Crucify Him!” just a few days afterward.    In a sense, it is an easy question to answer:  simply put, Jesus failed to deliver what the crowd thought He was going to deliver.  “Hosanna!” morphs tragically into “Crucify!” because in the “Hosanna!” of the crowd was a deep and profound misunderstanding.

Jesus did come to topple kingdoms.  He did come to start a revolution.  He did come to cast down the mighty and the proud.  But He did not come to do so through armed rebellion.  He came to do so through a much more subversive and profound strategy.  He came to turn the world upside down by drawing simple men and women into a kingdom that operated on God’s agenda and on divine mores, instead of on the agenda and mores of the world.  He came to start a rebellion by turning men and women’s hearts back to God.  In doing so, He came to begin the outworking of the Kingdom of God in the kingdoms of the world through the radically transformed hearts and minds of His disciples.  He came, in other words, to strike at the very core of what the world called “power” by subverting it through the lives of His followers.

Jesus did come to save and to “save now,” but not in the way the people expected.  He came to win the world one heart at a time.

The church father, the Venerable Bede, commented on this passage and said that “it was not God’s pleasure to give an earthly kingdom to the powerful, but a heavenly kingdom to the gentle.”[iii]

This is not what the crowd expected.  It is not even what they wanted.  And when Jesus failed to deliver, the crowd did what crowds always seem to do when Jesus doesn’t perform according to our plans:  they turned on Him.  They turned on Him and clamored for Him to be murdered.  Why?  Because He failed them so far as their expectations were concerned.  He did not come to be the political, military leader they expected.

In all honesty, some of you are struggling with this dynamic this very morning.  You feel frustrated with Jesus.  He has not done for you what you think He should do.  He has not been quick enough to give you what you want.  He has not healed the sickness, given the promotion, fixed the relationship, straightened out the child, or given you the financial blessing you think you are entitled to.

Some of us are coming to church and crying, “Hosanna!  Make it happen, Jesus!  Make it happen now!”

When it doesn’t happen, we grow frustrated and disillusioned.  Like the mob in our text we are too proud to realize that the Kingdom of God does not operate along the lines on which we think it should operated.  We are too stubborn to realize that when the King seems not to answer our requests it’s because He knows that we do not know our own requests as well as He does.

The King of glory comes to save and transform our lives, but not always as we wish.  But we may be sure of this:  His Kingdom is so much better than our own!

Let us misunderstand our King no more.  He comes lowly, humbly, and with the power of Almighty God.  He comes to turn everything upside down.  He comes to revolutionize all of life, one heart at a time, on His timetable, and as part of His divine plan.

It is not for us to hate the plan, to chafe under the plan.  It is for us to fall on our knees before the King of kings and Lord of lords and say, “I trust.  I believe.  I will follow.”

Have you embraced the King?  Have you bowed heart and mind and knee to His majesty?

I do pray that you will today.

John 4:46-54

⁴⁶ So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. ⁴⁷ When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. ⁴⁸ So Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” ⁴⁹ The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” ⁵⁰ Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way. ⁵¹ As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering. ⁵² So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” ⁵³ The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” And he himself believed, and all his household. ⁵⁴ This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.

Well-known pastor Fred Craddock tells a story about something very awkward that happened to him while he was serving as the dean of a seminary.  I’ll let him tell it:

                  For a brief time, I was acting dean at Phillips Seminary.  It was for fifteen months.  That’s similar to fifteen years.  The secretary said, “There’s someone here to see you.”  A woman asked me to come out to the parking lot.  I was a little nervous, but I followed her to the parking lot and to her car.  She opened the back door, and slumped in the back seat was her brother.  He had been a senior at the University of Oklahoma.  He had been in a bad car wreck and in a coma eight months.  She had quit her job as a schoolteacher to take care of him.  All of their resources were gone.  She opened the door and said, “I’d like for you to heal him.”

I said, “I can pray for him.  I can pray with you.  But I do not have the gift of healing.”

She got behind the wheel and said to me, “Then what in the world do you do?”  And she drove off.

What I did that afternoon was study, stare at my books, and try to forget what she had said.[1]

I sympathize with that woman.  I also sympathize with Fred Craddock.  It is, after all, a difficult thing to look into the eyes of a suffering person and be unable to stop their pain.  And, in truth, nothing causes a person as much pain as watching a loved one – especially a child – suffer.

This woman who came to Fred Craddock knew at least enough to know that Jesus was a healer, so she came to one of Jesus’ followers looking for the Master’s touch.

The Bible records a similar story, but with a radically different result.  At the end of John 4 we find a fascinating account of a father’s cry for Jesus to heal his dying son.  It is, on the surface, a powerful drama that grips the attention and moves the heart of the reader.  And yet, as is so often the case with Jesus, it is a story about so much more.  It is a story about the nature of faith, the nature of Christ, and what it means to believe the amazing gospel of Jesus.

It is a story, ultimately, about the greatness of Jesus and about what it means to place your faith in Him.

I. Saving faith is not perfect faith but it is sincere faith. (v.46-50a)

We have now left Samaria, where Jesus’ ministry bore great fruit.  We are returning to familiar territory where Jesus’ first great miracle and revelation of Himself occurred:

⁴⁶ So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine.

Undoubtedly Jesus’ name was well known and His reputation as a miracle-worker was well established in the land of Cana.  It is not surprising, then, that He is approached by a man with a need that only a miracle could meet:

And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. ⁴⁷ When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.

This man comes to Jesus.  At this point we should realize that this man’s coming is one of many that we have already seen in John’s gospel.  This man comes just as the crowds went to Jesus seeking baptism.  He comes just as Mary came to Him earlier in this same town when the vessels of wine were found to be scandalously empty.  He comes to Jesus as His disciples came when He called them to follow Him.  This man comes to Jesus just as Nicodemus came, in the night, asking how he might be saved.  He comes to Jesus as the Samaritan townspeople came to Him after hearing the woman’s testimony that they should come and see a man who told her all that she had ever done.

John’s gospel is saturated with the consistent movement of people coming to Jesus.

So this man comes.  He is no insignificant man.  He is, John tells us, “an official.”  This almost certainly means he was a man of some importance and position in the royal house of King Herod.

Royal men, important men, do not normally come to others seeking help.  But this man, John informs us, had a son who was ill.  Who knows what this illness was?  Who can say?  Perhaps it was a heart problem.  Perhaps it was a problem of breathing.  Perhaps it was leukemia, or some other disease or sickness.

Regardless, this child is dying, and so his important father comes.  And he does not merely come, he calls out to Jesus and asks him “to come down and heal his son.”

How heart breaking, and how very understandable this is! Would we not do the same?  In fact, I daresay some of you have done the same.  Some of you have stood by the sickbed of your child and cried out to Jesus for help.  Perhaps the Lord has healed some of your children. Perhaps, in other cases, it was not in the Lord’s will to grant physical healing.

Either way, I suspect there are those of you in this sanctuary today who understand what this broken-hearted-coming-to-Jesus means.

Our heart breaks at the thought of a child dying.  I have done funerals for babies before.  Hands down, it is the most terrible aspect of ministry.  Even though I know that these precious babies are in the arms of Jesus, I can never help but be overcome with grief at the sight of grieving parents.  And if you and I are moved to tears by this, how much more the Lord Jesus, whose love is perfect, pure, and undefiled.

No doubt Jesus was moved with sympathy for this man.  This fact is what makes Jesus’ response to the man all the more startling.  In truth, Jesus seems almost to scold the man:

⁴⁸ So Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.”

It is as if Jesus is seizing this heart-rending moment to cast the light of His own divine knowledge on the man’s motives and the motives of the crowd.  Is Jesus being cold here?  Is Jesus being harsh?  I think not.

We must understand that Jesus always sees and knows the story behind the story.  Even in a moment of great pain, Jesus knows that reality behind what we are saying.  Furthermore, Jesus knows that this moment is not only a moment for healing, it is a moment in which and through which he can draw this man’s broken heart into deeper fellowship with Himself.

So Jesus points out what he knows to be true:  that the man believes in Him in a sense, but the man does not really appreciate and understand who Jesus is.  Why does this matter?  Because Jesus knows that if He heals this man’s son without drawing this man into a relationship with Him, the man may come to marvel at Jesus as a powerful magician or wizard or sorcerer or healer, but he will not worship Jesus as Lord.

After all, what if this man gains a son but loses his own soul by missing the entire point of who Jesus is.  In this man’s mind, and likely in the minds of many who were initially attracted to Jesus, Jesus had great power.  But Jesus came not merely to let people know that He had great power, but, more so, to let the displays of His power reveal to people that, in Him, God had drawn near to seek and to save lost humanity.

The man had a miracles-based faith, but Jesus wanted Him to have a Christ-centered faith.  After all, it is possible to love the power of Christ more than we love Christ, isn’t it?  I fear this sometimes happens in movements within the Church that focus on healings.  After a while, the healings, the signs and wonders, become bigger in our minds that He who heals, than He who performs signs and wonders.

Jesus has compassion on this man, but He does not want the man to miss Him in His healing of the man’s son.  The man’s faith has already been revealed to be a bit misguided, a bit shortsighted.  But, let us notice that he does not turn away at Jesus’ observation.  Instead, he persists:

⁴⁹ The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”

This is powerful!  This is significant! Let us not miss what is happening here.  Let us not miss that something has happened between the man’s first plea for help and his second.  After his first plea, Jesus reveals to Him the true motivations of his heart and faith.  Yet, the man persists.  He does not turn from Jesus.

Interestingly, neither does the man deny the reality of what Jesus has said about his imperfect faith.  He knows that his own cry for help is a mixture of weak faith, desperation, and curiosity to see if maybe Jesus can pull of what no doctor had been able to do to that point.  The man knows that his faith is imperfect, but, in staying and crying out again, the man reveals something very significant:  that his faith, though imperfect, though small, though mixed with foreign elements, was nonetheless sincere.  It was not perfect, but there was a core at the heart of it that dared to believe that this Jesus could heal his dying boy.

Jesus mildly scolds the man the first time, though He did so for the man’s own good.  But what will Jesus do with this second cry for help.  Let us see:

^50a Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.”…

Dear church, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, saving faith is not perfect faith, but it is sincere faith.  Has this man’s faith suddenly grown perfect? No.  Is this man’s faith now suddenly completely pure in its convictions?  No.  This man’s faith is a simple faith.  It is not untainted by sheer curiosity.  It is not untainted by a sense of consumerism:  he wants Jesus to perform a miracle to make everything right.  This man’s faith has not really thought out the full implications of what a relationship with Jesus would mean.  But I will tell you this:  with all of its imperfections, all of its weakness, all of its shaky instability, this man’s faith dares to cry out to Jesus for help and mercy.

And Jesus honors his faith.

Some of you grew up in homes where you were not allowed to ask questions, where you were not allowed to struggle in your doubts.  Some of you grew up in homes where Christianity was defined as the absence of struggle.  Some of you inherited, and some of you are propagating, an understanding of Christianity in which our faith must be perfect and pristine.  Some of you think this is what good Christians believe.  Some of you think we’re supposed to have all the answers, never waiver, never struggle in our faith.

But here’s the truth:  all of us come to Jesus with an imperfect faith.  We speak about “growing in our faith.”  But “growing in our faith” assumes that there is a weaker and lesser point from which our faith must grow.

Yes, to be saved you must “confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead” (Romans 10:9).  But I plead with you not to wait until you think you have it all figured out.

Your faith must be sincere, but it must not be perfect.

We say, “Well, I would trust in Christ, but I cannot see it all.  I do not understand it all.  I cannot comprehend it all.”

Some of you are plagued by doubts concerning your own motivations, “Am I just doing this to avoid going to Hell?  Am I just doing this to please my parents, my mother, my father?”

And yet, even while you struggle, you feel drawn to this Jesus.  Like this man, your great need for mercy compels you forward.

Oh, listen:  if you feel your need for Jesus, if you really desire to know Him and to have Him, do not wait and wait and wait with your faith under the microscope of your own scrutiny.  If you feel drawn to Jesus and are willing to confess Him as Lord, cry out to Him now, now, now!

Jesus honors the imperfect faith the official.

And why should this surprise us?  Yes, again, you must be sincere in your faith.  No doubt you must!  God is not mocked.  God is not an ATM machine.  You don’t get the privilege of mindlessly mumbling some magical incantation and calling yourself “saved.”  But neither must you wait until all your struggles are removed, until all your questions are answered.

I plead with you to consider this man’s cry for help, even when Jesus scrutinized His motives.  I plead with you to remember that Jesus honors the faithful cry of any person who seeks Him, even when that person is still struggling.

Consider, for instance, the amazing episode in Mark 9 of another father whose son was possessed by an evil spirit that tortured him.  After the disciples fail to heal the boy, they bring the boy to Jesus:

²⁰ And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. ²¹ And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. ²² And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” ²³ And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” ²⁴ Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

Did you hear that father?  “I believe; help my unbelief!”  How many of us understand exactly what this means:  “Oh, Jesus, I believe enough to cry out to you, to know that you can do something, but I do struggle.  I struggle with my own weak faith.  I struggle in the flesh with being willing to give it all to you.  I’m struggling, Jesus, because my son is being tortured before my very eyes.  It makes me wonder where God is.  It makes me wonder IF God is.  But, Jesus, I believe enough to cry out to You.  I believe that if anybody could heal my son, you could.  Do I believe, Jesus?  Do I?  I am trying to.  I believe; help my unbelief!”

Or consider how Jesus describes faith in Matthew 17:20

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Do you see?  A mustard seed is a tiny thing, but Jesus will take even a tiny faith and multiply it.  Do not fail to come to Jesus because you find your own faith to be a struggling faith.  Come to Jesus with what faith you have and cry out to Him!

There has never been a sincere cry of faith, no matter how struggling, that the Lord Jesus looked upon with contempt.  He looks upon us as He looked upon this struggling father.

Your faith in Jesus may not be perfect, but, if sincere, the Lord God will take it, grow it, strengthen it, and bless you in it.

II. The blessings of faith are enjoyed in the enacting of faith (v.50b-53a)

Jesus said in the beginning of verse 50, “Go; your son will live.”  The miracle has occurred, but the man must move to realize it.  The healing had taken place by the power and authority of Christ’s word, but the man had to put feet to his faith to enjoy the blessing.

^50b …The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way.

The man goes!  He brings his struggling faith to Jesus, then he walks in His faith by the word of Jesus.  He goes.  He has voiced his faith in his cry for help, now he realizes the great blessings of his faith in His obedience to Jesus.  When he does so, he encounters something amazing indeed:

⁵¹ As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering. ⁵² So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” ⁵³ The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.”

The blessings of faith are enjoyed in the enacting of faith.  Faith is a verb.  When is faith is lived, faith is realized, and the blessing of it are enjoyed.

What if this man had determined to stay at the feet of Jesus instead of walking in the words of Jesus?  What if he had said, “No, Jesus!  I believe in You.  I will stay with You.  I will build a church right here and worship you forever!”

I suspect Jesus would likely have said, “Man, do you not see that faith is not a stationary declaration, it is a continuing journey.  When you walk in obedience to my commands, you walk in faith.  As this happens, your walk becomes your worship.  I have healed your son.  I wish for you now to see and know and marvel at My greatness.  When you see your boy alive and well, your faith will grow even stronger and you will see even greater things.”

How many of us miss the blessings of faith because we do not wish to walk in our faith?  How many of us miss the greater blessings of faith because we will not obey Jesus?

If we truly believe, we will want to obey, so Jesus says, “Go…”

Had the man not gone, he would never have seen his son healed.  He would have missed opportunities for greater worship because he would have committed himself to lesser obedience.

Some of us say, “Well, Jesus has spoken salvation over me.  Jesus has spoken healing over me.  That is enough.  It is enough.”

Is it?  What if Jesus has more to show you, more to teach you, more blessings to bestow upon you, but you miss it because you refuse to walk in His ways?

III. True faith is contagious faith (vv.53b-54)

The man believes as best he can, and the man obeys.  In doing so, his faith becomes stronger and his convictions more pronounced:

^53b …And he himself believed, and all his household. ⁵⁴ This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.

Ah, he believed enough earlier for Jesus to heal his son, but here John says that “he himself believed.”  It is as if true conviction begins to take root.  He has grown from an imperfect faith based on a desire for a miracle, to a substantial faith based on an understanding of Jesus’ kingly authority.

But that is not all, is it?  “And he himself believed, and all his household.”

What is this?  His household believed?  Yes, they did:  not just the man, but his household.

Let us note here a powerful truth about faith:  true faith is contagious faith.  True faith spreads.  Faith, by its very definition and properties, touches those with whom it comes into contact.

How many of you have been drawn into a stronger belief in Christ because of the example of belief you have seen in others?

His household believed.  This likely means his family and his servants.

Of course, it also means his boy, the one who was sick.

I try to imagine this man’s reunion with his son.  When he left, he thought he would never see his son alive again. He left his son on his deathbed.  I imagine this father leaving Jesus, coming home, and being greeted by his son:

Son:  Daddy, what happened?  I was so very sick.  I felt the cold creeping up from my feet.  Oh, daddy, I felt the grip of death closing in around me.  The world was growing dim and shadowy.  I could feel myself slipping away.  And then, daddy, just before the darkness washed over me completely…

Father:  Yes, son?

Son:  Oh, daddy, just when the darkness was about to swallow me up, I saw…

Father:  Yes, son?  What did you see?

Son: No, daddy, not “what” but “Who.”  Who did I see?  I saw, daddy, that man that was at that wedding a while back, that man who turned the water into wine.  I saw that man daddy.  I saw Jesus.

Father:  You did, son? You saw Jesus?

Son:  Yes, I saw Jesus.  And He came to me as I was slipping away.  He came to me, daddy, and, and…

Father:  Yes, what happened…

Son:  He came to me and reached out His strong hand.  He grabbed me as I was sinking into death and drew me to Himself.  He held me tight and whispered to me, “Not yet, boy.  Not yet.  Behold, I am making all things new.”  He held me, daddy.  And I buried my face in his chest, and when I awoke, I saw the servants standing in amazement.  Oh, daddy, have I said something wrong?  Why are you crying?  Don’t be mad.

Father:  Wrong?  No, boy, you have done nothing wrong.  I cry because, if I don’t, my heart will burst in half.  I cry, son, because I saw Him too.  I saw Him, son, and I begged for your life.

Son:  And did you know He would heal me, daddy?

Father:  Know?  No, I did not know, son.  You see, I went there with you on my mind.  But when I looked into His eyes, I realized that you were not the only one that needed saving.  So did I.  I did not know at first if He would heal you.  But I now know that I would follow Him anywhere, whether He healed you or not.  Oh, son, do you understand?

Son:  Yes, daddy.  Oh, yes, I know exactly what you mean.  I felt the same.  It’s not the miracle I love, daddy.  It’s Jesus.  And I will give Him my all.

Father:  Yes, me too.  Me too, child.  Me too.

How about you?  Have you trusted in Jesus?  Will you?  Will you come?  Will you dare to believe?  Will you?

Oh, come.

Come.

John 4:31-45

³¹ Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” ³² But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³ So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” ³⁴ Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. ³⁵ Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. ³⁶ Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷ For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” ³⁹ Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word. ⁴² They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.” ⁴³ After the two days he departed for Galilee. ⁴⁴ (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) ⁴⁵ So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.

I have two older brothers: David, the oldest, and Condy, the middle brother.  David is a couple years older than Condy and a few years older than me.  When Condy was born, David would have been somewhere between two and three-years-old.

My mother tells the story of waking up one morning shortly after having brought my brother Condy home from the hospital.  She noticed that he was not crying.  No sound at all was coming from his crib.  So she went into his room and looked into the crib, only to find a most unusual sight.

Baby Condy was lying there, still on his back.  On his face, balanced perfectly, was a large biscuit!  She said she could see Condy’s eyes peering out over the rim of the biscuit!

My mother called my brother David into the room and inquired as to the meaning of this very strange scenario.  He told her that he had awoken in the night worried that Baby Condy might be hungry.  So, David, just a couple of years older, went into the kitchen in the night, found a plate of leftover biscuits that my mother had made for dinner that night, grabbed one, and positioned it perfectly on Condy’s face so that he could have something to eat should he wake up hungry in the night!

That story has become legendary in our family.  It is a cute story, and more than a little bit sweet.  My brother David had good motives.  He wanted to feed his baby brother.  The problem was he was not able to comprehend the nature of the food that this new little baby needed.  I’m sure it provided a good teaching moment (and a lot of laughs) for my parents!

I can’t help but think of that little story when I read John 4:31-45. In this story the disciples try to give Jesus food, but He reveals to them that they have misunderstood the nature of the food that He, and they, and we need!

We are not done with Samaria.  The curtain has yet to drop on this strange and wonderful scene.  Last week ended with a series of fascinating motions.  Jesus reveals Himself to the woman at the well.  “The Messiah is coming,” she says.  “I am he,” Jesus replies.  Then there is immediate movement:  the woman leaves to return to the town.  The disciples, who missed the entire episode because they were grocery shopping, return.  (As an aside, there may have been a connection between the arrival of the twelve Jewish men and the sudden departure of this lone Samaritan woman.  Perhaps she thought they had not food but stones in their grocery bags!)  So the dust has barely settled from her departure and is barely settling from the disciples’ arrival.  As if to round off the amazing anti-climactic nature of their arrival, they begin to talk about food.

She leaves and the disciples say, “Rabbi, eat.”

But not so fast!  We’ve already seen Jesus handle people who want to change the topic of conversation.  The woman at the well did it when Jesus got too close to the real issues in her life.  Now the disciples do it when they encounter Jesus talking with this Samaritan woman.

“Rabbi, eat.”

Jesus appears to take the bait.  He too begins to talk about food.  But it is immediately obvious that Jesus has not taken the bait at all.  He will not be so easily distracted from the amazing drama of grace that has just taken place.

He talks about food, but, in doing so, he steers it toward the Kingdom of God.

Do not miss the irony here:  Jesus has just talked about water with the woman.  Now He talks about food with the disciples.

There are differences in the focus because there are differences in the immediate needs of the woman and the disciples.  The disciples, after all, are already following Jesus.  So when Jesus talks about water with the woman, He talks about her need for grace, her need for salvation.  With the woman, Jesus talks about the waters that save.  With the disciples, however, he talks about the food of their “followship,” the sustenance of their responsibilities and privileges as disciples.

With the woman, Jesus talks about the living water that brings one into the Kingdom.  With the disciples, He talks about the sustaining food of those who are already in the Kingdom.  The water speaks of entry into the Christian life, the food speaks of the life of a Christian.

Our intake becomes more solid as we grow.  In 1 Corinthians 3:1-3a, Paul chastises the Corinthian church for their refusal to grow towards more solid spiritual food:

¹But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ² I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, ³for you are still of the flesh.

So it is with us.  We always need the life-giving spiritual water of Christ.  We never do and never can abandon the waters of life.  But we also need the solid food of spiritual growth, the bread of discipleship.

This is what Jesus is speaking of here.  In doing so, He is calling the disciples to a more substantive feast.  It is a feast of growth and fellowship with God through Christ.  It is also a feast of motion.  Just as the episode at the well ends in movement and motion, so Jesus’ conversation with His disciples is likewise full of energy and power.

In particular, Jesus speaks to the disciples of an upward call, an outward privilege, and an inward gathering.

Let us rejoin the story as it unfolds.

The Upward Call: The Will of the Father (vv.31-34)

The disciples arrive with their groceries and marvel at the scene that has just ended.  You might remember that they marvel but they do not ask Jesus about it.  Perhaps you will remember verse 27 from last week:

²⁷ Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?”

They do not ask because they likely do not want to know.  They likely do not want to know, because they are probably beginning to understand that following Jesus just might well mean they’re going to have to rethink everything they’ve ever been taught about God, His grace, who the objects of His grace are, and what it means to have the mind of Christ.

So they do what we do when things get too uncomfortable.  They turn their attention to the menu:

³¹ Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”

I might point out to you that this is likely one of the first recorded instances of stress eating found anywhere in antiquity!  The disciples are stressed, so they start talking about food!

³² But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³ So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”

Well, this is all becoming rather predictable, isn’t it?  We saw this with Nicodemus (i.e., “You must be born again!” “What?!  I’m an old man!”).  We saw this with the woman at the well, (i.e., “I will give you living water.”  “The well is deep and you don’t have a bucket!”)  And now we see it with the disciples (i.e., “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”)

Once again, we’re witnessing an adventure in missing the point.  For Jesus, of course, this is a teaching moment.  He isn’t talking about physical food at all:

³⁴ Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.”

I think I can imagine the disciples hearing this, slowly taking their eyes off of the food in their hands and lifting them to Heaven.

Jesus is revealing to the disciples the upward call of the Christian life.  The world may stand around looking only at that which they hold in their hands, but not the believer.  We have an upward call, a Heavenward focus, a higher mandate.

It is almost as if He is whispering to them, “Guys, it’s really not all about what you can see.  What’s really important is what your God has called you to do.”  As He says this, it is almost as if Jesus is taking His hand, gently taking the chins of the disciples, and lifting them to the Heavens.

“Guys, if you’re going to follow Me, if you’re going to get Me and what I’m about, you’ve got to stop constantly thinking on this level down here.  I expect that woman to do so.  She has only just heard the gospel.  But you are my followers.  It is time to begin aligning your thoughts, your goals, your aspirations, your dreams, your hopes, and your plans to the thoughts, goals, aspirations, hopes, and plans of God Himself.  You are now of a new Kingdom.  You are now sitting at a new table.  This food that you hold in your hands will keep you for a moment.  The food that I want to introduce you too, however, will sustain you forever.  Yes, we need to have dinner in a bit, but there’s something you need even more:  to eat the bread of the will of the living God.”

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.”

What a moment!  What a revelation!  In calling the accomplishment of God’s will and work his “food,” Jesus was claiming that there is nothing more important than this.  Furthermore, in calling it “food,” Jesus was claiming that there is no real life outside of the will and work of God.

Jesus was sustained and nurtured and filled and blessed by obeying and accomplishing God’s plan in God’s way.  This union of purpose was so radical that Jesus will say in our next chapter:

“So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel.” (John 5:19-20)

Doing the will of His Father drove, sustained, and overwhelmed the life and ministry of Jesus, to the extent that when it was the Father’s will for the Son to die a cruel death on the cross, Jesus resigned Himself to that will.

Christian, listen to me:  you have nothing else to do, nothing else to consume and eat, and nothing else to live on but the will of your Father!

Yes, we must eat and work and live in the physical realm.  This is not unimportant.  Christianity has never taught (when it has been faithful to scripture) that the physical is irrelevant.  God made us to eat physical bread.  The point, however, is that there is a reality greater and more real than the mere reality of our physical survival.  There is a bread that is greater than bread, and that is the bread of doing the will of the father.

Christianity is not an escape from physical reality, but it is a breaking-in of the deeper realities of the Kingdom of God into mere physical reality.  Christianity does not say you should not eat bread, but it does say that you are more than the bread you eat.  “Man does not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4).  Christianity does not say you should abandon your earthly jobs and callings, but it does say that you have the high privilege of living out your Heavenly job and calling here in the context of your earthly job and calling.

Oh, Jesus will eat again.  He may have eaten shortly after this conversation.  But the point stands:  His food is to do the will of the Father, and ours should be as well.

How often do we miss out on the greatest feast because of our obsession with the lesser meals?  How often do we miss out on the greatest plans because of our preoccupation with our own paltry plans?

Church, are we, as a church, feasting on the will of God?  What is it that sustains us as a church family, that nurtures us in Christian growth, that compels and propels us forward?  Do we seek a feast here, a kingdom here?  Or do we delight in doing the will of God!

Some of us are perhaps trying to have both, but may I remind us all that we cannot serve two masters?  Either your life is going to be consumed with achieving more here and now, or it will be consumed with doing the will of your Father.

The Outward Privilege: Right Now! (vv.35-38)

Jesus next fleshes out what the will and work of the Father is.  He begins to speak to them of planting and harvesting that which was planted:

³⁵ Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’?

Here is language the disciples understand.  They live, after all, in an agrarian society.  They know what it is to plant and await the time of harvest.  But wait you must do!  In the fields of the earth, you plant in the ground and wait.  You may wait four months.  You may wait longer.   But the Kingdom of God is different.  In the Kingdom of God, the wait is over.  The harvest has come.  The time to gather up is here:

Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. ³⁶ Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.

What is this harvest Jesus speaks of?  The harvest is nothing less than the gathering in of the world to Christ.  It is this harvest that we are called to and it is the privilege of our discipleship as followers of Christ.

But before the harvest can be gathered it must be seen.  We must look out.  We must understand and be convicted over and burdened by the great outward privilege of our calling.  For out there is the woman at the well!  Out there is the world!  Out there is lost humanity!  Out there are hurting men and women who need precisely that which we can give them!

“Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see…”

You cannot look out and see when you are only looking at the food or the job or the money or the relationship or the car or the house or the promotion or the ambition or the plans in your own hands.  What we miss because we will not look!  What we miss because our eyes are fixed on the horizons of our own ambitions instead of on the great fields under our very noses that are white unto haves.

Looking out to the harvest means looking away from what has previously held your attention.  It is an upward focus on God resulting in an outward burden for lost humanity.  Here are the motions and movements of discipleship.

Look up, church!  Look out, church!  “Lift your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest.”

I agree with David Platt when he says, “Every saved person this side of heaven owes the gospel to every lost person this side of hell.”[1]

Jesus continues:

³⁷ For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

Unlike a farmer planting a crop, we cannot look at a saved man and say that his salvation is the fruit of our labors.  “I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor.”  In fact, salvation is a miracle of God, wrought by the Holy Spirit of God.  God gets the glory, but we get the privilege of being instruments through which He works to win the world.

Dear church, are we broken-hearted over the lost?  Do we see the fields that are white unto harvest?  Will we go and work in the fields for the Kingdom?  I do hope we will, for then we will have the honor of witnessing the final movement of discipleship, namely, the inward gathering of the nations to Christ.

The Inward Gathering: The Nations Come (vv.39-45)

Oddly enough, the great missionary in this text is not the disciples.  They were off shopping for groceries.  They were conveniently busy elsewhere.  They missed this amazing scene!  No, the great missionary in this text is a woman who was only just beginning to understand the nature of the gospel:

³⁹ Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.”

It may not have been the most polished testimony.  It may have been more a statement of amazement than anything.  But it did testify to the greatness of Christ, and, in doing so, it bore fruit.  It bore fruit in the belief of many of the woman’s townspeople.  It also bore fruit in the growth of the Samaritans in their understanding and walk with Jesus:

⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word.

There may have been a powerful moment here when the Samaritans asked Jesus to stay with them.  I cannot help but wonder if He turned and looked in the eyes of His disciples before answering.  Did He look at His disciples as if to say, “Do you see now?  Do you understand?  Do you get that these people are what I’m about and what I want you to be about?  Will you now look at the fields white unto harvest?  Will you now enter the fields to work?”  And I imagine the sheepish disciples pausing, looking into the plaintive eyes of the Samaritans, then looking back at Jesus, smiling, and nodding, “Yes.  Yes.  Let us stay.  We are with you Jesus.”

The Samaritans come on the basis of the woman’s witness, but then they come to see and know Christ themselves:

⁴² They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.” ⁴³ After the two days he departed for Galilee. ⁴⁴ (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) ⁴⁵ So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.

It is an amazing scene, is it not?  One woman at a well was touched by the power of Jesus Christ.  Through her witness, many came to know Christ and be saved.  She had the privilege of speaking the word of ingathering to the harvest.  She had the honor of saying, “There’s something about this Jesus!  There’s something about this man!  You must come and see Him!”

How about you?  Will you look at the field?  Will you enter the field?  Will you join in reaping the harvest of souls for Jesus Christ?  Will you take your place in the great adventure of witness and proclamation?  Will you join in the celebration of the harvest?

I pray we will.  I pray we will!

John 4:1-30

¹ Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John ² (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), ³ he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. ⁴ And he had to pass through Samaria. ⁵ So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. ⁷ A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸ (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) ⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) ¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” ¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” ¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” ¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” ¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” ²⁷ Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” ²⁸ So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, ²⁹ “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” ³⁰ They went out of the town and were coming to him.

Some of literature’s most beloved stories involve men’s struggles with showing grace to women who have made mistakes.  Most notably, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina focuses on Anna, the adulterous wife of Alexey Alexandrovitch.  In the story, Anna is having an affair with a character named Vronsky.  When her husband, Alexey, discovers it he ultimately writes her off as irredeemable and unworthy of grace.  Tolstoy has Alexey Alexandrovitch say the following about his adulterous wife:

“Forgive I cannot, and do not wish to, and I regard it as wrong.  I have done everything for this woman, and she has trodden it all in the mud to which she is akin.  I am not a spiteful man, I have never hated any one, but I hate her with my whole soul, and I cannot even forgive her, because I hate her too much for all the wrong she has done me!” he said, with tones of hatred in his voice.[1]

Or consider Jane Austen’s beloved story, Pride and Prejudice.  In the story, there’s a scene where a minister, Mr. Collins, writes a letter to Mr. Bennet after Bennet’s daughter, Lydia, scandalously runs off with a shady character named Wickham, publicly shaming her family in the process.  Mr. Collins, a Christian minister, writes a letter encouraging Mr. Bennet to forget his daughter and consider her dead because of her shameful actions. Here’s Mr. Collins letter to Mr. Bennet:

My Dear Sir – I feel myself called upon, by our relationship, and my situation in life, to condole with you on the grievous affliction you are now suffering under, of which we were yesterday informed by a letter from Hertfordshire.  Be assured, my dear sire, that Mrs. Collins and myself sincerely sympathise with you, and all your respectable family, in your present distress, which must be of the bitterest kind, because proceeding from a cause which no time can remove.  No arguments shall be wanting on my part, that can alleviate so severe a misfortune; or that may comfort you, under a circumstance that must be of all others most afflicting to a parent’s mind.  The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison to this…Let me advise you then, my dear Sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off your unworthy child from your affection for ever, and leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offence.  I am, dear Sir, [Mr. Collins][2]

“I hate her with my whole soul, and I cannot even forgive her,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.  “Let me advise you then, my dear Sir…to throw off your unworthy child from your affection for ever, and leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offence,” said Mr. Collins.

The common denominator in these examples is the unwillingness of these men to show grace to the offending women.  There are other examples in literature as well.

Interestingly, before either of these two examples were written, the New Testament revealed a situation in which Jesus had an encounter with a woman involved in scandalous behavior.  Jesus had the opportunity to withhold grace, like Alexey Alexandrovitch and Mr. Collins, but He didn’t.  In fact, Jesus’ approach to the woman He encountered has justly made this one of the most famous episodes in all of scripture.

Jesus chose to show grace.  In doing so, He revealed the nature of God.  Furthermore, He revealed the nature of grace itself.

Grace refers to the undeserved mercy and favor that God offers sinful human beings in the person and work of Jesus Christ.  If you don’t get grace, you won’t understand what Jesus is doing.

Grace is all over this story in John 4.  Let’s see what we learn about it from Jesus’ encounter with this unnamed woman.

God’s Grace Is For The Unworthy (vv.1-9)

John begins the story by telling of Jesus passing through the land of Samaria:

¹ Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John ² (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), ³ he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. ⁴ And he had to pass through Samaria.

Let us begin by observing that good Jews didn’t pass through Samaria.  Good Jews went around Samaria.  This was because Samaria was inhabited by Samaritans, and Samaritans were considered to be a kind of half-breed, heretical, unclean people by the Jews.  The Samaritans did not honor all of the Hebrew scriptures.  Neither did they honor Temple worship.  Their religious views were suspect, and their standing before God was considered broken by their own sinfulness and pride.

Some have found John’s wording interesting here:  “And [Jesus] had to pass through Samaria.”  In point of fact, He did not have to pass through Samaria, at least not as far as the customary Jewish routes of travel were concerned.  But what if Jesus “had to pass through Samaria” because He was driven more by the meeting He knew He would have there than any need for a shortcut?

John continues:

⁵ So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. ⁷ A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸ (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) ⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

Jesus has already violated social custom by entering an unworthy land.  Now He further breaks it by conversing with an unworthy person.  The woman had a number of strikes against her as far as Jewish men were concerned.  She was (a) a Samaritan, (b) a woman, and (c) a sinner.

But Jesus enters her land.  He “had” to enter Her land, verse 4 tells us.  He enters her land, sits where He knows she is coming, then asks her for a drink.

This is highly unusual and, in truth, highly scandalous.  This almost certainly explains the parenthetical statement in verse 8: “For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.”  But of course they did!  The truth is they didn’t want to be anywhere near this scene that Jesus was creating by His presence in Samaria.  They found a convenient excuse to do something else.

Let us not miss the prophetic significance of Jesus’ actions.  Merely by entering Samaria and speaking to a woman like this, Jesus was signifying something profoundly important and fundamental about the nature of grace.  His very presence said this:  grace is for the unworthy.

In truth, this is basic to the very definition of grace.  Grace, by definition, is for the unworthy.  The worthy don’t need grace.  Only the unworthy need grace.  As R.C. Sproul has put it:

It is impossible for anyone, anywhere, anytime to deserve grace.  Grace by definition is undeserved.  As soon as we talk about deserving something we are no longer talking about grace; we are talking about justice.  Only justice can be deserved…God never “owes” grace….God reserves for Himself the supreme right of executive clemency.[3]

And the further reality is that all of us are unworthy.  All of us are in need of grace.  “For all have sinned,” Paul wrote in Romans 3:23, “and fall short of the glory of God.”

Shane Clairborne recounts seeing a panhandler holding what he calls “the best cardboard signs for panhandling that I’ve come across…The sign simply read ‘In need of grace.’”[4]

The truth is, we all carry that sign:  “In need of grace.”  Paul knew this well.  A self-righteous Pharisee who persecuted the Christian church in his blindness and rage, Paul was overcome by the grace of Jesus Christ.  Did you know that the word “grace” appears at least by the second sentence of every letter Paul wrote.[5]

Do you feel unworthy this morning?  Have you done too much, said too much, thought too much?  Do you feel like an outcast, like damaged goods?

If so, you will want to pay special attention to this story, for in this story, Jesus intentionally creates an opportunity to confront a person just like that.

God’s Grace Is An Always-Sufficient Well (vv.10-14)

Grace is for the unworthy, meaning grace is for us all.  And God’s grace is always sufficient.  Listen to how Jesus explains this to the woman at the well:

¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” ¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”

Once again, as in the earlier conversation Jesus had with Nicodemus about being born again, Jesus is speaking on one level and His hearer is trying to process it and respond on another level.  Jesus says that He can give this unworthy woman “living water.”  He means, of course, that He can give her salvation, that He can give her Himself.  But she is only thinking of the literal water that she has come to draw from the well.  We might call this conversation “Exercises in Missing the Point!” at this particular point.

Jesus then further explains what He means:

¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

It is as if Jesus is saying, “No, you misunderstand.  I’m not talking about this water.  I’m talking about the refreshing, life-giving, saving waters of Almighty God.  Eventually, this well will run dry.  But, lady, the waters of God will never run dry.  The waters of God are for you, if you will drink, but they are also forever.  The waters of God are my grace that I will pour into you, and these waters will quench your thirst forever.”

But there’s even more to this, isn’t there?  Jesus also said that “the water I will give…will become…a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

This means that we not only drink from the well of grace, but the well is dug in our own hearts.  Grace isn’t just something outside that we take in.  Grace takes root inside and bubbles out.

God’s grace is an always-sufficient, never-ending, forever-refreshing well of water that He digs in our own hearts and souls when He gives us His Spirit.  The Spirit of God takes root when we come to Jesus and accept Him.  He is like a gushing torrent or an overflowing river of grace, continuously ministering to us, refreshing us, encouraging us, challenging us when we act contrary to His grace, and sustaining our hearts.

Church: grace breaches the banks and spills over, flooding the parched lands of our own souls with God’s great beneficent mercies!

God’s Grace Is Received By Repentant Hearts (vv.15-19)

Even so, Jesus turns to address the condition of the woman’s heart.  For as beautiful as this grace is, it is received by repentant hearts.

¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

At least to some extent, the woman begins to understand that Jesus is speaking of something more than mere water.  “Yes,” she says, “I want this.  Let me have this.”

What Jesus does next is curious.  He has created a sense of need and desire in her heart.  She now knows that she needs this water, and she desires to have it.  But Jesus goes on to steer the conversation into awkward areas. He begins to talk about her personal life.  Watch:

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

How fascinating.  As modern Americans accustomed to steering clear of awkward subjects, we might instinctively find this rude.  I might go so far as to say that the climate of our churches even might find this rude.

See, if Jesus were one of us, He might have said, “Oh, great!  You’re ready to accept me!  You’re ready to pray the prayer!  You’re ready to get saved and join the church!”

After all, that’s how we act.

But Jesus does something very interesting, doesn’t He?  She says, “Ok!  I’m ready!  I want this water!  I’m ready to drink!”  And Jesus turns on her and essentially says, “Fine, but tell me a little about the way you’re living.”

He baits her:  “Go, call your husband, and come here.”  He’ll say in just a moment that He knows she doesn’t have a husband.  He knows that she’s living with a guy who isn’t even her husband.  He knows that her past is strewn with the wreckage of ill-conceived relationships:

¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.”

You can see this woman fall from the heights to the valley.  A minute ago Jesus was enticing her with living water, with unending water.  A minute ago she was ready to go.  “This is great,” she seemed to be saying, “a little bit of Jesus to make my life go better.”  Then Jesus puts the spotlight on her life, on her sins.

Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”

What a painful moment:  “Yes, you don’t have a husband.  You’ve had five.  And the guy you’re currently shacking up with, he’s not your husband at all, is he?  You have a tendency of running through relationships, don’t you?  You have a tendency to live your life on impulse, don’t you?  You really have made a mockery of God and His plan in the way you’re living, haven’t you?  You’ve had a lot of men, and you’re living in sin with one right now.”

How will she respond?  Like us?  “Well, Jesus, that’s really none of your business, is it?  Who are you to judge me?  Who do you think you are?!  You guys are so narrow-minded.  If I want to live with a guy I’m not married to, what is that to you?!”

She could have said that, but she doesn’t.  Instead:

¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

I imagine her pausing.  The smile slips from her face.  Her voice is more quiet now.  The light of understanding dawns in her eyes.  Then she says, “You’re right.  My life is a wreck.  I’ve been doing it my own way.  Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.”

What is happening here?  Why would Jesus so suddenly expose the dark corners of this woman’s life?  We say, “Don’t go there!”  But Jesus went there.  And because Jesus went there, something deepened in this conversation, in this interaction between Jesus and this woman, didn’t it?

What’s happening here is that Jesus needs to teach her something else about grace.  He needs to teach her that grace is for the unworthy, yes, and God’s grace is an always-sufficient well, yes. But He needs to teach her here that God’s grace can only be received by repentant hearts.

To receive the gift, we need to know our need for the gift.  To receive these living waters, we need to know that our hearts and minds and souls are parched and dry with sin.  To be saved, we need to be convinced that we’re really lost.

It’s not just that Jesus went there with this woman, it’s that Jesus had to go there, because we don’t really know the joy of being found until we know the anguish of being lost.

It could just be that some of you this morning have tried to have grace without repentance, water without thirst, Jesus without humility. But that doesn’t work.  The nature of grace is that it is designed for those who know they need it.

Those who are proud or stubborn in their sins don’t want grace. They don’t think they need it.

Jesus created a sense of wanting in this woman when He told her about living water.  But then He created a sense of need in this woman when He reminded her of her sins.

What about us this morning?  What about you?  What is it that’s keeping you from Jesus?  It could be this particular sin:  cheap, disposable relationships.  Living with somebody in sin that you’re not married to?  Are something else: greed, anger, bitterness?

Oh, listen:  I know it’s painful to let God reveal what’s really going on, but I want you to get that this too is part of grace.  He reveals the wounds only so that He can heal.  He tears the scab off only so that He can get to the real problem.

Jesus isn’t trying to be cruel.  Jesus is trying to save this woman from herself.  To do that, He must bring her to a point of repentance.

Grace is received by repentant hearts.

God’s Grace Is Found In A Relationship (vv.20-30)

And then He shows her one more thing. He shows her that grace is found in a relationship.

This woman finally does what most of us do when somebody gets too close to what’s really going on in our lives.  She changes the subject:

²⁰ Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

She changes the subject by pointing to one of the old religious debates between the Samaritans and the Jews:  namely, where the people of God should worship.  But Jesus is having none of it:

²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

It’s almost as if Jesus is saying, “Woman, it’s not about where we worship.  It’s about Who we worship.  It’s not about knowing where worship should take place.  It’s about knowing God personally and intimately – knowing His name, knowing His nature, knowing Him as Father – so that you might worship Him at all.  Woman, worry less about these matters than about the fact that you don’t know who God is!”

²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.”

Ah, the irony!  Do you see it?  The woman shrugs off Jesus’ answer by saying, “Well, whatever.  We can’t settle it here.  Eventually, God’s going to send His chosen One to the world, then He’ll make sense of it.”  Ha!  Then Jesus strikes:

²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

Scripture does not describe her immediate reaction:  the look on her face, her body language, whether or not she opened her mouth in astonishment.  But what a powerful moment!  This woman suddenly seems to want to avoid the unpleasant issue of her sins.  She wants to avoid now the confusing issue of religious debate.  She retreats now behind the casual observation that one day the Messiah is coming to reveal the truth.  And Jesus responds by throwing all of His cards on the table:  “I who speak to you am he.”

“Woman!  Woman!  Don’t you get it?  Don’t you see?  What you’ve been looking for in all those past and now-shattered relationships…what you’ve been searching for in those five ex-husbands…what you’re looking for now in this man you’re living with…what you’re reaching blindly for in your religious tradition and religious questioning…what you’re waiting for in the promised Messiah…everything that your life has been hungering and thirsting and searching and looking and waiting for is right here in front of you!  You don’t have to keep running through relationship searching for meaning.  Meaning is right here!  You don’t have to keep mulling the religious questions over in your mind anymore.  The answer is right here!  You don’t have to keep approaching life looking for the next rush, the next relationship, the next whatever.  What you’re looking for is here!  Woman:  God’s grace is for you but God’s grace is found only in a relationship with Me!  I who speak to you am He!”

Even the thick-headed disciples seem to get that something amazing is happening here.  For once, they hold their tongues:

²⁷ Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?”

They are silent.  They didn’t understand it, but they knew better than to interrupt the high drama of grace with dumb questions.

But what of the woman?  What happened to her after her encounter with God’s grace?  Watch this:

²⁸ So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, ²⁹ “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” ³⁰ They went out of the town and were coming to him.

I love this.  No, the woman didn’t seem to have complete understanding.  I don’t think it can be definitively said that she truly trusted in Christ.  Of course, neither can it be said that she didn’t.  She was still struggling.  But I personally think her response here reveals the gentle sunrise of God’s grace over the horizon of her darkened heart.  It’s almost like watching the slow dawning of realization:  “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.  Can this be the Christ?”

Ah, yes. Yes, dear lady, it could be…and it is.

He has come.  God’s grace has come.  God’s grace has come…and it has a name…and that name is Jesus.

This morning, I’m going to let this woman offer our invitation.  Her words will be mine:  “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.”

Come.  Come and see.

John 3:22-36

²²After this Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he remained there with them and was baptizing. ²³ John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because water was plentiful there, and people were coming and being baptized ²⁴ (for John had not yet been put in prison). ²⁵ Now a discussion arose between some of John’s disciples and a Jew over purification. ²⁶ And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness—look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” ²⁷ John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. ²⁸ You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ ²⁹ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. ³⁰ He must increase, but I must decrease.” ³¹ He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all. ³² He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony. ³³ Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. ³⁴ For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. ³⁵ The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. ³⁶ Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

Let me share with you a blunt but honest opinion:  second place stinks.  Really, it does.  Second place stinks.

When I was in high school, I saw that the South Carolina Baptist Convention was hosting a speaker’s tournament for teenagers.  At that time, I knew that I had been called to ministry, so I signed up for the tournament.  I passed through the first and second rounds, then prepared for the final round at St. Andrews Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina.

There were, I recall, about ten of us.  There was one other guy and myself, and the rest were girls.

I knew when the other guy started speaking that I was in trouble. He was polished, smooth, and delivered a fantastic speak.  I figured he would win and, in the end, I was correct.  I won first-runner-up and he won the speaker’s tournament.

I’ll never forget when the state Baptist newspaper came out and our pictures were in it.  Under his picture it said, “Winner.”  Under mine it said, “First-Runner-Up.”

Well, I wasn’t thrilled about second place, but I enjoyed the experience.

A few years later, as a junior or senior in college, I was sitting in a large classroom listening to a lecture.  I noticed that the guy next to me looked familiar.  I began to talk to him and quickly surmised that he was the guy in the youth speaker’s tournament from some years earlier!  I couldn’t believe it.  Here I was, sitting next to “First Place” again!

I asked him how things had turned out for him and he replied:  “Pretty good.  I’m President of the student body here at the University.”

I will admit, to my shame, that I immediately thought, “Well, good grief!  This guy is always going to be ahead of me in life, isn’t he!”

I say it with laughter now, and with no small bit of embarrassment, but it really was odd.  I half thought, upon moving here to North Little Rock, Arkansas, that I would move into my house only to find that he lived next door to me in a little bit bigger house, driving a little bit nicer car.  (I knew he couldn’t have a prettier wife than I did, though!)

Yes, I must admit, I hate second place.  To be perfectly honest, none of us enjoy second place, do we?  We wouldn’t think highly of a ball team who, entering a tournament, declared publicly that their great goal was to win second place.

I suppose there’s something natural about this, but, really, that’s the problem.  Our nature isn’t a good guide.  Our nature, after all, is sinful and under the curse of sin.  The root cause of our hatred of second place is that, really, we think we are entitled to first place.  We practically demand it, don’t we?

I once read a biography on Edgar Allen Poe and was struck by the following statement that he made:  “My whole nature revolts at the idea that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself.”[1]

There you have it.  That is actually a pretty good summary of the human condition and conviction.  Before we come to Christ, we all say that:  “My whole nature revolts at the idea that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself.”

Of course, when we come to Christ, we should not say such a thing, right?  After all, the Apostle Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me…” (Galatians 2:20)  The New Testament, then, sees the Christian life not as the obliteration of the self, but as the rebirth of the self through its death to enslaving sin and reanimation through the resurrected Christ.

So Jesus came not to say that you and your life doesn’t matter.  On the contrary, He came to give you your life back.  But He came to give us new life through the death of the old life that was bound to sin, death, and hell.

This leads us to an amazing paradox.  This means, if you think about it, that our lives begin only when they end at the feet of something greater than and outside of ourselves.  We must die in order to live.  Consider the words of Jesus in John 12:

²⁴Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ²⁵ Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Part of this dying is recognizing that there is something in the universe greater than yourself.  Brothers and sisters in Christ, may I be so bold as to remind you that you are not God.  I am not God.  We are not God.

The Christian journey begins with a recognition that our attempts at self-deification, at being God, have only served to highlight our great distance from God.  When we repent at the feet of Jesus, we repent first and foremost of the native and inherent obsession with our own selves and our own opinions and our own desires and our own will and our agendas that has only served to destroy us.  The Christian journey begins not only with the recognition that there is something greater and grander than us, but that He has a name and His name is Jesus.  Our Christian journey begins, then, with an amazement at the God we behold in the face of Jesus the Christ and a subsequent rejection of the god we used to think we were.  The Christian journey begins with a heart-broken smashing of the altars of our own selves, a rejection of the false god we have crafted in our own image, the casting down of the golden calf that bears our own faces.

And yet, it seems that the “me-culture” in which we live is forever causing us to forget this.  Even in the church of the living God we may forget that we are not God if we are not careful.  We may slowly and subtly begin to suspect that we, after all, are pretty great and that God, after all, is really secondary.

It can happen!  It can!  But, ladies and gentlemen, with all due respect, may I remind us that we are not the point.  We are not the point!

The church rises and falls on her view of Christ.  A church saturated by a holy longing to see and celebrate the infinite greatness of Christ is a church heading in the right direction.  A church, however, that is committed to meeting the felt or perceived needs of people, or to providing for the comfort of people, or to offering people entertainment, is a church doomed to fail.

This is because the church was designed to be captured and held by a vision of Christ in His glory.  Then, through that vision of and relationship with Christ, the church, under the guidance and with the power of the Holy Spirit, engages people for God’s further glory.

It can be a difficult thing to put Christ first.  At the very least, it had to be a temptation for John the Baptist.  After all, there was a time when John was the bright star on the scene.  All of Jerusalem was going out to the Jordan to be baptized by him, by John.  To be sure, John the Baptist always made great efforts to remind the people that he, John, was not the point and should not be the object of their attention.  John was keen to tell the curious crowds and the angry religious officials that his entire job was to point to the coming of one greater than himself.

Even so, at least some of John’s followers had trouble with the transition.  They seemed to struggle with the fact that the crowds were now running to Jesus and His baptism instead of to their own master, John.

A lesser man, of course, might, in such a situation, find subtle ways to edge on the frustrations of his disciples, but not John.  Oh, to be sure, John was human.  I do not think it is dishonoring to John the Baptist to wonder if, in some way, he had to struggle a bit internally with feelings of jealousy.  But John was a man of God, and all the evidence suggests that at every opportunity given him he sought to downplay the jealousy of some of his own followers and make Jesus look great!

This morning, then, let us consider John as an example of a man who knew and loved Jesus Christ.  Let us look at him to see how we, too, should stay focused and attached to Jesus.

To Know Christ Is To Reorient Our Joy To His Joy (vv.22-29)

We first see that some of John the Baptist’s disciples were struggling with the attention that was being given to Christ:

²²After this Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he remained there with them and was baptizing. ²³ John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because water was plentiful there, and people were coming and being baptized ²⁴ (for John had not yet been put in prison).

It is interesting to note that John’s ministry did not cease with the coming of Christ.  John continued to baptize.  But let us note that John’s ministry was not in competition with Christ’s.  On the contrary, John simply continued his ministry and his baptism of repentance as a means to draw and point more people to Christ.  In the midst of this continuing ministry, some of John’s disciples grow concerned and, most likely, a bit jealous about the crowds’ shifting focus to Jesus and away from their own master:

²⁵ Now a discussion arose between some of John’s disciples and a Jew over purification. ²⁶ And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness—look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him.”

Now John has a choice here, does he not?  He could do what we might have done and egged on his disciples’ frustration.  He could have said, “I know, right?  I mean, we were out here baptizing before my cousin, Jesus, came along.  They used to listen to me preach.  I used to have the big church in town.  And then, wham!, here comes Jesus and steals the crowd!  I mean, isn’t that sheep-stealing?  And what about those folks that used to sit at my feet?  Well!  I guess all I did for them didn’t matter after all.  Go figure!  I’ve just been tossed out back, I guess.  You’re right:  it isn’t fair!”

John could have said that.  He really could have.  But, instead, he does a curious thing.  He begins to talk to his disciples about joy.  Listen:

²⁷ John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. ²⁸ You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ ²⁹ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete.

He speaks of joy twice here, and he approaches it through an illustration of a wedding.  Let us imagine John’s address to his disciples.  In doing so, allow me to read the cultural trappings of our weddings into the different cultural setting of a first-century Jewish wedding.  Nothing will be lost in doing so and I think this will help us get the point of what John is saying a little more easily.  Let us imagine John turning to his disciples and addressing them thus:  “Guys, look:  I get your frustration, but let me help you get this right.  Imagine with me that we’re at a wedding.  You’re sitting in the crowd and the wedding’s about to start.  You see all the guys standing up front wearing tuxedos.  And there’s the groom.  There beside him is the shoshbin[2], the best man.  And to the left and right, looking like nervous penguins, are the groomsmen.  The preacher is standing there in the middle.  And all the guys are waiting for the doors in the back to open and the bride to come down.  You guys with me?”

“Yeah,” all of John’s disciples nod.

“Well, imagine with me that the doors to the church open and there, standing in the doorway, is the bride!  Oh, man, she looks just like an angel!  She’s got on an amazing, white, wedding gown.  She’s smiling.  Everybody stands up and turns to her, and here she comes down the aisle on her daddy’s arm.  You hear the sniffles of some of the ladies in the crowd crying softly at how beautiful the bride looks.  Her father is kind of grimacing but trying to look happy.  And imagine they’ve come down the aisle and the bride is now just a couple of steps from the bridegroom.  He swallows hard and grins nervously at his bride.  You know what I’m talking about fellas?”

“Yeah, yeah, John.  We’re following.”

“Then imagine, guys, that just as she is being presented to her husband, the best man all of a sudden lunges at her, throws an elbow at the bridegroom, knocks him over, pushes her dad away, grabs the bride around the waist, plants one on her and shouts, “Woooo-hoooo!  Ain’t my woman FINE!”

I can see John’s disciples all laughing hysterically at the image.  John continues:  “I mean, guys, come on!  There would be absolute pandemonium, wouldn’t there?”

“Yeah, John, you’re right!  That would be crazy…and very wrong!”

“Yeah,” John continues, “it would be.”  Then he pauses, looks up for a minute and says, “Guys, listen:  Jesus – the one that all the folks are running to – Jesus is the groom.  I’m just the best man.  I’m not jealous that the bride – the people – want to be with their groom.  On the contrary, I feel just like a best man at a wedding.  My joy is linked to his joy, and all I want is for their marriage to be a great success.”

St. Augustine imagines John’s point in these beautiful words:  “I am in the place of hearer; he, of speaker; I am as the one that must be enlightened, he is the light; I am as the ear, he is the word.”[3]

Do you see?  Verse 29 again:

The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice.

John is saying to his disciples that knowing and loving and following Jesus means reorienting our joy to His.  It means determining that what makes me joyful isn’t the real point anymore.  Rather, what gives Jesus joy now becomes the source of my joy as well.

Then John puts an amazing bow on the thought.  At the end of v.29 he says, “Therefore this joy of mine is now complete.”

Theodore of Mopsuestia summarized this amazing statement in this way:

“My joy is that I see his incorruptible bride keeping her love for him.  That all would love him and believe in him – this is the kind of love that is fitting and due him – and most certainly due to him as Lord!  If I, instead, wanted to attract the bride to myself, I would be committing an act of spiritual corruption because I would deceitfully pursue a union for which I have no right, and would be committing adultery.”[4]

Don’t miss that, church.  John’s joy found its completion where Jesus’ joy began.  To put his plans above Jesus’ plans would be adulterous and wrong.  Doing the will of the Father brought Jesus joy, so doing the will of the Father became John’s joy as well.  Seeing people come to Himself brought Jesus joy, so seeing people come to Jesus brought John joy too.

How about you?  How about you?

Can you honestly say this morning that the joy of Christ has redefined and now defines your own joy?  Can you say that your affections have been aligned to His?  Or are you trying to have it both ways?  Are you trying to have the benefits of Christ without embracing and submitting to the joys of Christ?  Are you trying to have the gift of salvation that Christ gives without letting Him overtake your heart to such a degree that His mind becomes your mind, that His affections become your affections, and that His joy becomes your joy?

In thinking about joy, I really appreciate how philosopher Peter Kreeft differentiates between pleasure, happiness, and joy:

“Joy is more than happiness, just as happiness is more than pleasure. Pleasure is in the body. Happiness is in the mind and feelings. Joy is deep in the heart, the spirit, the center of the self.

The way to pleasure is power and prudence. The way to happiness is moral goodness. The way to joy is sanctity, loving God with your whole heart and your neighbor as yourself.

Everyone wants pleasure. More deeply, everyone wants happiness. Most deeply, everyone wants joy.

Freud says that spiritual joy is a substitute for physical pleasure. People become saints out of sexual frustrations.

This is exactly the opposite of the truth. St. Thomas Aquinas says, “No man can live without joy. That is why one deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal pleasures.” Sanctity is never a substitute for sex, but sex is often a substitute for sanctity.”[5]

Kreeft speaks of pleasure, happiness, and joy as a spectrum from lowest to highest.  Pleasure is a physical phenomenon.  Happiness is linked to moral goodness.  But joy is linked to the condition of the human heart.  Joy is the deepest and most profound condition in, by, and through which we have a deep and profound peace with the will of God.

I think that holds up nicely.  Christian joy is that condition of the believer’s heart in which he or she is so consumed with the beauty and glory of Christ that his or her affections, desires, wishes, and hopes have been aligned to Christ’s affections, desire, wishes, and hopes.

To know Christ is to reorient our joy to His joy.

To Know Christ Is To See Our Ego End Where His Greatness Begins (v.30)

Of course, the greatest challenge that John’s disciples presented to him was the challenge of ego.  When John’s disciples complained of the crowds flocking to Jesus, John the Baptist was faced with an amazing choice:  would he fall back into his own ego and take offense, or would he let his ego die at the feet of Jesus.

The answer is found in verse 30, in one of the most amazing, humble, selfless statements ever to pass the lips of mortal man.  Here is what John the Baptist said to his disciples:  “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

That statement is chill-inducing in its astounding humility.  “He [Jesus] must increase, but I must decrease.”

I can imagine the stirring storms of intensity in John’s eyes as he says it:  “Guys, get this and don’t forget it:  I want Jesus to get bigger and myself to get smaller.  I want my cousin to get the big crowds.  I want them to go to Him, not to me.  I want His fame to spread and my own name to slip into obscurity.  I want His name in the bright lights and my name off the marquee.  I want His ministry to explode and my ministry to have simply accomplished its temporary task!  I want Jesus’ to be known and worshiped and spoken of and adored and praised and followed by everybody who walks the earth.  I’m not the point, guys!  It’s not about me!  Guys, it was never about me!  He must increase, but I must decrease!”

Church, hear me:  to know Christ is to see our egos end where His greatness begins!  To know Christ is to see our agendas end where His plan begins.  To know Christ is to take the petty furniture of our egos and burn it in a pile out back.  To know Christ is to say, “He must increase, but I must decrease!”

Have you said that?  Are you saying that?  Do you wake up each morning with a profound sense of Christ’s greatness over your own?

Let me ask a more fundamental question:  are you convinced of the greatness of Jesus Christ?  Is he, in your opinion, the greatest?  Now, don’t revert to your Sunday School answers.  Answer honestly:  in the way that you approach your business, your relationships, and your own life, is Christ and His teachings and His vision and His cross and resurrection the main piece of the puzzle, the key component, the North Star of your path?  Do you see Jesus as the greatest and the best?

Even here there is a problem.  Actually, calling Jesus “the greatest” falls short of the reality.  Here’s how John Stott put it in his amazing book, The Radical Disciple:

“So we may talk about Alexander the Great, Charles the Great and Napolean the Great, but not Jesus the Great.  He is not the Great – he is the Only.  There is nobody like him.  He has no rival and no successor.”[6]

Indeed!  He is the Only!

He must increase, but we must decrease.

To Know Christ Is To Accept His Countercultural Message (vv.31-36)

To know Christ is to reorient our joy to His joy, to let our egos die where His greatness begins, and to accept His countercultural message.

I like the word “countercultural,” especially as it applies to Jesus.  A “cultural” message is one that is in harmony and agreement with the predominant message of the culture in which we live.  If you want to know what our cultural message is, observe the arts coming out of the culture:  music, movies, literature, etc.  But a “countercultural” message is one that runs against the cultural message, colliding, conflicting, and contrasting with it at key and crucial points.

Jesus’ message has always been countercultural and Jesus Himself was countercultural.  This is why He always sounded like He was upside down in the world.  This is why the world (and, oftentimes, the church) struggled and struggles to understand Him.  Jesus spoke and thought in a way that highlighted His origin from above and our enslavement to the ways of the world.  This is how John puts it in verse 31:

³¹ He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all. ³² He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony.

“No one receives his testimony,” John says.  The more we are immersed in our culture, the harder it is to get a handle on what Jesus was saying and doing.  His message was countercultural.  More than that, His message was the message of God, and lost people do not care for the thoughts of God.  But John the Baptist goes on to say that knowing and loving Jesus means accepting without reservation His countercultural message.  Hear verses 31-36:

³³ Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. ³⁴ For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. ³⁵ The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. ³⁶ Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

To be a believer in Christ means taking up the joy of Christ, letting our own egos stay nailed to the cross, and then trusting, believing, embracing, and walking in the message of Christ.

Do we really believe the truth of what Jesus said and who Jesus is?  “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life,” John says in verse 36.  But that belief, if true, should evidence itself in our lives as we follow and obey Jesus.  This explains the shift in verbs in verse 36.  Watch closely:  “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

Belief, then, is obedience.  Disbelief is disobedience.  You cannot say you believe if you will not obey.

To know Christ is to believe and walk in His will.  To truly believe in Christ is to see His miraculous and life-transforming power flesh itself out in our day-to-day existence.  This is how Lois Cheney put it:

There was a place

Where the unbelief was so great

That Jesus

Jesus, the Son of God,

Could not heal and help,

And so he left them.

Has anyone seen Jesus lately?

That’s not a bad question, really.  “Has anyone seen Jesus lately?”  Have you?  Have I?

Jesus, the Son of God, lives and reigns on high.  He is still in the business of turning worlds upside down, of transforming lives from the inside out.  He still confronts and challenges both the world and His church.

If you know Him, embrace His joy, abandon your own ego, and believe and follow the Risen King!

John 3:16-21

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. ¹⁸ Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹ And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ²¹ But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

Even the most shocking things become normal when we get used to them.  That’s true, for instance, of the human tolerance of sin:  things that once shocked us stop shocking us once we see them enough times.  Think, for instance, of the things you now watch on TV that you would not have tolerated just a few short years ago.  You can see this when you turn to your kids and say, “Let’s not watch that show tonight, Grandmamma’s coming over!”  All that means is you have come to tolerate things you once found shocking.

But it’s also true for the human understanding of God and His grace.  For instance, we in the church sometimes do not seem to be shocked anymore by the gospel.  This is a tragedy, for the gospel is the most shocking news the world has ever heard.  The Greeks were shocked by what they perceived as the gospel’s foolishness.  The Jews were shocked by what they perceived as the gospel’s blasphemy.  And believers were originally shocked by the amazing good news of the gospel.

Admit it:  there was a time when you were shocked by the gospel.  You used to sit in church or read your Bible with tears running down your face. You used to read of the cross and marvel that Christ did such a thing for you.  You were in awe of amazing grace, of His amazing love.

But somewhere along the way, many of us have ceased to be shocked by the gospel.

Our familiarity with John 3:16 is a perfect example.  This verse (and the verses following it) is immeasurably astounding in its central assertion and implications, yet we seem almost not to hear it anymore.  Don’t get me wrong:  almost everybody can quote John 3:16, but I sometimes wonder how many of us really listen to John 3:16?

This passage is one of the greatest passages in all of the Bible.  Its message is certainly the greatest message the world has ever heard!

James Montgomery Boice recalls coming across a little card with John 3:16 written on it.  Beneath the verse was this summary:

God (the greatest Lover)

So loved (the greatest degree)

The world (the greatest company)

That he gave (the greatest act)

His only begotten Son (the greatest gift)

That whosoever (the greatest opportunity)

Believeth (the greatest simplicity)

In him (the greatest attraction)

Should not perish (the greatest promise)

But (the greatest difference)

Have (the greatest certainty)

Everlasting life (the greatest possession)[1]

That’s well said!  This is, indeed, a great and beautiful verse, as are the verses before and after it.  Its greatness comes in its amazing revelation of the nature of God’s love for humanity.

God’s Love Is a Crucified Love

In verses 16 and 17, John writes:

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Listen again:  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…”

It’s the very famous beginning of the most famous verse in the world.  We teach our children to say these words.  If we are not careful, we can say them without even really thinking about them.  But when is the last time you were shocked at these words?  When is the last time you reeled at these words?

Honestly, some of you are thinking, “Why should I be shocked at them?”  The answer lies in the words “gave his only Son” and our over-familiarity with them.

“Gave his only Son” is an amazing thought, but it is made even more amazing when we remember what this giving meant.  It meant that he gave His Son to be crucified, killed by His own creation.

What if we flesh this out a bit when we quote John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that He let us murder His boy.

For God so loved the world, that He handed His Son over to us and we stripped Him naked and nailed nails through His hands and feet.

For God so loved the world, that He allowed us to mock and beat and strike and curse and spit upon His boy.

For God so loved the world, that He gave His Son to us so that we might make Him the object of our petty, ego-driven, and murderous desires.

For God so loved the world, that He let His own rebellious, ingrate creation mock, taunt, and torture His Son.

For God so love the world, that He gave His only Son, and we hated His Son, and we nailed Him up in front of His mother, and we yelled out, “Kill Him!  Kill Him! Crucify God’s Son!  Away with Him!  Destroy Him!”

Ah, it is no small thing, this giving of God’s Son!  It is no small thing because of who God’s Son Jesus was.  Do you remember when Jesus told His murderers, “Let us be clear:  you don’t take my life.  I give my life.  And if I wanted, I could snap my fingers and 10,000 angels could come and kill you all in a second.  But I will not do that, for I love you even as you kill me.  I am praying God’s forgiveness over you.  I will let this happen so that you can have life.  I will let this happen so that you may be forgiven!”

It is no small thing that God “gave His only begotten Son!”

Let us not reduce the cross through over-familiarity!  Let us not defang it.  It is a startling, shocking, scandalous, and amazing thing that “God so loved the world” and “gave His only begotten Son.”

Shane Clairbone once alluded to a CBS miniseries on Jesus that aired some years ago.  He recalled a scene in the miniseries “in which the Tempter meets Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane just before he is about to be crucified.  The devil tells him, ‘They do not understand your cross, Jesus.  They will never understand your cross.’”[2]

Indeed, sometimes it seems that we have failed to understand His cross.  This is, of course, understandable with lost people who have rejected Christ, but it must never be the case with the church, the people of God, who claim to have bowed heart and knee before the cross of Christ!

May we never forget that God’s love is a crucified love!

God’s Love Is a Rescuing Love

This crucified love is for our salvation.  It is a rescuing love.  It rescues us from sin, death, and hell.

John 3:16 does not stand in a vacuum.  The Word of God goes on to explain the radical implications of this Son-giving love of the Father:

¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Christians, followers of Jesus, believe in two advents, two comings, of Christ.  The first advent was when Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  In His first advent, Jesus came meekly and mildly, born a baby in a manger to a young, virgin, Jewish girl.  In His first advent, Jesus came to proclaim the Kingdom and to offer grace.  In His second coming, Jesus will come for His own and will mete out justice on the earth.  It will be a coming of judgment.  His second advent will be the conclusion of the entire production.  The curtain will fall then, and all will be assigned to their eternal homes.

But John reminds us here that, in the first advent of Christ, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  He came to save you!

The rejection of His saving work is also clear to see:

¹⁸ Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Do you see how this works?  Notice that Jesus does not step into a spiritually neutral world.  The world is already condemned.  The world is currently in a state of condemnation.  We are born condemned.  We are born sinners.  This is the upshot of verses 19 and 20, where we read:

¹⁹ And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.

We are condemned by our love of the darkness, but when we trust in Christ, we are saved.  When we reject Christ, it is less that Christ actively condemns you as a punishment for your rejection than that He leaves you in the condition of condemnation into which you were born and in which you have chosen to stay if you have rejected Christ.

So God’s love is a crucified love, but it is also a rescuing love.  Christ comes to rescue you.  He comes to seek and to save those who are lost. He has not come to condemn or destroy you.  In Romans 8, Paul writes:

¹ There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ² For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

In the crucified Christ, God offers us His rescuing love.

God’s Love Is An Offered Love

This crucified and rescuing love is offered to the world, but not forced upon it.  Notice the phrases calling for us to accept this gift:

“whoever believes in Him” (v.17)

“whoever believes in Him” (v.18)

“whoever…comes to the light” (v.21)

Christ is a gift and gifts are offered.  Something happens to the whole dynamic of gift giving when it is forced.  One does not normally kick in a friend’s door, pin the poor victim to the ground, and violently duct tape a gift to his face with a, “There!  Take that!”

I suppose that is one way to give a gift, but it sure makes for a weird party afterward!

No, gifts work best when offered and, tragically, offered gifts can be rejected.  So it is with Christ.  You may reject Him, but, if you do, you will not only be rejecting God’s offered grace, you will be embracing your own condemnation. 

Let me tell you about Edmond Safra.

Edmon Safra was a Lebanese-born billionaire banker who founded the Republic National Bank of New York.  In 1999, Mr. Safra was 67 years old and sealed a multi-billion-dollar deal to sell his banking empire in preparation for his retirement.  He was going to receive almost three billion dollars from the British bank HSBC.

Safra had homes in Paris, Geneva and New York, but in December of 1999 he was in the penthouse of his favorite residence overlooking Monaco’s yacht-filled harbor in the Mediterranean.

Safra felt safe in this home and even sent his bodyguards home at night.  On one particular night in early December, 1999, however, something happened that frightened Safra.  There might have been a couple of burglars somewhere in the house, nobody knows.  Regardless, Safra fled with a nurse into the bathroom where he locked the door.  Also, somewhere along the line, the penthouse was set on fire.

When the police and the firefighters arrived, the floor was on fire and Safra was locked in the bathroom.  The firefighters were making a great noise trying to put out the flames.  In a state of fear, he heard the noise and took it to be the burglars trying to get in to kill him.  The bathroom was slowly filling up with smoke.  Safra refused to open the door.  He made some cell phone calls to his wife, who begged him to come out, but he refused.  She told him that there were no burglars.  She told him that it was the police and the firefighters.  She told him that the ones he feared were the ones who were there to save him.  Still, in fear, he refused to come out.

And there, in a smoke-filled bathroom, as the blaze spread through the ceiling and reached the bathroom, billionaire Edmond Safra and his nurse, Vivienne Torrent, died a horrible death.

All he had to do was open the door and come out.  The sound that frightened him so badly was only his salvation:  firefighters fighting the blaze that threatened his life.  He refused to open the door, and so he died.  The article from which this story came was entitled, “Banker Hid Too Long, Paid With His Life.” [3]

How often have we feared the sound of the One who wants to save us?  How often have we too refused to open the door for fear of what we might lose?  This was the mistake of Edmond Safra.  This, too, is oftentimes our mistake.

Edward Safra died inches from his own salvation.  He feared his saviors, refusing to believe that they were who they said they were.

This morning the Lord Jesus is calling out to you.  Some of you know Him and others of you do not.  Some of you are afraid of what you might lose if you open the door, but, in refusing to do so, you risk losing everything.

Please hear me this morning:  He loves you.  He does not want to harm you.  He wants to save you.  Will you come to Him today?