Sermons tagged with Salvation

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, my name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here at the early service. As Kyle said, this is the ninth part of our series moving through the book of John. I've been encouraging you every week to grab a reading plan. They're on the information table on the way out in the lobby. We want you reading along, encountering the Savior along with us. We don't want your only perspective on John to be for me and what I say on Sunday morning, but you encounter him with your heart and your intellect as well. This week we arrive at John chapter 17, which I think is one of the most intimate and poignant and important passages in the Bible. It is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. And so I think just if that's all I would say about it, that it's the longest recorded prayer that we have of Jesus, we should want to lean into it and hear it, right? We should want to listen because this is our Savior and he prayed for us. And anytime he prays, we should want to lean in and go, how does he pray? What does he say? Like, I want to do it like he does it. And so we get the longest example that we have in John chapter 17. Before we dive into it, I want to give us a little context and background for when he's praying this and at the end of what he said and why he's praying it. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to John 17. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. And you can turn, it's the fourth book in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, John chapter 17. And we're going to be looking really at the whole chapter, but specifically at verses 20 through 24 this morning. So John 17 comes at the end of what's referred to by scholars as the farewell discourse. So if you've been paying attention in the book of John, we kind of move through the life of Jesus, right? And so the first, he's been ministering now for three years. He's had the disciples for three years, and he's just been moving through ministry and kind of just dropping in at spots and just giving highlights for each year or different things, right? But then time slows down towards the end when Jesus enters into Jerusalem for what we know as Passion Week. And he is in Jerusalem about to be crucified. The wheels have been set in motion for him to be arrested and tried and crucified and then resurrected, which we celebrate on Easter. So all of that stuff has been put in motion and the Gospel of John slows time way down and focuses a big portion of what he writes on just that week, and then a big portion of that week on just the last night that they're together. So they're around eating. They're eating a meal. Jesus looks at Judas, the one who is going to betray him, and he sends him off. He says, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then he's left with just the 11 faithful disciples in this room together, this really intimate moment after three years of laboring together every day. And listen, his relationship with his disciples is the closest thing that we could experience to having a relationship with children or something like that. They spent every day together. When he called them to follow him, it wasn't like, could you follow me Monday through Friday? Actually, we do 410s here, so just Monday through Thursday. It's every day that you wake up and you talk to him. You wake up and you pray with him. You wake up and you do ministry with him, and you encounter the crowds that he encounters, and you watch him walk in faith every day for three years. They're incredibly, they have this incredibly tight and intimate relationship. And when it's just those 11 that are faithful to him because Judas went to betray him, he starts to teach them. And for a long time he teaches them. He starts to teach them in chapter 13. And we looked at this two weeks ago with the new commandment. He says, this new commandment I give you, that you should love one another as I love you. And then from that new commandment, he launches into 14, 15, 16, those three chapters of teaching. It's the most longest teachings that we have from Jesus. If you have a red letter Bible, and most of you do, and you flip through chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, you'll see that they're all read. And this is one night that Jesus is saying all of these things in one room. And so we looked at one of those things last week in John 15, the idea of abiding in him, obeying him, and bearing fruit. And so then he wraps it up with this prayer. And it says at the beginning, when Jesus had spoken these words, so all the previous chapters from 13 until now, when Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted his eyes up to pray, which is just an interesting aside. There's other ways to pray besides bowing our head and closing our eyes. There's just different postures and different types of prayer, just as an aside. Before we look at Jesus' prayer, before we dive into it, I wanted us to kind of think about it a little bit so we can get a sense of what's being revealed here in this prayer. Those of you with children, I want you to imagine that they're adult children. Those of you without kids, just pretend that you have kids. And this is actually great because they've never sassed you and they're exactly what you want them to be. So just live in that moment. But if you have kids, I want you to imagine a situation where you're gonna part ways with them for a long, long time. Several years, probably decades, dozens of years. You're not gonna see them again. And it's gonna be a long time and you know it. And they know it too. And right before you part ways, you say, hey, let me pray for you. Okay? What would you pray? If you're gonna part ways with your kids for decades, not gonna see them again for a long, long time, you knew you were gonna see them again one day, but not for a while, and you said, hey, let me pray for you, what would you pray? It probably wouldn't be frivolous things, right? It probably wouldn't be like the test goes well tomorrow. It probably wouldn't even be that the interview's good. You would pray deep, meaningful things. You would pray long-term things. And whatever you prayed for them in that moment, I would submit to you is indicative of what your heart is for them. Whatever you pray in that moment is really revelatory of what you feel for them and what you want most for them, isn't it? It's going to show you, if I could listen, I would know what's most important to you for them for their life for the next several years, just by listening to your prayer. And so that's what's happening here. Jesus is about to part ways with the disciples. He's told them, I'm going to go prepare a place for you. Where I'm going, you cannot come for a while. We'll meet again, but it's going to be a minute. And Jesus knows that when he moves on from this moment, when he moves on from this week, he's going to see them a little bit. He's going to go to heaven. And then they've got their lives to live. And they've got the church to lead and the church to grow. We don't find out about Jesus. We never hear this story if the disciples don't do what they were trained to do. And he knows what they have ahead of them, that they have decades, that they're all going to die martyrs, deaths, that some of them are going to get married, that some of them are going to have kids. He knows what awaits them. And so he prays for them. And what I want to submit to you is that Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. In the same way, if you were praying for your kids and they were leaving for a long time, you weren't going to see them again, what would you pray for them? That would reveal what you most wanted for your children. This prayer reveals what he most wants for the disciples, and you'll see it reveals what he most wants for us. The thing I find really remarkable about this prayer is that Jesus prays for you. In verse 20, he says this. He's just in the prayer. If you read the whole thing, and I would really encourage you to do that in one go. Read chapter 17 all the way through. He opens up praying about himself, and then he prays for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, in verse 20, he says this, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. Do you know who that is? That's you. If you are a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would say that you are a believer, then Jesus is praying for you here. He's saying, I'm not just praying for the disciples who are here around me, these 11, Father. I'm praying for anyone that comes to faith because of their word, which is everyone ever who has become a Christian. So he's praying for you. And even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which I'm so happy that you're here. Thanks for trusting us with your morning. And I will try to go quickly. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, he prays for you too. So I want to know what he prays, right? What does he think is most important for us? When Jesus prayed for me 2,000 years ago to the Father, what did he pray? What did he pray for you? Well, here's what he prayed. Let's look at it. He prays, there's five verses that he prays for us, but this is really a good summary verse. This is the nuts and bolts of it us? What does he want for us? What does he pray for us? I think the answer to that is Jesus is praying for a twofold unity. Jesus prays for a twofold unity, two types of unity here. The first is unity with the Father. He says, let them be in us as we are together. Let them be one as we are one. And I love the heart of Jesus in this prayer, praying, God, let them experience what we have experienced. I think it kind of works like this. Like when you go out to eat, right? Let's say you go out to eat when there's five other people at the table and you win the order battle. It's a great feeling. Like all the plates come to the table and they set your plate down in front of you and everybody at the table goes, oh, that looks good. Should have gotten that. And like everybody knows you win. Like everybody now likes their dinner a little bit less because yours looks so good. That's a wonderful feeling, right? And if you're a good friend, now some of us are jerks and we go prison yard and like we cover it. We're like, sorry, you'll know for next time. But most of us, because we're really enjoying what we're eating, what do we do? We cut it and we hand it to people, right? You gotta try this and we put it on their plate or we pester people or like our grandmas when they love something a lot, they just force feed it to us. Like, if you say no to this, I'm just gonna put it directly in your mouth because they want you to try this because we want people to share in good experiences with us. Oh my gosh, this is so good. You have to taste this, right? That's why when we see something funny, when we hear something funny, Kyle lately, our student pastor, there's a comedian on Netflix named Nate Bergazzi. He is like an evangelist for this guy. He loves him and he's hilarious. And so he's telling everybody about him because Kyle likes laughing and he wants you to laugh too, right? He wants you to share in that experience. This is what we do. And this is what Jesus is doing. Jesus is saying, God, let them experience just a taste of what you and I have. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this. We're gonna deep dive in philosophy a little bit. God exists as a triune God. I don't have time to explain it this morning, which is good because I can't. It's just kind of one of these mysteries of the faith that we believe in a trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And they existed before time in eternity as a perfect unit, in perfect love and a perfect relationship, perfectly affirming, perfectly identifying, perfectly loving, perfectly accepting, never experiencing shame, never experiencing loneliness, never experiencing a lack of self-worth or a lack of identity or any sort of anxiety. They loved one another perfectly and they are perfect. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the most loving thing for a perfect being to do is to make other beings so that they can experience his perfection. Does that make sense? So God created man so that we could get a taste of the relationship that he experiences God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. He created us for the sole purpose of allowing us to experience relationship with him. He didn't do it because they needed it. It's not like God the Father and God the Son were looking at each other in heaven going, man, I am lonely. You know who would fix this? Tom Sartorius. That'd make it great. That's what we need. We need more Tom. This place would be great. That's not what he said. I want some company. I want a different perspective. Let's make people. That's not what they did. They said, this is so perfect that the best possible thing to do is to create people to experience in this relationship with us. The whole point of creation, the whole point of humans existing, is so that one day we can be reunited with God and experience the relationship that he designed us for. It's what our souls yearn for. It's what every bit of clawing for happiness is clawing towards. It's back to that relationship that the Father created just so that we could be intimate and united with him. It's the unity that Jesus is praying for here. And Jesus is saying, this is so good, Father, what we have. This is so good and so right and so affirming. Let them experience it too. Let them be in us as we are in one another. Let them experience a all-affirming love, a love that covers over shame, a love that erases anxiety, a love that imbues us with purpose, a love that assigns us an identity. Let them experience that, God. Bring them to oneness with you is what he's praying for. So it's a good, heartfelt prayer. And then he says, let them be one as you and I are one. So the second type of unity he prays for is unity with one another. He prays for unity with one another, right? He prays that you and I would be one, that all Christians would be one and would be unified. And at first, at first it seems like he's trying to almost pray away like denominations in the church. Like he doesn't want us to be Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics and all that stuff. He doesn't want that. He wants us to be one homogenous, like-minded group that agrees on everything. At first, it seems like the prayer is somewhat ineffectual. If you prayed that 2,000 years ago, let them all be one. And then the church launches from that and becomes incredibly diverse. Like I have to drive, when I drive home, I live really close. I live like five minutes away. I live one song away. That's how far I live with no traffic. That's what I know. I get one song on the way to and from work. I pass three churches at least. I guarantee there are things in each of those churches that I wouldn't agree with. I guarantee they would come here and they would not agree with some things. I mean, they'd be wrong, but they wouldn't agree, right? And so it makes me wonder, like, is God, is that prayer that ineffectual? Are we so far off the mark that we're not unified in that way? But as I thought about the unity that Jesus is praying for, I think that that unity is really exemplified in Kyle and Steve. Kyle's our student pastor and Steve is our worship pastor. And they're buddies. They're genuine buddies. As if we needed proof of this, every Wednesday staff goes out for staff lunch. Don't worry, we pay for that ourselves. We don't charge it to the church. We go out for staff lunch and we rotate who gets to pick. When it's your week, you get to pick the restaurant. And so this week, we ate at Pieology over there in North Hills. It will shock you to know that our student pastor chose a pizza place. And so we go there and Steve and Kyle ordered separately. They didn't talk to each other about what they were gonna order, but they both ordered a buffalo chicken pizza, right? And so they sit down and Kyle leans over and he jokingly says, look at us, we're buffalo bros, which is just a dumb joke, which makes it funny. So now they're buffalo bros, right? Like that's the thing. And they really are buddies. Every now and again on Mondays, they go out to eat together. Then when they don't have any plans, they just go eat together and they talk and they hang out. A lot of times when I'm trying to do actual work, they sit in Kyle's office and they distract me by talking to one another. But they're like friends. And it amazes me that they are because they are very different people. Kyle's 25. He's single. He goes out late. He plays Ultimate Frisbee and is good at Fortnite. That's Kyle, right? Steve's 43. I mean, we just started working on a 401K for him. He's so near the end of his career. He's in a different season of life. He's got a kid. He's building a house. Steve's Jewish and grew up in Boston for a little bit, a single mom, and then a stepdad going to Hebrew school. Kyle grew up in the south in a quaint suburb of Atlanta with a dad who worked at a Southern Baptist church with parents who are still together. It's totally different existences. Steve's gone through the loss of a parent. Kyle has both of his parents. Kyle was an athlete in high school, played a ton of sports. Steve's a musician. They don't have those things in common. I think Steve played basketball a couple of times. I question that. Totally different. Kyle doesn't have musical skills. Their interests are different. Kyle recommended Nate Bergazzi to Steve. Steve didn't like him. Kyle took it personal. There is no reason that they should be friends. But they work on the same staff and they're unified by the same goal. They both live to see people get connected to Jesus. They both live to see people experience the unity with God that they have. They both live for the purpose of the gospel. So whether or not they agree on everything, whether or not they're similar in every way, the unifying power of the gospel and the purpose of that has brought them together because it's what they both care most deeply about is seeing themselves walk with Jesus and seeing you walk with Jesus. And so they've leveraged everything in their life around those goals. And so it unites us. This week, I had a guy from South Africa come up. I met him once for a week, six years ago. He's an African-American guy from South Africa who grew up in Ocean View, in the shantytowns there, in extreme poverty, totally different life experience with me. I've only spent a week with him. When he got here on Thursday, he got out of the car and gave me a hug and called me brother. What else but the gospel unifies people in that way? So I do not think that when Jesus is praying here, he's praying that we would be a homogenous group that agrees on everything all the time. I think that he is praying that we would be unified in our goal and in our heart to reach people with the power of the gospel. I think he is praying that we would be brought together by what means most to us. And on a church level, this means that we're not against other churches. This means that we support other churches. This means it doesn't matter if we agree with them on everything. What we agree with them on, the most important thing is they're trying to bring people into the kingdom and we're trying to bring people into the kingdom. People have asked me a bunch of times, Summit's building a big, huge building right around the corner. They're saying, you know, Summit's building this huge building. Are you worried about that? No, no. He's a better pastor than me anyways. Moving closer isn't going to prove it. He's already a better speaker than me. What's it matter? We're all building the kingdom. Who cares? Who cares where anybody goes to church? Just go where you're getting closer to the Father, where you have community. We're all on the same team. That's the unity that I think that Jesus is praying for. And he prays this, and you can see it in the kind of unity that he's praying for. He's praying this. He says at the end, look, at the end of 21, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, and me, and I in you, that they also may be in us so that, listen, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I don't know if you've been paying attention in this series, but if you have, you will notice that this is why Jesus does everything. This is like, this prayer sums up the whole gospel of John. It sums up all of his teaching. It sums up everything. This idea, he wants us to be experienced unity with the Father, that all-fulfilling love of the Father, unity with one another in purpose, and the purpose is so that other people might believe in Jesus. It's what he says over and over and over again. In the very first week of the series, we said that the fundamental questions in life are, was Jesus real, and do I believe that he was who he says he was? And if we answer yes to those two questions, everything has to change. And Jesus keeps bringing us back himself to that question, do you believe in me? The way the gospel starts, John starts, Jesus is God. In the beginning was the Word, Word was with God, Word was God. Without him, nothing was made through him, all things were made. He sets him up as God, and we have to ask the question, do we believe that? The very first miracle that he does, turning water into wine. His mom says, hey, you should do that thing where you turn the water into wine. And Jesus says, it's not yet my time, woman, which is a really interesting verse to have in the Bible. But then he decides that he's going to do it anyways. Why does he do this miracle? Well, at the end, he tells us it's so that the disciples would believe that he was who he says he was. His motivation for the miracle was so that others would believe. We fast forward to maybe his greatest miracle in John 11 when he resurrects Lazarus from the dead. His best friend. He was told two days before his best friend died, hey, Lazarus is sick. You should come heal him. And he stays put for two days and lets his best friend die. And his two sisters, Lazarus' two sisters, Mary and Martha, he watches them get disappointed in such a deep way that when he meets back up with Mary, he weeps with her. He let them die. He let them hurt so he could resurrect them from the dead. And when he comes out, there's a prayer at the end of John 11, and he lifts his eyes up to God, and he says, God, I know. Father, I knew that you would do this, but I'm saying this now so that they might believe, you're following me for the wrong reasons. And they say, what are the right reasons? He says, you're laboring for temporary things. You should labor for eternal things. And they said, how do we do that? What do you tell them? Believe in the one that the Father has sent. Believe in me. Over and over and over again, believe in me. The new commandment that he gives in John 13, love one another as I have loved you. Why? So that others might believe in me. And then here in this prayer, God, I pray all these things for myself. I pray all these things for the disciples. I pray all these things for the church that will grow from the disciples. And I pray that that church will be unified with you and unified with one another. Why? So that they might believe in me. All through the Bible. All through the book of John. This is what Jesus cares about most. And then he prays this peculiar prayer. It's almost vain when we read it. It really kind of took me a minute to figure out why is Jesus praying this at the end of that. Verse 24, Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me, that's the church, may be through their word would see me in my glory, would see me as I am. Say, Father, they've only seen me as this weak and frail human. I pray that they would see me as God, that they would see me as divine, that they would see Jesus in his heavenly state in Revelation. Two or three different glimpses of him, and it's really magnificent. But why is Jesus praying this here? Let them see me as I really am. And as I thought about that, I realized something. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with the Father, what he prays for us? In heaven. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with one another? In heaven. Do you know what Jesus prays over and over again for the disciples in this passage? That God would preserve them. Preserve them for what? Heaven. Do you know where if other people believe because of our unity, because of our love, and because of his miracles, do you know where they go? Heaven. If we're going to ever see Jesus in his glory, do you know where we see him in his glory? Heaven. And so I really believe that what Jesus is praying here can be summed up like this. Father, let them experience heaven. That's what he's praying. If you read through everything here, if you read through John 17 and you want to know what's the heart of Jesus, what's he praying for us, what matters most to him, what he's praying is, Father, let them experience heaven. Let them experience eternity. What he's saying is if there is a perfect God who chose to create us so that we might share in an eternal relationship with him, what he's praying is, Father, bring about the whole purpose of all of creation. Let's go ahead and finish the job that we started all those years ago. Let's bring about the entire purpose why we're here and what we did to bring them to heaven with us that they might experience eternity and a perfect relationship with us and in a perfect relationship with one another. And if you read back through John through this lens, it amazed me as I looked at it this week, you will see that almost the only thing Jesus ever really cares about, it is guiding everything he says, all the miracles that he does, all the teachings that he offers, all the conversations that he has, all the places that he goes, and all of his timing. His primary and sometimes sole motivation is that you would be in heaven with him for eternity. That's his whole life. What matters most to Jesus? That you would be in heaven with him. What does Jesus care about more than anything else? That you would be in heaven with him. Why did Jesus teach all those people all the time? Why did he do all the miracles? Why did he train the disciples? Why did he pray for them? Why did he die on the cross? Why did he live his entire life? Why did he come here? So that you might be reconciled to him and spend eternity in heaven with him and with the Father and with the Spirit and with one another. It's all Jesus cares about is that you would one day go to heaven. And if that's what Jesus cares about most, just eternity, it makes me wonder, do we care about it as much as him? Or are we caught up in the temporary? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of life and death. If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of our friends. We would have a lot different view of our children and of our loved ones. If we cared about heaven for other people as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of people who cut us off in traffic. We would have a lot different view of the person who checks out too many items in the self-checkout aisle in Harris Teeter. Right? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, if we were singularly focused on eternity as Jesus was on eternity, it would change our prayers. It would change our relationships. It would change our interaction. It would change our priorities. It would change everything. And what I see as I go through John is that this prayer is a capstone on all the teachings of Jesus throughout the whole book. And do you know what he really wants for you? Do you know what screams to me out of the book of John? Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. It's the whole reason he created you. It's the whole reason he came here. It's the whole reason he died. It's the whole reason he hung around for three years. It's the only reason that he doesn't snatch you to heaven the exact moment that you accept him because he wants you to be about the business of bringing other people with you. The only reason we are here is to go to heaven and bring as many people as we possibly can with us on the way. And when we believe that, and I'll be the first to confess that I don't all the time do, it changes everything. To me, that's the message from John, that Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. He wants it so badly that he's willing to experience the death of crucifixion to do it. And that's what we're gonna talk about next week. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for your love. Grateful for your son. The way that he ministered to us and for us. The way that he fights for us. The way that his singular focus is to bring us into a relationship with you and him and the spirit that we might experience heaven, that we might experience eternity with him and with you. God, give us an ounce of the concern that Jesus has for the eternity. Give us a glimpse of what it's like to be eternally focused like he was. Give us an appreciation for the beauty of eternity with you. Give us an understanding that we really were designed to be with you and that we will only find purpose and identity and happiness and contentment when we are walking in the middle of your will and we are walking towards heaven. Give us a heart to bring as many people possible with us as we can. God, thanks for loving us in that way. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. How you doing? A couple of things. My name's Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I love seeing everybody here for the second service. There's a lot of space at the first service, so feel free. And in case you're wondering, does God smile more when you come to the early service? He does. He's smiling a little bit now, but man, the grin on his face when you get up that much earlier is really something special. The Lord moves in that first service. The other thing I want to mention is this. I'm super excited about this. It may not be the case. You never know what's going to happen for the rest of the tournament. But for now, Jen, my wife, is beating all of us in the churchwide bracket challenge, which is a pretty big deal. If you know Scott Hunter, he's in dead last, and that's fun too. All right, we're in the eighth part of our series in John, and I really enjoy getting to move through the book of John with you. This morning, we arrive at what I think is a critical seminal teaching of Jesus in this book. And to help us think about it, I want us to go back to that first day of a class that we took in college, okay? If you didn't have the experience of doing that or you haven't had it yet, you're not missing much. It's overrated. But for those that had to do it, there's this common experience on the first day of class in college. And I'm talking about back before the internet was a thing, when us old people went to college. It's not often that I get to lump myself in with the old people, but this week I do. This was before we had the Internet. You didn't know what to expect in your class, right? And so you'd go on that first day. You're taking whatever it is you're taking, Philosophy 101 or English 101 or whatever it is, and you don't know what to expect. It's the great unknown. What's this professor going to be like? What are my assignments going to be? How do I achieve success in this class? We all bring a different set of goals to the class. I mean, some of y'all are nerds, and you wanted to get an A, and so you thought, like, what am I going to have to do? And I don't mean that really. I wish I would have cared more about getting good grades. But some of you guys really cared about your grades, and so you're thinking, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? I just want to know the work that I'm going to have to do. For me, my academic goals were literally just, what do I have to do so that my parents aren't furious at me at the end of the semester? They were helping out with college, so what do I have to do to keep the gravy train rolling? That's the amount of effort I'd like to give to right? And there are some of you, you got there and you flipped to the back and you look at the assignments and you went, I will never step foot in this class again, right? Because there's too much work there. That's what we did. You get to class. For those that don't have the experience, you get to class. The professor gives you the syllabus. You grab it. And then at the top of the syllabus, you always read this thing. It says that the successful student will be proficient in yada, yada, yada, right? Or the successful student will be proficient in these things. And so you're like, okay, well, this is the goal of the class. This is what it looks like to be successful in this class. Now I know this, but then what are you really interested in? You're really interested in the assignments. What am I going to have to do to achieve the success? And then in the syllabus, you'll remember he or she would have like the philosophy of the class and their philosophy of teaching and all the goals and all the different things. You went, yeah, I don't care about that. You flip to the back of it, and that's where they had the assignment load. And you wanted to see how many tests, how long is the paper going to have to be, right? What am I going to have to do in this class to pass? And that's when some of us went, I don't think I'm coming back to this place because it was just too much work. But we've had that experience. And to me, regardless of what kind of student you were, whether you're a straight A student or you're a slacker like me, you would go to that class with a set of goals. I want to accomplish this in the class. And then you would love the syllabus because that would bring, that would make the unknown known. It would tell you, this is what's expected of me here. This is how they're defining success, and these are the things that I have to do to be successful. And we like this mindset. We have this mindset about a lot of the things that we do. We all, all of us, if we're old enough, have jobs, or we've had a job before. You get to that job, and what do they do? They give you a job description, and at the top of the job description, it says, this is what this position is for. This position will do this and this and this and this. And then there's objectives underneath that. This is how those things are going to be accomplished. This employee will do this thing and this thing and this thing. We like having a very clearly defined version of success, and we like having clear steps to achieve that success, don't we? And we often apply this to our faith. In every Bible study that I've ever been in, I've been in church my whole life. I've been doing ministry for about 20, I went pro in my Christianity about 20 years ago. And in every Bible study that I've ever been in, and a lot of conversations with with my friends and a lot of different small groups, this idea gets presented. And it happened again a couple of weeks ago in the young person small group that my wife and I are leading now. One of the girls said, wouldn't it be nice if there was like a to-do list for our faith? If there were just some clearly defined parameters in the Bible so that we know what to do and when to do it. Wouldn't it be nice if we kind of had a syllabus or a job description for our faith? And this is a commonly expressed desire because the Bible can be very confusing and it can be very intimidating and there's a lot in there to learn. And there are some churches, and then Christianity in and of itself, there's some churches that think this way about an issue, this issue is terrible and it's wrong and you should never do it. And then there's churches over here who are like, no, that's actually pretty okay and we encourage it and we think that you should do it. And there's churches all over the spectrum and there's different ways to interpret the scripture. There's tons of different denominations. And sometimes it's really difficult to figure out, man, what is it that I'm supposed to do? And if you're a new believer or a non-believer, I think a very natural thing to think is, I'm considering this faith, what is it going to require of me? Or, I'm a Christian now, I'd like to be a good one, what does that mean? Is there a to-do list? Is there just something simple where I can know what to do? How is success defined? And how do I achieve that success? Which is why I think John 15 is such a great passage, because I think that Jesus gives us our course syllabus for Christianity. So a little bit different this morning is your notes on the back of the bulletin that you received, you have notes on the back of that. The back of that is actually a course syllabus for Christianity 101. So if you don't have the notes, I'd like you to slip up your hand and the ushers will try to get one to you. Is there anybody that needs one? Some of the ushers have some and they're going to go around making sure folks have those. This is Christianity 101, okay? This is your course syllabus for this morning. You'll notice on it, I am your professor, Professor Rector. I do that. I'm not going to get the chance to do that probably ever again in my life, except for when I pretend at church. So I'm your professor this morning. Class is in session. We're going to take a lot more notes than we normally do. I would encourage you to get out a pen. There's one more, a couple more over here. Just send the whole pile down. I encourage you to get out a pen and write along with me, okay? If you don't have any now, we're out. So you're just going to have to go old school and cheat with your neighbor, okay? You have to look on to theirs. I believe, one more, she's auctioning it off. She's auctioning it off. I believe that Jesus gives us our core syllabus for Christianity in John chapter 15. I'm going to read the first five verses, and then we're going to talk about why I think this is true. If you have a Bible, you can open to it. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But this is what Jesus says. He says, That's important. We're going to come back to that later. Verse 5, this is the clincher. All right, so this week we arrive at one of these great I am statements that Jesus makes. In the other Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have the parables. You're probably familiar with them. They're made-up stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. And in John, we don't have any of those parables. What we see is Jesus making these I am statements. I'm the bread of life. I'm the living water. I'm the way, the truth, and the life. I am the good shepherd. And now this week, he says, I am the vine, and you are the branches. And this is said to an agrarian society that understood what it was to grow grapes and try to make wine from these grapes. It was part of that culture. They were very familiar with this terminology, and that's what he's talking about. I am the vine, you are the branches, you're going to grow grapes. Connect to me and you will bear much fruit. And so in our terminology and way of thinking of it, it makes more sense to say that I am the tree trunk and you are the branches. But what he's saying is, I'm the source of life, I'm the source of joy, and you are attached to me. And when you abide in me, when you are attached to me and you remain attached to me, you will bear much fruit. All right, that's what he's saying in this verse. And so in verse 5, when he says, I am the vine, you are the branches, abide in me, and I in you, and you will bear much fruit, that really is a packed statement. There's a lot of questions that come out of that statement. For me, the first thing that I see is what does it mean to bear fruit, and why is he talking about that? And I think that that helps set us up for the goal of the course. So at the top of the syllabus you have the student will be proficient in these things. So if we're thinking about Christianity as a course, we're trying to figure out what it is we need to do, then what we need to know is that the course goal is that the successful student or Christian will show proficiency in bearing fruit. Okay, if you're a believer and you want to know if you're successful, if you're thinking about becoming a Christian and you want to know what's going to be expected of me. If you're a new believer and you want to go, okay, well now what do I have to do? The successful student or Christian, the person who is successful in Christianity will be proficient in bearing fruit. And I say that because this seems to be the goal of the passage. Jesus says, abide in me, get attached to me, remain attached to me, and you will bear fruit. Do this, follow my commandments, obey me, love me. Why? So that you can bear fruit. It seems to be that the point of the Christian life, the reason that Jesus leaves us here rather than taking us to heaven immediately upon salvation is so that we can bear fruit. So if you want to know what's the whole point of the Christian life, why are we here? Christianity 101, the successful student will show proficiency in bearing fruit. That's the point. So then you have to ask, okay, what does it mean to bear fruit? And those of you who are church people, you've heard this before, you know this passage. And if I were to ask you, hey, it says that if I'm attached, if I abide, that I will bear fruit. What does it mean to bear fruit? You would probably go, well, it means that you should, well, now hang on. Because it gets a little complicated, doesn't it? What does it mean? Some people would say that it means that we should bear the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We should become more like God in character and develop those traits in our life. To bear fruit means to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Other people would say, well, it means to bear the fruit of ministry. It means that in your life, you're leading people to Jesus, you're discipling people, bringing them closer to Jesus, that there is actually evidence of ministry and people what I think Jesus would say is that it's both. And I think that he says this in what we talked about last week in John chapter 13. If you weren't here last week, in John chapter 13, Jesus tells the disciples, I'm giving you a new commandment that you should love one another as I have loved you. That's the new commandment. That's what we're supposed to do. And then the question becomes, how do I do that? So last week is kind of, what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to love one another as Jesus loved us. And this week is, how do we do that? Well, we do that by abiding. And so what it means to bear fruit, I think, is this. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, not as we love ourselves, a higher standard, Jesus' love. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, it is impossible to do that without bearing the fruit of the Spirit in our life, right? How are you going to love other people as Jesus has loved you if we're not bearing love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control? How are we going to be able to do that if we're not becoming more like God in character? We can't. So part of it is to bear the fruit of the Spirit. But then the results of this love, if we love other people as Jesus loved them, when Jesus loved these people, what did they do? They drew more closely to him. And so when we love others as Jesus loved us, it's going to have this natural effect of drawing them into the Father, of drawing them towards Jesus. And so I think it's safe to define for the purposes of the course, again, in our syllabus, that bearing fruit will be defined as loving others towards Jesus. When we're looking at this and it says that we should bear much fruit, what does it mean to bear fruit? It means that we are proficient in loving others towards Jesus. Loving them in such a way that when they look at our impact in their life, they go, I am closer to Jesus because of them. To bear fruit simply is to look at the wake of our life and the people that we know in our life and have people who would point to us and say, I love Jesus more because of the way that they love me. I love Jesus more. I feel closer to Jesus because of their influence in my life. That is fruit. It's both a character, that has both a character aspect and a ministry aspect. But that's what it means to bear fruit, is to love people towards Jesus. So that's the goal for the course, right? That's what success looks like. The successful student will be proficient in bearing fruit or loving people towards Jesus. So now, how do we do that? And that's what this passage answers. And it gives us, I think, our assignments. And so the coursework, the objective, the first objective, our first assignment, the first thing we have to do is abide in Christ. Plain and simple. Abide in Christ. And if you're a church person, you've heard this before. You know this passage. This is a famous passage. You know how this goes. But I think it works pretty similarly. If I say, what does it mean to abide in Christ? I think sometimes we have a hard time explaining that or understanding that. And so I really wanted to dive into it this week so I could do a good job hopefully explaining it to you. And one of the things that I learned that I thought was most helpful was this idea. See, Jesus is talking to the disciples at the end of his life. We are in the middle of Passion Week in the chronology of the life of Christ. In a couple of days, he's going to be arrested and crucified and then raised from the dead, and we celebrate Easter, right, in the story of Jesus. So he's very near the end of his life. He's been moving through life with the disciples for three years now. He's been doing ministry with them. He's been ministering to them. He's been discipling them. He's been training them. He's been teaching them. He's been loving on them. He's been developing them. And so over these three years, there's this intimate relationship that has formed between them. And to me, it's very interesting that here at the end of his life, he calls the disciples to abide. Abide in me are his instructions to the disciples. But that's not what he said when he met the disciples. When he met the disciples and he called them to himself, what did he tell them to do? Follow me, right? So three years ago, it was follow me. Three years later, after spending all this time together, it's abide. And I love that there's a relational maturation to the calling of Jesus in this passage, where at the beginning he says, I want you to follow me. And when you follow someone, there's a distance there. I'm watching what you're doing and I'm trying to do those things. But when you abide, there's this relational aspect to it of knowing someone intimately, knowing them well. Let your heart beat with mine. Let what brings me joy bring you joy. Let what breaks my heart break your heart. Let my goals be your goals. There is this relational dynamic to abiding. The word there in the text literally means to get connected and remain connected like a branch is to a tree. So over these three years with Jesus, we see this relational component where we're supposed to know him intimately. I think if we want to make it our goal to abide in Christ, one of the very first things we have to do is find time in our day, every day, to spend time in word and spend time in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, if we want to know him intimately, if we want to pursue him, what do we need to do? We need to get up every day, spend time in God's word and spend time in his presence through prayer. We have to do that. That's an integral part of our life. And this is actually this idea, abide, we are to abide in Christ, is where we get this idea of having a personal relationship with our Savior. You guys have heard that before. Even if you're not a believer, you're here because someone drug you here. First of all, I'm so glad that you're here, and I'll try to go quickly for you. But second of all, you understand, and you've probably heard this term before, that we should have a personal relationship with Jesus. And sometimes we talk about how this separates us from other religions, that we're actually invited into a relationship with our Savior and with our God. But it's a very natural question to go, okay, I'm invited into a relationship with Jesus, but how do I have a relationship with this person or this entity that I don't interact with the same way as I do everyone else? I can't see him. I can't touch him. I can't see the look in his eye. I can't hear the cadence of his voice. How do I get to know somebody that I can't see or feel or touch? How do I have this intimate relationship with what feels like at times a distant God? That's a very fair question to ask. And Jesus actually answers this. I was nervous about how to explain it. How do we abide in Christ? How do we have this personal relationship with him? How do we experience the connection that the disciples felt? And I was actually kind of nervous about explaining this to you until I got to read the passage and really study it. And what I found is that Jesus answers this question in verse 10. And so really this is the second part of, this is our second assignment, our second objective. We want to be successful in the class of Christianity. The first thing we do is we abide in Christ. The second thing we do is we abide by obeying. We abide by obeying. In verse 10, Jesus says this. He says, If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love. You want to know how to abide in Christ? Obey him. You want to bear fruit? You want to be a successful Christian? You want to do what you're supposed to do, what you were put on this earth to do? Then abide in Christ. You want to abide in Christ? Well, Jesus says, obey him. You want to abide in me? Obey me. That means all the things, right? That means that when Jesus says in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, that when someone hits us in the face that we need to turn the other cheek and not seek revenge, that we learn what that means and that we do that. That means that when someone asks us to go a mile and Jesus tells us to go an extra mile, we go an extra mile. When Jesus tells us that when someone asks for our fleece, we should give them our coat as well, we give them our coat. When Jesus tells us that we should be generous and that we should care for the poor, then we be generous and we care for the poor. When he tells us that, when he redefines and correctly defines the commandment on adultery, that it's not simply sleeping with another person's spouse, but it's looking at anyone with lust in your heart, then we define that as our definition of adultery. If we want to abide in Christ, then we walk in lockstep with his commands and we submit our life to his word. John 1 says that Jesus is the word of God, so we obey God's word, right? That's what we do. But here's the thing. Being obedient to the Bible, being obedient to Jesus's commandments, it's pretty challenging. It's pretty difficult. It takes a long time to get proficient at it. Some of us have a hard time with it all the time. And as I think about what it means to really obey God, I kind of think about it like I think about a golf swing. Back in 2013, I went to the Masters for the first time. Now, the Masters is a golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It's the greatest sporting event on the planet. If you don't agree with that, take it up with someone else. I'm not into frivolous conversations, okay? This is actually, I played golf a little bit when I was a kid. This is my Pawpaw Six Iron. He taught me how to play. I like to have pieces of him up here whenever I can. But I learned to play a little bit when I was a kid. But I left it to play other sports. I had ADD big time, I think. It was undiagnosed, but man, it was there. And so I liked to play soccer, and I walked away from golf a little bit. But in 2013, I went and I saw the Masters, and I thought, I've got to play this sport. This looks super fun. And so I grabbed a set of clubs, and I started going to the range as often as I could get there. A shameful amount of time. I neglected gym for golf. And so I started playing, right? And once you start playing golf, you start learning that the golf swing is pretty stinking complicated. It doesn't look complicated. You watch it on TV, it seems like a pretty simple thing. But man, if you've ever tried to hit that ball any distance, even just in the air, you know it is difficult, okay? And so I started learning to play golf and you start to learn, man, there's all these technical aspects to the golf swing. Now, some of y'all know the golf swing a lot better than I do. So please don't judge me too harshly. But you do the golf swing and you wanna square up to the ball. It's called a dress, okay? The's on the ground. You want to address it, so you want to make sure your club head is facing the right way behind it. You want your feet to be spread about shoulder width apart if you've got an iron in your hand. Not too far, because you'll look ridiculous like a sumo wrestler. So you just want it right there, right? And then you've got to grip the club. And there's actually a way to do this. They, like, tell you. I went and got golf lessons one time. And the first thing the guy said is, show me how you grip the club. And I'm like, you're weird. Just tell me how to swing the club. But apparently it's important. You have to interlock your fingers in the back. Or if you're fancy, you can cover over your fingers in the back. But you don't do it like this. That's what crazy people do, okay? You can't do that. You have to grab it like this. And this hand needs to be in a certain place. And did you know that your thumb has to go in the crease of your hand right there? It took me two years to learn that. I don't know why they didn't tell me that. But you have to put your thumb right there, and then you hold it. Your knuckle's got to be in a certain place. If you rotate your hand too far under, you're going to hook it. You don't want to do that. And if you do it too far this way, you're going to slice it. You don't want to do that. So it's got to be just right. And then they tell you, once you get the club, that you just want to hold it like a baby bird, okay? Like you just want it to be real gentle. I've got like this death grip on there, and people have told me, you're going to strangle that bird, man. You need to let it go. So you got to be gentle with it, you know? Just hold it like pillow soft, like you do a lot of dishes or something. And then you want to take it back. And when you take it back, you want to keep your left arm straight. And you want to keep your left wrist flat. I do this sometimes or this. You don't want to do that. You want to keep it flat, right, so that when you meet the ball, like it's flush. And so you come back. And when you come back, you want to bend your left leg, but not too much. You don't want to look like a crazy person. You got to do it a little bit. And then I had somebody one time on my backswing tell me, you want your back pocket to face the target. And I'm like, well, how do you, I don't know what that looks like. Like, I don't even, I'm not, maybe that dude was a gymnast. Like, I don't even know how to make that one work, man. And then you go and you do the thing and you follow through. And sometimes I'll follow through and people will say things that I don't understand. Like, I'll hit the ball and it didn't do what I wanted to because it never does. And people will go, oh, you double crossed that one. And I'm like, what are you talking, I don't know what that, I don't know what it means to double cross. Or sometimes people will tell me, your hands got a little fast on that one. And I'm just thinking to myself, like isn't that the point? Don't we want our hands to go fast in a golf swing? Like I'm thinking that slow hands is not good for golf. But it's super complicated, right? And so here's what we know about golf. When you're golfing with your buddies and somebody's struggling and you want to give them a little tip, I'm going to coach you. I'm terrible at golf. I have a 20-plus handicap, but I'm going to coach you. I'm going to give you the thing that's going to make you good at it. You can give somebody one tip to start thinking about one thing. Your backswing's a little fast. You want to slow that down, and it'll screw them up for the rest of the round. They won't be able to hit that because they'll be thinking about all the things. They won't be able to hit that for anything. So here's what they tell you in golf if you want to improve your swing. You get what's called a swing thought. When you're swinging the club, you get a swing thought. You get to think about one thing. Just do one thing. There's so many aspects to the swing. It's so technical and so complicated. You could think about 12 different things if you wanted to, but if you want to get better at it, you think about one thing. I played an entire round of golf focused on keeping my left heel on the ground when I would swing the club. The whole round, that's all I thought about all day. You get one swing thought. Because if you take more than that, you won't be able to keep up with it. It'll be a messy jumble in your head and you won't see success. But the way they teach you to get better at golf is you take one swing thought and you get better at that. You don't think about all the other things. You get better at the one thing, whatever's most urgent for you. And then once you get that down, you get that into muscle memory, then you do the next thing. That's how they teach you. And I think obedience works the same way. There's so many things to focus on. There's so many areas. We need to grow in our kindness. We need to grow in our generosity. We need to grow in our patience. We need to grow in our humility. We need to stop doing this one sin that's kicking our tail. We need to start doing this thing that God's been tugging on our heart about for a long time. There's so many different things we could do to try to obey God. But I want to submit to you that the way to really learn obedience is to just have one obedience thought. Just take the next thing. Just take the next step. I'm not saying that we don't worry about all the other things. When you're learning a golf swing, you don't forego everything else you've already worked on to work on the next thing. You keep those intact too, but then you work on the next thing. And I think our Christian life is much the same way. We should have, and we are wise to have, an obedience thought, a next step of obedience, a thing that we can do to begin to obey God a little bit better and a little bit better. And the beautiful thing about this is, I think all of us have a next step of obedience. Whether you've been walking with God for five days or for 50 years, there's always the next thing that you can work on. There's always the next thing that God would have you, the next step of obedience that he would have you take. If you were to go to a PGA event and talk to one of the guys who does it professionally and ask him, what are you working on with your swing? None of them would ever tell you, nothing, this is as good as it gets. They would always tell you that they're working on something. And this is how it is with our obedience to God. No matter how many years we've been walking, no matter how mature or immature we are, every one of us in the room has a next step of obedience that we can take. And if we're going to learn to obey God and follow Him and abide in Christ, then I think it boils down to simply taking our next step of obedience. So objective three, our third assignment in how we abide in Christ, is by praying, stepping, and trusting. We pray, we step, and we trust. Under that, I have a prayer for you where I'm encouraging you to pray, Father, show me my next step of obedience. And that's a prayer that I would encourage you to pray now and pray every day this week. Father, show me my next step of obedience. What would you have me do? So we pray about it. God, what's my next step? What do you have for me? What's the next thing you want me to do? Maybe it's to get more serious about church attendance. Maybe it's to get more serious about a small group. Maybe it's to get up every day and spend time in God's word. Maybe it's simply to consider Him, to read a book or do some research or have a conversation with somebody that would help us grow in our faith a little bit. Maybe it's to start the discipline of tithing or giving. Maybe it's to actually have the conversation that we've been having. Maybe you know exactly what it is because God's been pressing it on our hearts for weeks or months and we haven't listened. But we should pray that God would show us our next step of obedience that he would have us take. And then we trust. We step. We take the step. We obey him, and then we trust that it was the right thing, and we trust that life is going to be better on the other side of obedience. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about obedience, and we talked about this idea that sometimes the reason we're not obedient to God is because we believe that life is better on this side of obedience. And so to actually step into obedience requires a degree of trust that life is actually going to be better for us on the other side of obedience, that that's where we find God's grace and God's love. And so often obedience takes faith in God and the courage to actually take the step. But here's what happens when we do this. I love this. This is my favorite part about this teaching. When we take a step of obedience, however difficult it is, God impresses something on our hearts. I want you to do this. I want you to get up 30 minutes earlier and I want you to spend some time with me. I want you to actually give to this thing. I want you to actually have that conversation. It's a difficult step when he shows it to us. But if we'll take it, and when we take that step in our fear and what we're met with is God's grace and goodness, we'll see that we can actually trust him. And because we've had this experience of taking a step in faith and being met with God's goodness, it'll give us more courage to take the next step, won't it? And then the next step, and then the step after that. And then for our life, we are simply taking these steps of obedience as we grow closer to Jesus and abide in him. And then here's what happens as we take these steps of obedience. We abide in Christ. And Jesus says that when we abide in him, we will bear much fruit. And here's what I love about that. If you think about an apple tree, if you think about a branch attached to an apple tree, that tree decides when and what kind of fruit that branch is going to bear. That branch doesn't get to decide, you know what? I want to give us apples in the wintertime. I really like apple pie. I'm doing winter apples. That's what's happening this year. That's not how that works. The tree decides when that branch is going to bear fruit. The branch doesn't get to go, you know what, fellas? I'm really thinking pears. They're in. Turkey and brie, it's really good. That's what we're going to do. The tree doesn't get to decide, I'm tired of being in an orchard, I want to be in a mangrove. We're doing oranges this season. That doesn't happen. The tree decides when the branch will bear fruit and what kind of fruit it is. Look at this. When you abide in Christ, when you are connected and you stay connected and you're following him and you know him intimately, when you're connected to the tree, you will bear much fruit. And it's not up to you when and where you bear that fruit. It's not up to you what kind of fruit that is. It's not up to you when the season is when you bear it. The tree decides that. You remain connected to Christ, and Christ says, I'll decide when and where you bear fruit. I love the freedom of this. And my role, my heart is for grace. We've given our lives to build God's church here. So I want to see grace grow. I want to see the kingdom expand here. I want to see lives impacted. I want to hear the story about somebody coming, visiting with us over VBS or Summer Extreme, and their kid coming to faith who didn't know Jesus comes to know Jesus here. And then that kid goes home and tells their parents what they saw here. And then their parents come, and their parents get plugged into a small group, and they accept Christ. And then they grow in their faith by taking their next steps of obedience and then there are elders and there are leaders and they're leading their small group. I want to see that story. I want to see marriages rescued here and strengthened here. I want to see little kids that grow up here and then grow up to follow Christ so well and so closely and know him so good that they disciple us. I want some of the kids that are in there to preach up here one day and tell us what they've learned about God. I want to see all this stuff happen in our church, and I want to see you guys live healthy and vibrant lives in spiritual faith. I want to see that. Do you know how we bring that about? Do you know what my role is in bringing all those things about? Getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer and trying to take my next step of obedience, abiding in Christ. If I want to see that fruit at grace, if I want to see God do incredible things, you know what I need to do? Abide in Christ. Obey Him. He'll decide when and where we start bringing fruit. It's not about strategy. It's not about how good I preach. It's not about how good Steve does. It's not about marketing campaigns. It's not about follow-up. It's not about any of that stuff. It's about abiding in Christ, and Jesus will handle the rest. In your lives, you have kids you worry about and you pray for. You have ministries that you're involved in. You volunteer in different places. You have companies or groups of people around you that you want to influence and draw towards Jesus. You want to have a wake of people in your life who would say, I'm closer to Jesus because I knew that person. We want these things. You know how you get those things? Abide in Christ. Obey him. Get connected, stay connected. Take the next step of obedience. Pursue him daily. And guess what? He will decide when and where you bear fruit. But here's the promise. You will bear much fruit. Just simply abide in him. Pursue him. Obey him. Have the confidence and the faith to take the next step that he shows you, and you will abide abide in Christ and then the tree will decide when and where you bear fruit. There's a glorious freedom to this. And when we bear much fruit, you should know two things happen in this passage. Two things happen as a result of our bearing fruit. We are pruned and we are proven. We are pruned and we are proven. The second verse of this passage, Jesus says, when you bear much fruit, the Father will prune you so that you can bear more fruit. And make no mistake about it, that pruning hurts. That's the branches getting cut. That's when they lose a piece of themselves. I don't have time to delve into what pruning is like all the way this morning, but I know that for years and years, Jen and I prayed for a baby. We prayed to get pregnant, and it took a lot longer than we wanted it to take. We finally got pregnant, and then we miscarried. I've shared that with you guys before. That was four or five years ago. That was a super difficult thing. That's the hardest thing we've ever had to walk through as a couple. But I am convinced that that was a pruning period for us. Because how could I come lead a church? And how could Jen partner with me in this ministry if we didn't know grief? If we didn't know tragedy? If we didn't know what that was like? How could I teach about God's view of grief and how he's with us in our suffering unless I had experienced that? How could I empathize with someone who would shake their fist at God and say, why me, this isn't fair, unless I had walked through that in my life as well? I believe that part of the reason for that was a pruning to make us more effective in what God would have us do. I'm not saying that's the reason for all of our pain, but I'm saying that's the reason for some of it. God prunes us. That's why I hate the health and wealth gospel. We're not promised prosperity and a tragic free life. We're promised that if God prunes us, it's so that we will be more effective and bear more fruit, which is the whole point. And then, in that bearing fruit, we are proven. Every Christian ever has wondered, am I really saved? Did I do it right? Did I say the right prayer? Do I really have faith? If I were to die today, do I really know I'm going to go to heaven? You know what proves your faith? Fruit. Jesus says in this passage, you will bear much fruit, and so prove that you are my disciples. You want to not doubt your salvation? Look at the wake of your life and see if there is fruit there. When we bear fruit, two things happen. We are pruned and we are proven. And then as a result of all of this, all of these things, this idea of taking steps of obedience and finding God to meet us there in trust, of abiding in him and just focusing on him and not worrying about the end of the passage, verse 11. He says, these things I have spoken to you. So this lesson, what I've just taught you about the vine and the branches, these things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. All of these things, knowing Jesus, abiding in him, obeying him, bearing fruit, being pruned and being proven, all of these things conspire to fill you with joy. Because in simply abiding in Christ, we are relieved of the pressure of productivity. We are relieved from the pressure of results because it's not our responsibility to bring about the fruit. We just follow Jesus. We are relieved of the sense of hopelessness that sometimes comes from pain because we know that it's serving a purpose to prune us and make us more effective at bearing fruit for God's kingdom. And we are relieved of the worry and the anxiety of, am I actually saved? Am I actually going to persevere? Because the proof is in the fruit that we have borne. God relieves us of all of those things and frees us up to simply follow him, to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer, and to say, Father, what's the step of obedience you would have me take today? And when we do that, we experience the fullness, not of our joy, of his joy. So that's my prayer for you. That you would go from this place and that you would abide in Christ and experience the fullness of Jesus' joy. And my challenge to you is that you would pray now and every day this week, Father, what step of obedience would you have me take today? Father, please show me my next step of obedience. And I believe that by doing that and taking the step that he reveals to you, that we will abide in Christ and that by abiding in Christ, his word will be true and we will bear much fruit. And that by bearing much fruit, we will experience the fullness of the joy of Jesus. I'm going to pray for you. And as I pray, I want to encourage you right now to go ahead and begin asking God, what's my next step of obedience? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for this morning. We thank you for your word, how clear it is. We thank you that your son boiled things down for us to this place where we can understand it. I pray that we would simply abide in you, God. Create a fire in each of our hearts to know you, to abide in you, to walk with you, to obey you. Give us the strength to pray the prayer, to ask what our next step is. Give us the courage and the faith to take the step. Give us the clarity to see it. Give us the gratitude for your grace that meets us there. God, whether it's a big step or a small one, I pray that we would take it. I pray that this would be a church full of people who are abiding in you and with you. And God, we can't wait to see the fruit that you bring about here in our lives and in this place. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate, and I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for coming out on this holiday weekend. You guys didn't get the memo that you're supposed to be at, like, cabins or something, so you came here instead. And this is great. If you want to know how to excite a pastor, this is it, man. There's also space at the first service, if you'd like. It's good to see all of you here. This is the second part of our series in John. Last week, we opened up, and instead of just diving right into the text, I spent a week giving you some context for what's happening in the book of John and for why we are choosing as a church to focus on the book of John for this many weeks. We're going to carry this through the week after Easter. So we're going to camp out in this for a while. And so my whole goal last week was to get you excited enough about the book of John to go and to read it on your own. So we have a reading plan that we've developed. It's on the information table that you can get on your way out. I hope that if you were here last week, you grabbed one of those, or maybe you looked online and found that. If you don't have one, they're there this week. We are really encouraging you to read along with us as we go through John. One of the huge reasons to do this, if you think about this, this is a dangerous thing. If you come every week and you listen to the sermons and this is the picture that you get of John, but you never read it on your own, then I have bad news for you. You are only getting my perspective of your Jesus through John, and that's not good for you, okay? You are mostly smarter than me. Some of you are not, but most of you are smarter than me, and you need to process this on your own, okay? So that's what we're all going to do is dive into John together. This week, we open up the text, and we start the first 18 verses of the book of John, which are a sweeping narrative of the grandeur of Christ and who he is, why he came, how he's going to do it, and what that means to us. So those are the things that we're going to discuss today. This passage, John 1, 1 through 18, has been called by theologians one of the greatest adventures of religious thought ever achieved. It's a grand passage, and I'm nervous, if I'm honest, about not doing it the appropriate justice because of all that it is and all that it means to us. If you wanted to just do one sermon from the book of John, to just read one portion of the book of John and say, what is the message in John? This is the portion that you should read. John chapter 1, 1 through 18. As you read through it and it tells us about who the person of Jesus is, what he came to do, how he came to do it, and what it means to us. If you only hear one message from the whole series, I would say that this is probably the most important one because this message and this passage encapsulates all that it is that John wants to address for us. To help us understand this passage and what's going on here and why John approaches it the way that he does, I want to tell you about a trip that I had earlier this year. Earlier this year in January, my wife Jen and I took our daughter Lily to Disney World, okay? And this is the racket that Disney World has going on. We took her because if you take somebody before they're three, then their ticket is free and you get to save money. This is a great deal, right? Except my parents went, they took us. And so there's four adults paying for everything to go down there and the trip and then everything inside the park. And the money that I had set aside to pay for things in the park, I get to the end of the day, the first day, and Jen goes, how much money do we have left in our budget? I said, none, no money. We have no money left in our budget. We're not doing anything tomorrow. Like that's it, you know? But listen, we saved 200 bucks, right? Because we went early, a bunch of dummies. Disney's genius, man. So we go down there and I actually, I rehearsed the sermons before I subject you to them. And this one was always running long and I figured out it was because I was so excited about the Disney trip that I was telling you guys, I was going to tell you guys like all these details that you didn't need to know. So ask me afterwards, I'll be thrilled to talk with you about Disney. But the thing that I do want you to know is before we went, we did the best we could to give Lily some context for the trip, right? She's almost three years old. She's liked Mickey and Minnie her, her, literally her entire life. When she was a baby, she would watch them and like somehow they would bring her peace. And I'd be like, this is voodoo, man. Walt Disney, like I'm already spending money and And I will be for the next 18 years. But she loves it. So she was excited to go. Mickey and Minnie are going to be there. I get to see them. Tigger and Pooh are going to be there. It's great. So we're talking to her about those things. We're also showing her videos. Like there's YouTube videos of the rides down there, the Dumbo ride and the teacups and the different things to give her some context for what's going to happen to try to help her understand why we're excited. We did a little countdown in the kitchen. Every day she would cut like a ring off and she would count. And this is many days till we go see Mickey. And so the whole deal, we did the best we could to kind of get her ready for what we're going to experience. And so we go down there and she does phenomenal. She's loving it. She's smiling on the first day. I actually took her on a legit roller coaster. It was probably one of the few mistakes I've made as a parent so far. And I put her on the roller coaster by telling her that it was a small train and that she was going to like it. And so then I sit her there and I have to brace her little head because it's just flapping around with the G-forces. And we get done and I'm thinking she's going to scream and cry, but we got done. And I said, Lily, did you like it? She says, uh-uh. I said, why not? And she says, it was too fast, Daddy. And I was like, well, I'm pretty happy this is a response, and not just screaming. So she did phenomenal. At about three o'clock in the afternoon, we realized, gosh, you know what? We're making such good time here that we could get everything accomplished at the Magic Kingdom in day one if we pushed it, and then we could go see someplace different the next day. And so we started talking about what do we want to do? Do we want to call it? Do we want to push? What's going on? And we decided, you know what? Let's just take it easy. Let's just let her experience this. Not push her too hard. Let's not push us too hard. We're old now. I don't want to go till eight o'clock at night anymore. And so let's just go back and rest our feet. Let's let Lily rest. And then we'll come back the next day, right? And then we'll take it easy. We'll finish up the other thing. She can repeat some things and we'll just relax and just enjoy Lily enjoying the park. And that's what we decided to do. And it was a good decision. And one of the happy accidents of that decision was we got to see the joy of anticipation with Lily because she gets back that night and she starts to talk and she's telling us about her favorite rides and she loved Small World and she loved Dumbo and she loved Aladdin and she was like, these things are my favorite and I love doing this and I love doing that. And then she woke up the next day and she's super excited about what we get to do. She can't wait to go to the park and she can't wait to ride Small World. And we're like, we got a fast pass for that, so you're in luck. So it was really cool. We got the unexpected gift of anticipation for Lily. And because of that, we get to have pictures like this. This is us on the Aladdin ride. We're not even riding it yet. She's just excited that she's about to ride it. And I'm excited that she's excited. It was this great, genuine moment, right? Because she knew what was going to happen and she was really looking forward to it. Without anticipation or context, day two Lily doesn't happen. So we've got day one Lily with no context for what's about to happen to her. Just kind of some base excitement, but not really unsure what's going to happen. And then we have day two Lily who is super pumped because she knows what's up, right? Okay. As we approach John, and that's good. As we approach John, we have day one Lily and we have day two Lily. We have a group of people who really are not sure what's going on. They have a general excitement about the idea of Jesus, but they don't know who he is. And then we've got day two, Lily, which is a group of people that are really keyed up and ready for who the Messiah is and what he came to do. And so day two, Lily, the people who knew what was going on is the Jewish community to whom John was writing. John wrote to the Jewish community and the Greek community. And to the Jewish community, when you tell them in the first century AD, hey, the Messiah is here, they instantly know what that means. They know because they have a knowledge of the Old Testament. They have been for thousands of years now, generation after generation, looking forward to the coming Messiah. Every generation waits to see, is the Messiah going to be coming now? Is he going to come in our lifetime? They know the prophecies that he's going to be Emmanuel, God with us, that he will be King of Kings, Lord of Lords, that he will sit on the throne of David, that he will come from the city of David. They know all the stuff. And so when you go to a Jewish person in first century AD and you say, hey, the Messiah is here, they're day two, Lily, man. They're fired up. They know exactly what's going on. But the Greeks, they're day one, Lily. You go to them and you say, hey, good news, guys, the Messiah is here. And they're like, that's great. What's that? They have no context. They've not been expecting a Messiah. They don't know who Jesus is or what makes him a big deal. And because John wants them to understand how big of a deal it is that the Messiah arrives, he starts his gospel off in a different way than the other three gospels. See, I went back and I looked at the other three gospels, and when I looked at how Jesus was introduced, what I picked up on was the fact that in the other gospels, Jesus is presented as the Messiah. But in John's gospel, he's presented as God. The other gospels present Jesus as the Messiah. They just start off and they just say, hey, here's the genealogies. This is Jesus. He's here. He's our Messiah, and let's go. But John's gospel doesn't start off like that. John presents Jesus first as God and doesn't talk about him as the Messiah until verse 14, which we're going to get to. So this morning, we're going to move through this passage, look at who Jesus is, why he came, how he intends to accomplish the mission that he came for, and what that means for us. And so to define who Jesus is, rather than starting out with Jesus as the Messiah, John starts out like this in some of the most profound verses and impactful verses in Scripture. This is just packed with stuff. He writes this. John 1 starts out this way. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him, not anything made that was made. In the beginning was the word. So right away, the word is capitalized. It's a capital W in the Bible. So he is giving, he is personifying that word. He is saying this is representative of an entity, of a person that I'm going to tell you about. So his introduction of Jesus is the word. In the beginning, before time began at creation, there was this entity that I'm now calling the word, and it was with God, and it was God. So right away, what he tells us is the person that I'm about to tell you about was not created by God and therefore subservient to him. No, he was God and is not subservient to God the Father, but is on equal footing with him. He introduces the Trinity or the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Spoiler alert, because we don't talk about the Holy Spirit enough and because Jesus does in the Gospel of John, after this series, we're going to spend some weeks on the Holy Spirit and who he is, which should be a really comfortable series for a lot of former Presbyterians. I'm super excited about it. But he introduces Jesus like this. He says, he is the word. He was at creation. And the Jewish mind goes back to the account in Genesis, to creation. And when you look at the creation account, how did God create the earth? What did he do? He spoke. The word, his word, the word of God is the mechanism through which he wrought all of creation. Do you understand that? Jesus is the activation and the power of the Creator God in bringing about the formation of creation. It says, let there be light, and there was light. Let there be animals, and there's animals. Let there be trees, and there was trees. And it is God's Word that activates all of creation and brings about all of creation. So John is placing Jesus back in the creation narrative for both the Jew and the Greek to say, in the beginning, there was this entity, and without this entity, nothing was made. And he is the mechanism through which everything was made. So he says right away, the person that I'm going to tell you about and the rest of this Bible is divine. And he is as divine as God the Father ever was. He was not created by and therefore subservient to. He is God. He was there from the beginning. And it's important to note that when John says this and he tells us who this Jesus is that he's going to tell us about, that he is telling us who Jesus is just as much as he is telling us who he isn't. He is telling us who Jesus is just as much as he is telling us who he isn't. We see later in the gospels, Jesus asks this question of his disciples. He says, who do you say that I am? He says, some people say that I'm a prophet. Others say that I'm a teacher. Through history, we've seen people label Jesus as a moral representative, a moral guide of some sort. And Peter says, you are Christ, the Son of God. And Jesus says, yes, and on this faith, I will build my church. Okay? On this rock, I will build my church. Those questions about who Jesus is have regurgitated and rung through all of history. Those have always existed about who is this person, Jesus of Nazareth, that existed. And we've seen different cultures and even different religions and different offshoots of even Christianity explain Jesus as he was a prophet, minimize him to a prophet or minimize him to he was a good teacher or he was a good moral representative. And so we've seen efforts throughout history to reduce Jesus to less than God by calling him a prophet or a teacher so we can accept his teachings, but we don't have to accept his divinity. And John right away says, no, that's not going to work. Which by the way, Jesus, this person that we are worshiping as God, did claim to actually be God. So you can't call a dude who is lying about being God a good moral guy or a nice teacher, right? He either is or he isn't. There's no in-between. And John takes this in-between away from us right away. He says, he is divine. He was not created by and subservient to. He cannot be reduced to prophet. He cannot be reduced to teacher. He cannot be reduced to moral guide. He is divine. That's the person I'm going to tell you about. And then he moves into this next series where he talks about John. John the Baptist is coming. Next week, I'm going to preach all about John the Baptist. I'm really excited to do that because John the Baptist is one of my favorite figures in the Bible because Jesus says of John the Baptist that he is one of the greatest people, not one of, he is the greatest man ever born of a woman, which means that Jesus thought John the Baptist was the greatest man to ever live. So this week, I'd love for you to be thinking about why in the world did Jesus say that about John the Baptist? Because that's the question we're going to come back next week and answer. So I'm not going to focus on those verses this week. We're going to get to those next week. After those verses, he's told us the who. I'm going to tell you about a person who is divine, let there be no doubt about it, and this is what he's come to do. This is his mission. This is why he's here. And we can sum up his mission in verses four and five. This is what he came to do. It says, in this person that I'm talking about, in him was life. And the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it. And he goes down for several verses all the way up through to verse 16, through verse 15. And he talks about the light and what it means and what it came to do. And what we find out is that Jesus shines light in the darkness, that the darkness will not overcome it, that he is the light of the world. And that if we place our faith in this light, if we believe in him and what he came to do and who he claims to be, then we will be children of God and we are a part of God's kingdom. And this is what Jesus came to do, to be a light in the world and to claim his children back into God's family. That's what he came to do. And this theme, this idea of light runs through the book of John. So I'm not going to belabor it this morning because we're going to come back to it as we go through the series, but there is a theme of light throughout the book of John. If you read it and you pay attention, what you'll see is a bunch of different instances where the disciples go to Jesus and they go, hey, this thing is happening. Why is this happening? Shouldn't we do this? And Jesus' response is, no, in the daylight or in the day or in the light, this is how we behave because it will not always be light, but right now it is because I am here. So it's this theme that runs through John. And last week I pointed out to you that when Judas Iscariot, the disciple that betrayed Christ, does the thing that he does, that there's this ominous sentence in the text that says, and it was night because the daylight has changed. So this theme of day and night and light and darkness moves through the gospel of John. And so he's introducing that theme here, that Jesus is the light of the world. But what I want us to understand this morning is that Jesus came to shed light in the dark places and that the darkness will not overcome it. And what does that mean for us? Well, I think that the light that Jesus sheds is twofold. First, he sheds light on who we are and our ingrained need for him. He sheds light on you and your sin in your life. Before we know Jesus, we have this loose understanding that if there is a God, that he's probably not very happy with me for some of the decisions that I've made in my life. And then when we see the light of Jesus next to us, and we read through the gospel, and we see who he is, and we compare ourselves to his standards, what we realize in the light of Jesus, in the face of his light, is that we fall woefully short of the standards that Jesus establishes for us, that we can never be as good as he is, and he sheds light on the sin in our life. I even had somebody this week in my men's Bible study make the comment that, man, I'm really learning that even the good things that I do as I suss them out and figure out the motives that push me to those places, those are gross and selfish motives that really negate the good things that I'm doing. And I'm like, good news for you, that's Jesus's life shining in your light, showing you your desperate need for him. And the good news for us is that it's twofold. It doesn't stop at just illuminating our need for him in light of our sin, but then also illuminates his grace to us in the face of our sin. That's the twofold light of Christ. To illuminate for us our need for him because of our sin, and then to show us his grace in light of our sin. And that if we trust in that grace, we can be a part of his kingdom and rescued to heaven for all of eternity. That's the promise there by Jesus being the light. So that's why he came. That's what he came to do, to be the light of the world, to illuminate for you your need for Christ, and then to illuminate the grace that he offers in light of your need. Then we get to verse 14. In verse 14, we see the personification of Jesus. This is when we're introduced to Jesus. This is when John has gotten everyone up to speed. Now everyone is day two lily. Now everyone is ready to meet this person who has existed for all of creation, who is divine, who is the activator of creation, who is the light of the world and is coming now to shed light on us and on his grace. Now everyone has the proper context to really understand and be grateful for what happens in verse 14. This is the how. How was Jesus going to accomplish what he said he was going to accomplish? Verse 14. And the word became flesh. That's a big stinking deal. And the word, capital W, word. The person that I've been talking to you about, the divine one who has a heavenly form, has condescended to become one of us. What he's talking about here is the condescension of Christ. He's talking about the condescension of Christ. The Word became flesh. And we often have a problem with that word, condescension. We don't like to be condescended to. We're told not to condescend to others. But make no doubt about it, Jesus gave up His heavenly form to take on our form. The Word became flesh. See, only God in the history of gods and any other story and any other narrative in the history of mankind to condescend and give up his heavenly form to us. I didn't do this in the first service, but I just, I want you to see this. Revelation chapter 18 and 19. Let me tell you who Jesus is. This is Jesus. This is heavenly Jesus. In the Gospels, we see this meek and mild person who has taken on the infirmities and the frailties of humanity. He is the Lamb of God. But in Revelation 19, we see the Lion of Judah. John writes this in Revelation 19, Oh man, that's Jesus. That's heavenly Jesus. That's the one that's going to come one day and make all the sad things untrue and all the wrong things right and exact justice on those that did not honor God in their life. That's Jesus. And what I want you to understand is when John says the word became flesh, that this is the form that he's giving up to take on our form, to come and live with us, to come and be one of us, to condescend and understand our frailties and be faced with the temptations that we are faced with. And this is essential. His condescension and his taking on of flesh is essential to our understanding of salvation because unless he does that, unless he comes down and he takes on human form, he cannot rescue and reconcile us back to God. Because to qualify for a perfect sacrifice that would cover over our sins, he has to live a faultless life. He has to come down and he has to face the same temptations that we do. He has to face the same infirmities that we do. That's why the Bible tells us that if you are faced with a temptation, that you need to know that you cannot be faced with something that Jesus has never been faced with. And because he faced that temptation down for you, you now do not have to succumb to that temptation. You understand? That anything that tempts you in your life, anything that would rally against you in your life, anything that would seek to overtake you and pull you away from God in your life, that that is not too great for Jesus to overcome because he has already overcome it, because the word became flesh and he condescended to us and he gave up that heavenly form for a time to come down here and face that temptation for you so that when you faced it later, you could lean on him and know that you could be victorious. He comes and in John 11, he weeps with us in our tragedy and in our pain. He ministers to us and he prays for us. And he trains the disciples to lead his church, his kingdom, and he hands the keys of the kingdom off to them as he ascends into heaven. And his ministry on earth is the reason that we sit here over 2,000 years later and have the opportunity to learn from one of the disciples that he trained. We need the incarnation of Christ so that he could be the sacrifice for us, so that he could not only, through his example, illuminate our need for him, but through his sacrifice, illuminate his grace to our need. Do you see? We have to have the personification of Jesus in human form. We have to have his incarnation. The word has to become flesh or the whole thing falls apart. So, he gave up his heavenly form. He gave up sitting at the right hand of the Father. He is crucified on the cross where he says, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which means my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because for the first time in eternity, he was separated from God the Father for you. And then he says, tetelestai, it is finished. The debt is paid in full. I have accomplished what I came to accomplish. And then he passes on. We have to have the personal incarnation of Jesus for our salvation to work, for our faith to exist. It's absolutely essential. So in the beginning was the Word. That's who he is. He is God. He is as much God as anything has ever been God. He came to shed a light on your need for him and his grace in face of that need. And then he condescended to human form to take on your frailties and your infirmities so that he might die for you and make a path. And then one day he's coming back as this heavenly Jesus to rectify everything. That's who he is. That's why he came. That's how he's going to do it. And then John doesn't finish there. If he finished there, that's enough. If he just stops there and he just says, there's a God in heaven that I'm calling the word and he's going to illuminate, he's going to shed light in the dark places and the darkness will not overcome it. And he took on human form to deliver you back to heaven. If that's all we learn about him, that's enough. But John doesn't stop there. He leads into this great verse in verse 16. It's becoming one of my favorite verses in all of scripture. He writes this, and this is what it means to you. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. That word fullness there, if you look it up in the Greek, I'm not going to quote you the Greek word because it's obnoxious when pastors do that. I'm not smarter than you. I just have Google. What it means there is from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. That word fullness means the sum total of all that God is. The sum total of all that God is. From his fullness, from the sum of all that God is, from everything that we've learned in the sweeping narrative of God, that he is divine, that he is the mode and the medium of creation, that he has wrought the creation through himself. Without him, nothing exists. He is as much God as anything has ever been God. He is the light of the world. He condescended to take on frailty for us that he might save us. And from this fullness of an understanding of exactly who this Messiah is that I am about to tell you about from the next 21 chapters, from this fullness, from the sum of all of God is, we have all received grace upon grace. And then he goes back in 17 and 18, he says, until Jesus came, everybody had to follow the law. Everybody was subjected to the law of Moses. You had to follow these rules or you didn't get in. And now that Jesus is here, what we see is that we can't follow the rules. We'll never be able to do it right. And in light of our failings, we see his grace. So we have grace upon grace. There was grace provided and what the law did for us in the Old Testament and then covered over that grace is a larger grace of our salvation where now it's not a performance-based salvation. it's just a faith-based salvation. And we look at these truths of Jesus and we go, I believe you. I think you're telling me the truth. And he says, good, then I offer you grace and I claim you to be my child. And that word grace there is an important word. The easiest understanding of grace is to get something that you don't deserve. Grace is when we receive something that we haven't earned. Mercy is when we don't get something that we do deserve, but grace is when we get something that we do not deserve. And so what we're seeing here, when we think of this grace that we receive from Jesus, our mind probably goes first to our salvation. I don't deserve my salvation. I've done nothing to earn it. I've done nothing to deserve for Jesus to condescend, for the Word to become flesh and take on my frailty so that I might know Him. I don't deserve that. He didn't have to do that for me. He did that because He loved me. That's grace, and we acknowledge that as grace. But this doesn't say just grace. It says grace upon grace. And what I want you to see this morning is that from the fullness of God, from all that Jesus is, we don't just receive salvation, although that would be enough. But I want you to see that every good and perfect thing in your life that God has given you is grace, is something that you have that you do not deserve, that you have not earned. Everything in your life that brings you joy is God's grace in your life for however long it brought you joy. All those things are God's grace. Do you understand? As I think back through my life, I remember some moments that stick out. I can remember being up at the altar for my wedding day and watching the back doors open and the sun illuminate Jen in her white dress and knowing that that was the woman I was going to marry and walk through life with. And I began to cry right away because I still couldn't believe it. That moment is God's grace. Years later, I can remember learning that we were pregnant and going to the doctor and hearing the heartbeat of Lily. That moment is God's grace. I can remember having Lily and Lily laying on Jen's chest and me hugging her and looking at this woman who's now the mother of my child. That moment is God's grace. When we get those moments, they are God's grace in our life and you have them too. And what you need to understand is your own wisdom and your own goodness didn't bring those about, those treasures that we have, those moments of joy. When we have good enough friends that we can sit around and laugh and be vulnerable and real and be comfortable and be ourselves, that's God's grace to us. We have church that we enjoy. That's God's grace. We have small group that we enjoy. That's God's grace. And we have children. That's God's grace. All the goodness that we have in our life is a result of the fullness of God acting in you to bring about grace. Things that you have that are good that we did not earn or did not bring about because of ourselves. Those are God's grace. And so my hope is that this morning as you leave, you will walk in gratitude for God's grace. That you will understand that it's the fullness of God. It's all that He is. Everything that He was. Everything that He came to do and how He came to do it. That this full understanding of God rots for you the good things in your life that you did not earn and probably do not deserve, and that those things are God's grace to you, and from his fullness we have received grace upon grace. And even those of us who are walking through the hardest of times know that God still offers grace even through those things. And from His fullness, we have all, all of us, not some of us, not the chosen ones, not the believers, all of us received grace upon grace, gift upon gift, joy upon joy, goodness upon goodness. My hope is that you will walk in gratitude for God's grace in your life as you marvel at the fullness of Him that brings that about for you. Let's pray. Father, we love You and we are amazed by you. We marvel at you. That you would allow your son to give up his heavenly form to come down here to save us, to be one of us, to model for us, to carry our griefs and our infirmities and our temptations, God. That you would allow him to die for us so that we might know you. God, I pray that there would be this progressive revelation, these just waves of understanding that kind of hit us, God, as we go through our weeks of just all the goodness that you have allowed us in our life. that we would turn in gratitude for you for this grace upon grace that you offer us. God, we are so grateful for you. I pray for the people who are in this room right now that you would be in their stresses and in their concerns and in their heartbreak and in whatever is going on in their life and that all of those things would serve to draw us more nearly to you, Father. It's in your son's name I pray these things. Amen.