©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

08-06-06

First Encounters Pt. 1

8/6/06 First Encounters Pt. 1

After our seven week break for our series on relationships

we are going to return to our study of the Gospel of John this morning.

It’s been several months since we’ve been in this study

and the last time we were in it

we ended with John’s remarkable introductory words,

given to us in John 1:14-18 in which he says,

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. ... For of His fulness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

If you were with us during our earlier studies in this book,

you’ll remember that John wrote this Gospel

not in his youth,

not in those years immediately following Christ’s resurrection and departure,

but at the very end of his life,

very likely 50 years or more following Christ’s time on this planet.

And he wrote with the heart and eyes

of a man looking back on those events that altered first his life

and then the lives of many thousands of others along the way.

What he shares with us is accurate

as only a first person account can be,

but it is also selective.

He is not trying to meet an urgent need for facts about this Jesus

as did the writers of the first three Gospels.

He writes with a purpose

and with a perspective that deeply impacts what and how he shares.

I understand that.

In the early 1970's

I spent a year working in the St. Anne’s Valley

just outside of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad in the Carribean.

I’d been on the island twice before,

once for a summer in 1968,

and then again for a year in 1970.

But this third trip came in response to a request

from a missionary family returning to the states for a year of furlough.

They’d made some progress in establishing the beginnings of a church in St. Anne’s,

and they were hoping that I would be willing to come down and hold things together for them

during the time they would be away from the Island.

I loved the Island,

I loved the people,

and I jumped at the chance to go.

In so many ways

that year was a pivotal point

both in my life

and in the lives of a number of my Trinidadian brothers and sisters.

It was during that year

that I made a discovery about myself

that literally transformed the course of my life forever.

When I arrived in St. Anne’s

I found a handful of young believers

who were deeply sincere in their commitment to Christ,

but nearly ignorant of those truths that form the foundation of our walk with Christ.

I knew they needed a Bible teacher,

but all the other missionaries were busy in other areas of the island

and there was no one left for us.

I wasn’t much more than a kid myself at the time.

I had no Bible School training,

no Seminary training.

I could be friends with these precious people,

but I certainly wasn’t qualified for much else.

I remember telling the people we desperately needed a Bible teacher

and even suggesting that the people start praying that God would supply,

but no one showed up,

so in desperation I decided I’d better try to share a few thoughts each week myself

until the real teacher came.

I still remember that first night,

halfway through my thoughts,

suddenly looking at the people in front of me

and realizing that something was happening both in them and in me,

something that appeared to be very good indeed.

And that night I discovered

that at some level God had chosen to equip me to teach His Word.

And I learned something else through that experience as well.

I learned that quite often the first step in our discovering some project that God has for us

is our recognizing a need

and then feeling very strongly that someone else should fill it.

I’ve seen this happen so often in my own life over the years

that I’ve almost gotten use to it.

When I see something that troubles me

and find myself thinking, “Why doesn’t someone do something about that?”,

it sometimes isn’t long before the terrifying thought comes to mind, “Well, you’re someone.”

But the reason I brought this up

is because I know that, if I would have sat down as soon as I returned to the States

and written up a description of that third trip to Trinidad,

what I would have written up then

would have looked very different

from what I would write up now.

Thirty-five years ago

I would have recorded the facts of what happened.

But now I can look back and see their meaning.

More than that,

now as I look back

I can see the active, perfect hand of God in what took place.

I can see what He was doing in my life

and in the lives of my fellow Christians

as He prepared me and them for the things that were to come.

And what we get when we read the Gospel of John

is very much like that.

It is not just John recording the facts.

It is John recording for us the truth behind those facts,

it is John recording for us those things that mattered the most.

Clarity is very important to him.

He tells us the answers to the questions

even before the questions are asked.

We saw this the last time we were in this study

in these verses I just read for us.

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

From the very beginning of this remarkable document

John urgently wants us to know the truth.

This Jesus is the Word,

God’s perfect communication of Himself to us, His creation.

And to see Him

is to see God Himself.

And what we see when we see Him

is not what any of us expect.

What we would expect him to say is that we beheld His glory,

full of fear and trembling.

We expect God on the mountain

with the thunder and lightning surrounding Him.

And to be honest,

for many of us,

even now, on this side of His forgiveness and kindness,

this is what we still expect.

Oh, we don’t really expect the thunder and lightning, of course,

but we do expect a God who draws His lines decisively,

who then demands obedience from His children,

and who scowls in disgust when we fall short.

I was in a conversation with a young man this past week,

and in that conversation

he asked me a truly remarkable question,

a question that in some ways forms the pivotal point

in our entire relationship with our Creator.

He said, “Is it true that our sins can separate us from God?”

From my previous conversations with him

I knew the person I was talking with

was a deeply committed Christian,

growing in his walk with the King.

And here he was

asking me what is perhaps the most crucial question a person can ever ask.

I know, of course, what so much of the religious community around us would say.

And I know why they would say it.

They would say “Yes! Absolutely!”

And they would say it

with the hope that their answer

would help keep this young man from sin.

That’s what religion does.

It looks for some kind of fear or guilt motivation

to try to prod us into improved performance.

But when he asked me that question, “Is it true that our sins can separate us from God?”,

I said, “If it is, then Christ blew it.

He failed in what He came to do.”

He said He came to establish what He calls “a new covenant in His blood”,

an agreement between us and Him

in which He takes all of our sin onto Himself

and then pays the price for all those sins forever

through His death on the cross.

Either the debt really is paid in full forever,

and our sins no longer stand as a barrier between us and Him,

or Christ failed,

His death was not an adequate payment for our sins,

and we have no hope.

But we know ourselves so well.

We know our weaknesses,

we know our failures,

we know our sins,

and because we know them

so often our first expectation of God

is one of judgement, of disgust, of wrath.

And when Paul boldly proclaims that, (ROM 5:1) “Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...),

and when he tells us that, (ROM 8:1) “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...”,

we simply don’t get it.

But when John begins his Good News,

he wants us to know the truth from the very beginning,

and so he tells us what they saw

when they saw God.

...we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Full of grace...

full of grace...

full of grace...

And then, to make sure we understand,

to be sure we heard what he just said,

he says it again,

and then again.

For of His fulness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

And I didn’t mention it the last time we were in this passage,

but I do love the last phrase in that passage.

Have you ever wished

that someone would explain God to you?

What’s He really like?

How does He really feel about you?

What’s He doing on this planet?

Well, that’s part of what Jesus was doing - explaining God to us.

He did it with His words to some degree,

but He did it mostly with His life,

and with His death.

He did it with the very fact that He was here,

and with the way He was here.

When I was writing The Fisherman

and I reached that point in Peter’s life when,

for the first time in history,

a person recognized Jesus for who He really was

and openly acknowledged it,

I used that setting to allow Peter

to put into words the kind of struggle I’ve gone through in my life

in the discovery of who my God is,

the kind of struggle that I think all of us go through at times.

You’ll remember the incident if you’ve read the Gospels.

It took place about three years into Jesus’ time with his men.

They had been watching Him,

listening to Him,

living in His presence for a considerable time.

And then Jesus gathered them together

and asked them, “Who do you think I am?”

And Peter responded, MAT 16:16 "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

And then I put these words into Peter’s mouth.

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.”

You think perhaps I had a head start, beginning with the knowledge of his love as I did. You are wrong. I did not have a head start; I simply had a different start. Having begun with the knowledge of his love, I then had to grow into the knowledge of his deity. You, perhaps, will begin with the knowledge of his deity and then must grow into the knowledge of his love. Both pilgrimages are filled with pitfalls. Neither can be successfully accomplished apart from the leadership of the Spirit. But neither, I think, is easier than the other. And both lead us in the end to the same amazing truth about the same amazing God.

I share that passage with you again this morning

because it is that same truth,

that same pilgrimage that John is trying to lead us through

in this fourth Gospel.

Discovering the absolute goodness of our God

is never easy for any of us.

It is, in fact, the central battle of this life,

a battle in which our enemy skillfully seeks to bombard us

with every possible evidence to the contrary.

And yet, it is only in that discovery

and in choices that then grow out of it’s truth

that our lives find purpose and stability.

And with all of us

the foundation for our discovery of this truth

is always at those times

when we can once again hear and believe the voice of our God.

Does that sound strange to you?

Does it sound like some sort of strange religious experience

where we think we “hear” the voice of God?

If you are relatively new to what it means

to live with God through faith in Christ,

I think maybe I should prepare you for something

that will become very common stuff for you in the years ahead.

And maybe I’d better do this in an organized way

just to make sure it doesn’t get confusing.

Our life with God begins

at that point in our lives

when we recognize our need for a Savior

and we reach out to our God

and choose to believe He’s telling us the truth

when He tells us that Christ was dying for our sins too

when He died on that cross.

Paul says simply,

EPH 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God...

And don’t get all weird with that faith thing.

All that means

is that we choose to believe

that God is telling us the truth

when He tells us Christ paid our sin debt in full.

OK, when we do that

God then responds to that simple act of faith

by literally placing His Spirit within us.

I love the way Paul said it in the first chapter of his letter to the Ephesians.

EPH 1:13-14 In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation-- having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance...

With most of us, I think,

at first we don’t have any clear awareness of what’s happened.

With me, all I knew is that something big had just changed inside me.

This tension between me and my God was gone.

I didn’t know that was the Spirit of God within me.

I just knew something was very different.

Sometimes our first clear awareness of the Spirit within us

comes as a result of changes in our attitudes

that simply cannot be explained any other way.

Last year I shared with you

what has become one of my favorite one-line descriptions of the life of God within us

when I told you about a young Christian

who stopped some destructive behavior patterns

that had been a regular part of his life.

And when I asked him why he stopped

he said, “Well, I just don’t want to do it any more.”

I responded by saying, “And that, my friend, is the result of the Spirit of God inside you.”

And then he looked at me

and said, “Oh dude! It works!!”

That kid’s exclamation

will stay with me for the rest of my life

because it captures the way our spirits respond

to those early discoveries of the work of God’s Spirit within us.

But my point here is simply

that He does indeed place His Spirit within us.

And then, from then on,

one of the many remarkable works of the Spirit in our lives

is the process in which He begins to take the written Word of God, the Bible,

and make it personal to us.

And I’m not just talking about giving us facts

or principles,

I’m talking about a process in which He takes promises that God made to other people,

at other times,

in very different circumstances,

and He hands them to us

as His own personal communication to our lives.

More than thirty years ago, now,

there was a school teacher at a small Christian school here in Soldotna.

She was teaching in the grade school.

She was a good teacher,

and she loved her kids,

but she knew where she was and what she was doing

wasn’t really what her God had for her.

She’d started to make plans to move out of the state when school ended,

but even that was only a direction to head

with no clear goal in mind.

During that year

a young Bible teacher visited her church for just a month.

He’d been invited up to help with the youth work in the church.

When this school teacher met him

something inside her drew her to this young Bible teacher.

But she rejected the thought

because he was only there for a month,

and he would soon leave Alaska with no plans of returning,

and, even more significant, he was engaged to be married that fall.

But then the Spirit of God

brought this school teacher to a promise in Scripture,

and the Spirit gave it to her in a way that she knew

it was somehow linked to this young Bible Teacher.

That promise is recorded in Jeremiah 29:11 where God says,

‘For I know the plans that I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.

She never said a word to anyone about that promise for some considerable time.

She didn’t try to make anything happen.

She certainly didn’t show anything more than the most casual, indifferent interest

in that young Bible teacher.

In fact, it wasn’t until after she and that young teacher were married a year later

that she told him

about that promise God had given her a year earlier.

I know about this

because for the past 30 years

that school teacher has been my wife,

my life partner,

and the best friend I’ll ever have.

And that process of the Spirit of God taking His written Word

and giving it to us as our personal word from Him

is an active, crucial, ongoing part of His involvement in the Christian’s life,

and it is also the essential ingredient

in our discovery of the absolute goodness of our God

and of the intimate, personal nature of His love for us.

When John writes this gospel to us

he’s not just talking with us about something that happened between him and his God,

he’s talking to us

about something that he wants to happen

between each of us and our God as well.

It wasn’t just John who, at the end of his life,

looked back and proclaimed that grace upon grace poured out on him through his Creator.

He wants us to know

that, for everyone of us who turns to Him in simple faith,

when we see Him and our lives correctly,

we will proclaim exactly the same thing.

And when I feel otherwise,

one thing I know for certain.

What I’m seeing

and what I’m feeling

has to some degree

been twisted and tainted by lies from the enemy.

Well, I didn’t even get through my introduction

into our re-entry in to John,

but we’ll pick it up here next week.