©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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04-09-06 |
First Words |
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4/9/06 First Words
We are returning to our study of the Gospel of John this morning,
and I want us to return to something we touched on last week
but didn’t do near as much with as we need to.
There are some statements being made by John
throughout this whole first section of this`xc56f+ book
that, if we hear them correctly,
will revolutionize the way we see life.
We’ve seen one of those statements already.
In fact we spent a whole morning on it a few weeks ago.
We saw it in the very first verse.
JOH 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God.
The Word WAS GOD.
Jesus Christ is God in human form.
This man, this Jesus who entered our history 2000 years ago
was not just a prophet.
He wasn’t even just a man dramatically empowered by God.
This man was literally God in a human body.
We hear John telling us this in the first verse of his book,
and then we hear Christ Himself telling us the same thing
repeatedly throughout the Gospel.
This “Christ-being-God” thing
wasn’t just the product of the disciples’ imaginations or wishful thinking.
Though Christ obviously, absolutely limited Himself
to the confines of a human body while He was here,
again and again He told us who He was.
JOH 12:44-45 And Jesus cried out and said, “He who
believes in Me does not believe in Me, but in Him who sent Me. And he who
beholds Me beholds the One who sent Me.”
JOH 10:30 “I and the Father are one.”
JOH 14:7,9 “If you had known Me, you would have known My
Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him... He who has seen Me
has seen the Father...”
And everything He said,
and everything He did,
and His every action toward every person He came in contact with
were the words and the actions of God Himself.
Do you want to know what God is like?
Then open your eyes
and see Jesus Christ.
The implications of that truth
are staggering.
Among other things
John is telling us that every thought we have about God,
every idea we have about who He is,
and how He relates to us,
and what He thinks about us
must be held up next to what we know about the Person of Jesus Christ.
And if we see any difference between what we’re thinking
and what we see in Jesus,
we know we’ve got it wrong.
Perhaps the most powerful single strategy Satan ever uses
in his efforts to defeat us in life
is found in the way he creates in our minds
a distorted concept of God
and then encourages us to try to please or serve or relate to that “God” he has created for us.
I was in a conversation with a young person recently
who was struggling over God’s involvement in his life,
and in the course of our conversation he said that when he thinks about the life God wants for him
it seems like it would be really boring.
I think he pictured himself sitting inside his room reading his Bible
while all of his friends were outside
having fun on snow boards or skateboards.
When he said that
I knew that he, just like the rest of us, had been fed a lie by Satan,
the lie of a God who doesn’t really know us,
or doesn’t really understand what makes life good,
a God whose goal
is probably to make us religious,
to strip us of our identity
and squeeze us into an insipid, hideous religious mold
in which we all dress the same, talk the same, act the same,
and allow the rest of the world to walk all over us.
That is not what God does...ever.
That’s what religion does,
but it’s not what God does
because such ideas are utterly inconsistent
with the kind of value He places on each one of us.
And when John begins his book to us
the first thing he wants us to know
is that we can never correctly understand God
until we see Him in the Person of Jesus Christ.
When you woke up this morning,
though you probably didn’t think about it consciously,
you brought with you into this day
a concept of God - who He is, how He feels about you right now, what He expects from you.
And from the time you opened your eyes
you have been living out your relationship with Him
in response to that concept of Him that is imbedded in your mind.
Let me offer you a question
that may make it a little easier for you to relate to what I’m trying to say here.
If God were to describe you to another person
what would He say about you?
Picture a scene in heaven
in which God
and the Apostle Paul are chatting
and your name comes up in the conversation.
What would God say about you?
Some of you would respond to that question
by saying that it would simply never happen
because it wouldn’t ever even enter His mind to talk about you.
The image of God that you hold in your mind right now
is a God who has far more people
who matter so much more to Him than you do
that it would simply never enter His mind to talk to anyone about you.
And there are others of you here this morning
who, when I ask that question,
find yourself cringing inside
because you believe that the first thing God would talk about if your name came up
is the evil, the corruption that has stained your life.
In fact, the truth is that your moral failures
have been driving your response to God for your entire life.
You know what you have done,
and you know how wrong,
how destructive,
how hideous it was,
and you are convinced
that those failures,
those sins must certainly be the central focal point
of God’s attitude toward you right now
and they form the basis of His actions toward you.
And surely if He were to say anything about you at all
His words would be filled with disgust,
and disappointment,
and profound displeasure.
When we were talking a few weeks ago
about why John wrote this book,
one of the reasons we looked at
came directly from the words of John himself.
JOH 20:30-31 Many other signs therefore Jesus also
performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book;
but these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.
John tells us that his goal in writing
is to give us insights, truths about Jesus,
truths that will enable us to reach out to Him as He really is
and then find in Him
the true life we have always longed for but never dared believe could be ours.
And one of the ways John does that for us
is through focusing almost exclusively
not on Jesus and the masses,
but rather on Jesus and the individuals.
Whereas in the first three Gospels
we have a great deal of attention being given to the big picture,
to the public ministry,
to the parables,
to the miracles,
to Jesus’ presentation of Himself to the Nation as a whole,
in the Gospel of John
we see Jesus in private conversations,
with individuals who came to Him.
And I want to be sure we don’t miss what John is doing,
because it has been carefully designed by him
in order to help each of us
defeat those lies imbedded in our minds by Satan,
those lies designed to keep us from our God,
to keep us from experiencing the real life that can only be found in Him.
And let me see if I can show you what I’m seeing here.
It is in the Gospel of John that we find Jesus’ first private words to Andrew,
and His first private words to Andrew’s brother, Peter,
and His first words to Nathanael.
It’s in John that we are allowed to listen in on a private conversation
between Jesus and a man named Nicodemus who came to Jesus at night,
and to hear another private conversation
between Jesus and a Samaritan woman,
a woman at the bottom of the social ladder,
a woman who’d given herself to so many men so often
that she’d finally given up even the facade of marriage.
It’s also in John that we are allowed to hear Jesus’ private words
to a woman caught in the act of adultery,
a woman flung down in front of Him in horrible, open shame.
Over and over again
John allows us to listen in on God’s conversations
with individual people at critical points in their lives.
And just so that we don’t miss the obvious here,
let me just say that all of these people came into the presence of Christ
exactly the same way you and I do,
drenched in their own sin,
carrying with them the weight of their own past moral failures.
You see,
there simply is no other way to come to Him.
We may be able to create the illusion of piety to the world around us
through our fervent religious facade,
but we know all too well
that any external facade is worthless when we stand before God.
But what I want us to see here
is the difference between what we may expect from God
and what He really seeks to give us.
This is running a little ahead in our study of John,
but just so that we don’t miss what John is doing for us
in all of these private interviews throughout the book,
I want us to see the way Christ began some of those interviews.
I want us to see
how God opened a number of personal conversations
with people who were just exactly like you and me.
We’ll start with His first words to Simon Peter.
We have them recorded for us in John 1:40-42.
One of the two who heard John speak, and followed Him,
was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He found first his own brother Simon, and
said to him, "We have found the Messiah" (which translated means
Christ). He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him, and said, "You are
Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas" (which is translated
Peter - the rock).
Our problem here, of course,
is that we know too much about Peter
for the power of these words to really impact us.
We know Peter’s whole life.
We know who he eventually became
and the remarkable things God did through him in the years ahead.
And it is easy for us to assume
that it was on the basis of what would happen in the future
that Christ spoke these words.
But what we need to remember
is that when these words were spoken
Peter wasn’t Peter,
he was just a stubborn, arrogant, foul-mouthed fisherman.
And of all the things Jesus could have used
to open that conversation
look what he chose -
He chose to look beyond the years of arrogance and stupidity that were to follow,
past the blasphemy-filled public denial and desertion,
past all the past and future failures and disasters,
to the person Peter would one day become through the redemptive work of God -
you will be the ROCK!
I will change your name
You shall no longer be called
Wounded, outcast, lonely or afraid.
I will change your name
Your new name shall be
Confidence, Joyfulness, Overcoming One.
Faithfulness, Friend of God
One Who Seeks My Face.
Ya, well but that’s not fair - that was Peter.
OK, let’s listen in on some of those other conversations.
His opening words to Nathanael
are recorded for us just a few verses later in John 1:47.
This is the same Nathanael who,
just a few minutes prior to his meeting with Jesus
heard that Jesus was from Nazareth and said, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”
And here’s Jesus’ opening words to Him.
JOH 1:47 Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and said of
him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!"
Behold! An honest man!
So what?
Do you think Nathanael was some sort of perfect person?
Do you think his life wasn’t just as filled with blunders,
and failures,
and wrong choices as our lives are?
And yet Jesus begins His friendship with Nathanael
by finding in him that one great quality that was already in place in his life
and then He affirms him at that point.
Ya, but he was going to be one of the 12 disciples.
So that’s not really fair either.
OK, let’s look at some others.
How about that Samaritan woman.
She’s more like some of us, huh?
She had a whole boat load of failures -
five failed marriages, and currently living with another man she didn’t even bother to marry.
How did God open His conversation with her?
JOH 4:7, 9-10 There came a woman of Samaria to draw
water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink." The Samaritan woman
therefore said to Him, "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a
drink since I am a Samaritan woman?" (For Jews have no dealings with
Samaritans.) Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God,
and who it is who says to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and
He would have given you living water."
Jesus began His conversation
with this woman who had long since given up on herself,
this woman who, many years ago lost all respect for herself,
this woman whose defining issue in life
was a desperate search for any man who would toss her the brief illusion of love
in exchange for anything he wanted from her,
Jesus began His conversation
with this person whom we would consider to be
one of the obvious failures in life
by offering to fill that deep emptiness within her soul
with a glorious, raging river of life.
Do you know what I think this woman thought
when Jesus first spoke to her?
I think she probably thought, “Here’s another man whose after something,
and I’ll bet I know what it is.”
After at least six men of her own,
she had a pretty good idea what men were like,
and what they wanted.
And yet the needs inside her were so intense
that she risked responding to Him,
with the hope that maybe with this one
she could at least get as much as she gave.
And for some of you here this morning
that’s not unlike where you’re at
in your own response to God.
Your past experiences have convinced you
that you know all about this God thing, this religious thing.
You’ve been used and abused by the world of religion enough
so that you know it’s a scam,
it’s a game,
it’s a con looking for a mark.
But still there is this hunger inside you,
this aching deep down inside,
this longing for something you can’t even put a name to.
And so here you are this morning,
hoping against hope
that maybe you can get something from this world of religion
that makes it worth the risk of reaching out once again.
Well, there is one thing I can do for you for sure -
I can tell you what’s causing that ache deep inside.
What you’re hungering for
is the love of your Creator.
It’s that “living water” Jesus promised the woman at the well.
And if the image of God that you woke up to this morning
is the image of a God
that you’ve been running from, hiding from for a very long time
because you have feared the words with which He would open the conversation
if you ever stopped long enough to listen to what He had to say,
then the God you’ve been running from
is not the one who really exists.
I know there’s a whole bunch of things
that He could use to open your conversation with Him if He chose to,
things that strike terror in your heart,
just as He could have opened that conversation with the woman at the well
with words of justifiable condemnation.
But He didn’t with her,
and He doesn’t with you,
just as He didn’t with that woman caught in the act of adultery.
You remember her, don’t you.
And here again
we have another one of those one-to-one interviews
that only appear in John’s Gospel.
Are you still afraid of your God?
Maybe you’re a Christian,
but you’ve spent your whole Christian life
hiding from your God
because...well, because He knows,
and what He knows fills you with shame.
Maybe this will help.
JOH 8:3-11 And the scribes and the Pharisees brought a
woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the midst, they said to Him,
"Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in
the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?" And
they were saying this, testing Him, in order that they might have grounds for
accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground.
But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them,
"He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at
her." And again He stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And when they
heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and
He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the midst. And straightening
up, Jesus said to her, "Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn
you?" And she said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said,
"Neither do I condemn you; go your way. From now on sin no more."
Talk about shame!
And look at how Jesus opens His conversation with her.
"Neither do I condemn you; go your way. From now on sin no more."
And my point with all of this
is simply to let you know
that, if the God you woke up to this morning
is one who fills you with a sense of fear or shame,
if he’s a God you’ve been running from, hiding from for a very long time
because He knows,
then the God you’ve been running from
isn’t the God who really exists.
Oh, He does know, of course,
but He does not seek entrance into your life,
into your mind and heart to condemn you.
JOH 3:17 For God did not send the Son into the world to
judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him.
Don’t be afraid.
What you hunger for does exist
and it can and will be found
in the presence of your God.
And here again John lets us hear it directly from the mouth and the heart of our God.
JOH 10:10 “I came that you might have life, and might have it abundantly.”