Betrayal

Please turn with me if you will in your Bible to the gospel of John and we're looking at chapter 18 That should be on page 904 of your Pew Bible as John chapter 18 verses 1 through 27 We are in the last few weeks of our Exploration of the gospel of John we have seen a lot of Jesus in this gospel We've seen him engaging with his disciples trying to bring the truth and the promises of the gospel to bear upon their lives. We've seen him in a public teaching ministry Speaking to all sorts of people of all different stripes. We've seen him perform miracles Which were just a foretaste of what would happen in his own resurrection We've seen him even engaging with people who have absolutely no interest in him whatsoever People who are unbelievers and they know it. They don't play the Christian game And he comes to them and he brings that gospel to bear upon their lives And so I wonder if as we've reached this point in John's gospel Where you're at with Jesus? How you understand him to be what the present value of him is in your life? Tomorrow morning at this time you're going to be doing something else other than this You're going to be at work You're going to be doing some kind of task or responsibility that you need to do over the course of your life And what I'm curious to know and what I think John is curious to bring a bear upon a life Is what difference does Jesus make in those contexts? It's what we need to be thinking about as we come to the scripture this morning It's passage that we're going to read as I just mentioned is Not one of those touchy-feely passages if you were you know looking for a little pat on your back this morning This is probably not the first passage that you would go to in all the scripture We're coming to a climactic point in John's gospel This is the part right after Jesus Praise that beautiful prayer that high priestly prayer that we saw last week Especially pertaining that we as a church would be united that we would be one just as he and the father of one After that prayer we see him coming to the point where he is about ready to be arrested and in just a short period of time He's going to go to the cross. That's where we're at So let's take a moment now to read this passage from John chapter 18 beginning in verse 1 through verse 27 John writes this When Jesus had spoken these words he went out with his disciples across the Kidron Valley Where there was a garden which he and his disciples entered now Judas who betrayed him also knew the place for Jesus often met there with his disciples So Judas having procured a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees went there with lanterns and torches and weapons Then Jesus knowing all that would happen to him came forward and said to them Whom do you seek? They answered him Jesus of Nazareth Jesus said to them I am he Judas who betrayed them was standing with them When Jesus said to them I am he they drew back and fell to the ground So we asked them again whom do you seek and they said Jesus of Nazareth Jesus answered I told you that I am he so if you seek me let these men go This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken of those whom you gave me I have not lost one Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it and struck the high priest servant and cut off his right ear The servant's name was Mouches so Jesus said to Peter put your sword into its sheath Shall I not drink the cup that the father has given me? So the band of soldiers and their captain and the officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him First they led him to Annas for he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas who was the high priest that year it was Caiaphas who had advised the Jews that it would be expedient that one man should die for the people Simon Peter followed Jesus and so did another disciple So if that disciple was known to the high priest he entered with Jesus into the court of the high priest But Peter stood outside the door So the other disciple who was known to the high priest went out and spoke to the servant girl who kept watching the door and brought Peter in The servant girl at the door said to Peter You also are not one of this man's disciples. Are you he said? I am not Now the servants and the officers had made a charcoal fire because it was cold and they were standing and warming themselves Peter also was with them standing and warming himself The high priest then questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching Jesus answered them I have spoken openly to the world I have always taught in the synagogues and in the temple where all the Jews come together I have said nothing in secret Why do you ask me ask those who have heard me what I said to them they they know what I said When he had said these things one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand saying Is it is that how you answered the high priest? Jesus answered him and What I said is wrong bear witness about the wrong but if what I say is right? Why do you strike me? Annis then sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself so they said to him you also are you not one of his disciples? Are you he denied it and said I am not One of the servants of the high priest a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off asked Did I not see you in the garden with him? Peter again denied it and at once the rooster crowed Amen, this is God's word to us this morning When I was a freshman in college at the University of Arizona I became friends with a guy who was in my campus ministry named Andrew and he was a guy who I would grow to really enjoy getting to know a person who gave all indications of being someone who genuinely and truly loved the gospel and loved the God's people and loved the word and loved everything that Jesus Christ was about He was one of the guys on the campus where if there was some contentious issue the newspaper would call him up and Get an interview from him because they wanted to get an articulate and thoughtful evangelical voice on the campus And so he was someone who was by all intents and purposes a true leader and someone who genuinely loved the Lord He graduated from college and after graduation he ended up going on the Ministry staff of that campus ministry at a major university in California There was another person that I met when I was in college there as well and her name was Beth Beth was a pastor's kid She wasn't one of the pastor's kids that goes absolutely hog wild. She was actually one that Turned out from everything that I could tell to truly love Jesus. She cared about bringing the gospel to her neighbors and to her friends And she was one of the most thoughtful Christians that I've ever come to know she was a theoretical astrophysics major Who majors in that? This girl did and she went on after college to get graduate degrees at MIT and Harvard and I admired something about her Because she was not the kind of Christian who would walk into the doors of the church or a campus ministry and just check her brain at the door She was thoughtful about this and integrating her faith into all of her life There's a third person I want to tell you about as well. It's not just one person. It's probably 15, 20, 30 people that I know in my life people who've been brought up in the church People who know the Christian vocabulary people who live somewhat more lives very more lives but perhaps better than many Christians in many respects if the Barnard group or the Gallup poll were to call them up and to take a Survey some kind of poll and to ask them if they were born again Christians They're the kind of people who would say yes, they absolutely are But here's the link between Andrew and Beth and all of those other people that I'm bringing to bear upon your life right now all of them have more or less Abandoned the Christian faith entirely In a case of Andrew and Beth They have reached the point to where they deny the existence of God they've given Intense thought to this they didn't just wake up in a bad mood when morning and say God doesn't exist They plumb the depths of Scripture. They plumb the depths of science and all of the things in the fields that Interest them and they have come to the point to where they discovered that God does not exist And those who think that he does just worship some kind of an imaginary friend which is one thing for a three-year-old to do It's another thing all together for grown adults to do and to build their whole life upon that In the case of the third group of people that I mentioned They're people who just no longer seem to think that Christ really moves them They've developed another set of rules another set of way of living their lives and the other Objects to bring them the benefits that we believe that Christ brings to us things like joy things like security Things like satisfaction salvation from a meaningless hellish hopeless worthless life They've gone after other things and so they made profess to be Christians, but they deny Everything that is essential about the gospel and I think that what I see in them As diverse as their rejection of Christianity goes is something that I see that is native to myself and that is native to you As well and it's this it is that there is something within us That causes us to want to push back against Jesus had all costs That is part of our DNA from the moment we're conceived We're inclined that way we're inclined to push back against Jesus to resist him It comes out in all sorts of different ways it can come out in very Active belligerent hostile ways as is as is the case with Andrew and Beth It can come out in entirely in different ways You don't hate Christianity. It just isn't really something that's very important in your life Even though you may show up to church from time to time There are those who And by the completely Different religion is a way to avoid Jesus Christ People with intellectual hang-ups People who seek to avoid Jesus By their immorality by doing whatever it is that they please in order to give their lives some meaning People avoid Jesus through their strict morality By trying to have their ducks in a row and by looking out at everybody else in their life and by saying I'm better than that person I've got my act together All of us even if you know Christ have a measure of this in a life This is this is part of our very being it's part of our very nature to be like this And so the reason why I'm even Making an issue of this is because when I look at the soldiers and when I look at Peter and I look at the people in this passage And I look at Judas I see Something that is there in the heart of every human being And I want us to have that in our rearview mirror as we go through some of the snapshots that I think that John is wanting to bring to bear upon our lives in this passage I want to point out just a few of them that I see here and here's the first scene that I want us to zero in on The first scene that we need to see is this group of soldiers that is coming to Jesus and seeking to arrest him These are the people who illustrate our in-born hostility towards God They're encountering Jesus and when you encounter Jesus as he truly is he's going to confront you And he's going to confront you and me at the level of the most sensitive and personal parts of our lives In the South we have a phrase for this We say that when someone's doing that that they go a meddling That's what Jesus is doing here. He goes a meddling and people's lives He peels back the layers of the things that they're building their life and their Identity and their self-definition upon and he exposes them as objects of their worship As the things that they seek to save them from meaninglessness and hopelessness And what he does in the midst of that is he says You worship a God whether you believe it or not You're just worshipping a God that is counterfeit. That's made of plastic That's something completely different and and gives you completely false hopes Whereas I'm the true thing. I'm the real deal I'm the genuine true God who is the only redeemer of your soul and the only one who can bring you eternal lasting joy And the only way you're going to get that is when you stop depending upon yourself and stop worshipping all of these other things And making them the foundation of your life and you transfer your worship over to me When you call someone to do something like that It's going to raise some hostility. It's going to arouse a pushback Because it's striking at the most precious things of our souls So when Jesus comes to someone and he says repent and believe That's not always the best way to win friends and influence people But that's the message that Jesus brings to them here that he's been bringing throughout his entire public ministry And it's reached a boiling point It's reached the point where he's going to be arrested and he's going to be crucified for it The whole scene here is really kind of laughable when you think about it Jesus goes throughout his whole ministry his whole life And he never so much as lifts a finger against anybody and these soldiers show up with all guns blazing They've got weapons and torches and the whole bit and they're coming at Jesus Like he's you know pack and heat or something And he comes out they come out of him like this And the reason why they do so is it's just an expression of their own and born pushback against him Because when you encounter Jesus when you're really see him as he is When you listen to his words When you come face to face with him He moves you He moves you in one direction or the other That's how you can tell that you come to terms with Jesus because he actually moves you It physically happens in this story These guys come face to face with Jesus and he says I am he I am the one you're looking for and they follow the ground Because they've seen him They've seen him as he is When you encounter Jesus my friends Listen to this when you encounter Jesus as he truly is He will not allow you to imbibe with service Christianity To take solace in the fact that you are a Methabaptitarian and you grew up in that church and that's just how you are And that's just what people believe around here And so where else am I going to go that's just what I am He won't allow you to imbibe that He drives you to the point Of where Peter was in one of his much better moments than we see in this passage Where he comes to Jesus and he says Lord who to whom do we go You are the one that carries the words of eternal life you are the holy one of God He's going to drive you to that point or he's going to drive you to stick your finger in his chest And say I want to have nothing to do with you. I reject you. I'm finding something else to build my life upon He's going to drive you either to rejection or repentance There are times in our Christian life Where we're just flat out dry We're parched at the level of our souls and And we don't feel a tug one way or the other towards Jesus and we feel somewhat ambivalent to And those are periods that we go through But I think what John is trying to bring to bear here and what we see in Jesus and his interaction with these people Is at the thrust of the Christian life It's going to be one that goes towards him Towards loving him towards enjoying him towards abiding in him And so the question that you have to reckon with this morning and that I have to come to terms with as we get ready to eat a big Thanksgiving meal and head out today is to ask the question what place does Jesus have in my life What he'll be in difference is he making in my life I Know the right things to say but what difference is that making in the way in which I interact with my wife And with my child and with my friends and with my neighbors and with my enemies If you have dryness That's great admitted, but what are we going to do about that? Where are you going to go? Are you going to go to the other counterfeit objects that you've been seeking to build your life upon? Are you going to run to Jesus? Are you going to say I'm not going to live like this anymore? Are you going to say I'm not going to be satisfied with where I am? I need forgiveness. I need grace and I need Jesus to get it my life even at the most embarrassing Touchy parts of my life and I need him to come and bring healing and transformation to those parts You're either going to do that or you're going to stick your finger in his chest and you're going to say Crucified him But he doesn't allow you to take the middle road. You can't straddle the fence Have you ever tried to straddle a fence? It hurts You can't do it for very long you're going to go on one side of the other And that's what Jesus forces you to do and that's what we see in the elders or the soldiers confrontation with Jesus here That's the first scene But here's the second scene that I want us to see too as well This is just one of the most bizarre scenes in the whole Bible And it's where Peter cuts off the soldier's ear Peter Is really an enigma He's a strange bird He's one of these guys that is just a common ordinary fisherman. He's a blue collar kind of guy And Jesus calls him to himself And he has a zeal for Jesus that's almost unparalleled of any of the disciples in the whole Gospels that you see He is the first one to affirm that Jesus is the Son of God The first one to say that Jesus is the one who is the way to eternal life And he's full of boldness and he's full of zeal and we see it even in his misunderstanding of Jesus And even in his disobedience to Jesus even there underneath the disobedience in the sin is a measure of zeal that Is not common to superficial Christianity I think that if you've ever been around the young Christians or if you remember back to the point in your life Where you first became a Christian if you were aware of a time where you were once in darkness And that was that was clear to you And then you came into the light and you understand there was a point that Jesus said come and he saved your soul Those types of Christians are the most exciting kind They have a tremendous zeal They're they're newly transformed and they're wanting to talk about Jesus to everybody And they get excited about Christianity they get excited about Jesus and sometimes they get a little bit overly dogmatic That their their language is not particularly nuanced but even in the midst of that they have a tremendous zeal When I first became a Christian there was a clear point where I crossed the line and went from darkness and delight And I must have been the single most annoying human being on the face of the earth in the first year or two which I became a Christian Because I wanted to tell everybody about it But the reality is this Is that if there was ever an example of misplaced zeal in all of scripture this is the place It's the part where Peter cuts off one of the ears of the soldiers It was an act of colossal stupidity Even when he thought he was doing the right thing Everyone even when he was thought that he was expressing a real true genuine love for Christ And it reminds me of how we can engage in a world that is hostile towards him How we can engage with with people in our lives Who have an act of or a passive hostility towards Jesus Christ Think of the way in which so many Christians speak Against Social ills immorality bad political things going on evils even within the church There's there's an embarrassment that comes along with that There's a difference between a Christ-centered Biblically informed gospel saturated The set of solutions and criticisms and just pure low-ball attacks And that's you know the difference and I think that's what we see here to some extent Is when we and we follow the pattern of Peter here end up fighting all of the mess of the world with worldly weapons Rather than with the weapons that Jesus Christ has given to us in his gospel Do you know what weapons he's given us to fight All of the evil all of the hostility towards God That we have within ourselves and that we experience in this life. Do you know what he's given us Ordinary things the word And he's given us prayer He's given us his word he's given us his scripture and he's given us the power to tap into him through prayer To and he's given us the Holy Spirit who dwells within us To live out who we are in Christ in the ordinary circumstances of our life to be light in salt and a dark and decaying world He's given us his word to bring that to bear either Explicitly or implicitly upon the world upon the people in our lives upon our neighbors In the way in which we speak and in the way in which we live He has enabled us to pray and actually pray with a measure of expectation that he would bring those people in our lives who are in bondage to himself into his light To bring them to repentance to bring them to embrace him and delight in him Look there were soldiers here Who were going to come and arrest Jesus Christ One of the soldiers came and slapped Jesus Christ across the face The audacity of that man to do that But we think of a man like Paul who had God's people murdered for following after Jesus Christ And in the midst of what seemed to be the most hopeless of situations most unlikely of people to repent and believe He comes and he takes Paul's heart and he chisels away the stone and he makes it a heart of flesh one willing to believe and he does that I had a former pastor of mine tell me there's nowhere in the Bible this says is the case But it is pure hypothesizing but I think there's probably a good measure truth in it When he said that he didn't think that anybody came to know Jesus Christ who hadn't been prayed to come to Jesus Christ first There's something to be said for that that we can pray for our neighbors. We have that weapon in our back pocket We can trust him to change them and to change our heart and our attitude towards them And so my challenge to you in light of this is to think about people in your life. You just flat out don't like People who are your enemies People who you work with Who are belligerently against the gospel or who are just indifferent to And to pray that their eyes would be open That their ears would be open to see and to hear and to taste and see that That Jesus Christ is good and to fight with those weapons that he has supplied for us And to change our heart as we engage with them But this is something that Peter completely missed Peter missed that His zeal got the best of him And he fought with worldly weapons Rather than with the weapons that God had supplied for him So there's all this zeal in in Peter and it's completely misplaced and then in the very next breath of this passage We see that all of that zeal seems to have been vacuumed out The the air in his life had just been sucked out and he had been sucked dry and there's no zeal whatsoever anymore He's questioned by these people About his identity with Jesus Christ does he follow him and that's the final scene that I think that we need to see here Is the scene where Peter denies knowing Jesus Christ at all I think that every Christian can resonate with that reality I certainly can there's no one that's immune to this you can remember Times in your life maybe in the not so distant past Where there was a boldness to your Christianity There was a boldness a full flavor to your faith And then for some reason you just became linguine spine You just became hypocritical And then so many facets of your life you practically gave expression that you denied even knowing him See the Christian life is a lot of things But one of the things that it is about And that we experience in our Christian life is the ongoing day by day Temptation to protect ourselves and to save ourselves In something else other than than the one who protects and saves us and that is Jesus Christ We have this temptation all around us all the time from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night To believe that someone or something else other than God is good that that thing is good and that God is not That's been going on since the beginning of time That's what was happening in the garden when the serpent came to Adam and Eve He was trying to expose the fact that God's promises and God's will were not good And his temptation was That's the that's what's undergirding so much of your life And so that's what happens to Peter here in the midst of his fear In the midst of his lack of sleep Probably he'd been up for more than 24 hours In the midst of seeing that Jesus's death was imminent And in the midst of people probing him And in the end of this story you read it and you think what difference is there between Peter and Judas They both betrayed Jesus What difference is there between the two of them Peter is acting exactly like an unbeliever here That's someone who doesn't know Christ Christians act like that sometimes a lot of the time It's not surprising It's not surprising when you see people who profess to genuinely know Jesus Christ to act exactly as if they were an unbeliever And the reason why is because sin is so insidious It's always around us that temptation is always around us I wonder if Peter had just anticipated that temptation might be coming his way in the midst of this That the fact that Jesus had been arrested And hauled off And the fact that since Peter had spent most of the last three years with Jesus every single day That just maybe someone might come and Inquire about the fact that he was following Jesus too That he might receive just a little bit of pushback since Jesus was about ready to go to the cross But he wasn't aware of that. He wasn't prepared for that temptation at all See the Christian life in so many respects is this ongoing battle against our inherent hostility towards God Against a world that hates him And against those forces of evil that seek to attack and seek to kill and seek to destroy us And they constantly fight to get us to try to throw Jesus under the bus all the time The reality friends is that we're in a battle We're in a battle. This is not peacetime So many of us engage the world and engage our life as if it were peacetime But Jesus is trying to show us that we're in an ongoing battle against ourselves Against everything coming at us That seeks to get us to In the most subtle and inconspicuous ways deny Jesus with all of our lives We need to realize that the moment we wake up in the morning Is the moment when discontent is going to settle in It's the moment when temptation is going to settle in Many of you know exactly what this is like you walked in the door this morning with a smile on your face Showing that you were so glad to be here when in reality about 10 minutes earlier You were so ticked off with your family that you were about ready to drop your kids off on the ocean springs bridge on the way to church You know that that kind of thing is just alive and well in your life all the time to some extent It's a battle and whenever you face those things there are ways to seek to undergird your faith To get you to Go off in some direction other than to Jesus Christ but when you Understand that that's the case That that is just your ongoing experience in your life And you're going to be prepared to see your life as a battle rather than as a time of peace And you're going to go to battle with the weapons that Jesus has supplied for you in the gospel You'll look to a place like Ephesians chapter 6 And you'll see that on the hangars of your spiritual wardrobe is the belt of truth And you've girded that on yourself That truth that is yours in the gospel And that becomes yours and you and you strap that on yourself every day so you don't go into the battle with your bridges hanging around your ankles You go to battle with the breastplate of righteousness Which means that you're constantly having in view the fact that the righteousness of Christ has been credited to you So you don't live life in a despondent, despairing way as if you were a condemned sinner You begin to see yourself as someone who's who's been a recipient of the righteousness of Christ And so now you're set free. He sees you as having that righteousness. That's your hope And so you go out and you live in the context of your life As if that were the case You live a holy life empowered by the Holy Spirit because that's what you've already been given You go into life with those gospel shoes. It's always before you The the fact that God is holy and that you were not and that you need his grace and that he gives it to you in the gospel And that liberates you to live lives at your life in gracious Christ filled ways and you bring that to bear upon people's lives He's given you the shield of faith All that junk that comes at you in life you put up that shield of faith What means at what means that you're looking to Jesus For your identity for your hope for your solace and a world that's seeking to bring you down And you whip out that sword of the spirit. It's that word of God which means you have to be grounded in it That means that you seek to know it and seek to live it and you seek to breathe it And when pressure is applied to your life and your and your life is punctured What comes out of your veins is the word of God. It's the truth and the grace of God's word That is how you fight the battle in this world There's one more thing you need to remember When you look at this passage you see a sharp contrast between Peter and between Jesus Because Peter stands before his questioners And he denies everything And Jesus stands before his questioners and he denies nothing Peter is tempted With the experience of mockery and lies and if his reputation being in stake Jesus is tempted with something so much greater than that with real danger and he remains steadfast Peter shows himself to be a coward here And Jesus shows himself to be faithful to the very end My friends You're only hope in your whole life Is the fact that When you have failed as bad and and even worse than Peter That Jesus has as succeeded at every single point where you have failed That's the only hope that you have in any sphere of your life Peter has failed and Jesus has succeeded and you have failed and Jesus has succeeded for you if you believe him And you know what that means? It means you can own your failures I mean you can own your sin and stop sweeping it under the rug Stop minimizing it stop ignoring it stop excusing it Stop blame shifting and you can own it and say I am a mess to my very core That's not what defines me What defines me is that in my place condemned he stood But what defines me is the fact that Jesus substituted himself for me That he succeeded in the midst of all of my failures And the difference between Peter and Judas if you're asking that question at the end of this passage Is that Peter would get that Peter would get it and Judas wouldn't How wonder No matter how long you've been here No matter how long you've heard this gospel message No matter what you experience in the Christian life if that's something that you believe Do you believe that Jesus has stood in your place That he has succeeded when you have failed and that is your only hope and that he defines you by his righteousness and not yours That's your only hope that's what frees you from hiding and enables you to start living faithfully As though you were accepted and loved and adopted as his child and given his holy spirit and all of the benefits of the gospel Have you discovered that? If you haven't Considered an invitation to do so before you leave this morning It's come to him now in prayer Father, this is a passage that pierces our souls and is so little of what we really want to hear Because in seeing you in this passage you expose a darkness that is there in our lives in so many different spheres

We know that we need you after we read this passage We know that we need your ongoing grace We know that we see our lives and we see so much filth and so much junk and so much rebellion and so much indifference And that's our testimony But we stand upon your work for us and not our own Let that be our hope Let that be what transforms us and makes us look more and more like you and display your glory and find our joy met in you Do that in us for your sake For the sake of those who don't know you and even for our sake as well We ask this all in the name of him who came such a distance for us our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ