the gospel of john: overcoming spiritual...

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Transcript September 27/28, 2014

The Gospel of John: Overcoming Spiritual Paralysis Aaron Brockett | John 4:46-5:15

If you are new with us, if this is your first time to be with us, we are in a message series on the Gospel of John and our philosophy of the preaching ministry is to work out way through “whole book” Bible studies. So it is to take a whole book of the Bible, not to skip around, but to take it chapter by chapter, verse by verse. I am more of a teacher by nature so I want to teach you what the passage says, I want to address some of the complexities and difficulties in the passage, help us all to understand it and then to figure out a way to apply it, not only to our individual lives, but to the life of your family, your Life group, and then the church at large. Then we will intersperse “whole book” Bible studies with more of a thematic study. What is a real life issue that we all struggle with and what does God’s Word have to say about it? Well right now we are in the middle of a “whole book” Bible study. We are studying the Gospel of John. If you have missed any of these messages you can go on our church app or online and you can get caught up on all the messages for free. We are studying through this gospel together. By the time we are done, when we button it all up, it will be about 33 or 34 weekends. But we are dividing it into parts and I am going to take a break a couple of times. I am going to take a break at Christmas and do a Christmas series. At the beginning of the year we are going to do a relationships and marriage series. It has been a while since we have addressed that subject. Last week, I don’t know if you know this or not because I didn’t mention it, but we finished part one of this series. You are just like the rest of the services, all excited about that, I can tell. The title of this whole series is The Gospel of John – God became Man. But part one is face-‐to-‐face with God. So John wants us to know right out of the gate in chapter 1 who Jesus is. He is not just an ordinary guy. He is not just a run-‐of-‐the-‐mill teacher. Jesus is the logos (logic) of God, which means that in the Old Testament God is all mysterious and difficult to understand and sounds a little irritable at times. God doesn’t make full sense until we get Jesus. Jesus is the logic of God. Jesus is from God, He is God, He is the Messiah, and He is man. So John gives us these narrative accounts where Jesus is talking to these people and they slowly come to realize that He is God. Nicodemus didn’t realize it at first. The woman at the well didn’t realize it at first. Jesus flat out says to here, “You are face-‐to-‐face with God.” That is part one. Today, as we are finishing up John 4 and as we launch into chapter 5, it is part two of this series; face to face with life. How many of you would agree with me that life can be painful, disappointing, and difficult at times. How many of you agree with that statement? I am looking around the room to see if there is anybody who did not raise their hands, because if you did not raise your hand I want to know what you are drinking. I want to know what kind of lahlah land you are in because at the very least, whether you agree with everything I say today or not, you’ve got to agree with that. That life can be crushing, it can be difficult and you can get the emotional wind knocked out of you.

The Gospel of John: Overcoming Spiritual Paralysis September 27/28, 2014

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

What John wants us to see is that God, Himself, is not immune from that, that Jesus is God in the flesh and Jesus faced some incredible disappointment, betrayal, and difficulty, Himself. In fact it is in John’s gospel that the shortest verse in the Bible is found. It is only two words. “Jesus wept.” Jesus broke down and He shared our grief. He shared our pain and our suffering. Now one of the things I want you to see, especially as we get into chapter 5. Chapter 5 is a pivot point gospel. There is this growing hostility and it is like this thunderstorm on the horizon that is beginning to brew. It is beginning to build up momentum towards Jesus that will eventually lead to His crucifixion. That is kind of the large story going on as we look at these two narratives here this morning. What I love about John is that he was in no rush to write his gospel. John was likely a teenager when he followed Jesus. He was a teenager when Jesus went to the cross. And if I would have been John, as soon as Jesus ascended into heaven I would be like, “I’ve got to write my gospel right now. I’ve got to tell people about Him.” But John didn’t do that. John waits until he is well into his 80’s before he writes his gospel. He had marinaded in his relationship with Jesus. So what he writes is birthed out of wisdom, it is birthed out of experience, and it is birthed out of compassion. John is writing to a Greek culture that had largely dismissed Jesus. They had chalked it up to foolishness. It mirrors our culture today. So this gospel is perfect for wherever you might be in your belief system. We have been saying the Gospel of John is kind of like a swimming pool. There is a deep end and a shallow end and it is an all swim. We can all get in and find something that will nourish us wherever you might be in your beliefs. As you look at the four gospels they all have a theme. If we were to break it down we can see that Matthew was the gospel of maybe fulfilled prophecy. Matthew 1 begins with this extended, Old Testament genealogy. You are scratching your head saying, “Why would you begin a gospel that way?” but Matthew knew his audience. He knew they would have known those Jewish names and Matthew wants us to see that Jesus is the Old Testament Messiah that has been prophesied. He wants them to see the connections. Mark would be the gospel of events. Mark is real rapid paced. If you have a short attention span, read Mark. Mark is just like, “Give me the facts, man. Just give me the facts.” He just writes them down and just blows right through it. He is a typical guy, alright? Then you’ve got Luke and Luke is the most educated of all of them. He is a physician and he is funded by a wealthy benefactor named Theophilus. Theophilus says, “Here is your expense account. Go travel where you need to travel, go interview who you need to interview. Just give me an orderly account of what Jesus said and did. So Luke would be the gospel of accuracy. If that is true for those three guys, John is the gospel of belief. John wants us to come to believe in Jesus Christ. He wants to show us who He is and why it matters. So the thesis of this gospel is found in John 20:31. John says, “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.” So what John does is he doesn’t just say, “Hey you need to believe,” the end. John actually takes us through these narratives, these stories that help us to see these people and how they travel from skepticism, or unbelief, to belief. He shows us the barriers that commonly exist and how they systematically can come down in our lives.



So John would say to us in John 14, we’ll get to that passage sometime in this series. He would say that “Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life and nobody comes to God the Father except through Him.” So what he is saying very clearly and unapologetically is that Jesus is the only way of our salvation, which is an explosive thing to say in our very tolerant culture. You want to get punched in the jaw? Just say that multiple times in the presence of somebody else. The reason why you might get punched, or at the very least have their eyes roll at you. It sounds like you are saying, “My belief system is superior to yours.” If that is what that means, I don’t blame them for punching you. But that is not what that statement means. John 14, “Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life and nobody comes to the Father except through Him,” is a statement of identity. That Jesus is God in the flesh. Everybody else that taught a belief system, taught a philosophy or a world view, was merely a human teaching a system of beliefs. Jesus is God in the flesh prescribing a prescription for what has gone wrong with humanity. He says, “I’ve come to bridge the gap between broken humanity and a holy God.” In other words, He is the door. That Jesus came to live the life that you and I attempted to live by cannot live. He came to die the death we were supposed to die so that now He removes our filthy rags and clothes us in His righteousness. That is why He is the way. Let me state it this way. Let me just draw your attention in case you have started to glaze over or daydream about the Colts game coming up in an hour and a half. I’ll have you out of here. I want you to think about this. This is going to sound a little odd, especially to “church folk” with an emphasis on the “folk.” To you church folk this is going to sound a little odd but I want this to sink in. Jesus is the only way to God but there are multiple ways to Jesus. There are multiple paths that lead to Him. John wants us to see that there is not a one-‐size-‐fits-‐all recipe. Some of you know this to be true, that in your lives faith came very easy for you. It was not a struggle, it was not difficult, it came quickly and you were able to jump right in and place your belief in Jesus Christ. For others of you, it has been a struggle. Maybe you have taken three steps forward and maybe two and a half steps in your journey towards belief. Maybe there have been some moments when you have felt really, really close and there have been some moments when you have drifted away and it has grown cold again. John just wants us to see, “Stay with it, stay with it. Everybody’s path to Jesus may look a little bit different, but man, stay on the path. Bring your questions, bring your hurts, and bring your baggage to Jesus Christ.” That is the whole thesis of this gospel and it is why we are spending so much time in it as a church. So to set up what we are going to look at today. We are going to begin in John 4:46. If you were here last week you know that Jesus and His disciples were in Judea. They were traveling north to Galilee. They did not go around Samaria, but they we straight up through it. Jesus stops at Sychar and He meets a woman with a reputation at a well and her life dramatically changes. She goes back into town as a missionary and it says in John 4:42 that the people say to Jesus, “We initially believed because her life changed. Now that is not necessarily the case. Now we believe because of your Word.” And Jesus has a really successful couple of days in Sychar because all these people are coming to believe. He does not get that kind of response in Galilee, which, ironically is His home turf. So Jesus goes back up into Galilee. He is from Nazareth. About ten miles north of Nazareth is a place called Cana. This



is where Jesus did His first miracle. He changed the water to wine back in chapter 2. To the north of Cana is a place called Capernaum. That is the setting where we meet a royal official and his sick son. So pick it up with me in John 4:46, “So He came again to Cana in Galilee, where He had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to Him and asked Him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.” So this was not a head cold. This was not a flu. This was a very serious illness. Verse 48, “So Jesus said to him, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’” Now that sounds like kind of an odd thing for Jesus to say to a guy who is hurting, don’t you think? Here is this guy, he has come, and he says, “Jesus, “I’ve got a sick son at home.” And Jesus has a number of ways He could have responded. For starters He could have said, “I am sorry to hear that.” Jesus could have been pastoral in this moment. He could have said, “Tell me more about it. What is he struggling with?” But instead Jesus says, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” It is a little bit of a jab. What we have to understand is that Jesus senses the spiritual indifference in this location and it has miffed Him just a little bit. You see He has done this miracle in Cana, changed water into wine. That is His first miracle and people are still talking about it. People are like, “Jesus came back to Cana, what else is He going to do? What is part two of this show?” They get their popcorn and they get their tickets to the front row. They want to see Jesus do another show like He is some sort of like the Blue Man group in Vegas or something. And Jesus is irritated. That is why He says this. He says, “I guess you are just looking for a sign. You only believe me if I show you some sort of a sign.” “The official said to Him,” but he doesn’t seem to be phased by this, he says in verse 49, “’Sir, come down before my child dies.’” Now John does not specifically identify this guy but he calls him “a royal official,” and the idea that we get is he is some kind of a Jewish official more than likely in Herod’s court, which means that he was very wealthy, that he was powerful. It means that he had a privileged position and the odds are pretty great that he had already been a part of a few private meetings with some of his colleagues, some of the higher-‐ups, that were trying to figure out how to get rid of Jesus. More than likely he had been a part of some discussions, there was an email chain. Hey, Jesus is gaining popularity. What are we going to do about this guy? But his whole perspective changes when his son gets sick. Chances are he had already sent his son to some of the best medical professionals that that time period could offer. None of it has worked. Basically, the doctors have said, “Why don’t you take him home? Why don’t you spend some quality time with your son in the time he has left?” The life had drained from his face, he was not as responsive as he was before, and this guy gets desperate. What this is, understand that Capernaum was about 20-‐25 miles away from Cana. This guy does not send an assistant. This guy does not send a messenger. He goes himself. 25 miles is not a big deal to us because we could hop in a car and be there in about 15 minutes. But on foot, in the First Century, this could take an extended amount of time for him to travel. This is a Hail Mary pass. The guy is desperate



and what I want you to see is if it wasn’t for his dying son, he probably never would have bothered with Jesus. So “Jesus said to him,” in verse 50, “‘Go; your son will live.’” I don’t know about you, but if I were the royal official I would want something more substantial than that. If I were coming to you and my son is sick. Notice what he asked Him and Jesus totally avoided it. He said, “Would you come with me home? Come with me to my son’s bedside. I believe you will heal him but I want you to be present to heal him.” The thing about this guy is that he oftentimes gets a bad rap. In studying the commentators on this guy, some of the commentators love him and some of the commentators dislike him because they are not quite sure what his motivations are. I have to say at least this. The guy does have quite a bit of belief. I think it is because he is in a desperate situation here. Keep in mind Jesus has not healed anybody yet. He has only turned water to wine. This guy says, “You know what? You’ve done that. Maybe you can heal my son but you’ve got to come with me.” Jesus says, “Go, your son will live.” Does that not sound like a blow-‐off to you? I am kind of like, “Come on dude. Can you put something in writing? Can you give me a money back guarantee?” Now we would just probably text our loved ones and say, “Jesus said He is going to live. Can you go in and check on Johnny,” I don’t know if his name is Johnny. I am just assuming that, and some of you are like, “I didn’t see that in the Bible.” Maybe his name is Johnny. “Can you check and see if Johnny is recovering. Can you see if he is doing well, because if not, I am not going to travel the 25 miles back. I am going to stay here and I am going to continue to pester this guy until He heals him.” But notice what it says here. It says, “The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him,” and he not only believed it but he “went on his way.” He took some sort of action here. Why in the world would he do that? Can you imagine how long of a journey that would be home not knowing, not knowing if you son were getting any better or not and by the time he would get back to Capernaum, if he was not recovering, it would be too late for him to turn around and make the 25 mile journey back to Cana to ask Jesus once again. Now here is what I think is going on. This guy got into the presence of Jesus and he felt (could I say it this way?), he felt the weight of His person. I think he gets around Jesus and he thinks, “Man, there is some substance to this dude.” Have you ever been around somebody with an incredible amount of integrity, an incredible amount of character, and an incredible amount of insight, and they make you feel it. Like they make you feel like you are the most important person in the world and you feel safe with them. You don’t know exactly how to articulate it but you would just say, “There is a weightiness to this person.” I think Jesus had that with this guy. I think that is why he believed so easily. This says that “He believed and he went on his way.” So notice what happens here. He comes to Jesus on his terms and Jesus says, “No, we will do this on My terms.” And see what it says in verse 51. “As he was going down,” or as he was going back to Capernaum, “his servants met him.” So the idea here is that the boy was recovering and the servants are like, “Let’s travel to Cana and tell the father that he is doing well.” So they meet about half way or so, “and told him his son was recovering.” Verse 51, “So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday.’” Now does that seem odd to anybody? What this seems to be implying is that the dude got a hotel room



and spent the night and said, “I’ll head back the next day.” Now I don’t know about you but if I am in a desperate situation, I want my son to be healed and Jesus says, “Oh he will live,” I want to rush right home to see if he was doing better. But there is this degree to which he believed Jesus that a peace came over him and he said, “Well, I’ll get a good night’s rest and I’ll travel the next day.” That appears to be what is happening here. “They said to him, ‘Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.’ The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, ‘Your son will live.’” And then it says this. “And he himself believed, and all his household.” Now I don’t know about you but the end of verse 53 is extremely frustrating to me because I am like, “Come on John, can’t you give us any more detail than that?” “And the guy believed and all his household.” John, if you are writing a gospel trying to get people to come to believe, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about this guy’s testimony? John, why don’t you go back and tell us about the conversations he had with his wife and is kids and his neighbors? That would be pretty good baptism video, John. Hey man he came back and Johnny’s color started coming back to his face. Man, we said, “Tell us about this Jesus,” and he taught us about His Word and we were all in. What an incredible testimony. Now have you noticed that this is John’s pattern? That when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus he didn’t really wrap it up, didn’t put a bow on it, didn’t tell us exactly what Nicodemus did with the information. He gave us a little more info with the woman and the well but not a whole lot. And now with the royal official he says, “Yeah he came to believe and so did his household. The end.” Come on John give us some more info. Why do you think John is doing that? I think this is the reason why. John is saying, “Look, these people are precious, these people are important, but they are not the main event.” What has a tendency of happening is that when we hear an incredible testimony the tendency is to focus on that testimony maybe more so than the Christ behind the testimony. John says, “Don’t walk away from here thinking much about the royal official and his family. Think much of the Christ. Think much of Him. I don’t want you distracted by the details of their story here.” It is kind of like sermon illustrations for me. I do a lot of preaching and what a sermon illustration should be is that when I notice some eyes glazing over in the room, I go okay I need to bring you back somehow. I need some smelling salts. So I’ll try to, well a fair amount of illustrations just come to me impromptu, which is always very scary because you don’t exactly know how they are going to go. They could work beautifully or they blow up in your face. It is a great deal of fun. It is like playing Russian roulette. So what ends up happening with sermon illustrations is when I notice that you are drifting, when I notice that I am not getting you anymore, I try to open up a window for there to be some fresh air. It is kind of like drinking from a fire hydrant and I want you to go, “Oh, I get it.” Now here is the doubled-‐edged sword of illustrations. They can hijack the whole sermon if I am not careful. All of the sudden you walk out of here thinking, “Man that illustration was so interesting. That illustrating was so funny. That illustration was so offensive and I am going to email him and he shouldn’t have used that.” That happens from time to time and I appreciate your grace. One of the things as a preacher that I have to repent of all the time is maybe I let that illustration become the main event rather than the principle. This is, I think, what is happening here with these



miracles, with these changed lives, that John is like, “Yes, it is great. Yes, it is fantastic. But listen, they are not the point. Jesus is the point.” John writes this in such a way that you could write your story in. There is a little bit of you in Nicodemus. There is a little bit of me in the woman at the well. There is a little bit of us in the royal official. John says, “Don’t miss the Christ.” So as we go into chapter 5, this is where the brewing hostility is going to begin building towards Jesus and we see why. What we see here in chapter 5 is Jesus showing an incredible amount of compassion and picking a fight at the same time. I love that about Jesus. He is much more than the Mr. Rogers of the First Century. Jesus comes and He picks a fight with the Jewish establishment and He shows compassion and grace. What I want you to see in this is that what happens next is a parable of salvation. It is a real-‐life parable. Chapter 5, starting in verse 1. It says, “After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda.” Now Bethesda means a house of mercy, or house of grace. This pool “has five roofed colonnades.” So it is these roofs that provided some cover from the sunlight around the area of the pool. “In these lay a multitude of invalids – blind, lame, and paralyzed.” Well, if I am teaching this verse, one of the things I might draw your attention to is John is using the word is. He says, “There is in Jerusalem a Sheep Gate and a pool.” What this is signifying is he is writing to a culture of skeptics and he says, “Look.” It’s about 85-‐90 AD when he writes this and he is writing about an event that took place in 28 AD, so this is 60 years later. About 25 years after this Jerusalem was initially destroyed. John says to the Greek culture, “Hey, you know that Sheep Gate and that pool that you walk by? This is where that happened.” He is showing them some history here. And the pool of Bethesda, we have a picture here of what it would have looked like then with the five colonnades. We’ve got a picture of excavated ruins of it. It is sort of like we get this idea that is was a pool built over some sort of a spring or hot springs. My family loves Colorado and every time we go to Colorado we try to venture our way to Glenwood Springs. In Glenwood Springs there is a natural hot spring at the base of a mountain that they built a swimming pool on. It has been there since the early 1900’s and on one side of the pool the water is warm, but it is not as warm as the side closest to the source of the hot springs. If you go to that side of the pool it is almost so hot that you cannot be in it. And this I kind of visualize with the pool of Bethesda. It is a pool built over a spring and there are people with physical ailments who have gathered around the pool and apparently, periodically, the pool would bubble up at the source of the spring and they would get into the water thinking there was something mysterious in the water that might heal them. But more than likely it just felt therapeutic to their hurting bodies. So Jesus walks up to this pool. There are all kinds of hurting people with physical ailments lying around the pool. And He picks out one guy. Look at what it says in verse 5. “One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-‐eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, He said to him, ‘Do you want to be healed?’” Which is an extremely odd question because you would think that would be a no-‐brainer. This guy had been an invalid for thirty-‐eight years. My guess is that he was probably thirty-‐eight years old, about my age. He had been an invalid his whole life and he couldn’t walk.



Jesus walks up to him, now understand Jesus can see into our hearts, He knows what is there. He says to this guy, “Do you want to be healed?” This guy has no clue Who Jesus is. In fact it seems like he only does way late into the game. And Jesus comes up to him and says, “Hey man, do you want to be healed?” It is the same question. This is a parable of salvation and Jesus is searching for us long before you ever look for Him. Now notice the response that this guy gives to Him. It is kind of a weird response. Verse 7, “The sick man answered Him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.’” Now did he answer the question? I don’t know, it seems like a simple yes or no. Do you want to be healed? Yes or no. What he does is he has a little bit of a pity party for himself and he says, “Well, nobody will carry me down into the pool and every time the water bubbles up and I try to get in somebody just butts in front of me.” And Jesus doesn’t even acknowledge the guy’s excuse. Look at what He says. Verse 8, “Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.” Here is what I want you to see. Nowhere did the guy ask for it. Nowhere did Jesus say, “Okay you need to muster up some more faith and then I’ll do this.” Jesus just did it. It is an example of His sovereign grace in this guy’s life. The guy didn’t even know what really hit him before Jesus came. We have a tendency to think that if God is going to move, if He is going to stir in my life, if He is going to bring me to a place of belief, if God is going to heal me, if He is going to change my circumstances, then I better get my act together. I better muster up and bring it to the table and see what He will do. In this instance it is not the faith that brings the healing. It is the healing that brings the faith. Now look at what it says to finish up this passage in verse 9. “Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.’” That is real compassionate. This guy has been lying at the pool every day. He is an invalid for thirty-‐eight years. They would have known who he was and all of the sudden he comes walking up, his legs fully restored. You think they would have at least gone, “Whoa, this is pretty cool!” Instead they are like, “How dare you be healed on the Sabbath, lay back down.” There is no compassion here. Verse 11, this just reveals to us this guy still does not know what happened to him. Verse 11, “But he answered them, ‘The man who healed me,’” he didn’t even know Jesus’ name. “’The man who healed me, that man said to me, “Take up your bed, and walk.”’” He is still kind of making excuses it seems. Well, I didn’t do this, He did it. Go talk to Him. Verse 12, “They asked him, ‘Who is the man who said to you, “Take up your bed and walk?”’ Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place.” That is fascinating. For starters, Jesus could have walked into the pool of Bethesda, blew His lifeguard whistle and said, “Everybody get into the pool. I am going to do a mass healing.” But He does not do that. He only walks up to one guy and He doesn’t do this abracadabra thing. He just says, “Hey get up, take your mat, and walk,” and He disappears into the crowd. It is as if He doesn’t want to draw attention to it. “Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, ‘See, you are well!’” and I would imagine that Jesus put both hands on the man’s shoulders, got this bit smile on his face and “said to him, ‘See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.’” That is not this idea of a checklist of



sins. This is this idea of man I healed your physical body. Now will your spirit be healed? Do you realize what happened? “The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who healed him.” That sets off that controversy that will eventually take Jesus to the cross. So, that is the text. Let me give you four handles of application this morning that I want you to think about and marinade on. This is what I want you to discuss in your Life groups. I want you to do some personal thinking and meditation about these things. Four handles of application, that come right out of the teaching that we just looked at. Here is the first one. Jesus often uses painful circumstances to awaken us to spiritual realities. And we see that with both the royal official and the lame man at the pool of Bethesda. One of the things that I know to be true in this room right now that I look across is that, represented in this room right now this morning is a fair amount of pain, and a fair amount of disappointment, and a fair amount of confusion. We do a pretty good job of hiding it especially at church. I think we are kind of trained to do that. But if I were to pull back the veil and if we were to see everybody’s collective pain that is just in this room, the weight of it would more than likely crush us. I know right now what some of you are dealing with, what you brought in here with you, what has been the running commentary in the back of your mind as you have been listening to me teach is, “What am I going to do?” Some of you, your marriage is beginning crumble and nobody knows it except for you and your spouse. Some of you are sitting in the ashes of a crumbled marriage as we speak. Some of you have a child who is off the rails and you don’t know how to bring them back. Some of you faced some sort of difficulty in your career. Some of you, you had somebody say something to you this last week that punched you in the soul and it has decimated you and you are trying to figure out how to recover from it. Some of you are dealing with depression all alone. Some of you are dealing with addiction. There is pain, disappointment. Some of you are bothered right now and you don’t even know why. There is pain and suffering in this world and ironically I would say that one of the top three most common reasons that I hear from people in their struggles to come to believe and place their faith in Jesus is this issue of pain and suffering. Meaning, if there was a God, why does it exist and why won’t He take it away? It is a very complex issue that you cannot answer with trite, simplistic answers. I’ve studied the issue. I’ve studied the theology of it. I’ve sat under lectures and I’ve tried to learn as much as I could. I’ll tell you that the thing that has taught me more about this particular issue is becoming a father of four kids. One of the struggles of being a dad and I’ve got four kids at home. They are 12, 10, 7, and 2, and a little over 12 years ago when my wife came into the bedroom with a little stick and it said positive and she said, “Surprise! You are going to be a daddy!” When I came to, one of the things I noticed was that she was thinking about the immediate and I was thinking about the long-‐term. She is figuring out what the baby’s room is going to look like and I am thinking about college. She is thinking about what kind of stroller we are going to get and I am thinking about the poor young man who asks my daughter on a date. That is what I am thinking about. I am fast-‐forwarding through all this. The thing that hit me, I’ve never thought about it before but it continues to reoccur is simply this. And this was the struggle I have and some of you can relate to this. Okay, I am going to bring a child into the world. There is nothing I can do to insulate them from pain and suffering. Yet this is like this impulse in



me as a dad to do that. Already, at the ages of 12, 10, 7, and 2, every single one of my kids have already had broken hearts. Every single one of them has come home with tears in their eyes. Every single one of them has had somebody say something to them that has wounded them. And everything within me as a father wants to insulate, wants to protect, wants to keep them from the spirit of brokenness. Here is the thing. I also know, as a dad, I’ve got to have great wisdom to know that if I insulate them from every pain, hurt, and suffering, that I am just going to raise a china doll that will be easily shattered. So I can’t just insulate them from everything. There are moments when I’ve got to have great discernment and wisdom to know how to let out just enough rope for them so they experience enough of that that maybe toughens them up, that causes wisdom. Wisdom doesn’t come easily. It comes when you navigate through pain and suffering. Here is the thing, as a dad there are times when I have to do this and take a step back and say, “That is going to hurt. That is going to hurt right here.” As a father it would deeply grieve my heart if their response to that was to blame me, accuse me, or reject me for that experience. What I want them to do is I want them to lean into me. I want them to know I am right there. So when my daughters are hurt they can bury their heads in my chest and cry and I’ll be there. When my son faces something he and I can go on a walk together and we can discuss it. God will not insulate you from everything, partly because we live in a very broken world, and partly to bring you to this place of spiritual maturity. Now here is the thing. You can reject Him for it if you want. That is your freedom. That is your option. That is a way. The simple thing that I simply ask you is what in the world does that get you? What does it get you to reject Him in the midst? It is well known that a common tenet of atheism is, “There is no God and I am really angry with Him,” and you can reject Him if you want. I would simply say that I would affirm your pain and your suffering. I would not diminish it in any way. I would just simply ask you, “What does it get you at the end of the day?” Or you can lean into Him. What we see from this royal official and this lame man is that Jesus will often not cause. This is not sadistic bait. Watch this; I am going to cause pain and suffering, lean into me. That is not what He does. He will allow it for the purpose of raising our eyes to a spiritual reality. Here is application handle two. Jesus will meet you right where you are struggling to believe. What I want us to see is that these guys have a weak and tepid faith. They do not get it all figured out. They do not come to Jesus with all the answers. In fact, the last guy is totally clueless as to who Jesus is, revealing to us that Jesus is searching for you long before you ever search for Him. Most commonly how people ever come to faith, there are really three ways. We have already said that Jesus is the logic of God. God doesn’t make full sense until we get Jesus. There are three primary ways that people come to place their belief, or their faith, their trust in Jesus Christ. The first would be what I would simply call the weight of His person, meaning have you ever been in the room with a really important person? Have you ever been a room with somebody who is well known, who is deeply respected, and you got up and you talk to them and you are not yourself because you just feel the weightiness of their authority? This is this idea that some of you came to believe because you got into the presence of Christ and you came to believe by the weight of His person, but not all of you. Some of you came to believe by the power of His Word. This is the people in Sychar. This is exposure to God’s Word. This is why we teach through whole books of the Bible and you may not get it after one



week, or two weeks, or six months, or one year but I fully believe a steady diet of God’s expositive Word as it is explained and applied, eventually the power of that will seed itself in your heart and that power of it, the fruit of it, will be belief, but not all of you. For some of you, you need to experience the work of Christ in your life, some sort of what we might call a miraculous event. Here is what a miraculous event is. Have you ever noticed, and we’ll see this through the Gospel of John, when Jesus draws a miracle He doesn’t draw attention to it. He actually tries to diminish it. He’ll actually walk up to somebody and heal them and say, “Hey, will you do me a favor? Don’t talk about this.” I don’t know about you but if I could do that I would say, “Hey could you post that on social media, what I just did to you there?” I would like more people to know about that. Jesus doesn’t do that. Jesus says, “Don’t talk about it,” and He disappears into the crowd. What a miraculous event is, it is the sovereign grace of Christ bumping you up over the barrier that you can’t get over on your own. It is mysterious, I don’t know how it works, it is even a little bit uncomfortable to talk about. But I’ve seen examples of it. A few weeks ago I was at a men’s retreat in Crawfordsville and there were some men that stood up and gave their testimonies. There was one guy, I believe he was in his late 50’s, maybe early 60’s, talking about his conversion as a younger man, I think somewhere in the decade of his 30’s if I am not mistaken. He was talking about how he and his wife, their marriage was on the rocks, things were coming apart at the seams, and he was estranged from his kids. He goes to a bar late one night. He has too much to drink. He goes out, gets on his motorcycle at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, which is not a good combination. He is racing home on his motorcycle and it begins to fish tale on him. He lost control and is thrown off his bike. He says he was on a two lane road, sitting down, he is flat on his bottom with his legs out in front of him, sitting down, sliding down the opposite lane in the road at 65 miles per hour. He looks to the side and sees his motorcycle flipping beside him. He goes, “I maintained my consciousness through the whole thing,” which I am going, “I don’t think I want that. I think I’d want to be knocked out and not remember it.” He says he is sitting there sliding down the road at 65 miles per hour and he is fully conscious and aware. He says it was as if everything slowed down and he started to just thing very clearly. His first thought was, “This isn’t good.” Like he was fully aware that there could be another car coming in the oncoming lane and they wouldn’t see him on time. It was kind of like over a little hill. He said, “I could slide off the road into a fence or into a tree or a pole and that would be the end of me.” And as he is sliding he says, “It was as if he had a divine moment with the Lord.” That is where Christ came and plucked him, if you will. He said what he did was he slid to a stop. He just stopped in the middle of the road. He stands up, brushes himself off. He had a few scrapes and bruises. That was it. He walked away and he said, “At that moment, everything changed.” It was a miraculous even, the grace of God that bumped him up over his hump of belief. Here is the dangerous thing about talking about that. As people we either want to be skeptical of it or explain it away, or we want one of those for ourselves. Not the whole accident thing, but something miraculous. Here is the thing about it. That example is descriptive, not prescriptive. The difference, you see, is that it is not a prescription for salvation.



Well, I guess I’ve got to get into a very bad accident then had this cognitive experience where everything slows down. No, no, no, that is the act of God’s grace in that one individual’s life. Some of you have had that experience and some of you have not. Some of you haven’t needed it and Jesus certainly won’t draw a whole bunch of attention to it because He doesn’t want you to miss the Christ for the miracle. But if you need it, He just might in the goodness of His grace, give you one. The third application handle is Jesus will deconstruct what you think you know. He will deconstruct it. For many of us this is not an issue of trying to come up with saving faith, it is more of an issue of asking or articulating this simple thing. What does my unbelief demand? Have you ever sat down and articulated that, those of you who are struggling to believe? Make a list. What does my unbelief demand? Well, I would believe if I had more proof. That is what that is. I would believe if God would reveal Himself. I would believe if this issue would get resolved. That is what your unbelief demands. I would just simply ask you to make a list, not look for simple, trite answers. Make a list. Keep it in your Bible, keep it on your nightstand, keep it where you will see it on a regular basis, and just simply say this. God that is what my unbelief demands. Let me just give that to You on a daily basis and see what You might do with it. I think you’ll be surprised. It may not come in a day, it may not come in a month, it may not come in a year, but eventually Jesus will deconstruct what you think you know. The fourth application handle is simply this. Jesus offers you and I something we can never achieve on our own. These two real-‐life conversations are parables of salvation. That He comes to these guys and says, “You can’t do anything on your own, it is my power in your life.” One of the things, as long as God gives me breath, as long as God blesses me with the ministry of this church, I will continue to contend for on a regular basis, is to help us understand (I am going to sound like a broken record, and a record is what we used to listen to music on a long time ago; I am going to sound like a broken ipod), I am going to continue to put this before you. There is a difference between the Gospel and religion. That is what is confusing us, that is what some of you are rejecting. I would simply say this. Do you want to know what the difference is between a Christian and a religious person? They look a lot alike but there is a subtle difference. The difference between a Christian and a religious person? They both pray, they both read their Bible, they both have had some sort of conversion experience, they both go to church, they both repent of sin. But the difference between a Christian and a religious person is that a Christian repents of their righteousness because it is flawed and because it will crush you or it will lead to pride. Some of you are giving me a really weird look right now. Don’t feel bad. All three services have. Repent of righteousness? What is the world? You’ve got to understand that our attempts at righteousness may be the very things that are keeping us from Christ. The difference between a Christian and a religious person, you know you’ve got it when you say, “Lord, I not only repent of the bad things I’ve done, I repent of the good things I’ve tried to do thinking that by that I’ll be saved.” That is the difference. Here is what I am going to ask you to do as we close up. I want to ask everybody to close their eyes right now. I know there is somebody in this room that is a lot like me. Whenever a preacher, when I was growing up, would say, “Close your eyes,” I would not. I want to ask you to close your eyes, not because I am telling you to, not because this is some sort of reverent moment, but just out of privacy for the people around you. People need to know that nobody is looking.



Here is what I want you to do. If you are here now and you are struggling to believe but honestly there is something inside of you that would like to believe but there are some barriers. Would you just raise up your hand really quick? You can put it right back down. I believe but I am going to be honest and say there are some barriers to that belief. Just raise up your hand and put it right back down. Now in all three services there were a number of hands that went up and I want you to know that this is a safe place for you to bring your questions, a safe place for you to bring your baggage, a safe place for you to bring your brokenness and Jesus will meet you there. Let me pray for you. Father I come to you and I thank you for every person who raised up their hand and for every person who didn’t have the courage to. Father I pray that you would meet them right where they are at. That you would help them with whatever barrier exists to their full-‐on belief. Some people here, they would say, “You know what? Six months ago I was a lot closer to the Lord than I am now. I’ve taken some steps back and I’ve regressed.” God, I pray that you would meet them right where they are and help them get back over that. I just lift them up to you now. With eyes still closed, here is what I want to ask you to do. One final thing, I want you to think of the name or a face of a person that you want to come to know Jesus Christ sometime within the next year. Or maybe this is a person you need to be burdened for. Maybe this is a spouse, it is a child, it is a co-‐worker. If you can think of a name, if you can think of a face of somebody you want to see come to believe, would you just simply stand to your feet right now? Just as a representative of that person. Man, my heart is burdened for them. I don’t have a spirit of superiority over them. I don’t feel like I’ve got more knowledge than this other person. I just want them to know Christ. If you look around the room, it is okay to open your eyes now you see a fair number in the room are standing. In all three services, this has been this way. As a church, the people that are represented by your stance here, is why we exist: To help lead people to Jesus Christ and help mature them in Him. There is so much confusion in the world right now. There is so much uncertainty around the world. And people need the truth of Jesus Christ in their life. Not so we are proving that we are right and their religion is wrong, but that Jesus is the righteousness that we will never be. What righteousness means is He will make things right. So Father I come to you and I just lift up the people who are represented by this standing room. I pray that you would meet them where they are. I know that for some people, the barrier is their own intellect. For some people, the barrier is a hurt or wound. For some people it is laziness. God, I pray that you would ignite our church on fire. That people would see an authenticity in us because of the person of Jesus Christ. So we give this all to you. It is in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

the gospel of john: overcoming spiritual...

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