John 3:1-15

¹ Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. ² This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” ³ Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” ⁴ Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵ Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. ⁶ That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷ Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ ⁸ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” ⁹ Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰ Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? ¹¹ Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. ¹² If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? ¹³ No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴ And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵ that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 

In John 3, Jesus told the Jewish teacher Nicodemus that he had to be born again if he hoped to see the kingdom of God.  In doing so, Jesus was saying the same thing to us.  “You must be born again.”  But what on earth does that mean?

R. Kent Hughes has passed on a story about Ian Thomas that is very interesting indeed:

“Ian Thomas tells of getting on an airplane and being so tired that he planned to just curl up and sleep.  But then heard a “psssst” and then another ‘psssst.’  Looking in the direction of the sound, he heard a man say, ‘I am reading in the Bible about Nicodemus in John 3, and I do not understand it.  Do you know anything about the Bible?”[1]

It’s an interesting story, and one that raises an interesting question:  If somebody were to ask you what the phrase “born again” means, what would you say?  Unfortunately, many Christians simply do not know how to explain being born again.  As Kent Hughes observes:

“One of the greatest of all Biblical terms has been stolen, emptied of its meaning, and dragged through the mire so that today born again can mean almost anything or nothing!  We need to rescue it and return it to its proper place…The term born again has been pirated, emptied of its meaning, dragged through the gutter, and given back to us minus its power.  Today when a person says he is born again we cannot be sure what he or she means.  The mere use of the word tells us almost nothing.”[2]

Kent Hughes makes a very troubling but very true point:  the words “born again” cannot really be explained by most Christians who claim to be born again.

But there’s an even bigger question than whether or not you can explain being born again, and that is the question of whether or not you yourself have been born again.

Let me simply pose that question to you this morning.  It is very important that you be honest with yourself, as we will see.  Have you been born again?  Have you?  Can you say this morning that you have experienced the second birth, that you have been born again?

As we look at what God’s word says about being born again this morning, let me teach you the word that the church has historically used to describe this reality:  regeneration.  Regeneration is being born again.  Regeneration is the inward work of the Holy Spirit in a man or woman’s life in, by, and through which he or she passes from death unto life and is born again and saved.  When a man or woman is born again, he is said to be a regenerate man or woman.

Now, for our purposes this morning, learning the truth of regeneration is not as important as learning the word “regeneration,” but I do think it is a good word and one worth taking note of.

In John 3, we find Jesus being visited by a Jewish teacher.  The man, Nicodemus, wants to learn the essence of who Jesus is and what His message is.  Jesus responds by talking about regeneration, being born again.

It is a fascinating conversation that Jesus has with Nicodemus.  This morning I’d like for us to watch and observe what Jesus does here and what He says.  More important than that, I would like for us to listen to Jesus’ teachings about being born again as far as they relate to our own lives.

The Necessity of Being Born Again

The first thing Jesus does is reveal the necessity of being born again.  He does so in a rather blunt and straight-forward way.  Look at the first three verses:

¹ Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. ² This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” ³ Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Now, in verse 4 we will see evidence that Nicodemus is almost certainly an older man.  He is a man who has a high regard for God and the things of God.  He is a man who apparently treasures truth and, to some extent, seems to want to know the truth.  But it is also possible that, in this initial meeting with Jesus, Nicodemus is driven in large measure by curiosity.  “Who are you?” he seems to be saying.  “Who are you and what are you about?”

Jesus’ response goes (as Jesus’ responses always go!) to the heart of the matter, and He strikes at the root issue of Nicodemus’ spiritual condition.  “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Imagine the shock of this statement as it hit Nicodemus’ ears!  “Nicodemus!  Nicodemus!  If you are not born again, you will never see the kingdom of God!”

Like a shotgun blast in the middle of a nap, Jesus’ proclamation of the necessity of being born again is as astounding as it is profound.  It cuts through Nicodemus’ surface concerns and hits at the real issue.

Why does Jesus do this?  Why is Jesus so emphatic that you must be born again?  Because being born again is absolutely necessary.  It is essential.  Without the second birth, nothing else matters.

Let me assure you that I am not wanting to overstate the case this morning.  In fact, I do not think the case can be overstated.  You must be born again!  Listen to me:  you must be born again!

Jesus says that if you are not born again you cannot see the kingdom of God.  That is a terrifying thought!  It is made even more terrifying when the entire New Testament teaching concerning the necessity of being born again is allowed to speak.

While what I am about to share with you is startling, I give you my word that I am not exaggerating.  I am simply going to let the New Testament say what it says.  Consider the following:

A. If you are not born again, you are going to perish.

1 Peter 1:22-23

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God.”

B. If you are not born again, you are enslaved to your own unrighteousness.

1 John 2:28-29

“And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.”

The church father Tertullian made a helpful comment on this truth when he said, “Every soul, by reason of its birth, has its nature in Adam until it is born again in Christ; in addition, it is unclean all the while that it remains without this regeneration. And because it is unclean, it is actively sinful and suffuses even the flesh, with which it is joined, with its own shame.”^[3]

C. If you are not born again, you are a child of the devil.

1 John 3:9-10

“No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”

D. If you are not born again, you do not know God.

1 John 4:7

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”

E. If you are not born again, you are wide open to the devil’s attacks.

1 John 5:18

“We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.”

Do you see now why Jesus immediately confronted Nicodemus about being born again?  Do you see now why He immediately confronts us as well?  There is no more important question than this.

Billy Graham once told how the great preacher, George Whitfield, “preached every night on the subject, ‘You must be born again.’ Some of the leaders of the church came to him and said, ‘Why don’t you change your text?’ He said, ‘I will when you become born again.'”[4]

Whitfield understood what we must understand:  without regeneration, without being born again, nothing else matters.  It is that important!

The Agent of Being Born Again

Having established the necessity of being born again, Jesus, in response to Nicodemus’ questions, explains the agent of regeneration.  Who creates the reality of being born again?  Who gets the glory for the amazing transformation?

Nicodemus, being an elderly man and a teacher, is caught off guard by Jesus’ insistence that he be born again.  Hear verses 4:

⁴ Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

You’ll have to admit that, looking at it from the angle from which Nicodemus was looking at it, that’s a pretty good question!  But once again we note that Jesus and the one to whom He is talking are talking past each other on very different levels.  Nicodemus is being a literalist here, while Jesus is trying to make a much more profound point:

⁵ Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. ⁶ That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷ Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ ⁸ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus’ question is powerful in that it reveals the contrast between the first and second birth.

Nicodemus is thinking only of the first birth, which is physical, originates with man, and is medically observable.  Jesus is speaking of the second birth, which is spiritual, originates with God, and cannot be observed by the human eye (although the fruit of the second birth certainly can be observed).

The first birth results from the union of a man with a woman.  In a physical sense, man is the agent of the first birth.  But the second birth is different.  The second birth is a result of an inward work of transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit of God.

In verse 5, Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”  This verse is fascinating, and no small number of interpretations have been proposed to explain it.  Among the most likely are the following:

• That “water” refers to physical birth and “Spirit” refers to spiritual rebirth.
• That “water” refers to baptism (meaning you cannot be saved until baptized).
• That “water” refers to repentance, of which baptism is a symbol, and that repentance leads to the second birth.

In truth, I find the third option most likely.  After all, we are on the heels of John the Baptist’s baptism of repentance in the Jordan.  Nicodemus was aware of the fact that people were going to the Jordan to repent in anticipation of the coming Messiah.  He may have even observed John the Baptists baptism of repentance.  Matthew’s record of John the Baptist’s work is helpful here.  In Matthew 3:11, John the Baptist says:

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

John said that his baptism, the baptism of repentance, was one of water, but that Jesus’ baptism was one of the Holy Spirit.  So you have water (repentance) and the work of the Spirit in the believer’s life.

When a man or woman repents of their sins and places faith in Christ, they receive the Holy Spirit who works an internal transformation in their very hearts and souls.  The Holy Spirit affects the new birth.  He is the agent of regeneration, of being born again, of the second birth.

John already hints at this in the first chapter.  Do you remember?

“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12-13)

The first birth is one of body and blood and human procreation.  The second birth is of God.

Likewise, Peter is more explicit in 1 Peter 1:3 when he proclaims:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

He has caused us to be born again!  It is a miraculous, gracious, inward work of a holy God who loves us and gave Himself for us.

When you repent of your sins and place your faith in Jesus Christ, He works an inward work that cannot be grasped by the human mind.  He makes a dead thing live.  He makes a sinful thing forgiven.  He breaths light into darkness, life into death.  The second birth is nothing less than a resurrection, a re-generation, a beginning again.

The Means of Being Born Again

Being born again, then, is absolutely necessary, and it is wrought inwardly by the Holy Spirit, but how does it happen?  What is the means of regeneration?

Nicodemus had the same question, as verse 9 reveals:

⁹ Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”

This, too, is a very important question!  How can I be born again?  By what means?

Jesus has already put the spotlight on Nicodemus and his lost condition.  And He has put the spotlight on the Holy Spirit who affects the new birth.  But finally He turns the spotlight on Himself.

¹⁰ Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? ¹¹ Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. ¹² If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? ¹³ No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴ And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵ that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

Jesus is reminding Nicodemus of a story he knows well.  He is reminding him of Israel’s wilderness wanderings in the Exodus.  He is calling to mind that terrible scene in the wilderness, so many years ago, when poison serpents came into the camp of the Israelites and bit the people of God so that death hung over the entire camp.

When that happened, the Lord instructed Moses to fashion a serpent, put it on a pole, and lift it up.  Whoever then looked up toward the raised serpent was healed.

Nicodemus undoubtedly thought this was a strange time to be telling this particular story, but Jesus does two interesting things with it:  (1) He connects it to the new birth and (2) He applies it to Himself.

What is the means of the new birth?  It is nothing less than Christ crucified, Christ lifted up, Christ on the cross.  Christ is now the One to whom we who have been bitten by deadly sin look for forgiveness, healing, and salvation.  We are born again when we cry out to Christ, bowing at the foot of His cross.

John would say this letter in 1 John 5:4-5

“For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world— our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

Notice the progression of verbs and concepts:  (a) whoever has been born again overcomes, (b) we receive this overcoming victory through faith, and (c) the one who overcomes is the one who believes in Jesus Christ.

We are born again, then, when we believe that Jesus is the Son of God.  We are born again when we come to Him in faith and repentance.  And when we come in this way, the Holy Spirit of God works an amazing miracle in our lives.  He regenerates us, causing us to be born again into life everlasting.

It is a very simple question, and a very important question:  have you been born again?

John 2:13-25

¹³ The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ¹⁴ In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. ¹⁵And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. ¹⁶And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” ¹⁷ His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” ¹⁸ So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” ¹⁹ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” ²⁰ The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” ²¹ But he was speaking about the temple of his body. ²² When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. ²³ Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. ²⁴ But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people ²⁵ and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.

It seems like we sometimes say things without really thinking them through.  For instance, I often hear good Christian people say, “I’m praying that we’ll meet Jesus at church today.”  Sometimes when I hear that I want to say, “Are you sure about that?  Did you read what happened the first time He went to church?”

Would I like to meet Jesus in church?  Well, of course, unless I was just playing church or making a mockery of God in church.  You see, the first time Jesus went to church, it didn’t turn out so well.  The episode is recorded in John 2:13-25.  What it reveals is pretty startling:  the first recorded time that Jesus went to church in John, He grows so angry that He starts driving people out with a whip of cords!

Why?  Let’s take a look.

The Church’s Lack of Love

Now, I am obviously, in this sermon, drawing a parallel between Jesus’ visit to the Temple at Passover and the idea of Him coming to church, but, of course, there were and are great differences between the church and the Temple.  The differences are stark too:

• The Jews saw the Temple itself as a physical symbol of God’s presence with and in Israel.  The church, on the other hand, is a body of believers.  We do not (or should not) view the actual church building in the same way that the Jews viewed the Temple.

• In the Temple, the Jews came to have sacrifices made over and over again.  In the church, we come to celebrate the fact that the sacrifice has been made once-and-for-all on the cross.

• There was one Temple.  There are many church buildings.

So there are limitations in drawing analogies between the Temple and church.  Yet, in a general sense, in both the Temple and the church the people of God gathered to worship, to pray, to seek God, and to seek His forgiveness.

So let us let the analogy stand for our purposes this morning.  When Jesus went to church, He was not pleased by what He saw there.  Consider:

¹³ The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

The Passover was a high, holy, religious day. The Passover was that time when the Jews remembered and celebrated God’s miraculous liberation of His people from the bondage of their slavery in Egypt.  You will, I trust, remember that the Jews were freed from their enslavement when the Lord informed them that the angel of death was going to pass through Egypt slaying the firstborn son of every house whose doorposts were not marked by the blood of a sacrificed lamb.  So do not miss the ironic and poignant scene of this story:  Jesus, the Lamb of God, goes up to Jerusalem, to the Temple, at that time in which the Jews remembered that they were saved by the blood of the sacrificed lamb.  It is not the only irony we will find in this story.

What He found in the Temple astounded and angered Him:

¹⁴ In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. ¹⁵And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. ¹⁶And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

There are two things happening here:  animals are being sold for sacrifice and money changers are converting the coins of the Jewish males into the appropriate currency to be used for paying the Temple tax.

We will consider the specifics of that in a moment, but let me first point out that Jesus’ indignation was excited first not by the fact that animals were being sold but rather by the fact of where they were being sold.

You see, the Temple itself was designed to remind people of how far or close they were from God.  Consider this diagram of the 1^st century Temple:

You will notice that the outermost court of the Temple was called the “Court of the Gentiles.”  This is where non-Jews, Gentiles, who nonetheless feared God could come and call on His name.  Let us at least acknowledge that the provision of a court for Gentiles was a gracious gift from the Jews.  At the very least, it acknowledged that God loved some of those who were not of Israel.

Even so, it was insufficient, was it not?  For instance, it was the farthest place in the temple from the altar and from the place of sacrifice.  The God-fearing Gentile who came to worship would have been reminded that he was far from God.  Jewish women could go further into the Temple by entering the “Court of Israel,” and Jewish men could go even further by entering the “Court of the Men of Israel.”

What did it say to the Gentile to watch observant Jews pass through doors through which he could not enter?  What did his spatial distance from the holy inner courts of the Temple communicate?  Well, it communicated that he could call on God, of course, but he was still far from God.

But the Court of the Gentiles is even more significant in this story for it was here that the animal sellers and money changers set up their tables.  They brought their oxen and sheep and pigeons into that part of the temple where those furthest from God were supposed to be able to worship.

In doing so, they showed an amazing lack of love for those who needed grace.

Jesus comes into the Court of the Gentiles, that is, into the court of the outcasts, the court of the sinners, the court of those who could not call themselves the people of God.  Jesus comes into the court of those who did not feel worthy to approach a holy God and those who were reminded of their unworthiness by the very layout of the temple.  Jesus came into the court of those people who, to the Jews, were unclean, who were rebels, whose touch could defile good and holy people.

And what did He see here?  He saw that insult had been added to injury and the court of the outsiders had been desecrated by the foul smells and loud sounds of animals and commerce.

After all, what exactly do oxen, sheep, and pigeons do to a sacred place?  To be delicate, the necessities of nature would inevitably lead these animals to taint the place with excrement and with stench.   The money changers doing their business helped to transform the court of the Gentiles into something like a crude shopping mall.

Jesus is incensed that the house of prayer has been transformed into a house of commerce, but He is particularly incensed that the Gentiles, those farthest from God, have been so demeaned as to render their efforts at worship unpleasant and odious.

No doubt there were some Jews who objected.  It would be unfair to suggest otherwise.  But at least a sizeable portion of the Jewish authorities, as well as those actually involved in the commerce, did not object.

But Jesus did object.

What they were doing was roughly equivalent to you bringing an embarrassing relative to church only to tell him to sit in a folded chair in the court, out of sight of the real action going on in the sanctuary.

The reason Jesus had none of this in the Temple and will have none of this in the church is that He understands something that we religious people too-often forget, and that is this:  there is no foyer in the Kingdom of God.  There is no outer court.  There is no back of the balcony.  There is no “over there” as opposed to “up here.”  There is no dark corner.

Because of the blood of Jesus, the most terrible sinner can draw as close to God as the most righteous person.  The blood of Christ is the great equalizer, obliterating our petty distinctions.

Grace, brothers and sisters in Christ, is horribly embarrassing.  It does not honor our manufactured caste systems, social stati, class ranks.  Grace does not favor the couple who has it all together more than the couple who are a train wreck.

Grace cries out to those on the outside, those sheepishly hiding in the corner just hoping maybe to get to touch the hem of the robe, and it says, “What are you doing back there?  You are the special object of My love!  You are the apple of my eye!  Come on down!  Come near to me!  You do not have to stand at a distance anymore!”

Jesus was enraged at the lack of love being shown to the Gentiles.  He was angered by their shameful relegation to a secondary class of miscreants.

Let us be honest:  how often do we communicate in ways both subtle and explicit that we prefer these kinds of people but not those?  How often have we been guilty of ushering him to the front of the line, but not him; of giving her the good seat, and putting her in the back?

A friend of mine used to serve as an Associate Pastor at a large urban church.  He was telling me that a young family once visited the church.  He said that the lady looked like a model and so did her husband.  They were good looking folks: successful, articulate, nicely dressed.  He said their children were models of politeness, charm, and grace.

He visited a moment with this family at the back door and they departed.  When they left, an elderly lady in the church leaned over to my friend, motioned to the departing family, and said, “Now those are our kind of people!”

My friend was expressing how uneasy this made him.  It makes me uneasy too.  “Our kind of people”?  What does this say about us?  What does this say about the church?

Let us make this perfectly clear:  all people, regardless of their problems, regardless of their issues, regardless of their baggage, regardless of this lives, who come and call on the Lord Jesus Christ are God’s kind of people.  Gentiles are God’s kind of people.  And we had best make sure that our kind of people are God’s kind of people or we risk becoming the objects of God’s wrath.

Let us not dishonor anybody who is seeking God.

Are we doing this? Do people who come into this church know that we love them wherever they’re at?  Do they know that we love them?

Fred Craddock once told the following story:

“My mother took us to church and Sunday school; my father didn’t go.  He complained about Sunday dinner being late when she came home.  Sometimes the preacher would call, and my father would say, “I know what the church wants.  Church doesn’t care about me.  Church wants another name, another pledge, another name, another pledge.  Right?  Isn’t that the name of it?  Another name, another pledge.”  That’s what he always said.

Sometimes we’d have a revival.  Pastor would bring the evangelist and say to the evangelist, “There’s one now, sic him, get him, get him,” and my father would say the same thing.  Every time, my mother in the kitchen, always nervous, in fear of flaring tempers, of somebody being hurt.  And always my father said, “The church doesn’t care about me.  The church wants another name and another pledge.”  I guess I heard it a thousand times.

One time he didn’t say it.  He was in the veteran’s hospital, and he was down to seventy-three pounds.  They’d taken out his throat, and said, “It’s too late.”  They put in a metal tube, and X rays burned him to pieces.  I flew in to see him.  He couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat.  I look around the room, potted plants and cut flowers on all the windowsills, a stack of cards twenty inches deep beside his bed.  And even that tray where they put food, if you can eat, on that was a flower.  And all the flowers beside the bed, every card, every blossom, were from persons or groups from the church.

He saw me read a card.  He could not speak, so he took a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it a line from Shakespeare.  If he had not written this line, I would not tell you this story.  He wrote:  “In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.”

“I said, “What is your story, Daddy?”

And he wrote, “I was wrong.”[1]

Oh, church, let us prove the world wrong.  Let us show them that we love people, and we love them all alike.  Let us show amazing grace and radical love to any and all who would draw near.

After all, we are the Gentiles in the story, and radical love has been shown to us.

The Church’s Profiteering

Jesus was also enraged by the commerce that was taking place.  To be sure, those selling animals were providing a kind of service.  After all, it is difficult to cart your own animals from far away to be sacrificed at the Temple, and the risk of injury is great.  No doubt these animal sellers had convinced themselves they were doing the Lord’s work in setting up shop.

The money changers were there to convert currency into Tyrian coinage whose purity of silver made them acceptable as a form of payment for the Temple tax.

In both case, money was being handled and profits were being made.  The Temple was being perverted into a place of commerce and the people of God were being reduced to objects for financial gain.

Jesus makes a cord of whips and drives these people from the Temple.  What a terrifying sight that must have been!  It is not the business of the church to profit off of people!

Let us be clear:  giving is a spiritual act of devotion and one for which we will not apologize.  I have no intention of apologizing that we pass the offering plates.  It is good and right to give back a portion of that which has been given to us.  But let us quickly add that it would be better for the church to close its doors than to use the name of God for profit and to use the people of God for gain.

Let us give cheerfully, and let us encourage one another to give as we should, but let us never pervert the gospel into financial gain!

Is it not odd that, in many cases, the church’s spiritual power decreases as her wealth increases?  Not always, mind you.  There are churches who have been richly blessed and are richly blessing others with what they have, but, tragically, this is not always the case.

A medieval writer named Cornelius once told a fascinating story about St. Thomas Aquinas:

St. Thomas Aquinas was in Rome.  He was walking along the street with a cardinal.  The cardinal noticed a beggar.  Reaching in his pocket, he pulled out a silver coin and gave it to him.  Then he turned to Aquinas, the great doctor of the church, and said, “Well, Thomas, fortunately we can no longer say, as Peter did, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’

St. Thomas replied, “Yes, that is true.  But neither can we say, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.’”[2]

Why is it that our spiritual power sometimes decreases as our wealth increases?  This is especially true when a church determines that it wants to be a wealthy church.  This inevitably leads to a perversion of worship and the manipulation of God’s people for financial gain.  It is a deep tragedy, and one we must avoid.

A friend of mine once went on a mission trip to India.  What he saw in India had an amazing impact on his life, especially the squalor and poverty of that nation as it contrasted with the wealth and power of the American church.  When he returned home, he wrote a poem entitled “My Easy Christ Has Left the Church.”  (As an aside, the question that is asked of Jesus repeatedly in the poem – “Quo Vadis, Domine?” is Latin for, “Where are you going Lord?):

My easy Christ has left the church.
Who can say why?
Maybe it’s because His video-logged apostles all
read diet-books, travel agency brochures
and Christian fiction thrillers
on how the world should end
But none read books on what the starving ignorant
should do until it does.
He left the church so disappointed that Americans
could all spell “user friendly”
but none of them could spell “Gethsemane”

Can we say for sure he’s quit?
Oh yes, it’s definite, I’m afraid:
He’s canceled his pledge card.
I passed him on the way out of the recreation building
near the incinerator where we burn
the leftover religious quarterlies
and the stained paper doilies
from our Valentine banquets.
“Quo Vadis, Domine?” I asked him.
“Somewhere else,” he said.

My easy Christ has left the church,
walking out of town past seminaries where
student scholars could all parse the ancient verbs
but few of them were sure why they had learned the art.
He shook his head confounded that many
had studied all his ancient words
without much caring why he said them.
He seemed confused that so many
studied to be smart, but so few prayed to be holy.

Some say he left the church
because the part-time missionaries were mostly tourists
on short-term camera safaris,
photographing destitution to show the
pictures to their missionary clubs back home.
I cannot say what all his motives were.
I only know I saw him rummaging through dumpsters
in Djakarta looking for a scrap of bread
that he could multiply.
“Quo vadis, Domine?” I asked him.
“Somewhere else,” he said.

He’s gone – the melancholy Messiah’s gone.
I saw him passing by the beltway mega-temple
circled by its multi-acred asphalt lawn,
blanketed with imports and huge fat vehicles
nourished on the hydrocarbons of distant oil fields
where the poor dry rice on public roads
and die without a requiem, in unmarked graves.

Is it certain he is gone?

It is.

We saw him in the slums of Recife,
telling stories of old fools
who kept on building bigger barns,
oddly idealistic tales of widows with small coins
who outgave the richer deacons of the church.

I saw him sitting alone in a fast-food franchise
drinking only bottled water and sorting through
a stack of world-hunger posters.
He couldn’t stay long.
He was on his way to sell his
old books on Calvin and
Arminius to buy a bag of rice for Bangladesh.

My easy Christ has left the church.
I remember now where I last saw him.
He was sitting in one of those new
square, crossless mega-churches
singing 2x choruses and playing bongos
amid the music stands and amplifiers
with anonymous Larrie and Sherrie.
He turned to them in church and said
“I am He! Follow me!”
But they told him not to be so confrontational
and reminded him that they
had only come for the music and the drama,
and frankly were offended that he would dare
to talk to them out loud in church.
After all, they were only seekers, with a right to privacy.

I followed him out through the seven-acre vestibule,
where he passed the tape-duplicating machine
where people could buy the “how to” sermons
of the world’s most famous lecturers.

He left the church and threaded his way
across the crowded parking lot,
laying down those whips and cords
he’d once used to cleanse the temple,
and looked as though he wanted to make
key-scrapes on Lexi and huge white Audis
and family buses filled with infant seats.

He stooped and shed a tear after
and wrote “Ichabod” in the sand.
In a sudden moment I was face to face with him.
“Quo vadis, Domine?” I asked him.
“Somewhere else,” he said.

My easy Christ has left the church,
abandoning his all-star role in Easter pageants
to live incognito in a patchwork culture,
weeping for all those people who
cannot afford the pageant tickets.

He picked up an old junk cross,
lugging it into the bookstore
after the great religious rally,
and stood dumfounded
among the towering stacks of books
on how to grow a church.
“Are you conservative or liberal,” I asked him.
But he only mumbled, “Oh Jerusalem…”
and said the oddest thing about a hen
gathering her vicious, selfish chicks under her wings.
He left the room as I yelled out after him,
“Lord, is it true you’ve quit the church?
Quo vadis, Domine?”
“Somewhere else,” he said.[3]

Let us love people where they are.  Let us never use people for financial gain.  Let us never pervert the worship of a holy God.  And let us NEVER become a church that Jesus would not attend.

The Church Missing the Point

Ultimately, however, Jesus reveals His anger that those who were most religious missed the truth of God that was standing right in front of them.  Jesus was incensed by the empty religiosity of man that, far from drawing him closer to God, actually blinded him to the things of God!

Did you know it is possible to be religious and completely miss Jesus?  The Temple authorities proved this:

¹⁸ So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” ¹⁹ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” ²⁰ The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” ²¹ But he was speaking about the temple of his body. ²² When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

After Jesus’ great and terrifying prophetic act of cleansing the temple, He makes an astounding assertion:  “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

The Jews are bewildered at the statement, for they take “this temple” to be a reference to the building itself.  But the disciples would learn, of course, that Jesus was speaking of His own body.

There is rich irony here.  The Temple was that place that symbolized the presence of God with His people.  And here stands Jesus, God-with-us, in the Temple trying to get the Jews to see and understand.  What He was trying to get them to understand was nothing less than this:  that what the Temple symbolized and typified had come to its completion in Christ.  Christ fulfills completely what the Temple could only hint at incompletely.

Christ was saying that He was the Temple.

Would you see God?  Run to Jesus.  Would you come into the presence of the God?  Run to Jesus.  Would you enter the holy of holies?  Run to Jesus.

In redefining the Temple to His own person, Jesus spoke of his crucifixion (“Destroy this temple…”) and His resurrection (“and in three days I will raise it up.”)  He did so because it is precisely through His crucifixion and resurrection – that is, through the cross and the empty tomb – that we are ushered into the presence of God.  For Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes unto the Father except through Him.”

How is it possible that they could not see?  How could they be blind to the truth of God standing in the very Temple of God conversing with the Son of God?

I’ll tell you how:  because their religion had blinded them to God, and what the Temple had become had blinded them to the One to whom the Temple was meant to point.

It is a profound calamity when those who should be most keen to the things of God miss the things of God!

How about you?  Have your religious duties blinded you to the person of Jesus?  What has church become for you?

Honest question:  would you really like to meet Jesus in church?  Would you?

Our Lord Jesus loves to shower His grace on all who come to Him.  However, He is not mocked.

Let us make it right.  Let us call upon His name for forgiveness today.

Let us return worship to what it is supposed to be.

John 2

¹ On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. ² Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. ³ When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” ⁴ And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” ⁵ His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” ⁶ Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. ⁷ Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. ⁸ And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. ⁹ When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom ¹⁰ and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” ¹¹ This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. ¹² After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.

I want to invite you this morning to a party.  It is a wedding party, a wedding celebration.  It is, in fact, a feast.  If you are going to come along, you will have to be well-rested, because this celebration is a first-century Jewish wedding celebration, and that means it could last as long as one week.

Would you like to go?  Good!  Let’s go.

The wedding is in Cana, which was probably located on a site that archaeologists call today Khirbet Qana.  It is now “an uninhabited ruin about nine miles north of Nazareth, and lying in the Plain of Asochis.”[1]

I do not know who is getting married, and, frankly, that is not our concern.  You see, I, and many of you, are friends of some friends of the bride and groom.  The unnamed couple has invited our friend Mary, her Son Jesus, and his five new friends, which we learned about in chapter one of John:  Andrew, Peter, Philip, Nathanael, and an unnamed disciple (who I suspect may be John, the author of the fourth gospel).

So we are in the house now, and man what a party!  There’s a pretty big crowd here.  You will have to forgive me, I do not know a lot of these folks.  But, look, there’s Mary and a couple of her younger sons.  I cannot tell for sure, but Mary may actually be in charge of the catering duties.  She seems to be looking over the food and drink aspects of the party.

Up there is the bride and groom.  They look so happy, do they not?  And yet, the party has been going for a few days already.  I wonder if they are about exhausted by all of the festivities!  Who knows?  They are living on love, right?

Ah, and look over there.  Hard to believe, is it not?  There is Jesus.  Hmmm.  That is suprising.  I had expected to see Jesus looking somber, unsmiling, looking…well…holy.  Having heard some preachers talk about Him, I just assumed that He would be standing with his arms crossed in the corner.  But, no!  Just look at Him!  He is reclining at the table laughing with the disciples and some other guests.  Apparently Peter tripped over Nathanael’s foot getting up from the table and spilt his plate in Philip’s lap!  That is pretty funny!

Wow!  What a scene.  Everybody looks pretty happy, don’t they?  Man, I just love seeing people in love, don’t you?

Wait a minute.  What’s going on?  One of the servants is excitedly whispering something to Mary and she looks concerned.  They’re having a pretty intense whispering match over there.  Now look.  She’s brushing past the servants and making her way quickly to Jesus.  She’s trying to be graceful about it in the way that we always try to be graceful in a crowd when we have something urgent to do!

Let’s come over here and listen.  She’s talking to Jesus.  She’s having to raise her voice a bit to be heard over the crowd.

Listen:  “They have no wine.”  That’s what she just said to Jesus.

He can’t hear her.  Andrew is sitting next to Jesus and is telling everybody a joke.  Andrew’s one of those guys who doesn’t get how loud his voice is.  Jesus is asking Mary to say it again.

“They have no wine!”

Jesus is looking at her now, a look of seriousness coming over his face.

He’s probably concerned because He knows what a big deal this is.  Running out of wine at a wedding feast is not good.

No, really, I don’t think you understand this.  See, this kind of culture – first century Jewish culture – is what’s known as a “shame-based culture.”  It’s easy to dishonor yourself or your guests if you don’t take proper steps to provide for them at a time like this.  In fact, I kid you not, you can technically sue somebody if they invite you to a wedding feast and do not provide enough wine and food.

This is a problem.

Look, Jesus is standing up.  He’s going to speak to Mary.  Let’s listen to what He is saying:  “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”

Did you hear that?

Jesus and Mary are now just looking into one another’s eyes.  Mary’s intensity seems to have given way to momentary confusion, then to a kind of acceptance.  Jesus just did two very interesting things:  He called her “woman” and He told her, “My hour has not yet come.”

He’s not being rude to her, but He’s also not using the normal term of affection for a mother.  Jesus’ use of the word “woman” here is roughly equivalent to the Southern use of the word “ma’am”…not exactly so, but maybe that helps a bit.

He says to her, “My hour has not yet come.”  When Jesus talks about “my hour” in the gospel of John He is talking about His death on the cross and His great work of salvation.

When he says, “Woman, what does this have to do with me?  My hour has not yet come,” He’s pointing out to His mother that He came to do a job.  He came ultimately to give Himself on the cross to save all who will trust in Him.  But this plan is God’s initiative, not man’s.  The great work of Jesus cannot be prompted, manipulated, controlled, or even begun by the request of man or woman, even the sincere request of Jesus’ own mother.

It’s almost as if He’s saying to His mother, “Mom, you are correct that I have a task to do, but this task does not and will not and cannot operate along human timetables and human initiatives.  It cannot begin because you feel that it is time for it to begin.  It is something I must do.  I must do it because I and I alone can do it.  It is a commission from my Father, mom…my real Father.  I love you, and I honor you, but my job and its timing and how it’s going to play out is separate from you and from your expectations.”

This must have been difficult for Mary.  After all, she bore Jesus in her womb, delivered Jesus in childbirth, raised Him, nurtured Him, taught Him.  Mary is Jesus’ mother.  But Jesus had something to do, you see, that transcended His mother.  “Woman, what does this have to do with me?  My hour has not yet come.”

Some commentators point out that in the gospel of John almost every time Jesus appears with Mary He’s distancing Himself from her and her plans so as to highlight the fact that His great mission is to do the will of His Father, not of His earthly mother, or of any man or woman.

Well, back to the party.  Mary seems a bit wounded, but she also seems to understand.  Look, she’s turning now to the servants.  She’s saying, “Do whatever He tells you.”  Yes, she understands a little better now.  Her Son and His great work cannot be directed by immediate earthly concerns.  He is operating in the will of His Father.  Mary trusts in Jesus.

Jesus Refills What Has Run Out

Now if you’ll look over there in the corner of our room you’ll notice six large stone jars.  The first thing I want us to notice is how big they are!  Each one holds twenty or thirty gallons.

What’s Jesus doing?  He’s talking to the servants now.  He’s saying, “Fill the jars with water.”  The servants have filled them up, all the way to the brim.

Now what’s He doing?  He’s telling them to draw some of the water out and take it to the master of the house.

What?!  I’ve got to tell you, Jesus sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense from my perspective.  This is going to be a grave insult to the master when they take him a cup of water.

Watch, they’re carrying it up to him now.  Jesus is waiting in the background.  The servants themselves seem hesitant.  When the master of the house tastes water instead of wine, he’s really going to be hot!

Watch this.  He’s putting the cup to his lips.  This is going to be awkward!  He’s taken a drink now.  He’s looking down into the cup.  He seems confused.  His face looks surprised.  Told you!  Oh no, he’s yelling for the bridegroom!  That poor guy is going to be mortified that he insulted the party’s sponsor, the master of the feast.  He’s coming up to the master.  Let’s listen:  “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

What?!  Wine?  But the servants served him wat…oh man.  That isn’t water.  That IS wine!

But how did Jesus…

I’ll tell you something about Jesus that I think you need to know:  Jesus came to refill what has become empty.

Some of you, this very morning, feel like dry, parched, empty vessels.  Life has not turned out like you thought it would.  The joy of earlier years, the joy of your marriage’s first love, the joy of being a parent, the joy of being an employer or employee, the joy of friendship, the joy of living…all of these things have slipped away.

Some of you are empty vessels.  Some of you are as empty as a desert inside.

But could it be that one of the points of this amazing miracle is for Jesus to remind empty people that He is the God who fills empty things to overflowing?  He had these six vessels filled to the brim then He worked a miracle in them.

Friends, Jesus fills empty hearts, heals broken lives, and turns disaster into joy.

But that’s not all that’s happening with these vessels.  Did you know that many of the Jews looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, and they envisioned His coming in terms of a great feast with overflowing wine?  For instance, in Hosea 2 we find:

²¹ “And in that day I will answer, declares the LORD,
I will answer the heavens,
and they shall answer the earth,
²² and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and they shall answer Jezreel,
²³ and I will sow her for myself in the land.
And I will have mercy on No Mercy,
and I will say to Not My People, ‘You are my people’;
and he shall say, ‘You are my God.'”

And, again, in Isaiah 25 the prophet says:

⁶ On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.

So to the Jews a miraculous overflowing of wine signaled the coming of God’s Messiah who would save Israel.

Jesus was doing more here than simply filling up what was empty.  He was saying that He Himself is the one who fills the empty hearts.

Are you empty this morning?  Jesus can fill your life to overflowing.  After all, Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.”

Jesus Frees Us From Religious Ritual

But there’s even more happening here.  These jars, verse 6 tells us, were jars the Jews used for their rites of purification.  That is, they were jars that served a general religious purpose.  They were stone jars, which was customary for jars containing water, since earthen vessels would contaminate the water.  But they were jars containing water for purification.

Not only was the first century a shame-based culture, it was a purification-based culture.  The Jews were forever having to wash themselves so that they might be pure before God.  These jars contained water that was used in an effort to meet the demands of the law.

How many times had those in this house turned to these jars for their own peace of mind before God?  Before they prayed, before they ate, before they worshiped, they went to these jars for purity and for cleansing so that they might stand before God in good conscience.

These jars represented their best efforts at standing rightly before God.  These jars meant a continuous cycle of religious ritual.  The jars meant man’s best effort at obeying the law, keeping the rules, being good…and these are the jars in which the first miracle of Jesus is wrought.

Jesus came not only to fill up what was empty, He came to free us from what causes only despair. 

It is a tricky thing trying to be clean enough for God.  It is a tricky thing trying to wash yourself enough to feel really clean.  It is a difficult thing to perform enough rituals to please a perfectly holy God.

When all is said and done, our best efforts at religion fall short of bringing us into a relationship with God, don’t they?  Some of you have tried this.  You’ve run to the jars over and over and over and over again, trying somehow in your own power to be clean.  You’ve read the books, bought the t-shirts, sung the songs, quoted the verses, attended the services, dropped money in the plates, been on the committees, attended the potlucks, gone to the conferences, been on the trips…some of you have done it all but you’ve done it in an effort to meet the demands of God, to please God, to pacify God, to make God, in your mind, somehow less angry with you.

Oh, listen to me:  religious ritual cannot be a substitute for a real relationship with Jesus.

This is why some commentators even find significance in the fact that there are six jars.  The number seven is the perfect number, the holy number, and it’s very possible that this account is pointing to the number of seven.  After all, it should be pointed out that Jesus performs the miracle at the wedding of Cana on the seventh day of the gospel of John.  In other words, the first day begins in John 1:19-28 with the delegation being sent to question John the Baptist, and it culminates here, on the seventh day, with the creation of wine.[2]  This is consistent with John’s drawing on Genesis 1, which we’ve already seen when looking at the beginning of John 1.  Jesus performs his first miracle on the seventh day.  There are six days of creation in Genesis 1, then the Sabbath.  Jesus represents new creation, the beginning of a new way of living life.

But there are only six jars.  Six, obviously, falls just short of seven.  Again, this may or may not be the case (not every number in the Bible should have a spiritual meaning read into it), but it could just be that the six jars represented the imperfection of the Law and of ritual to save the people of God.  The Law, in other words, fell just short of being able to accomplish true peace between God and humanity.

But Jesus takes these six purification jars and miraculously makes them containers of wine.  The jars that used to remind the people of their distance from God have not been transformed into vessels of joy, of celebration, of a new day.

Jesus comes to fill what is empty, and to free us from what brings only despair.

Are you tired of empty religion?  Then come to the fountain of life and live.  Jesus is waiting to give you life.

Jesus Calls Us To a Relationship of Joy

And of course, this miracle occurs at a wedding with wine.  This is not insignificant.  A wedding and wine.  Jesus would link both of these images to Himself in powerful ways.  For instance, in Matthew 9:

¹⁴ Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” ¹⁵ And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. ¹⁶ No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. ¹⁷ Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”

So Jesus calls Himself the bridegroom and the gospel is likened to new wine put into a new wineskin.  In other words, Jesus calls us into a relationship not unlike a marriage and into a new way of living life (new wine).

In John 3, some of John’s disciples will question John about Jesus:

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.”

So John the Baptist calls Jesus the bridegroom and His followers “the bride.”

Also, at the end of the Bible, in Revelation 22, Jesus links together the ideas of a wedding and of being thirsty:

¹⁷ The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.

It simply cannot be denied that the venue for this miracle, the fact that it was performed at a wedding, means something very important.  What it means is this:  when Jesus calls us to accept Him, He is calling us into a celebratory relationship of fulfillment and away from a despairing cycle of ritual.

Brothers and sisters in Christ:  Jesus is calling you to a wedding, and the feast is the gospel and the groom is Christ Jesus Himself, and we are the bride.

Around thirteen-hundred years ago, a Christian we call today the Venerable Bede commented on this miracle at Cana and made the following observation:

“By this sign he made manifest that he was the King of glory, and so the church’s bridegroom…Therefore, let us love with our whole mind, dearly beloved, the marriage of Christ and the church, which was prefigured then in one city and is now celebrated over the whole earth.”[3]

It is true!  It is true!  You are invited to a wedding in which you are the bride! You are called to come to Jesus.

But may I finally be allowed to remind of you the most powerful image?  At the wedding of Cana Jesus turned water into wine to declare who He is and to declare the type of relationship He is calling us to.  But the creation of miraculous wine also speaks of the way in which we enter into a relationship with Jesus.

For this is not the only meal Jesus attended with wine.  On the night that He was betrayed, Jesus took bread and wine.  He broke the bread saying, “This is my body,” and He poured the wine saying, “This is the new covenant in my blood.  This do as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

The miracle at the wedding of Cana is not the last time that Jesus would use wine to make a point.  He also used it to reveal that He would pour His own blood out on the tree for you and for me.  Jesus changed water into wine at Cana.  Jesus turned His blood into your salvation at Calvary.  Jesus filled the purification jars at Cana.  Jesus filled the righteous demands of God at Calvary.

Cana pointed to Calvary, and Calvary points us to a loving God who has given Himself so that we might have life, and have it abundantly.

Would you like to come to the wedding this morning?  Would you come to Jesus this morning?  He is waiting with open arms.

John 1:35-51

³⁵The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples, ³⁶and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” ³⁷The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. ³⁸Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, “What are you seeking?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” ³⁹He said to them, “Come and you will see.” So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. ⁴⁰ One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. ⁴¹He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). ⁴²He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter). ⁴³ The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” ⁴⁴Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” ⁴⁶Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” ⁴⁷Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” ⁴⁸Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” ⁴⁹Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” ⁵⁰Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” ⁵¹And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

I would like to introduce you this morning to a word that you may not be familiar with.  It is a word that the church used to talk a lot about, but not so much anymore.  But it is a good word, a great word even, and one that we must learn again if we are to be the kind of church we have been called to be.

The word I’m talking about is the word “disciple.”

Now, some of you are immediately suspicious that I might be playing a game with you.  Some of you might even think that I am trying to insult you.  Let me assure you that I am doing no such thing.

I realize that probably all of us in here have heard the word “disciple,” but, as a church culture – meaning, as a conservative, evangelical church in North America – it is just possible that some of us have actually forgotten that Jesus came to call us to be disciples.  In other words, He called us to a life of discipleship.

I think that many Christians today have forgotten that the Christian life is supposed to be a life of discipleship for a couple of reasons:

1.  First of all, many of us have emphasized conversion so strongly that we see it, conversion, as the main thing with discipleship as the less important thing.  This can happen sometimes in very evangelistic churches like ours.  Sometimes, out of a sincere desire to see people come to Christ, we can almost neglect discipleship in order to focus on conversion.  We may say, for instance, “I want to see people saved.”  And, of course, we should want this.  Something is wrong if you do not want to see people saved.  But let me ask you a fairly awkward question:  after a while, what happens to the church when all we talk about is seeing the lost saved without ever talking about seeing the saved grow into full-fledged disciples of Jesus?  I’ll tell you:  an emphasis on conversion to the neglect of discipleship will inevitably make us ten-miles-wide and one-inch-deep.  I think this may be a reasonable picture of the church today:  we’ve all been saved, but are we all disciples?

Now, this is another sermon for another day, but many of us are of the opinion that it is reasonable to ask a man who is not a disciple of Jesus whether or not he has truly been converted at all.  In other words, can you come to Jesus for salvation if you have no intention of following Him as a disciple?  I think not, personally, and I think the New Testament bears that out.  But, for our purposes this morning, let us just observe the following:  when the church exalts conversion to the neglect of discipleship, it only hurts itself.

One more thought here:  let us remember that mature disciples are more effective in reaching the lost for Christ.  Meaning, in time, if we do not focus more on discipleship we will have a church of people who “asked Jesus into their hearts,” but who never learned to walk with Jesus, and that includes learning to share the gospel effectively.

2.  Second, the idea of discipleship has suffered in recent years because sometimes we seem to have reduced Christianity to a moment based on knowledge instead of to a life based on a relationship.  In other words, we almost talk about Christianity as if it is nothing more than mere agreement with an idea.  We say, “Believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that He died for your sins, and you are a Christian.”  But the Bible never presents the Christian life in merely this way.  This Christian life is not less than this, of course, but it is more than this.  To be a Christian is not merely to agree with something.  To be a Christian is to agree with the truth, accept the truth, and let the truth of the gospel of Christ take root in and change your life.

Somebody once said that a student is a person who wants to know what his teacher knows.  A disciple is a person who wants to become what his master is.

Let me ask you:  which one or you?  Are you a student of Jesus, or a disciple?  Are you an observer of Jesus, or a disciple?  Do you agree with Jesus, or are you following Jesus?

Are you a disciple?

“Why,” you may ask, “does it matter?  What’s the big deal?”  That is a good question, and it deserves an answer.  The reason why it is important that we reclaim this idea of discipleship, of being disciples of Jesus, is that our witness is weakened, our church is wounded, and mission is undermined when we fail to be disciples.

You see, to be a disciple is to be on a daily journey of looking more and more like Jesus.  Disciples grow consistently toward being more like their masters.  This means that if we fail to be disciples, we fail to look and sound more and more like Jesus, and the lost world is consequently less and less interested in seeing what we say.

For instance, consider these words by John Stott:

Why is it that our evangelistic efforts are often fraught with failure?  Several reasons may be given, and I must not oversimplify, but one main reason is that we don’t look like the Christ we proclaim.  John Poulton has written about this in his perceptive little book A Today Sort of Evangelism:

The most effective preaching comes from those who embody the things they are saying.  They are their message…Christians…need to look like what they are talking about.  It is people who communicate primarily, not words or ideas…Authenticity…gets across from deep down inside people…A momentary insincerity can cast doubt on all that has made for communication up to that point…What communicates now is basically personal authenticity.

Similarly a Hindu professor, identifying one of his students as a Christian, once said, “If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at your feet tomorrow.”

Another example is of the Reverend Iskandar Jadeed, a former Arab Muslim, who has said, “If all Christians were Christians there would be no more Islam today.”[1]

Another wise Christian teacher, Dallas Willard, has put it like this:

“So the greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heart-breaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as “Christians” will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.”[2]

And again, Willard writes, “Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.”[3]

When John shows us the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, he shows us Jesus calling people to discipleship.  Let us make sure we do not miss this fact, for it is as true today as it was then:  when Jesus calls us, He calls us to be disciples, not merely converts and not merely students.  He wants you to follow Him and be consistently transformed into His own image.

Fortunately, John’s account of the calling of the first disciples gives us amazing insights into the nature of discipleship.  What does it mean to be a disciple?  Let’s look and see.

I. A Disciple is a Person in a State of Movement Toward His Master.

Let us look at the first two disciples who follow Jesus:

³⁵ The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples, ³⁶ and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” ³⁷ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. ³⁸ Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, “What are you seeking?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” ³⁹ He said to them, “Come and you will see.” So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour.

If you read that too quickly, you may miss the very interesting contrast in two of the main verbs in this passage. In verse 35, two of John’s disciples are “standing” with their master.  In verse 36, Jesus is “walking” by.  In verse 37, the disciples see Jesus and “they followed Jesus.”

John’s choice of verbs is not incidental. These two men were standing with John the Baptist, then they were walking with Jesus.

This is fitting, in a way, because John the Baptist’s ministry was one of anticipation and announcing.  They stood and proclaimed what was coming.  But when Jesus came, they no longer stood and announced, they saw and they followed.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the difference between being a disciple and being a mere believer can be seen in the contrast between these two verbs:  standing and following.

Some of you accepted Jesus many years ago, and you have stood right there, in that moment, with that understanding of who Jesus is and what the gospel is all these years.  You have not moved forward.  You are, for all intents and purposes, still in 4^th grade Sunday School.  You have no greater knowledge of God’s Word, no greater understanding of Christian truth, and no greater sense of the work of Christ in your life than you did when you were maybe 8 or 9 and first believed in Jesus.

That is “standing” Christianity.  That is immobile Christianity.  That is stuck, unmoving, sedentary Christianity.  That is a Christianity of profession, but not of life.  That is Christianity without discipleship, the so-called acceptance of Jesus without acceptance of the life of Jesus.

But disciples move.  Disciples gravitate constantly toward the object of their affection, Jesus the Lord.  Disciples do not consider themselves as having arrived, but this one thing they do:  they forget the past and “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14).

In verse 38, Jesus quizzes the would-be disciples: “What are you seeking?”

It is a great question for us today:  what exactly do you think following Jesus means?  What are you hoping to find?  What are you willing to lay down to follow Him?  What, exactly, is it that you think you are doing when you call yourself a Christian?  Do you realize that Jesus asks for your entire life?  Do you realize that Jesus wants it all?

“Rabbi, where are you staying?” they ask.  “Come and see” is His answer.

Here is the invitation to discipleship.  “Come and see.”

Listen:  You cannot see if you will not come.

Sometime will try to see without coming after Jesus.  But that does not work.  Jesus calls us further and deeper and higher than we were when we first met Him.

Jesus calls us to movement, to motion, to followship, to being a disciple.

Are you a disciple?  If so, you are constantly moving toward Jesus.

II. A Disciple is a Person Whose Identity is Changed by His Master.

But there is more.  A disciple is not simply in a state of movement.  In fact, his or her very nature and identity is in a state of transformation by his master.  A disciple is somebody whose name is changed in following Jesus.  Listen to verses 40 through 42:

⁴⁰ One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. ⁴¹ He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). ⁴² He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter).

Here we see the beginning of Simon Peter’s life with Jesus.  Andrew, his brother, finds Peter and announces, “We have found the Messiah.” When Peter comes to Jesus, Jesus says, “So you are Simon the son of John?  You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter).

To be a disciple is to have your name changed by the Master.  We all had a name before we met Jesus, and, when He is through with us, we have a new name.  We must come to learn what our new name in Christ is.

The story is told that the Queen of England once toured a large nursing home in England.  She was surprising the elderly men and women and encouraging them with uplifting words.  The whole nursing home was abuzz with the Queen’s unexpected visit!

In one particular room, an elderly woman was lying in her bed.  Upon seeing the Queen, she did not react at all and appeared not to recognize who the Queen was.  The Queen leaned over her bed and the lady looked up at her blankly.  The Queen smiled sympathetically, patted her hand, and gently asked, “Madam, do you know who I am?”  After a moment of curious staring, the lady said, “No, dearie, but the nurse out in the hallway can help you with that if you’re confused.”

Well!  Peter must have been confused about his name.  “You are Cephas,” Jesus said, “but you will be named Peter.”

Understand  that Jesus was not playing with words in renaming Peter.  Instead, he was telling Peter that his very identity would be transformed as Peter followed Jesus and became a disciple.

Many of you had a name when you came to Jesus.  Some of you were named “Bad Temper.”  Some of you were named “Greedy.”  Some of you were named “Profanity.”

Before you came to Christ, your character was formed by your distance from God, by your vices and your sins.  Some of you used to be named “Adultery,” “Arrogance,” “Selfishness.”  Some of you might have been named “Anger” or “Gossip” or “Self-righteous.”  Some of you were named “Religious” or “Spiritual.”

All of us come to Jesus with a name.  But then you accepted Christ as Lord and Savior and He gave you a new named:  “Saved,” “Redeemed,” “Forgiven,” “Born again.”  In fact, one of the glories of salvation is the knowledge that we will have the name of Christ stamped upon us, as Revelation 22:1-5 reveals:

¹ Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ² down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³ No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. ⁴ They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. ⁵ There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

But the Christian life is not simply a game of waiting for something to happen when you die.  This is where being a disciple comes in.  At conversion you were given a new name.  But in discipleship you actually become your new name.  When you move toward Jesus and walk with Him, He grows you into your new name.

As a disciple, your name starts to fit you.  It is no longer a declaration of a position before God.  It begins to become an accurate description of your very character.

So as you walk with Jesus day by day, watching Him and learning from Him, your name is changed from “Anger” to “Gentleness,” from “Bitter” to “Forgiving,” from “Unfaithful” to “Faithful,” from “Religion” to “Relationship.”

People often say, “Jesus loves you right where you are.”  And that is true, thank the Lord, for where we are is where we’re at!  But let us make sure that we understand that while Jesus loves us right where we are, He never leaves us right where we are.  Jesus meets you in the valley, but it is not His intent to leave you there.  He wants you to walk with Him, and, as you do, you are changed by Him.

When we become disciples, Jesus changes our name.

III. A Disciple is a Person Whose Faith is Expanded by His Master.

After Peter sets his feet on the path of discipleship, Philip and Nathaniel do the same.  Nathaniel’s case, in particular, is interesting and helpful:

⁴³ The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” ⁴⁴ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵ Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” ⁴⁶ Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” ⁴⁷ Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” ⁴⁸ Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” ⁴⁹ Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” ⁵⁰ Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” ⁵¹ And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

When Philip tells Nathanael about Jesus, Nathanael has trouble believing.  The main problem is that Philip tells Nathanael that Jesus is from Nazareth, which, to put it mildly, is not the kind of razzle-dazzle place most people would expect the Messiah to come from.

Nathanael is a lot like us.  He has a surface-level faith.  His faith is dependent upon his own understanding of things.  When Jesus comes along, He fits into Nathanael’s faith like a round peg in a square hole.  It just does not seem right.

Then, of course, he comes to realize that this Jesus is none other than “the Son of God” and “the King of Israel”?  Why?  Because Jesus demonstrates His divinity by showing Nathanael that He knew him before He met him, that He had seen him sitting under a fig tree before Philip even called to Nathanael.

Nathanael is amazed by this.  His skepticism gives way to awe.  Suddenly this Jesus that did not fit his expectations exceeds his expectations.  When Nathanael expresses amazement and praise, Jesus says, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe?  You will see greater things than these.”  One of those things, Jesus tells Nathanael, is that he “will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” (v.51)

Do you see what is happening here?  Jesus, here in this initial meeting with Nathanael, is already expanding Nathanael’s faith.  He’s expanding his faith concerning what type of Messiah Jesus is.  He’s expanding his faith concerning Jesus’ on character and nature.  And He’s expanding Nathanael’s faith concerning what is about to happen to him as he walks with Jesus.

To be a disciple is to have your faith, your perspective, your understanding, and your knowledge of God in Christ increasingly expanded so that you can know Him more, walk with Him more faithfully, and love Him more completely.

Many of you have experienced this.  When Jesus met you, you were lounging beneath a fig tree.  But now that you have walked with Jesus, you are learning and seeing wonderful things!  You look back over your walk with Jesus and see how He has grown you.

This is the way of the disciple.  Disciples expand in their grasp of Jesus.  Disciples have their skepticism hammered into awe, their doubts formed into faith.

But some of you have not experienced this.  You are attempting something that simply will not work:  you are attempting to receive the benefit of Jesus without ever having to follow him.  Some of you want Jesus to come to you under the fig tree, bless you, then leave you alone.  Some of you want Him to save you without you having to follow Him.

It is a tragic thing when a man or woman wants Jesus to be Lord without wanting themselves to be a disciple.  It is a selfish kind of Christianity, is it not?  Listen to how Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola put this in their Jesus Manifesto:

Our problem is this:  We have created a narcissistic form of Christianity, in which “conversion” is less a turning toward Christ than a turning toward success or fame or fortune.  Narcissus never had it so good than in best-seller Christianity, which has become self-centeredness wrapped up as “spirituality,” which has become the latest fashion accessory for the person who has everything…We have made conversion primarily about ourselves, a finding of ourselves and a fulfilling of ourselves.  We’ve made it a journey of self-discovery rather than a journey of God discovery.  Yet conversion is not about us, but about God’s overture of love, without which we are devoid of sufficient motive or power to change and be changed.  True “conversion” is to lay hold of Christ, or rather, as Paul corrected himself, to allow Christ to lay hold of us.  True “conversion” is directed toward the one to whom we convert, the one to whom we turn.  It is a life of “fullness,” in which the “fullness” is Christ.

You are not the point.  And we are not the point.  Jesus Christ always has been and always will be the point.  All the arrows point to him and not to us.[4]

In truth, to refuse to walk with Jesus, to refuse to be changed by Jesus, to refuse to follow Jesus, to refuse to be a disciple, is to rob yourself of the greatest blessing the Christian has:  daily fellowship with Christ Himself.

Some of you simply want to be converts without being disciples.  But God is not mocked.  You cannot claim Him as Lord if you refuse to follow Him as a disciple.

Some of you have never come to Him at all, and you desperately need to.  Today can be the beginning of a wonderful journey in your life if that is you.

Would you come to Jesus?  Would you become a disciple?  Will you follow Him?

John 1:19-34

¹⁹And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” ²⁰ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” ²¹And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” ²²So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” ²³He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.” ²⁴(Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) ²⁵They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” ²⁶John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, ²⁷even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” ²⁸These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. ²⁹The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! ³⁰This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ³¹I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” ³²And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. ³³I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ ³⁴And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

Do we have the right to think about God however we would like?  Do we have the right to envision His person and character along whatever lines we desire?  Some people think so.

For instance, I recently read the words of a pastor who proudly and openly embraces the titles of “liberal” and “progressive.”  This pastor says we should think of God however we happen to envision God.  Listen to this:

“Every person, no matter their age, sexual preference, gender, or nationality, has the right to have access to the divine, however they see the divinity made manifest.”[1]

Now, this is a very modern-American thing to say, is it not?  It has, for instance, the two great hallmarks of popular culture today.  First of all, it has a good dose of entitlement:  “Every person, no matter their age, sexual preference, gender, or nationality, has the right to have access to the divine…”  Access to God, then, is now a fundamental right regardless of one’s life or lifestyle.

And, secondly, according to this idea, human beings have “the right to have access to the divine, however they see the divinity made manifest.”  So not only are we entitled to God, we are entitled to whatever version of God we happen to prefer.

Again, this is straight out of the rule book for the way we modern Americans think:  (1) unquestioned, individual entitlement and (2) the sovereignty of personal preference.

But that is pretty dangerous, is it not?  After all, if people are simply free to think of God “however they see the divinity made manifest,” does that not open the door for a person with a really crazy idea of God to be able to say that their idea of God is as legitimate as a biblical view of God?

No, somehow we know, deep down, that our view of God must have substance and that substance must arise from some place other than our own preferences, assumptions, or wants.

John thought that we should think about God.  John thought that we should think accurately about God.  John thought that God could be known and understood.  John said that Jesus was the key to understanding who God is and what He is like.  Jesus reveals God.

Let me take a moment and point out, by the way, what a great gift revelation is.  Do you realize that if God had not chosen to reveal Himself in Christ and through His Word to us, we would never know who God is?  “We love him,” John wrote in 1 John 4:19, “because He first loved us.”  Had God not revealed Himself, we never would have known Him.

I like how R.C. Sproul put this in his amazing book, The Holiness of God:

“There is a special kind of phobia from which we all suffer.  It is called xenophobia.  Xenophobia is a fear (and sometimes a hatred) of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.  God is the ultimate object of our xenophobia.  He is the ultimate stranger.  He is the ultimate foreigner.  He is holy, and we are not.”[2]

That is true enough!  In our sins, we have a deep phobia of God.  We do not know Him, so we fear Him.  We do not want to know Him, so we hate Him.  But when the light of Christ shines on us, and when we come to know Him as Savior and Lord, we both know Him and love Him.

Because of Jesus, we are now able to think about God.  We are now able to want to think about God.  We are now able to think about God correctly.

In the first eighteen verses of John 1, we have already seen two fascinating images of the person of Christ.  We have seen Christ the Word and Christ the light.  But there is more.  In verse 19, John records the words of another John, John the Baptist, and his words about the coming of Christ.

John the Baptist casts further light on the person of Christ, and the light he sheds is mind-boggling to say the least.

Christ, the Lord

The first occasion for John’s testimony about who Jesus is was a question put to him concerning who he, John the Baptist, was.

¹⁹And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” ²⁰ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” ²¹And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” ²²So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” ²³He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

It is an interesting scene.  The priests and Levites, sent, we will find out in a bit, by the Pharisees, are interested in the identity of John the Baptist.  But John the Baptist is interested only in the identity of Jesus.

In answering this question from the priests and Levites, John quotes a passage from Isaiah with shocking implications for who Jesus is.  In verse 23, John alludes to Isaiah 40.  Here is the wider context of that passage

¹ Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins.

³ A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
⁴ Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
⁵ And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

John the Baptist sought to draw attention away from himself and focus it rather on Christ.  He claimed to be the “voice” mentioned in Isaiah 40:3.  That is interesting, but what is really interesting is what the voice in Isaiah 40 is doing.  Clearly, the voice is preparing the people for the coming of the Lord.

John quoted only the first part of verse 3:  “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD.’”  But in doing so he was appealing to the whole passage, the second part of which would have been known by these priests and Levites:  “make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

What an utterly amazing thing to say!  John said that his purpose was to preach the coming of the Lord, of God Himself, in the desert.  Clearly John the Baptist meant by this nothing less than that Jesus was God Himself.

Some of you may be of the opinion this morning that it does not matter what we think about Jesus.  You may think it is ok that Christianity speaks of Jesus as God but other religions speak of him as a good man, or a great prophet, or an angel, or nothing at all.  You may be tempted to say that these questions do not really matter.  You may say that so long as we obey Jesus, or try to be like Jesus, or ask the question, “What would Jesus do?”, that that is all that matters.  But may I point out that John, the writer of the fourth gospel, and John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus, were overwhelmingly concerned first of all with the fact that we understand that Jesus is God Himself among us.

In other words, the first question is not, “What would Jesus do?”  The first question is, “Who is Jesus?”

It matters.  It matters deeply.  Who you think Jesus is will ultimately shape how you live your life.  Fortunately, these two Johns we are looking at are completely clear on the answer:  Jesus is Lord!  This is the earliest confession of the church.  It is the summary of our faith, the hope of our salvation.  Jesus is Lord!  In Greek, that looks like this:  Kyrios Iesus!  Jesus is Lord.  Jesus is God.  Jesus is God come near!

Christ, the Lamb

That John the Baptist called Jesus Lord and God was unsettling enough to the world then and now.  But what he did next was utterly confounding:

²⁴(Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) ²⁵They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” ²⁶John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, ²⁷even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” ²⁸These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. ²⁹The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

When John spots Jesus coming, he shouts, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”  In saying so, he was doing two things.  For one thing, he was once again speaking in harmony with the prophecy of Isaiah 40 that we have just seen, for verse 2 of that chapter begins: “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned…”

So it was consistent with Isaiah 40, the passage he is quoting, for John to say that the coming Lord would forgive sins, even as it was shocking for him to say that Jesus was that coming Lord.  But in calling Jesus “the Lamb of God” John was saying even more:  he was saying that Jesus is not only the Lord who forgives sin, He is the Lord who forgives sin by becoming Himself the sacrifice for our sins, the lamb of God.

How must John’s original audience have heard and understood such a strange idea, that God could be the forgiver and the sacrifice?  How do you hear it today?

John called Jesus Lord, which was earth-shaking in its implications.  He called Him lamb, which threatened to redefine everything the Jews thought they knew about God.

John is saying that Jesus is Lord and lamb.  He is the One to whom all sacrifices are due, and He is simultaneously the sacrifice that is due.  He is both shepherd and sheep.  John is saying something, in other words, that would have been very difficult for people then (and now) to grasp:  that the Lord is the lamb.

Imagine it, if you can:  He is the One to whom our lives should be given, but He gives His life for us.  He is the just God whose standard demands a sacrifice, and He is the sacrifice sent to meet the standards of a just God.  He is the holy God before whom sin cannot stand, and He is the sacrifice that bears our unholy sins.

Seriously, I ask you:  can you believe it?

Throughout the ages artists have attempted to depict this image of Christ as the lamb of God.  One of the most famous images is that of Francisco de Zubaran, a Spanish painter who painted in the 17^th century.  The image has always moved me.  It is a lamb, lain on an altar, its feet bound by cords, its body lifeless, dead.  This is the Christ who saves.

Zubaran apparently added horns to the image as a symbol of strength.  After all, Christ did not have to lay down His life.  “No one takes [my life] from me,” Jesus said in John 10:18, “but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

Jesus is strong, it is true,  but Jesus laid His life down.  He is the lion of Judah, but He is the lamb of God.  In Christ Himself, the lion lays down with the lamb.  He was the sacrificial lamb.  Jesus is the God who puts Himself on His own altar.  He is the shepherd who takes the sin of the flock upon Himself.

He is the One who says, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin” (Hebrews 9:22), and then He sheds His blood.  He is the scapegoat of guilty Israel.  He is the ram caught in a thicket for Isaac.  He is the raised, bronze serpent on whom dying, wilderness-wandering Israel must look in order to be saved.  He is the one who demands payment at the same time that He is the one who pays what is demanded.

The world had never heard anything like it.  The world has never heard anything like it since.

The vision of Jesus as the lamb of God, the “Agnus Dei,” is a vision that has inspired Christians over the years.  For instance, I learned this week that each year during the feast of Epiphany, in the subways of Bucharest, Romania, Christian children lead lambs through the subway stations and trains in order to remember and to remind others that Jesus is the lamb of God.[3]

The Lord is the lamb, and the lamb is Lord.  “Behold the lamb of God!”

Christ, the Life

Yet the coming Lord that John the Baptist spoke of does not merely forgive sins.  He also comes to give a new way of living life.  Christ is the Lord.  Christ is the lamb.  Christ is the life.

³⁰This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ³¹I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” ³²And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. ³³I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ ³⁴And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

Notice that Jesus came not only to lay down His life, He came to create a new way of living life through the laying down of His life.  So He is not only the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, He is also “he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” (v.33)  This happened to the early band of believers gathered at Pentecost, and this happens today every time a person bows his or her heart and mind to Jesus.

To know the lamb, then, is to follow the lamb because He has baptized you in the Holy Spirit.  Not only that, the lamb now lives in you.  Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola put this nicely in their Jesus Manifesto when they wrote:

The mystery of God is this…this glorious, limitless, amazing, incredible, expansive, incomparable, marvelous, stunning, staggering, majestic, mighty, matchless, spectacular, outstanding, tremendous, immense, infinite, vast, grand, triumphant, victorious, precious, radiant, peerless, wonderful, magnificent Christ has chosen to place all of His fullness where?  Inside of you![4]

It is true!  The Lord who is lamb baptizes you in the Spirit when you come to Him and, in so doing, empowers you to also live this kind of life!

This means that we go into the world as the army of the lamb of God in order to reveal a new way of living life.  For instance, in Kenya, Africa, in the 1950’s, there was a war in which the Kenyans fought against the British colonialists for independence.  In the midst of that war,

a number of Christians sought to intervene between the black Kenyans and the white colonialists.  These Christians refused to fight and, instead, they called the conflicting sides to lay down their arms.  Because of this, they were nicknamed, “people of the Lamb.”[5]

What are we known as?  Do our lives reflect Christ, Lord and lamb?  Have we come to Him only in the hope of salvation, or have we come to Him for life?  To know Christ as the lamb of God is to approach life from a totally different vantage point than the one you previously held.  How you envision God determines how you live life.  How can it not change our lives to think of Jesus as Lord and as lamb?

On the official seal of the Moravian Church are the words, “Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him.”

This, I believe, sums the matter up quite nicely: “Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him.”  The lamb conquers through His cross and resurrection, and now we have the privilege of following Him.

Central Baptist Church:  “Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him!”

John 1:3-18

³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. ¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'”) ¹⁶ And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

When I was in college, I became aware of something in my own life that really began to bother me.  I had noticed even in high school that, during the winter months of the year, I became very sad and melancholy.  Not overly so or dangerously so, but evidently so, to me, anyway.  In college during the grey months of fall and winter (which, ironically, I otherwise loved), I would find myself increasingly brooding.  Strangely enough, there were times when I would be alone and I felt like crying.  I felt like I was walking around with a lump in my throat all the time.  But in the spring and summer, it would leave me.  Again, I do not want to overplay this:  I was never dangerously depressed or self-destructive.  Had you talked with me likely you would not have even noticed that anything was wrong.  But I noticed, and it bothered me.

After graduating from college, Roni and I were married and we moved to Ft. Worth, Texas, to attend Southwestern Seminary.  I carried this kind of seasonal sadness with me.  In fact, since we moved to Ft. Worth in the winter, I was very aware of it.

As it turns out, part of being enrolled in seminary is having a mandatory visit with the campus psychologist.  All students had to do this, and, though I was not particularly keen on it, and though I even tried to get out of doing it, I visited with him as well.  He was a wonderfully insightful and helpful man, and I appreciated our visit.

Shortly after meeting with him I began to feel this sadness again, this creeping seasonal melancholy, and, having enjoyed my earlier meeting with him, I thought, “Why not?” and scheduled a meeting with him.

When I laid out my situation and explained my sadness, he told me that there was actually a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder (acronym – SAD, of course), in which some people found the decreased amount of sunlight in the days of fall and winter to be particularly oppressive and mood altering.

Then he gave me some advice that I’ve never forgotten.  This is what he told me to do:  “In the fall and winter months, you need to find those brief moments in each day when the sun is shining and get yourself in the light.”

I have never forgotten that, and I’ve tried to obey it:  “Find where the light is shining, and get in it.”

It is not bad advice for those who find the darkness oppressive, is it?

This morning many of you have come into this sanctuary and are deeply affected by SAD – Spiritual Affective Disorder.  The darkness seems too present and the light seems to dim.

Some of you are overwhelmed by the darkness of the world order.  You are inundated by news of local and foreign chaos, crime, and disorder.  You feel that you are sinking in darkness.

Some of you are overwhelmed by a darkness of your own making.  You have fallen into or actively embraced some sin or rebellion against God.  Maybe it is some act from the past that even now casts its long and oppressive shadow over you.

Some of you feel that you live in darkness.  Darkness has overtaken your marriage, your relationships with your children, your relationship with your friends.  You do not know how it got there, but you cannot deny it is there, and you despair of finding a way out.

If you find yourself in this position, you will likely be thrilled to know that John calls Jesus “the light.”  Jesus is light.  He is the light of the world.

The first eighteen verses of John 1 are known as “the prologue” to John, for they lay the foundation for the rest of the entire book by expressing in beautiful and power ways the riches and depths of the person of Jesus Christ.  That prologue is dominated by two fascinating images for Jesus:  the Word and the light.

We have seen that Jesus is the eternal logos, or Word, who was in the beginning, who was with God, and who was God.  But this morning we see that Jesus is not only the logos, He is the light.

Christ, the Light That Reveals.

The fundamental and essential property of light is revelation.  It reveals that which was previously obscured or hidden.  So when John calls Jesus light, He is speaking of Christ as the revealing light of God.

We would do well to remember that before “revelation” was a book, it was, and is, a person.  Christ is revelation.  He is revealing light.

Consider John 1:3-9:

³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

You will remember, I trust, that John’s gospel begins by applying the words of Genesis 1 to Jesus.  “In the beginning, God…” Genesis 1 tells us.  “In the beginning was the Word…” John 1 tells us.  This, of course, was an intentional and provocative declaration of the person and nature of Jesus Christ.  He is none other than Yahweh, Creator God.

But John 4 carries this even further.  Remember the first act of creation from Genesis 1:

¹ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ² The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.  ³And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Imagine with me:  the Spirit of God is hovering over primordial blackness and nothingness.  There is nothing there.  God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.  And then, into and over and under and around the dark void, the utter nothingness, the voice of God Almighty speaks:  “Let there be light!”  I love the sound of the Latin here:  Fiat lux!

And then, whoosh!, a brilliant, incomprehensible, immeasurable, uncontainable explosion of blinding iridescent light blasts through the black void.  Nothing is no more, for light has been spoken into the darkness.  The inky black absence of anything has been made alive with light, for the light of God means life!  It is a staggering thought.  It would have been an amazing thing to behold, except for the fact that we would have been instantaneously incinerated in the beholding of it.

In Genesis, God speaks light into darkness, and creation is born.  With that in mind, consider again the amazing implications of John 1: “In the beginning was the Word…In Him was light, and the life was the light of men.”

John is appealing again to Genesis and depicting once more Christ as not only Creator, but also as the agent of creation, as the life-giving light without which creation cannot be sustained.

It is a flabbergasting thought.  But what is even more flabbergasting is the fact that Christ is the revealing light not only on the grand cosmic scale of creation, but also on the smaller scale of your own life.  He shined in the darkness at the beginning of all things, and He shines even now in your own life.

Christ is light, and, as light, Christ reveals.  He reveals many things.  He reveals the nature of God.  Did you notice verse 18?  “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”  Christ makes God known.  He reveals the person and nature of God.  He reveals what God is like.  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

He reveals the truth.  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6)  Christ is truth and Christ reveals, in His person, the truth.

But that is not all.  He also reveals the truth about us, and this can be painful to see.

Christ, the Light That Convicts.

Christ is not only the light that reveals, He is the light that convicts.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “an unflattering light?”  That phrase is used to describe light that is too revealing.  Some light shows more than we want it to show, does it not?  This is why men take women on romantic dates to candlelit restaurants and not to places where you sit under fluorescent lights.  When you are dating, you do not want the person to get too good a look at you!

In all seriousness, though, some light flatters while other light does not.  We prefer the dim light that keeps us from utter darkness but that, on the other hand, does not reveal too much.  But Jesus is the light that reveals everything about who we are:

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

One of the reasons the world rejected Jesus was that He revealed too much.  He stills reveals too much as far as our carnal natures are concerned.

He revealed not only the love and grace of a holy God.  He also revealed the deep depravity of our own sinfulness and selfishness.  For the light that reveals, reveals everything.

This is why many of us prefer the night-light Jesus to the full-fledged, burning-bright, revealing, convicting Jesus.  We want just enough of Him to know that He is there keeping the darkness from overwhelming us, but not enough of Him to reveal all that we really are.

But you cannot have it both ways.  You cannot have “a little bit” of Jesus.  Light has no fellowship with darkness.  If light is to do its job, it must be allowed to shine.

Have you ever seen an operating room in a hospital?  Hovering over the operating table is a massive, intrusive, powerful light.  It looks like one of those old science fiction UFOs hovering up there.  No surgeon worth his salt would say, “Ah, it’s time for open heart surgery. Somebody light a candle and put on some Yanni.”  No!  If he is to do what he must do to save us, the light must shine.

Our sins envelope us in darkness, and they demand the intrusive properties of the light of Jesus Christ to be seen, uprooted, and abolished.

I once pastored a church in which there was an elderly couple who would ask me on occasion to drive them on day trips here and there.  They were unable to drive themselves, so my wife and, at the time, our very young daughter, would drive them to various places, usually the mountains of western Tennessee.

They once asked me to drive them to a place where we toured a deep underground cavern.  We paid the entry fee and then were guided through a tour deep into this underground tavern.  Dim lights were placed along the path to keep us from going awry.  I was less than encouraged when the guide revealed to us that it would actually be quite dangerous to go off the path as the cavern contained deep and seemingly bottomless pits into which you could fall.  Once such cavern, he revealed, contained the skeleton of a long-dead sabertooth tiger at the bottom!

At the bottom of one descent our little group gathered together in the middle of a large chamber.  The tour guide asked us if we wanted to experience true darkness.  I suppose enough people agreed to warrant the demonstration. So we all came in close together and, at the count of three, he cut off all the lights.

To this day, I have never seen (for lack of a better word) such absolute darkness.  I literally could see nothing.  I saw less than nothing.  It was an utter absence of any light.

This is what our sin is like, and this is our condition outside of Christ.  Thus, John contrasts the light of Christ with the darkness of the world:  ^“The light shines in the darkness…”(v.5)

The darkness is the world order that is hostile to the grace of God.  We all prefer the darkness and hate the light by nature. We are, by nature, children of wrath.  How else can we understand the chilling words of verse 11:  “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”

How about you?  Have you received Christ the light?  Or do you prefer the darkness?

Have you submitted yourself to the searching, revealing, probing, uncovering light of the gospel of Christ?

The light does indeed shine in the darkness.  But that is not at all.  It must be understood that “the darkness has not overcome it.”

Christ, the Light That Saves.

There is no darkness of sin, death, and hell that the light cannot penetrate and destroy.  Christ is the light that saves:

¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'”) ¹⁶ And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

It is not necessary to resign yourself to the darkness that kills.  You may come to the light that gives life.  It is true that the revealing light of Christ burns us as it searches us, but it burns us only to heal us.  It searches us, painfully at times, only so that Christ may reveal to us that which is destroying us.

The light is not meant for our pain, it is meant for our salvation.  In fact, “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (v.12)

There is a two-fold need here:  the need to believe and the need to receive.

Many try to believe without receiving.  “Yes,” they say, “I believe that He is the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But they do not receive Him. They do not say, “I believe He is my Christ, my Savior, my Lord, and I give Him everything.”

There is a legal note sounded here in this proclamation of salvation as well:  “he gave the right to become children of God.”

We speak today of “forensic justification,” or the idea that when you are justified through the blood of Christ there is an affected legal change of status.  You were dead, but now you live.  You were blind, but now you see.  You were lost, but now you are found.  You were guilty, but now you are righteous.  You were in darkness, but now you live in the light of the grace of God.

“And from his fullness,” John writes in verse 16, “we have all received, grace upon grace.”  To which we can only respond, “Hallelujah!  Hallelujah to the lamb that was slain!”

Christ is the light who reveals, who convicts, and who saves.

Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Jungle Book, used to sit as a little boy with his nose pressed to his bedroom window, watching the man walk down the dark street lighting the street lamps.  This enthralled the young boy.  It so enthralled him that he once cried out to his mother, “Momma!  Come watch this man punching holes in the darkness.”

This is what Jesus came to do.  He came to punch holes in the darkness.  But He came to do even more.  He came to overwhelm and abolish and drive out the darkness.  Just as He did in the act of creation, so He does even today.

Step into the light.  Step into Christ.

The light is shining in the darkness.

John 1:1-2

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God.

A few years ago the Associated Press reported that a Manhattan civil court judge had granted a 42-year-old man named Jose Luis Espinal the right to change his name.  This, of course, is not particularly newsworthy in and of itself.  What makes it interesting was that Espinal wanted to change his name to Jesus Christ.

Judge Diane Lebedeff granted Espinal’s request, much, I should point out, to his delight.

His reason for wanting to do so?  I’ll let you hear his words:  “I am the person that is that name,” Espinal said.  “This was not done for any reason other than I am that person. You’re dealing with the real deal.”[1]

Mr. Espinal will simply have to forgive us if (1) we prefer the use of his given name and (2) we are more than skeptical of his claim to be “the real deal.”

When it comes to Jesus, there’s only one “real deal,” and He did not have to petition a judge for the name.  He was given it by God, and He reigns on high forevermore.

In truth, I think we can fairly summarize John’s purpose in writing his gospel as a desire to present “the real deal” to the church.  We’ll look at why John wished to do so in a moment, but, first, let me take a moment and explain why this issue is so very important.

The fact of the matter is that the church rises and falls on its view of Christ.  The question, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15) is the most crucial question the church must answer.  If we get that wrong, we get everything else wrong.  If we answer it well, we do so to the strengthening, edification, and growth of the church.

We may allow ourselves to be unsure of many things, but we dare not be unsure of the identity of Jesus.  John understood this point well, and so he wrote an entire gospel to show how and why Jesus was the real deal.

John’s Purpose

John is not ambiguous in his gospel about why he wrote it.  He spells out why clearly in the last two verses of the next-to-the-last chapter in the book:

“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31)

We see, then, that John’s purpose was two-fold:  (1) to lead the readers of this gospel to belief in Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of God,” and (2) to lead the readers of the gospel to salvation and a new way of living life as through believing on Christ.

John’s purpose, then, is not mere biography.  In truth, none of the gospels are mere biography.  Yet it has been universally recognized that John’s gospel is unique from the first three gospels (the so-called “synoptic gospels”).

John’s gospel, including how he arranged and presented it, has as its goal nothing less than the presentation of “the real deal” to all who will listen and see.  He is not concerned with information for information’s sake.  Instead, he is concerned with life-changing good news that, when embraced, forever changes the life the one who believes.

Why should John’s gospel be studied today?  There are many reasons, but two in particular are noteworthy:

1. John was writing in a religious culture that was very similar to our own.

The late New Testament scholar E. Earle Ellis wrote that, “In many ways John probably would feel more at home in our century than in any since his own day.”[2]  While Ellis wrote this sentiment in 1965, it is nothing but more true today.

John’s world was one of great societal, political, and religious upheaval.  Religiously, the church was in a very similar situation at the end of the first century to the situation in which she finds herself today at the beginning of the twenty-first.

The basic doctrines of the church, particularly the person and nature of Jesus, were being redefined by heretical groups from within the church in the first century.  Particularly, John’s culture had to deal with the threat of two heresies:  Gnosticism and Docetism.  Both of these movements sought to say that Jesus had been misunderstood, that he was really, for instance, a teacher of secret, hidden knowledge, or, in the case of Docetism, that he was not really human, flesh and blood.

The church was also in a great time of conflict with those outside of the faith.  In particular, John’s gospel reveals a growing conflict between the early Chrstians and the Jews.  This is a time when the Christians are being expelled from the synagogues, and tension is rife.

It was also a time when the church was threatened from outside by pagan Greek philosophies and secular ideas.  The gospel was foolishness to the Greeks, and they relished in lampooning the faith.

So it was a time of great uncertainty and of great spiritual danger.  When John wrote, nothing less than the very definition of Christianity and the very identity of Christ was at stake.

And so it is in our world:  the threat of radical Islam and it’s redefinition of Christ, the rise of a new kind of militant atheism that is aggressively telling young Christians that there is no God and that claims the church has spoken a lie about Jesus, the undermining of the reliability of the Bible…all of these realities and more have caused a feeling of unease in the church, a quiet sense among otherwise faithful people that we cannot know who Jesus was and what He meant.

It is to these questions that John directs this gospel.  The gospel of John is a clear trumpet blast of truth in the midst of a time of great uncertainty.

2.We should also study John because John understood the vital connection between right belief and right living.

Right belief is the basis or foundation of right living.  To embrace Jesus and His radical person is to embrace the radical implications of Jesus in one’s life.

This is what is so very frustrating about those who say, “It does not matter what you believe about Jesus so long as you follow Him.”

But it does matter a great deal to me because the identity of the one I am following will dictate how I follow and to what extent I follow.

If, for instance, I think that Jesus is merely good but not divine, I will trust Him up until the point that He asks me to do something that makes no sense to me.  I will, in other words, listen to the sound advice of a man I think is good, but I would not lay down my life for him if I thought he was merely good.

It matters who you think Jesus is, and, to this end, John writes his amazing gospel under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus the Word

At the outset of John’s gospel, he does something most surprising.  He applies a title to Jesus that no other writer applies.  He calls Jesus, “the Word.”  The Greek word for this is “logos.”  Jesus is, “the Logos!”

In doing this, John could not have chosen a more loaded word.  The word “word” had various meanings to different groups at the time in which John wrote.

For instance, the Stoic philosophers believed that the world was governed and held together by a kind of universal spirit or soul, a rational principle that gave meaning and direction to all things.  They called this universal spirit “the word” or “the logos.”

Others see a connection between this word “word” and the Jewish use of the word “wisdom.” For instance, wisdom is personified in Proverbs 1:20-33 as a woman crying aloud.  Furthermore, consider the similarities between John’s description of “the Word” in John 1 and Proverbs’ depiction of the voice of wisdom in Proverbs 8:

²² “The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
²³Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
²⁴When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
²⁵Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
²⁶before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
²⁷When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
²⁸when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
²⁹when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
³⁰then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
³¹ rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man.

³²“And now, O sons, listen to me:
blessed are those who keep my ways.
³³ Hear instruction and be wise,
and do not neglect it.
³⁴ Blessed is the one who listens to me,
watching daily at my gates,
waiting beside my doors.
³⁵For whoever finds me finds life
and obtains favor from the LORD,
³⁶but he who fails to find me injures himself;
all who hate me love death.”

But that is not all.  Others have pointed out that the word “word” was used as a title for God Himself in the Aramaic translations of the Old Testament called “the Targums.”  John Roning has recently argued this case in his The Jewish Targums and John’s Logos Theology:

“This book depends entirely on, and argues for, the view that John’s decision to call Jesus ‘the Word,’ the Logos…was influenced by the Targums, the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, many or most of which were prepared for recitation in the synagogue after the reading of the Hebrew text.  In hundreds of cases in these Targums, where the MT refers to God, the corresponding Targum passage refers to the divine Word.  Considered against this background, calling Jesus ‘the Word’ is a way of identifying him with the God of Israel.”[3]

Clearly the word “word” (logos) meant many things to many people.

This makes verse one all the more significant:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

What was John trying to do?  Which understanding of “word” was he trying to redefine in applying the title to Christ?

Likely, he was thinking of all of these understandings.  In other words, John appears to be aware that the word has many meanings and he seems to be making a general statement about how Christ is the fulfillment of every previous attempt to understand and describe God.

What the Stoics envisioned as the cosmic soul of the universe was nothing less than Christ Himself, for “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17)

What the Old Testament calls the wisdom of God is nothing less than Christ Himself.

When the Targums spoke of God as “the Word” they were really, if unknowingly, speaking of Christ Himself.

Jesus, then, is the fulfillment of all attempts to envision who God is.  He is the fruition and culmination of all titles.  He is “the Word” of God!

In this sense, what John is doing may not be terribly different from what Paul did when he addressed the Athenians in Acts 17:22-23:

“Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

John, likewise, is going to explain the God to whom others were reaching without full knowledge.  John, like Paul, was doing nothing less than showing the world “the real deal.”

Jesus, the God-Man

As staggering as this is, there are even more reasons for awe at the person of Christ.

Imagine with me for a moment that you are a Jewish man or woman or boy or girl.  You have been raised in a faithful Jewish home.  You are familiar with the Hebrew scriptures.  Their words and phrases are ingrained in your thinking.

Were somebody to approach you and say, “In the beginning…”, you would instinctively finish the sentence, “God created the Heavens and the earth.”

These words are as familiar to you, a faithful Jew, as the air you breathe.  You know the language.  You know the order of things.

“In the beginning…God.”

It is the foundational statement of your faith.  It is the very essence of your understanding of reality.

“In the beginning…God.”

Then imagine with me that you come upon a friend of yours who is reading a scroll.  You ask what he is reading.  “Something unusual,” he says.  “Something troubling.”

“Well,” you say, “let me hear it.”

“Ok, listen to this,” your friend replies.  Then he begins to read:  “In the beginning…”

Ah!  But you know these words.  You do not remember a time when you did not know them!  You finish the sentence out loud for your friend:  “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth.”

“That is not unusual,” you say to your friend with a smile.

“No,” he responds.  “Listen to how this reads:  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

“In the beginning was the Word?” you ask.  “Well, I have heard some of the rabbis speak of God as the Word.  That is not the usual way of putting it, but I understand.”

“No, no, no,” your friend continues.  “Listen to this:  And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…”

Imagine how you, a devout Jew, would receive this startling statement.  “The word became…flesh?!”

Do you see what John has done here?  It is quite scandalous on the face of it.  He is applying the Genesis language of creation to Christ Himself.  He is saying that this Jesus is none other than He who created the Heavens and the earth.

He is saying that this Word, this Jesus, is God Himself among us.

The assertion is no less amazing to us today than it would have been to a first-century Jew.  It is a bold assertion of the deity and divinity of Jesus.  It is an assertion that has shaken the world for over two-millennia now.

But, most importantly, it is an assertion that has the potential, if grasped and believed, to change your life utterly and profoundly.  For the Word has not only been spoken, He has been spoken to you and for you.