John
That the Works of God May Be Manifest…
In John 9, the Apostle John continues his mission to demonstrate to us Who Jesus really is by recording the miracle of the healing of the blind man. John opens by telling us that this man was born blind, that it was Jesus who saw him, and he recorded the conversations between the apostles and Jesus concerning the man’s condition.
There was a thought process in Israel during Jesus’ day that if good things happened to you, God was pleased with you. If bad things happened, God was angry with you.
In the case of the blind man, what happened? Was God upset with his parents? Or with a future sin this man would commit.
Jesus answered, “neither,” saying that the man was born blind so that the works of God would be manifest in him.
From this passage, we see that the Lord sees us. We then see how God works in our lives, and we see the timeframe by which God works. For more, check out Pastor Leland Acker’s message posted above.
To Be Set Free
One of the great tragedies of our day is that people are in bondage to sin, yet because of the pleasure of sin, they don’t realize they’re trapped.
Cards on the Table, This is Truth!
The conversation continues between Jesus and the Pharisees in the aftermath of His forgiving the woman who was taken in the act of adultery in John 8. The Pharisees are challenging Jesus’ authority and trying to discredit Him, while Jesus preaches the truth and calls them out on their Spiritual ignorance.
In this message, Pastor Leland Acker warns about the dangers of studying scripture without learning Who God is, and how many high-level Bible scholars spend lifetimes reading and studying scripture without knowing God. Such was the case for the Pharisees.
So, in this passage, Jesus reminded the Pharisees that, like all non-believers, they stand condemned before God. The only escape from this condemnation is through faith in Christ.
Jesus then confirmed His identity and promised blessings to the believers. Listen in as Pastor Leland Acker brings us an encouraging word from this powerful passage.
What is Truth?
Having pardoned the woman taken in adultery, confronting the Pharisees for their own sin and addressing their unbelief, Jesus then turned His attention to the people that believed on Him. In a word of encouragement, He said, “If ye continue in my word, then ye are my disciples indeed. And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
How amazing it must be to know the truth and to be set free by it. It seems simple, yet liberating. Easy, yet hopeful.
Then, questions arise in our souls. Questions like the one that plagued Pilate, “What is truth (John 18:38)?” And, “From what are we being set free?”
To answer these questions, lets travel back in time to the days of Christ. Israel was under Roman occupation, and the people faced oppression, not only from the Roman government and military, but from many of their own people.
From the publicans who enriched themselves by extorting tax money from the people, to the religious leaders who enriched themselves by seizing power through the religious institutions. For the people who followed Jesus, there were few points of hope, save for one… that the Messiah would come and set everything straight.
As Jesus walked the earth, the people had become hopeful. The timing of the arrival of the Messiah was nearing as predicted by the Prophet Daniel. John the Baptist fulfilled scriptures in Isaiah concerning the forerunner to the Christ, and John himself pointed out Jesus as being that Christ.
As Jesus taught and ministered, many of the people came to believe that He was, in fact, the Christ that had been promised to deliver Israel. Those who followed found salvation, love, compassion and deliverance in His words.
The people who were constantly being called upon by their own religious leaders to sacrifice more, to suffer more, and to obey more, were being told by Jesus, “Come unto Me, and I shall give you rest.” And, for a time, they accepted that invitation.
Jesus knew that there would be those who would follow for a while, and leave. Indeed, it is a common thing when one is overcome with the struggles of life to cling to religion, or a religious leader, in order to find some sort of answer or resolution. Often, when that resolution is found, or when hope of a resolution is lost, the follower will fall back to their old ways.
It was that pattern that Jesus spoke to when He said, “If ye continue in my word, then ye are my disciples indeed.” The ones who are truly the followers of Christ are those who continue to follow and trust Him regardless of outcome, who continue with Him until the end.
That level of dedication leads one to know the truth.
What is truth?
Truth is objectively true, and which is true under any consideration. Truth is real regardless of how men may perceive it.
Regarding the Lord, truth is the reality of the Gospel, and the blessing of hope that comes through the Gospel.
Jesus told His followers that if they continued in His word, then they would truly be His disciples. They would know the truth of the Gospel, Who He is, and the truth of God’s grace, and thus they would be freed from the oppression of the religious leaders and the anxieties of living under Roman rule.
For us today, continuing in the word means continually learning the truth of the Gospel from the scriptures. The more we do that, the better we know and understand the Gospel, the more we know the truth, and the more we are set free by the truth.
Being set free by the truth means being freed from fear of God’s judgment, from the questions of whether we’re good enough to get into Heaven, and freed from the fears peddled to us by cable news. We have been set free, because we know the One who holds tomorrow, the One who holds us, and we know that our eternal life and deliverance is in His hand, not ours.
And that is liberating.
Jesus: Light of the World, Destroyer of Darkness
In chapter 8, the Apostle John records the account of the woman taken in adultery, in which Pharisees challenged Jesus by bringing a woman who was allegedly caught in the act of adultery, and demanding that Jesus tell them what her consequence should be.
In that famous passage of scripture, Jesus told the Pharisees that the one without sin could cast the first stone. After they all left, realizing both their own sin and their inability to win this particular debate with Jesus, the Lord asked the woman where her accusers were. When she said no one stood there to condemn her, Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
John 8 is a beautiful account of the sinless perfection of Christ, and His grace and mercy upon us as we struggle with sin.
After this incident, Jesus proclaimed, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
Jesus being the Light of the world is a recurring theme in the book of John, beginning with John 1, in which states that “in Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.”
With that, we are reminded that life with all of its meaning, fulfillment and blessings, comes from Christ. He is the source of life, intellect and creativity. This means that, ultimately, Christ is the source of all that is good in life.
Check out this message, as Pastor Leland Acker discusses how Christ being the Light of the world brings goodness to our lives and gives us deliverance from the darkness of this world.
One Focus, One Mind, One Church
In John 17, Jesus has just observed the Passover meal with His disciples. Having broken the unleavened bread and shared the wine, thus instituting the Lord’s supper, Jesus spent the next few moments preparing the disciples for what would come next. From John 13-16, He prepared His disciples for His arrest, trials, and crucifixion.
As He discussed these things with His disciples, He reminded them of God’s eternal plan through all of it, and how it would all work to their redemption. Still, things weighed heavy on the heart of our Lord, and on the hearts of the disciples.
So, in John 17, Jesus lifted up His prayer to God. In that prayer, He prayed for His own glorification, for the protection of the disciples, and then He brings the prayer to its glorious conclusion in verses 20-26 as He prayed for the unity and glorification of His disciples.
You read that right… the unity, and the glorification of His disciples.
Christ prayed that His disciples would be one, that they would be unified. Since verse 20 shows that Christ not only prayed for His disciples, but also for all future believers, we can conclude that He prayed for our unity as well.
This unity that Christ prayed for was not a generic hope that we would all be able to get along. Unity can only come from being centered around a central idea, theme, ethic or cause. There has to be a basis for unity.
In His prayer, the Lord prayed that we would be one in God. The basis for our unity is the Lord Jesus, and our Heavenly Father. In a broader sense, the basis of our unity would be in what Christ was about to accomplish on the cross.
Unity among believers can only happen if we are centered upon the Gospel. If we lose our focus on the Gospel, we will find ourselves preoccupied with different things, and those different things will divide us. Therefore, we must continually focus and refocus ourselves on the Gospel.
As Alastair Begg once preached, we must preach the Gospel to ourselves daily to prevent ourselves from drifting from the Lord, and placing our trust in ourselves and our own understanding.
Indeed, once we lose focus on the Gospel, we become more focused on the menial things of this world, and such drift more toward selfishness. This is the cause for most church divisions.
Show me a church that is divided over worship style, and I’ll show you a church that has lost its focus on the Gospel. Show me a church divided over carpet color, sanctuary decor, and programs, and I will show you a church that has lost its Gospel.
Show me a church building that has been placed on the market as the congregation it once housed disbanded, and I will show you a church that forgot the reason for its existence.
When we lose the Gospel, we lose unity, we lose purpose, we lose everything.
Jesus prayed that we would be one. That we would be united in will and understanding, that we would hold the same mission. That can only be accomplished through our unified focus on the Gospel.
Jesus then prayed that we would be glorified. Specifically, in His prayer He mentioned that the glory that was given to Him was also given to His disciples. This “glory” is translated from the Greek, Doxa, from which we get the title of the song, Doxology, which means to make renown, or to be well thought of.
Christ not only made His name great in the Earth by completing the Gospel, He lifted up the names of His disciples, too. This was done so that the disciples could turn around and glorify the Lord.
There are aspects to our transformation in the Gospel that make us stand out in this world. The purpose behind our standing out is to direct people to the Gospel.
The purpose of all of this is to effectively proclaim the Gospel and lead others to salvation. Is that a purpose we live by? Or do we get in the way with our earthly and selfish desires? To ensure that we do the former, and not the latter, we must be Gospel-focused.
Transformed by the Word of God (John 17:14-16)
As Jesus prayed in John 17:14, He made a profound statement. He said, “I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”
This statement proclaims how Jesus Christ transformed His disciples by giving them God’s word. Because they were transformed, they were no longer of the world, meaning they no longer held the world’s mindset. Thus, the world hated them.
Now when Jesus said that He gave them God’s word, He didn’t mean that He gave them the scriptures. The disciples had known the scriptures from the time they were children. Starting at the age of five, they would have begun attending school, where they would spend several hours per day memorizing the Old Testament.
The Old Testament scriptures were so familiar to the disciples, that Jesus could say things like, “You have heard it said, (quotes Old Testament scripture),” and the disciples would know the scripture and where to find it. You find the same phenomenon with the Apostle Paul, who would write things like, “As it is written…” before quoting Old Testament scripture, with the expectation that the reader would know the verse.
However, just because one knows what the scripture says does not mean that they know the Word. Often it is that men know the scripture without knowing the heart of God. They know the verses without knowing the God Who inspired them. They know the words without knowing what they actually teach.
Scripture without the Lord is dead. Such was the case for the Pharisees and the Sadducees of Jesus’ day. They knew the entire Old Testament word for word, but they didn’t know God. They didn’t know the Gospel. They didn’t understand God’s master plan, which is our redemption and reconciliation to Him.
Thus, to the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Old Testament became an endless list of proclamations, rules, laws, ceremonies, commandments, and ordinances. Knowing these scriptures meant endless word studies, explorations of word definitions, and debating whether the words actually meant what they said.
This impacted the way the scriptures were taught as the disciples were growing up. So, when Jesus said, “I have given them thy word,” He was saying that He completed the word they knew by giving them the Living Word, Himself.
He accomplished this by speaking past the noise of doctrinal debates by going to the heart of what the scriptures addressed. While the Pharisees and Sadducees quoted the commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” before debating what the definition of “adultery” was, Jesus said, “If you look upon a woman to lust after her, you have committed adultery in your heart.”
In that teaching, Jesus pointed out that the sin in your heart is what separates you from God.
Many people parse words from the scriptures to delude themselves into thinking that they haven’t sinned. They redefine terms, they make excuses or find exceptions. However, when we apply the teachings of Christ to the words of the Law, we find not only are we all sinners, but we still have sin in our hearts.
It’s a sentiment the Apostle Paul knew all too well when He wrote, “But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 24 O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? 25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.”
In Romans 7, Paul related how he struggled with sin, not doing the things he knew he should, while doing the things he knew he shouldn’t. It came to the point that even when he did the right things, he did those things with sin in his heart. It all came to the conclusion of Paul confessing his wretchedness and proclaiming his faith that Christ would redeem him from his brokenness.
Paul had this keen awareness of his broken condition because he not only knew the scriptures, but he knew the God behind the scriptures. Thus, in Galatians 3:24, he wrote that the “law is our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.”
As we continue to hold ourselves up to the light of the scriptures and the sinless perfection of Christ, we continually see our need for his grace and forgiveness. Thus, we find ourselves continually trusting in His forgiveness, and as we do that, we find ourselves being transformed by the scriptures to the point that we become more aligned with the values, character, and mission of Christ.
When that happens, we are no longer of the world, as Christ said. And when we are no longer of the world, we no longer have its values and mindset, it rejects us and we become its enemy.
We should not fear this, however, as Christ went on to pray that God would not take us out of the world, but that He would protect us from the evil one.
Christ wants us to be in the world so we can lead others to salvation. However, He wants us to be protected from being overcome by the world, absorbed by the world, or destroyed by the evil one. Knowing that this was Jesus’ prayer for us, and that the Father answers Jesus’ prayers, this should give us confidence.
So, spend time in the word, get to know the Lord through the word, and let that transform you. Then, boldly carry that word to others.
Jesus Said Goodbye (John 17:11-13)
What if today were your last day on earth?
What if you knew, without doubt, that this was your last day to live. How would you spend your time? How would you live? How would you feel?
As Jesus prayed the High Priestly Prayer of John 17, He knew He was in His final hours. In a short amount of time, He and the disciples would retire to the garden on the Mount of Olives, and He would be arrested, stand trial, and be executed by crucifixion.
For our Lord, this death would actually accomplish His divine plan. Through His betrayal and death, Christ would bear the wrath of God for man’s sin, clear us of our guilt, and rise again, conquering death and winning us eternal life.
You see, God is the master conductor, who can make the symphony sound magnificent regardless of whether the members follow the sheet music. If the woodwinds get off tune, God can adjust the brass section to off-set their error and keep the symphony sounding amazing. If the brass lose time, God can adjust the percussion section.
Moreover, when man rebels against God, God not only corrects the sin and redeems man from the condemnation and destruction that follows, but He also has a way of using man’s misdeeds to further His cause. That’s one reason why Romans 8:28 says that “all things work together for good to them who love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.”
So there Jesus is, in the upper room, with His disciples, having just observed the Passover and the first Communion, praying for them, as He prepared to go to the cross to redeem man from sin.
In His prayer, the Lord mentions that He will be leaving the world and going to the Father, so He prays that the Father will keep the disciples by His name, so that they will be one as Christ and the Father are one.
Jesus prayed that God would keep the disciples through His name. In this, we learn that we are not only saved by the authority of God, we are kept by the authority of God. Therefore, there is no danger of us losing our salvation.
Then, Christ prayed that we would be unified. That unity comes under God’s authority, and it comes from the Gospel. For a more in-depth look at John 17:11-13, see our pastor’s message posted above.
What Repentance Really Means
Facing death is an indescribable experience. We all know we are going to die, but we don’t know when, where, or how. There’s a moment of intensity you experience when all of those questions are answered.
Such was the case for the woman taken in the act of adultery in John 8. Here, she’s been thrown to the ground in front of Jesus, with a small mob of Pharisees accusing her of adultery and quoting Old Testament scripture in calling for her to be stoned to death.
The whole thing was a set-up to discredit Jesus and cause Him to lose followers. They intended on derailing His ministry altogether, but when you fight against the Lord, you lose every time.
John 8 records that Jesus wrote in the dirt, then told them that the one among them who had no sin could cast the first stone. Realizing their own hypocrisy, or maybe in an exercise in hypocrisy at its finest, they left.
Jesus then turned to the woman and said, “Where are your accusers, does no man condemn you?”
“None, my Lord,” she replied.
“Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
As teachers of grace, we often harp on the first part of our Lord’s pardon of the woman, “Neither do I condemn you.” However, the latter part is just as important, “Go, and sin no more.”
However, is it possible to go through life without sinning? Romans 7 teaches us that it is not.
So, did Jesus tell the woman to do the impossible? He did not.
Going back to the original language, Jesus was telling her to leave the lifestyle of sin. And in that, He painted us a perfect picture of repentance.
Repentance does not mean you live the rest of your life perfectly. It does not mean that you go back and make everything right with everyone you’ve ever sinned against. Repentance is more than simple sorrow or regret over sin. The act of repentance carries with it the notion that we are leaving our sinful ways behind.
Jesus instructed the woman to leave her adulterous lifestyle behind. Likewise, scripture commands the drug addict to leave the dealer and the user-buddies behind. The porn-addict is to step away from his computer, and the prideful man is to step away from the spotlight.
In the late 1980s, there was a church in the Dallas area that ministered primarily to Hippies and Rock and Rollers. This church routinely went into the nightclub district to find those who were being swallowed up by the darkness of sin. When they found someone ready to turn their life around and trust the Lord for salvation, they not only congratulated them on their profession of faith with a church invite, they took concrete steps to help that sinner leave the lifestyle they were caught up in.
Drug addicts were found homes away from their influencers. Prostitutes were rescued from their pimps. Homeless people were given food and shelter. They were all given the tools and opportunities they needed to leave the sinful lifestyle. That church didn’t merely preach repentance, they led you to it.
So, with all this in mind, let’s do a little self-assessment. Have we left our sinful lifestyle, habits, choices, and the tools that fuel them behind? Or do we keep them in a side-pocket in case we need them? Have you truly repented?
The Point... 