the gospel of john: god came near… · august)16/17,2014)))))

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved.

Transcript August 16/17, 2014

The Gospel of John: God Came Near Aaron Brockett | John 1:1-18

You guys can take a seat. How are we doing this morning? Good, hopefully a lot better after that. I am glad you guys are here today. If this happens to be the first time you have ever been at Traders Point or if you have been here a handful of times, I just want to welcome you. My name is Aaron, one of the pastors on staff. I really would genuinely love to meet you sometime, so if you see me out in the lobby or out around town somewhere, maybe in the super glue aisle, just come up, stop and I would love to meet you sometime soon. I would love to invite you to a couple of things. Coming to a church, especially if this is kind of new to you, can be a little intimidating. I would just like to give you what maybe your next step could be. I would love for you to come to something called First Step. It meets in between hours on Sunday morning. You can get all the information online. It is not every single weekend, but every several weekends. You will sit down with about 10 to 15 people in a room. We intentionally keep it relatively small so I get a chance to know you, to hear from you, and just tell you a little bit about me and my family and, at a high level, who our church is and what we are trying to accomplish. I would love for you to sign up for one of the First Step sessions this Fall if you are relatively new around here. If you have been coming for a while and you would say, “Traders Point is home for us or we would like to make it home,” I would like to invite you next Sunday, August 24 from 2 to 4 o’clock in the afternoon to our membership class. Pastor Matt Hessel and I teach that. It doesn’t obligate you to anything, we don’t lock you into anything, we just want to teach you about who our church is, what we believe, what we value, what we are trying to accomplish, and what membership means to us. I would love to see you there if you could register for that online. But regardless of who you are, what you believe, what you are struggling with... maybe you are here and you are hurting right now. You are just kind of attending to heal. Man, I am glad you are here and I hope you feel welcomed and loved. Today we are beginning a brand new series of messages I am really excited about. In conjunction with that I would encourage you to consider getting into a Life group. Life groups are the backbone of our church. We’re not real interested, at all, in massing a crowd of people together, growing a big church. But we are interested in making a big impact for the cause of Christ in our city and around the globe. As we grow larger it is really important that we focus on growing smaller at the same time, meaning a lot of times you come into a big church and say, “I don’t know anybody.” You don’t need to know everybody, but you need to know somebody and somebody should know you. Life groups are the best way to do that. Our personal vision and goal is that over 80 percent of our church family would be in some kind of Life Group setting where you are digging into the Word together with others, you are building relationships with others. Right now we are at about 50 percent of our church in Life Groups. We’ve got some work to do there. I would love, as we begin this new series, for you to try it. I know some of you maybe have had bad experience in Life Groups. I know the number one response, if you are like me is, “I am really, really, busy. Don’t you understand school has started? Our evenings are

The Gospel of John: God Came Near August 16/17, 2014

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

packed full.” I get that. The other objection you might have is, “What if we get into this group and we don’t like these people? What if they smell like cheese? What if they invade our private space?” I just want you to know that our desire is not to put you in a group where you don’t have relational or geographic chemistry. We want to do our best to make it click for you, and if not, graciously get into another group. The last thing I want is another obligation on your calendar. We are all jam packed. I don’t want you going, “Oh man, Life Group is coming up,” and you get this sinking feeling in your gut. You are trying to figure out any excuse not to do it. Then don’t do it. That is just a waste of everyone’s time. But I want you to be in a group where you do click, where you do look forward to it. You are busy but you say, “I need this and it will fill up my cup.” That is our goal in that. So I would encourage you after the service to stop by the multi-‐purpose room for Life Group Connect and give it a shot. And if it doesn’t work, be honest about it. Be gracious, but be honest and talk to us about it. We’ll try to get you into a group that is a fit. Grab a Bible and get to John 1. If you don’t have a Bible with you, you can download our church app for free on your phone or a tablet. You can follow along. There is a free Bible on there. I’ll throw these passages on the screens. If you are the kind of person who is like, “Man, give me a paper Bible. I really like the paper Bible,” we will give you one for free. It is our gift to you. Just stop at Connection Central on your way out and those friendly people will give you a free Bible. Bring it back with you each weekend because we are going to be in it together every single week, studying it. Today we are in the Gospel of John and I want to start with this question. Have you ever developed an opinion about somebody prematurely? Maybe you meet them and you don’t really say much. You just look them up and down, maybe you see what they are wearing, maybe you assume some things about them from appearances. You judge them unfairly. You label them. You put them in a box. Then, for whatever reason, circumstances allow you to spend some time with them. Maybe you get put on the same team with them at work to work on a project, maybe you go on a road trip with them. You spend ten hours in a car. Maybe your kids join the same soccer team so you are spending every weekend on the sidelines together. After a while, the conversation moves from the superficial to the meaningful and it dawns on you one day, “This person isn’t who I thought that they were.” Who knows? They may go on to be your best friend. Maybe you even go on to marry this person and start a family with them. If that has ever been the case for you, if you have ever judged somebody wrongly and then you got to know them and realized, “This person is different than what I thought,” that is the Gospel of John. John is writing to a group of people who have come to some conclusions about who Jesus Christ was, maybe prematurely or falsely. So John is writing to blow all that up. John is writing to say, “You’ve assumed wrongly who Jesus Christ is, and now I want to give you a clear picture of who Jesus is, what He has done, and why that matters.” The content of the Gospel of John is really deep, yet at the same time, it is accessible to every single person in this room. That is one of the things I love about John. When I was in Bible College we took a Greek class, because the New Testament of the Bible was originally written in Greek. So if you want to know the Bible as accurately as possible you study Greek. So one of the very first New Testament books, as Greek students, that we would translate from Greek to



English and English to Greek was the Gospel of John. Because it is the easiest of the New Testament books to do that with. That does not mean that it is simple. It’s actually got deep waters. That is the way that I would explain it. John has a shallow end and a deep end where everybody can play. I have kids that range in age from two to twelve. Every time we go to a pool, my two oldest ones want to go to the deep end and jump off the diving board because they are pretty good swimmers. But my middle age daughter, who thinks she is a better swimmer than she really is, I need to keep an eye on her and have her in a place where at least she can still touch and keep her head above water. And I have a two year old who needs to play in the baby pool. That is the Gospel of John. Because in our church we’ve got some of you who have been doing this for a while, you are seasoned believers. You are like, “Man, I don’t want to be over here in the shallow end. Aaron let me jump off the diving board. I want to do a gainer or something.” And you have some adolescent Christians who, you think you are better swimmers than you really are, so we need to keep an eye on you. We have to keep you in a place where you can kind of touch and keep your head above water. Then we have some baby Christians who are new to Bible study, maybe you are not even a believer yet, new to Bible study, new to all this, and not even sure what the Gospel of John is. What I love about John is he offers this deep content that is meaty to feed the most seasoned believers in the room, yet it is assessable enough for those of us who don’t know anything. So as a church we are going to spend some extended time studying the Gospel of John together because he is writing to inform us, maybe for the first time, to remind us of who Jesus Christ is and why that matters, because this is the key to everything. The overall purpose of the Gospel of John can be found in John 20:31. Let me just read that for you. It is up on the screens. John says, “These things,” referring to his gospel, “are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.” In other words, John writes for the intensive purpose of clarifying for us that Jesus was not just an ordinary man, He was not just a guy who told interesting stories, He was not just another philosopher in a long line of philosophers, He was not just a Jewish rabbi, He was not just a First Century Mr. Rogers who wants everybody to hold hands, get along, and sing kumbaya. Jesus was God with skin on and He came to us to bridge the gap between broken humanity and a Holy God. So we are going to be in this together for a while. The Gospel of John is 21 chapters long and if you are the kind of person who likes to jot down notes, you might jot this down. At a very high level, the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John are all about Jesus who came from His Heavenly Father to represent His Father on earth. Chapters 11-‐21 are all about how Jesus returns to His Heavenly Father to create a way, to give us access to God. Now as near as I can tell as I have kind of been laying this series out, it is 21 chapters long. We don’t want to move through it so quickly that we fail to do it justice. I don’t want to be in it so long that we belabor it either. As near as I can tell we will probably be in this series for about 33 weekends. Now those of you who are a little bit A.D.D. are freaking out right now. Relax we are going to break it up into parts and mini-‐series. I don’t think people get sick of sermon series content, I think you get sick of graphics, so we will change the graphics. You’ll just be like, “Oh, new colors.” So we will break this up into mini-‐parts. I am going to take a break at Christmas, I am going to take a break to do a marriage



series, and there might be one other series that we will take a break in. Lord willing we will land the plane in John somewhere around Memorial Day, 2015. So today is kind of like a foundation message for us to understand the gospel and then I am going to work through the first 18 verses, which has traditionally become known as the prologue of the Gospel of John. So anytime you are going to study any book of the Bible, one of the things you’ve got to do is look at who wrote it. That makes sense, right? If you are going to read an email, if you are going to read a letter, if you get a text message… Did you ever get a text message and you don’t have their number in your phone? It is just like a number that pops up like, “Hey how is it going? I thought maybe we could get together later today.” Who is this? I don’t know how to interpret your message because I don’t know who you are. But if you’ve got their name there, you can fill it in. The same thing is true with the books of the Bible. If you are going to accurately understand what the Bible is saying, you’ve got to look at authorship. Who was the person? What were the conditions under which they were writing? What was their aim in writing? What were they trying to accomplish? So who was John? John was one of the apostles. The apostle John was the one who wrote the Gospel of John. So who is he and what was his purpose for writing? Well John was a Galilean fisherman and Jesus called him to follow Him as one of the twelve disciples. So John started off as a young man following Jesus around, listening to Him teach, watching miracles, experiencing life with Him. Eventually, after Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection, John became an apostle. He became a pastor, in Asia Minor, of several different churches. Two years ago, if you were here, we studied through the book of Revelation together. John was the one who gave us the Revelation because he was sequestered to the island of Patmos under Roman persecution. So John as a younger man was a disciple of Jesus and he followed Him around. Not only that, but the Bible tells us that there were three of the twelve disciples that Jesus was especially close with: Peter, James, and John. John was kind of a part of Jesus’ inner three. One of the things I find fascinating about that, I don’t know if you ever thought about this, but I’ve always thought, “Jesus had favorites? Is that right? Isn’t that wrong? That is sinful, right?” It can’t be sinful because Jesus never sinned. Jesus was able to have three favorites in kind of a righteous kind of a way. Not only that, but the Bible tells us that John was the disciple that Jesus loved. Now you know that he got some mileage off that. “Hey guys, He loves you all but I am the one He really loves.” You know if he were around today, he would put this on his twitter profile. He would put that on his resume. He would probably get a tee shirt that said, “I am the one that Jesus especially loved.” Now what does all that mean? Why do we even mention it? You could say this. John was Jesus’ best friend. If I want to know things about you, I would go talk to your best friend. Tell me what this person was like when the crowds are not around. Tell me what they enjoy. Tell me what they think about. Your best friend would probably be able to give me an accurate representation of who you are. So when John writes his gospel we can really lean into it because he knew Jesus, perhaps maybe better than anyone else. Now one of the questions that might be bouncing around in your head and I have had this questions fielded to me before. I’ve had people curious about this, “What are the gospels and why are there four of them? Do they say different and contradictory things about Jesus?” Maybe you have heard that said before. Maybe you have gotten on some sort of a blog or a website and that was one of



the criticisms of the Bible. You’ve got these four guys who are saying things about Jesus and who do you believe and do they contradict themselves? Let me just give you the straightforward straight up answer on the contradictory thing. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four guys who wrote the four gospels. The gospel just simply means they recorded the life, and the ministry, and the events surrounding the life of Jesus Christ. That is what the gospels are. They each write with different emphasizes. We are going to see this in just a minute. They had a different audience in mind when they wrote. Matthew had a Jewish audience in mind. Mark had a Gentile audience in mind. Luke was trying to write a well-‐ordered, historical account. So what they chose to emphasize and highlight was slightly different. The way they chose to communicate was slightly different because they had their audience in mind. So they include different details of Jesus’ life that are not contradictory. They are complementary and that is different. It is like if you were to go to a movie with three of your friends and afterwards somebody says, “Hey, man, tell me about Guardians of the Galaxy. Tell me what that movie is about.” So one of you might mention the humor that is in it, one of you might mention the action sequences that are in it, one of you might mention the soundtrack of the musical score. And that person wouldn’t say, “Man, would you guys get your story together? You are contradicting yourselves.” Actually, they would say, “You are helping me by the four of you telling me what you noticed. You are giving me a fuller understand of what the movie is.” We are getting in the ballpark of what is going on with the gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote their gospels first. Actually Mark was the first one. Mark is a straight to the point. I love Mark. He is fast-‐paced and straight to the point, doesn’t spend a lot of time on details. He is like, “I want you to know what is essential here.” Then Matthew and Luke came after that. The three of them wrote their gospels all within about the same time period; about 20-‐30 years after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into Heaven. So because of that, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the synoptic gospels. That word, synoptic, just means seeing or viewing together. In other words, Matthew, Mark, and Luke gave us a very similar description of Jesus’ life and ministry that gave us a synopsis; that is where we get the word synoptic, a synopsis of what Jesus said and did. They lean on each other’s information and there are a lot of similarities in those three gospels. But when John comes along, John wrote his gospel another 30 years after Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote theirs; so about 60 years after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into Heaven John writes his gospel. So about 90 percent of what is in John is unique to John. It is not found in the other three. John spends about two-‐thirds of his time focusing upon the last week of Jesus’ life. So the question that is in front of us is why? Should we be concerned about that? Why is there so much difference? So let me just give you some of the reasons for this. The first reason is just the timing in which it was written. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote their gospels, it was about 20-‐30 years after Jesus’ resurrection. Now think about this. That represents about a generation of people. So when Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote their gospels, their primary concern was the last of the eye witnesses are beginning to get older, they are beginning to pass away, and we need to get an accurate, historical, reliable account of Jesus’ life and ministry down on paper for the next generation of believers. I love anything related to World War II, that time period, any of the movies; Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, any biographies about World War II. It just captures my imagination and we are getting far



enough away from that time period that a lot of the veterans, a lot of the eye witnesses, a lot of guys who experienced that are getting up there in age and many of them are passing away. It would be important for us, if they are willing to talk about it, to talk to them and get their accounts of that war. The same thing is true for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Luke even says this at the beginning of his gospel. “I am trying to write an accurate, historical, credible account of Jesus’ life and ministry.” That was their aim. Well by the time John comes along, John is an older, seasoned, veteran pastor. And he has seen the fads come and go and he has seen the changes in culture. Another 30 years has gone by. Do any of you have an older gentleman in your life? Maybe it would be the pastor at your home church, maybe your grandfather, maybe just somebody you seek out counsel, wisdom, and advice from. This is John. By the time John writes his gospel he is not nearly as interested in writing out a historical account of Jesus’ life and ministry. He is like, “That has already been done. Matthew, Mark, and Luke did a great job of that. I am not interested in regurgitating what those guys did 30 years ago. I want to do something different.” So Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they are writing to Gentile and Jewish believers. John is writing to Greek pagans. The culture has completely changed. By the time John writes his gospel, he had noticed that they were beginning to question the whole thing. They were beginning to say, “You know what? I guess Jesus existed 60 years ago, but what difference does that really make? Who was He really?” So John writes his gospel, not really to tell us what Jesus did. John’s primary focus is to tell us what it means and why it matters. So out of the four gospel writers, John is the most theological. He is also, I think, the most accessible. I think the reason why is because he was a seasoned pastor. He had pastored in churches for decades. He wasn’t interested in impressing people with big theological words like synoptic. He didn’t want it to go over their heads. He wanted to serve it up so they would come to understand. Each of the gospel writers, they place a different emphasis on the work and the personhood of Jesus. So just to summarize it down, this might help you. This will be on the screens. Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ kingship. Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience. He wants them to know, “The Messiah you are looking for is found in Jesus Christ.” That is why he begins his gospel with a big, long, Old Testament genealogy. Did you ever open up to Matthew 1? You are like, “What is going on? There are all these names I don’t understand. I can’t even pronounce them. This is not a good way to begin a story Matthew.” No, he knows exactly what he is doing because the Jewish audience would have known every name on there and would get the connection that Jesus is the Messiah. So he is elevating Jesus’ kingship. Mark comes along and he is elevating Jesus’ servant-‐hood. He wants people to know Jesus didn’t come to be served. He came to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. Luke comes along. Luke is a well-‐educated physician and Luke is emphasizing Jesus’ manhood. Luke wants us to know, if you go all the way through it, he is a doctor so he thinks through these terms. Luke says things like this, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost.” Luke wants us to know we have a divine friend in Jesus Christ who can relate to us whether we are rich or poor, urban or rural, broken or whole, churched or un-‐churched. Luke wants us to see that Jesus can identify with our humanity. John’s focus is emphasizing Jesus’ Godhood. John wants us to know that Jesus is God. Jesus wasn’t just another good moral teacher, He wasn’t just another representative. Jesus is God in the flesh, God with



skin on, who came to bridge broken humanity back to God. John’s introduction is unlike any of the other of the gospel writers. We are going to look at the first 18 verses together. I hope you have gotten there in your Bible, now that we have gotten some of the introductory work out of the way. Thanks for hanging with me. You wouldn’t build a house without a foundation. I wouldn’t start a sermon series without one either. That is what that was. We are going to dive in here into the first 18 verses. Matthew begins with genealogy, Mark begins with Jesus’ introduction through John the Baptist and some of the chronological details, and Luke begins with the little baby Jesus, for those of you who love Talladega Nights. Then John just jumps right in. It is almost as if John is saying, “Before I introduce you to Jesus personally, let me introduce you to Him theologically.” The first 18 verses of John is arguably the best theological description of who Jesus Christ really is. Look what he says in the beginning. “In the beginning,” what does that sound like? That sounds like Genesis. “In the beginning was the Word,” notice Word is capitalized, so he is referring to Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Now there are some cults that have gotten into our Bible and have changed that to say, “The word was a god.” That is not what the Bible says. That is not the original Greek. It says, “The Word was God.” Verse 2, “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and without Him was not any thing made.” Now I really want you to focus on that capitalized word “Word”. It is mentioned three times here in verse 1 and the literal translation of that word is the word “logos”. So when you go back to your Bible and you read this again, it literally says, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” John is brilliant. Because we read that and we are like, “Okay, I’ll kind of go with you on that.” John was writing to Greek intellectuals. This concept of logos was something that they loved to debate on a daily basis. They were always talking about logos. The concept of logos was this idea of a creative or directive force that everything emanated from and it held things together. So maybe a way to help us to grasp this, it is not perfect, it is in the ballpark. If you have ever watched Star Wars they are always talking about the force. This is kind of in the ballpark of the same idea when the Greeks talked about logos. They were like, “We don’t know how we got here. We don’t know how this is holding together. I guess it is just some sort of force, some sort of logos where everything kind of draws its meaning.” They loved to talk about it. To help us further understand this, the idea of logos was the thing in which something was made for. So it is the reason why something was created, the reason why something existed, its purpose for being. That is the definition of logos. It is “purpose for being.” That is the definition of logos. If you were to go over to somebody’s house for dinner and you walked into their living room and you see a large 65 inch, high definition television set, but it is not hanging on the wall. It is laying flat on two cinder blocks in front of their couch and they’ve got two mugs of coffee, they’ve got the coasters, they’ve got magazines laid out, and they’ve got a little flower arrangement on it. Not only would you think they had certifiably lost their minds, but you would have to say, “They don’t understand the logos of this television set.” This television set was not designed to be a coffee table. It was designed to display all of the goodness of NFL football on the wall. Now we are beginning to kind of grasp this idea of logos. By the time John writes this gospel, the Greek culture had fractured so much so, to the degree, that they were beginning to wonder if there was any



logos at all. They were beginning to wonder if there was any meaning to life. Is there any right and wrong? Are there any absolutes? What is the reason for our existence? Does that sound familiar to anybody? The Greek culture to which John wrote is very similar to our culture today. That is who John has in mind as he writes this. John is brilliant. He begins by saying… Now here is one added thing to help us understand logos. The word logic comes from logos. So if you were to go back to John 1, you could read it this way. “In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God, and the Logic was God.” So saying that Jesus was the Logic of God or the Logic of life means that you and I are never going to truly understand who we are, why we exist, what has happened, what God will one day do to reconcile us, until we come to understand the Logic of God as it is found in Jesus Christ. How is that as an intro to this book? That is all found in verse 1. I think we jumped into the deep end right away. I thought as Christians we were just supposed to be dumb, simple-‐minded, and check our brains at the door. Like that is what it meant. You are supposed to have blind faith and just leap into this. And John writes to the Greek culture and says, “No, no, no, begin with the Logic of God. And the Logic of God is not some abstract argument or philosophical construct. No, the Logic of God is found in the person of Jesus Christ.” God punched a hole in our roof and He climbed in to dwell with us. He goes on in verse 4. I feel like you guys are drowning. Are you kind of still with me? I’ve given you a lot of content, I realize this. I have the upper hand on you. I’ve been studying it for five days and I am super excited about it. But I feel like I am drowning you with a fire hose. So, anyway, 4, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” So he is essentially saying that we live in a really, really dark world. Nothing has changed. Just turn on the news and you see the riots going on in St. Louis. You see the stuff going on in Iraq. Every generation wonders, “What kind of world is going to exist for my kids and grandkids?” John acknowledges this nearly 2,000 years ago. He says, “The culture is dark. It is always going to continue to get darker and darker,” and then he gives us this hope. He says, “I don’t care how dark the culture gets, it will never consume the light.” Jesus is the light that defeated all of that. It will never drown Him out. It might get pretty dark. When it is dark, stay close to the light. In verse 6 John does a really peculiar thing here. Right in the middle of his introduction of Jesus Christ, he introduces us to someone else. I don’t even know if that is good grammar, but there is a reason for it. So look what he says, “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.” Now he is not talking about himself. He is not a rapper. He is talking about a different John. Now he is talking about John the Baptist. John the Baptist did not write this gospel. The apostle wrote this gospel. So he is introducing us to John the Baptist. “He came as a witness to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. The true light,” Jesus Christ, “which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” So right here in the introduction to Jesus, he pauses to introduce us to someone else. I’ve oftentimes wondered why. Why would you do this? At a devotional level, I sometimes wonder, oftentimes in pursuit of Jesus Christ I want to take the spotlight from Him. He is basically saying here, “Actually this guy John who came to announce Jesus Christ was not the main event, he was just the pre-‐show.”



I remember like 15 years ago my favorite band was U-‐2. I got concert tickets to see U-‐2. I was all excited to see them. I walk into the arena and for like 30 minutes there was this band up there. I had never even heard of them in my entire life and I am just like, “Hey man, get off the stage, I want to see Bono.” Right? This is John the Baptist. John the Baptist is like, “I am not the show. I am not who you came to see. I am just the pre-‐show and the main event is coming.” We are going to talk more about him next week. I love John the Baptist because he is the guy who said, “He must become greater and I must become less. We must diminish in the light of Jesus Christ.” So John the Baptist is like this wild-‐eyed, crazy haired, camel hair wearing, locust and wild honey eating prophet of God. You could say he was the last of the Old Testament prophets because between the Old and the New Testament there had been like 400 years of silence. It was called the Inter-‐Testamental period. There is no word from the Lord through the prophets until John the Baptist shows up. John’s primary purpose was to come along and say, “The light is on! It has been dark for a really long time. The light is on!” That was his only purpose. And maybe the cynic in some of you is like, “If Jesus is such a bright light, why does He need an announcement? Since when do you need to tell people the light is on?” Well you don’t, unless they are blind. In 2 Corinthians 4:3 it says, “The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is the image of God.” I love the fact that John inserts this here. There is a reason. This is the clearest description that I could give of how salvation works. It is a light that comes on and you either see it or you don’t. This is why you can come to church from the day you are born to the day that you die and still be lost and not know God. Some of you have been coming here maybe for a really long time and it is as if the words that are spoken and taught from the Bible, it is like they are bouncing off a brick wall. It just does not penetrate. One of the greatest rewards and one of the greatest frustrations for me in ministry is one in the same. It is sitting down with people and explaining the gospel and doing everything I can to make it as accessible and understandable and to have them just reject it. It is like throwing a ball off a wall. It is like, “Whatever.” And one of the greatest rewards is to sit down with somebody and before I’ve even uttered three or four sentences, it is like, “I believe!” It is like, “Wow I am amazing. That was like incredible.” It has nothing to do with the messenger. It has nothing to do with the words I articulate. It has everything to do with your ability to see light. And for those of you here who are cynical, and hardened, and questioning I just want you to know I am so glad you are here. I want you to be here. I want you to bring your questions. I don’t want you to take it easy on us. I want you to keep throwing that at us. I just simply want you to entertain this one thought. Could I be in the dark and not know it? If 2 Corinthians 4 has any truth to it, it says that there is somebody who has blinded you. There is somebody who has kept you from seeing the light of the gospel. I just want you to crack the door open on that even for just a minute because see when all is wrapped up in this idea of logos it basically… Maybe you are looking for a really rational argument to believe in God. Man if you could prove that all this is true, then I would be in. God didn’t give us a rational, air-‐tight argument. He gave us a rational, air-‐tight person. It is found in Jesus Christ. That is why Jesus says He is the way, and the truth, and the life.



John says, “The light is on!” But look what happened in verse 10. Jesus “was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him. He came to His own,” in fact He wrapped Himself in flesh. He came to us, “and His own people did not receive Him.” Isn’t that so sobering? He came and we didn’t see it. We missed it. I was thinking about that last week and I was away from my wife and kids for about 12 days this summer. I had to come back a little bit early. When they finally got home the kids looked like they had grown up a little bit, and I had missed some things and I thought, “Man what an awful feeling it would be if I came in the room and they were like, ‘Who are you? I don’t know who you are. I don’t understand.’” And we are beginning to get this feeling that our Heavenly Father, your Creator, the One who knows you better than you know yourself, He came and we missed it. This is the whole reason why John is writing this gospel. Because he is living in a culture of people who missed the person of Jesus Christ. Verse 12, “But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” What does that mean? He is basically saying that the way you become a child of God is not because you were born to it, verse 13, it was not because you were born into this family. In other words, nobody here was born Christian. You are not a Christian because your grandparents and parents were. You are not a Christian because they took you to church from the time you were an infant. You were not born into the family of God. He said, “You are not a Christian because of the will of the flesh.” What does that mean? The will of the flesh. You’ve got to have the will of the flesh to get on the treadmill. You’ve got to have the will of the flesh to go out and run a few miles. This is the idea that I really want it, I have a strong desire for it, I’m going to go get it. You don’t become a child of God because of a strong desire. Then he says here, “not because of the will of man,” in other words, this is not something else somebody can do for you. So you don’t become child of God because of your heritage, because of a strong desire, because of some sort of human effort made on your behalf. You become a child of God because God came to you in the person of Jesus Christ to bridge the gap between us and Him. And now John summarizes, re-‐emphasizes, and recaps everything that he just said at the conclusion of this prologue. The first 18 verses of John are like a boomerang. He throws it out, comes around, and lands right back where he starts. I think it is like, “Man, let me come back to this idea of logos because I didn’t fully capture it yet.” And so in verse 14, “And the Word,” or the Logos, the Logic, “became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” And that is Christianity. Verse 15, “(John,” the Baptist, “bore witness about Him, and cried out, ‘This was He of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks before me, because He was before me.”’) And from His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” What is better than grace? Well, double grace. Verse 17, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” That is why He is the way and that is a pretty good way. Verse 18, “No one had ever seen God;” I love how intellectually honest the Bible is. Nobody has ever seen God, “the only God, who is at the Father’s side, He,” referring to Jesus, “has made Him known.” In other words, do you want to know what God is like? Then look at Jesus. Get really, really close to Him because He represents God to us.



So John concludes where he began with this idea of Word. I think he’s got one more thing he wants us to know about logos. It is this idea that you cannot truly ever get to know somebody without receiving a word from them, without speaking to them. So if you were to go to the same Starbucks every single morning on your way to work, you bump into the same handful of people every day, but without ever talking to them, just observe them – do you ever do that? If you were just to see the same group of people – if I were to come to you after about three or four months and say, “Hey do you know those people?” You would say, “Well, yes and no. I know some things about them, but I don’t really know them. I know what they drive. I know their fashion sense. I know where they work because they wear their little name tag thingies. I know what they like to order on a regular basis. I know some things about them.” But you don’t know them. If you are ever going to get to know them, what would have to happen? You would need to speak to them. You would have to hear their word. So John is saying this, “Listen, you can maybe know some things about God, you can even believe in God, but you won’t ever truly know God until you hear His Word. And His Word is found in the person of Jesus Christ.” So when it says, “Jesus is the Word of God,” that is an amazing statement. He is saying that you cannot know God except through the person of Jesus Christ. Some of you, if I were to say to you, “Where do you stand with God?” You would say, “Well I go to church and I believe in God.” Well anybody can come to church and even the demons believe in God. So he is saying here, “Salvation, your conversion, is that relationship with Jesus Christ and you will never know God until you come to know Jesus Christ because Jesus is the ultimate revelation of who God is.” As I said just a little bit earlier, I meet with people all the time who just keep running up to these roadblocks and say, “If I just had proof that all of this was true, I’d have no problem with it,” and you are looking for air-‐tight rationalism. Man I don’t blame you. I like rationalism. I like to study. I like to use my brain and John is speaking to very intellectual Greeks and he is saying to them, “God has given us rationalism. It is just not wrapped up in a philosophy or an argument. God gave us an air-‐tight relationship and that is so much better.” God gave us an air-‐tight person in the name of Jesus Christ. So this isn’t anti-‐rationalism, this isn’t cheap sentimentality or blind faith. You need to use your mind. You need to study. You need to ask questions. I thought about this so much before. If God just wanted me to have blind, stupid faith, why would He give us a book that is actually kind of hard to understand in places? He wanted you to engage in it. He wanted you to pursue Him in that. But you will never truly come to understand who you are and why you exist and what all this is for until you come to the person of Jesus Christ. Christianity is not a set of moral guidelines or some mystical, spiritual experience. It is found in a relationship that is communicated in truth. So I want to land on these two questions that I want you to think about personally this morning and maybe in your Life Group, or maybe in your brand new Life Group, because you are going to sign up for it right after the service, right? Don’t answer that too quickly. My self esteem can’t handle it. So, let me just give you two really quick questions here. Here is the first one. Who is Jesus to you? Now, resist the urge to say, “Man, I wish my neighbor was here, I really wish my spouse was here, I really wish my kids were here.” Well, they are not here, you are. So I want you to ask yourself this question, “Who is Jesus to me,” regardless of whether you would call yourself a believer, whether you have been here for a while or not.



Who is Jesus to you? Would you just say He is a good guy? He is another moral teacher? He is somebody who I draw spiritual insights from among another long list of individuals over here? See many of us treat Jesus this way. Well, Jesus had some good stuff so let me take some of His stuff and throw that in a bowl. Let me take some things from Gandhi, and let me take some things from Buddha, and I read something on somebody’s Facebook that sounded pretty good. Let me take something from Oprah, and Doctor Phil, and let me mix some of that up like a spiritual tonic and I’ll put it in a capsule, take that once a day, and that will be my spiritual growth plan. John says, “That is not who Jesus is.” So who is Jesus to you? Is He your buddy? Is He your co-‐pilot? Is He somebody you pull out when life gets treacherous? Or is He God? Not just your Savior, your Lord. Here is your second question. What have you done with Him? What are you doing with Him? Have you ever received Jesus Christ, or can you not think back to a time in your life where you had that introduction, we call that conversion, that beginning point of that relationship? Who is Jesus to you, have you received Him, and what are you doing with Him? This applies to those in the shallow end and those in the deep end. If you have never given your life to Jesus Christ, my prayer during this whole week and throughout this series is that you would during this series. The Gospel of John is a great place to start for those who are maybe new to all of this. I just pray that you commit to hanging with us through this series as we work through John. It is a small commitment, Memorial Day 2015. Just kind of be with us as we work through this. Would you just make yourself open to say, “Who is Jesus and before I walk away from this maybe once and for all. Before I reject this I need to take a good hard look at Jesus Christ.” For those of us who maybe have been doing this for a while, for those of us who are in the deep end we are jumping off the diving board, and I am just wondering if there is anybody here like me today. Maybe the flames of your faith are beginning to die out. Maybe you need some sort of infusion. Maybe you have begun to feel it. School just started back up, you are in the routine and you are constantly moving all the time. Life is so busy. You feel like, “Man, I feel like I am drifting away from God but I am not quite sure what to do about it.” We think that maybe it is reading another book or going on a retreat or getting into another study. Man, I really hope the sermon is good this week. Hopefully that will ignite my faith. And I just want you to know that it is found in the re-‐introduction of a relationship with Jesus Christ and I want you to know I am right there with you in that struggle. Do you want to know one of the primary things God hammered me with while I was on my break? It hit me while I was in Colorado and I got up and I was spending a little bit of time with the Lord. It was just this impression upon me where God nailed me, like ripped my jugular out. He was like, “Brockett, if you weren’t a pastor, would you be as passionate about this book? And would you be as passionate about teaching Jesus Christ if you weren’t a pastor?” I am going to be really honest with you. I didn’t like my initial response. So if the flames of your faith have begun to die out, it is not found in trying harder, it is not found in jumping to another church or going to another retreat. It is not found in a rational argument. Get really, really close to Jesus Christ. Pursue Him. Start in the Gospel of John. That is why John writes. As an older, seasoned pastor, he is like, “Let me tell you about Jesus, my best friend, who is God in the flesh.” You do not have to be perfect to be here. We are all a broken mess, me included. You are broken and I am broken. Quit pretending like we are not broken. Let’s just be broken and messy together and pursue the One who can make us whole. And His name is Jesus Christ.



Let’s pray. Father, we come to You right now. I thank You for the Gospel of John. I thank You for a description of who Jesus is within it. I pray that You would help us understand why that matters so deeply. If there is a person here who just keeps hitting roadblocks because they would really like to believe but their minds won’t let them get there, I pray that the Gospel of John, they could marinade in it, they could be changed by it. They would come to understand that God has offered us some Logic, wrapped up in the person of Jesus Christ. God, if there is anybody here who they are just struggling, they thought about quitting church, they thought about walking away from you, they don’t really struggle with belief, they believe, but it just feels like the enemy has gone after their marriage, the enemy has gone after their kids, the enemy has gone after their friends, it has gone after their health, and they don’t know if they can stand much longer, God I pray that they would be strengthened by way of a relationship with Jesus Christ, the Logos, the Logic of God made flesh for us. We ask this in your name. Amen.

the gospel of john: god came near… · august)16/17,2014)))))

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