3/4/07 Faith Pt. 2

Our study of the Gospel of John

brought us to the final few verses of chapter 4 last week.

And it also brought us to an account of a man

who illustrated for us

what it really means for us to have faith

or exercise faith in our relationship with God.

If you were here

you will remember that in those verses

John told us about a man of some significant social prominence,

a man whose son was near death.

And he told us how the man left his dying son in search of Jesus,

how he traveled a full day until he finally found the Master,

and how he then begged Jesus to return with him to heal his son.

Then in John 4:50

we have a truly remarkable statement by Jesus

and just as remarkable a response from the man.

Jesus said to him, "Go your way; your son lives."

And John tells us that, “The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him, and he started off.”

And as we were closing our time together last week

I mentioned that this account

gives us such a clear, simple picture

of a true faith response to God.

At a time of tremendous pain and upheaval in his life he turned to Jesus,

he listened to what Jesus said to him,

and the man then chose to believe what Jesus said and set off immediately for his home.

There are at least two major problems we run into, though,

when it comes to our being able to gain any real value from what we have here.

The first is that, because this account is given to us in THE BIBLE,

we have to fight some major mental battles

before we will allow this fellow to be a real human being.

This goes right back to what we were looking at last week

when I talked about the Bible story mentality we have been handed by our culture.

Because this account is so familiar to many of us

we’ve never honestly allowed ourselves to see it for what it is -

an accurate historical account

of one man’s real interaction with his God.

And the second problem we run into here

is that so often our own concepts of faith

are so confused and muddled

that we simply can’t see how this account

has anything to do with so many of the choices and struggles we face everyday.

So before we move ahead with our study of John

I want to spend a little more time

helping us see how this man’s example

and this whole faith thing fit into our daily lives.

In the course of our 20 something year history together

I have taught on the concept of faith a number of times.

There was even a time in our study of Hebrews

when I spent an entire month teaching on faith.

And yet, each time I return to the topic

and look over what I’ve said in the past

I come away frustrated with my own words

because they never quite seem to say what I want them to say.

So I’m going to try yet again.

And we’re going begin by spending a little time

getting to know the man in this account better.

You see, right now he’s simply not real to us.

Right now he’s just a man who had a sick son

and who ran to Jesus

so that Jesus would heal him.

It makes a great Sunday School story,

but the truth is we feel nothing in common with him.

By that I mean that we have not allowed ourselves to believe

that this man felt the type of things we feel

or faced the kind of battles we face in our relationship with our God.

So let’s begin by backing up a little ways in this man’s life.

You see,

this was not his first contact with Jesus.

We can be certain of that

first because he was obviously anxiously waiting for Jesus’ return to the north,

and second because of where he lived.

JOH 4:46 ...And there was a certain royal official, whose son was sick at Capernaum.

He lived in Capernaum,

and we know that Capernaum was where Jesus began His public ministry,

where He kept a house,

and, in fact, where He kept His home-base for the entire four years prior to His death and resurrection.

Prior to His first public trip to Jerusalem,

Jesus had already become well known around Galilee,

and especially in Capernaum.

This is where He began His public teaching,

and this is where He began to introduce to His listeners

a concept of God unlike anything they’d ever heard before.

The nation was well acquainted with the teaching

of those within the religious mainstream.

It consisted of little more than an ever increasing list of rules and regulations,

defining, expanding, and applying the law of Moses

to the most intricate and obscure areas of daily life.

How many yards could a person travel on a Sabbath day

without it being considered “work” and thus violating the commandment?

Was it necessary to count the exact number of mint leaves from each plant harvested

and tithe exactly one tenth of them,

or was it permissible to simply count the number of whole plants

in order to determine the required tithe?

It was what they knew,

it was what the nation understood

of the God who gave the law.

Then the Prophet John came on the scene

and brought a dramatic contrast.

His simple, clear, powerful call

to personal repentance and submission to God

deeply impacted those who heard him speak.

But when Jesus taught

it was unlike anything anyone had ever experienced before.

He didn’t yell.

He didn’t plead or whine.

He just talked, the way a person would talk with a good friend.

It was impossible for those who heard Him

to listen to Him without feeling as if He was reading their minds.

He knew what they feared.

He knew what they lusted after.

He knew all the things they were clinging to for security.

He didn’t excuse.

He didn’t condemn.

He simply, powerfully pointed them back

to the only source of true freedom, forgiveness, and security—to God himself.

John had called the people to repentance before God.

Jesus then called them to trust in God.

And he did it in a way

that made trust seem like the most natural, logical, reasonable thing a person could ever do.

And nothing has really changed since then.

Whenever the message of Jesus Christ

is correctly presented in our culture today

it will have the same affect on those who are open to Him.

And right here is the great dividing line between religion

and the true message of Jesus Christ.

The goal of religion is obedience.

Each shade of religion offers a slightly different list,

but the goal is always the same - obedience to the list offered.

And then religion uses a variety of tools

with which to move it’s followers toward greater obedience.

It may use social pressure,

it may use the promise of great rewards,

it may use the threat of punishment,

it may use fear, or guilt, or shame.

It may use the assurance of social prominence.

But the goal is always the same -

to bring about greater obedience and compliance to the religious system.

But that is not what Christ seeks to accomplish in our lives,

and it certainly isn’t what true Biblical teaching seeks to accomplish.

Religion seeks to generate obedience,

but the true message of Jesus Christ seeks to generate trust -

our trust in the deep, personal love of our God for us.

Once we get that,

once we begin to know His love for us at some level,

the obedience thing takes care of itself.

It’s not always easy,

but it becomes what our heart longs for most of all.

Until we begin to hear and trust His love for us

it’s all just man-made religion and God-games.

But for that to happen

there is something crucial that must take place within us,

something that, when it happens,

will profoundly alter our perception of God

and our response to Him forever.

And it is this something that we see this royal official in John chapter 4 illustrating for us.

And before we end this morning

I’ll show you what that something is.

So lets get back to our friend from Capernaum.

Jesus’ teaching quickly captivated the entire city,

and I want us to picture him joining that crowd as Jesus taught.

What he was hearing

was unlike anything he’d ever heard before.

Over and over again

he heard Jesus talking about a God he’d never known before,

a God who loved, and cared, and understood.

Then, at one point, Jesus glanced down at His feet

and saw a tiny flower growing there.

He reached down,

cradled it in his hand, and said,

“Do you see this tiny flower?

It doesn’t get up at sunrise and go to work every day.

It doesn’t spin garments for itself.

And yet Solomon at the height of his glory

could not clothe himself like this little flower.

If your heavenly Father dresses this forgotten little plant in such beauty,

don’t you think he knows your needs and cares about you?”

It sounds great, doesn’t it?

It sounds great to us,

and it sounded great to that royal official when he heard it.

But then the meeting ended

and the royal official went home,

and a few days later Jesus traveled south,

and while He was gone something terrible entered this man’s home.

His son got sick,

very, very sick.

At first the man chose to believe his son was simply suffering

from one more childhood illness,

something that would pass in a day or two.

But it didn’t pass.

It just got worse, and worse, and worse

until the boy was delirious in his fever

and the father was paralyzed with helplessness and fear,

knowing his son was near death.

And at that point I believe that man’s first responses to God

were not feelings of faith and trust

in a benevolent Deity who loves him deeply.

I believe every time he looked at his son,

he saw that little boy’s suffering

as the ultimate proof that Jesus had it all wrong.

How in the world

could he take what was happening in his son’s life,

and what was happening in his own life

and reconcile it with a God of love,

a God who cares,

a God who understands?

This Jesus fellow talked a good talk

but what He said simply didn’t square with real life.

Ever been there?

Of course you have.

We all have,

every time some form of evil touches our lives.

In fact, everyone of us came in here this morning

with our own private list of “proofs”

of the absurdity of a God of love.

It’s probably not a dying son as it was with this man,

but it’s some other loss, or emptiness, or turmoil just as great.

Maybe it’s the loss of your own health,

or the health of someone you love.

Maybe it’s some other major setback in life,

something that has happened

that has forced you to realize

that the future you’d so carefully planned out for yourself

will simply never be.

Maybe your “proof” concerns some deep emptiness,

or fear,

or disappointment you struggle with.

Maybe it involves something

that someone has done to you,

or something they failed to do.

The truth is

there is no end to the list of “proofs” we can come up with

in a fallen world,

proofs that we think confirm

that this God of ours simply isn’t nice,

and He’s certainly not nice to us.

The truth is

that’s where we all start in our relationship with God.

And because loss,

and pain,

and suffering,

and disappointments are so much a part of life in a fallen world

we have an endless supply of evidences

that seem to counter the concept of a God who loves us.

Certainly that’s the way it was with this royal official,

and I think it is very likely

that his first response to God

in the face of his son’s sickness was anger -

anger at a God who would allow such a thing to happen to child,

to his child.

But then, somewhere along the way,

this man did something that, to be honest,

even now, after 2000 years of history,

very few people do today.

He did that one thing I mentioned earlier

that must take place within us

before we can begin to enter into a true faith response to God.

He took his eyes off of his mental concept of God

and turned them onto Jesus

and in so doing

he allowed Jesus to redefine his concept of God.

Now how do I know that?

I know that

because of what the man did.

At this, the most critical point in his entire life,

He didn’t go to the priest in Jerusalem.

He didn’t go to his Rabbi.

He didn’t go to the Synagogue.

He went to Jesus.

And somewhere in that process

he let go of his anger,

and his resentment,

and his evidences against the love of God

and chose to believe

that this Jesus was telling him the truth

when He talked about a God who was truly good.

And that right there, my friends,

is the starting place for all true faith.

Faith begins

when we too begin to allow Jesus Christ

to redefine our concept of God.

And do you think we Christians already do that?

Well, maybe we do,

and then again maybe we don’t.

The truth is that reshaping our concept of God

into conformity with the Person of Jesus Christ

is literally a lifetime battlefield for all of us.

You see, even with all of our Christian heritage,

and Christian culture,

and Christian knowledge we possess,

still the truth is that most of our responses to God

look nothing like the disciples’ responses to Jesus.

What they do look like

is a combination of our responses to our human father

and our muddled perceptions of the God we think we see under the Old Testament.

I know I shared this with you last year,

but I’m going to do it again in this context

because I simply don’t know how to express this any better

than I did at that point in The Fisherman

when Peter finally recognized Jesus for who He really was.

You see, the words I put into his mouth at that point

captured what I believe to be the very heart of the most significant struggle we face in our Christian lives,

and certainly the most significant struggle we face

when it comes to our exercising true faith in our relationship with God.

Here’s what I had Peter say...

You don’t understand why this was such a revelation to me, do you? You can’t figure out why, with all his miracles, and all his power, and all his authority, it took me three years to see the truth. Well, you see, it was because . . . because he liked me, and because I liked him. I knew Messiah was coming. I knew Messiah was the hope of our nation, the hope of our world. But who could have guessed that Messiah would be my best friend? Who would have guessed that Messiah would love me and that I would love him? Who could ever have imagined that Messiah would laugh at my stupid jokes, and sit and talk with me for hours about nothing, and clearly delight in my friendship and my presence with him? Messiah was not supposed to like me, and me like him. Messiah was supposed to rule and conquer and judge and command great armies. Messiah was supposed to be absolute power. But no one had expected him to be nice, to be kind, to be gentle. Of course Messiah would care about the nation, but how could I have known he would care about me?

And if you were not one of the few who were there with us in those days, I think you may have to fight this battle from the other way around. For those of us who were there, we found out Jesus was nice and that he cared about us and that he really, truly loved us before we discovered that he was Messiah. You, on the other hand, may have already accepted him as Messiah, but you have not yet allowed yourself to believe that he loves you personally, deeply, eternally. You cannot imagine that he delights in your friendship and cherishes your sense of humor and values his communication with you as much as the communication he shared with King David. If so, then you also have before you a pilgrimage, a bridge to cross. Only, when the Spirit finally leads you to the other side, and the Master asks you, “Who do you say that I am?” your great and glorious breakthrough will not be, “You are Messiah,” it will be, “You are my friend.”

The truth is

there simply is no basis for true faith in our life

apart from our discovery of the love of God for us.

This royal official here in John chapter 4

entered into a true faith response to God

when he let go of his distorted perceptions of God

and allowed Jesus to become his window

through which he could see his God correctly.

And where do we begin in this whole process?

Well, I will tell you that it’s never easy.

Our minds are so filled with lies about our God,

lies that breed mistrust.

But the process has a great starting place.

It begins with us standing at the foot of the cross,

looking up at Him

and hearing Him say, “My child, this is for you,

because it’s the only option I had that would bring us together,

and bringing us together is all that has ever mattered from the very beginning.”

Until we hear that

trying to trust Him is just religious games.

But once we hear it

trusting the other stuff He says to us finally begins to make sense,

one step at a time.

ROM 8:32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?