September 18th, 1918, just outside the French village of Marcoing, it's the waning days of World War I and British private Henry Tandy is finishing up an arduous day of fighting that will wind up earning him the Victorian cross. That's the British military's highest honors, the equivalent of our Medal of Honor, but here late in the day along the front lines out of the fighting stumbles a wounded German soldier and a Tandy's line of fire. He gets the drop on him, he has him in it lined up in his sights, the soldier seems resigned to his fate, desperate and wounded and like he had done many times before, Tandy decided wounded man he wouldn't shoot. He let him, he let him go. He done it many times before, it didn't seem significant, but it is in the pages of history because that was Lance Corporal, 29-year-old, Adolf Hitler, the stuff of legends, the kind of thing that historians like to debate could World War II have been prevented with a single shot. Well, the debate can rage, but nobody doubts that Hitler was hugely responsible for the Second World War and it wasn't because of his military prowess, it was because of his oratory skills, his powerful words. After Hitler's death, one of the foreign diplomats who knew him personally was quoted as saying, you could have blindfolded me and put me in a room and I'd know if he was in there. There was an electricity in the air, so with any great leader like that, the way he spoke, the power in his words, he were left with only three possible options. You could flee, you could run, try to get out of there or you could try to assassinate him, take him out, get rid of the scourge or you could give yourself to him, mind, body and soul. That kind of power in his words, all you're left to do is either run, kill him or give him everything. John 7's where we're going. That's page 16, 60 I think in your Pew Bible. Let me be clear, I don't condone anything that Hitler did. But we are coming to words that are more powerful and therefore more dangerous than Hitler's. Will you run? Will you try to kill him? Or will you give him everything? Let's hear from God. Beginning at verse 11. Now at the festival, the Jewish leaders were watching for Jesus and asking, where is he? Among the crowds, there was widespread whispering about him. Some said he is a good man. Others replied, no, he deceives the people. But no one would say anything publicly about him for fear of the leaders. Not until halfway through the festival, did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach? The Jews there were amazed and asked, how did this man get such learning without having been taught? Jesus answered, my teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory. But he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth. There's nothing false about him. Has not Moses giving you the law yet not one of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me? You're demon possessed the crowd answered, who's trying to kill you? And now skipping next week's passage jumped down to verse 40 on hearing his words. Some of the people said, surely this man is the prophet. Others said, he's the Messiah. Still others asked, how can the Messiah come from Galilee? Does not scripture say the Messiah will come from David's descendants and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived? That's the people were divided because of Jesus. Someone had to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him. Finally, the temple guards who'd been sent back in verse 32. Finally, the temple guards went back to the chief priests and the Pharisees who asked them, why didn't you bring him in? No one ever spoke the way this man does the guard's reply. This is God's word. Let's pray. Lord, this morning we ask that you would make your word clear that we would hear one who speaks like no one else and we would see your face. Changes by your word we pray in your name. Amen. All right, those of you who've been coming through this series with us in the gospel of John, at some point you may begin to say, Russ, some of this just seems kind of repetitive. John is being a little bit cyclical here. He is repeating certain themes that keep coming up, but think of it more like a spiral staircase. As he's leading you upward, remember the end of John, which we've finished last spring. John 20, we're told, John's goal in writing this gospel that you would believe that you would have faith in Jesus. And everything he's doing is to set that up. And this narrative we're looking at, one of the central questions is, who is this? We talked about it a little bit last week that the people were confused. Let's look a little closer. All right, first of all, they say he's a good man in verse 12 and kind of the same thing in verse 20, I mean, sorry, verse 40, that he's a prophet. All right, let's back up from that. If you're a secular historian today, pretty much from any culture on the planet and you're knowledgeable, if you want to make a list of the three most influential people in history, just from the sheer numbers of people affected, it'd be virtually impossible to keep Jesus off that list. He's had an incredible influence. And because of that, I mean, just that alomics people want to give him a positive spin. Most people would say, oh, he's a good man. That's sort of the politically correct position to have today that he's a prophet, a good teacher. But as we've seen so far in John, Jesus won't allow you that position. If that's the position you come with this morning, hear what Jesus says here. He's claiming a connection with a father that nobody else has in another place in the gospels when they call them good teacher. He says, why do you call me good? Nobody's good, but God, he presses it out. His claims are too big to just call him a good man. Let me give you a connection. I don't know. Maybe if you're like me, you've gotten a ton of these emails. But if you've got an email account, you've probably received an incredible story. This note from an African business man's inheritance board, I guess, letting you know that this man has died in Africa and he's got millions of dollars that's just kind of hung up. And the sole beneficiary has to be a worthwhile individual. And this committee is reaching out to you because they've noticed you, though you've never met them from Africa. And they thought of you are the one who should inherit $2 million or $10 million or $156 million incredible amount of money. Have you got the email? And all you've got to do is send them back some personal information like your social security and bank account number and things like that. And here you are left with this dilemma. On the one hand, this could be an incredible life altering reality that
you can respond to or this person is evil and how to take advantage of you. There's really no middle ground to say, well, they seem like nice people because if they're about to give you millions of dollars, I mean, that's phenomenal. That's at least got to be categorized as great. Not just sort of, I think I like them a little bit, you know, or they're evil. And that's really Jesus claims have such a magnitude. You can't come down and say, I kind of like him. With what he says about himself, the implication is either this is the most phenomenal thing I've ever heard or this guy is evil. That's really all we're left with. And that's the conclusion other people come to you. Look at this later on in this passage, they say in verse 20, are you demon possessed? Verse 12, they call them a deceiver. It's kind of the same thing. One way or another, they're saying, are you lying to us or are you even lying to yourself? And that's why you're lying to us. You know, was Jesus crazy? There's a famous case study in the 1960s. This psychiatrist decided he had different patients who believed they were Jesus Christ, three of them. And he thought, maybe it'll help them see reality a little better if I get the three of them together. He wrote a study about it called the Three Christ of Yipsa Planty. And he gets these three guys together, all of whom are convinced they are Jesus Christ, they are God in the flesh. And he sits them down thinking, you know, when they see it in the other person, they'll say, that guy's crazy, maybe I'm crazy. But instead what happens is, he says, now who are you? Well, I'm Jesus Christ. Who told you that? Well, God did. And the other guy would pipe up and say, I told you no such thing, you know, it was that kind of banter that would go on. And he thought eventually they'd get it. But instead what happened is they just sort of reoriented and came to some sort of conclusion that let them write the other two off either, well, you're a mental patient. And you should be here, you know, or one of them thought, well, you're, you know, you're a dead and you're just a robot operated by remote control. You know, they tried to come up with a different way to maintain their reality. But everybody else involved in the situation could look and say, you are one sandwich short, buddy. You know, something is wrong here. It's kind of like if you're in a big city and you're on a train and somebody slides up next to you a little too close to your personal bubble and you kind of take, you take inventory of what they're wearing and they're demeanor and they lean in and they say, I've got a secret for you. I'm from the planet Ventor. And there's a space taxi leaving in an hour. I need $5 to catch it. You know, you immediately you're thinking, okay, all I know is I want you away from me. You know, your immediate assessment is this person is crazy. And that's kind of what some people are coming to by what Jesus claimed. But at the same time, others of them think there's such a force and such a beauty to what he's saying. They can't dismiss him so easily. But at least we're beginning to enter into the question. Is he a deceiver or is he who he says he is a Messiah, God in the flesh. Look, really, those are pretty much our only two legitimate options. Crazy deceiving himself or deceiving other people and evil in that regard that he would take control of your life or you should give him everything. And many of you have grown up in the church. I've heard that kind of assessment before. I want to press on you a little bit this morning. Let's think about this. The list of people who've claimed to be the Messiah. I googled it this week in the internet. Wonderful. And Wikipedia reports this long list of people and pretty much unless you count Imperial heads of state in the ancient world who were claiming sort of a demigod status. I'm divine, but there are lots of other gods. Just you have to do what I say. Excluding sort of that group, everybody else who's claimed divinity. I mean history has shown them to be a fool. And if anything, absolutely abusive of power. Let me just take a couple of recent examples. David Kuresh, Waco, Texas, you know, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, you know, that Marshall Apple White, the guy with heavens gate with all the people killed themselves. If somebody is a Messiah figure and you give yourself over to them totally, it is dangerous. Dangerous. There is a legitimacy to the objection by ardent anti-Jesus people that Jesus is dangerous. And as church going Christian espousing people claiming the name of Jesus, we need to be able to admit that readily because the name of Christ has been abused historically for a lot of other purposes than what he stood for, which is all the more reason we need to go back to what he talked. So what is it? I mean, look at this. Look at his teaching here. It says he's amazed the Jews. Now there's a sense of scoffing from the leadership, but he amazed them. And if you jump forward to what the guards say, I mean, they're absolutely captivated by him. We know from verse 32 when they're sent to verse 36 when they come back at least a day has passed. Now think about that for a minute. These guys are temple guards. They're not Roman guards. They're under the authority of the priest and the Sanhedrin who send them out when they say, go bring this guy in. They go and they start listening to Jesus. They're looking for an opportunity to arrest him and they're hanging out around him and they hear what he's saying. And after at least a day of listening to this guy, I mean, they come back and they're like, we can't arrest him. We've never heard anybody speak like this. I mean, they are absolutely amazed by what they're hearing. Barnhouse, Donald Gray Barnhouse says, it's hard to imagine how the priest would respond unless you think of a modern-day judge saying to cops, all right, I want you to go arrest this guy. We got to warn out for his arrest. And they come back and they go, well, judge, you hadn't heard this guy talk yet. He's going to be livid. You're fired. We'll get somebody to go get it. What's wrong with you? And there's almost there's that kind of arrogance permeating the entire passage from the leadership. We'll get to that in a minute. But they're amazed by his teaching. And when people tell them he's a lunatic, he's crazy. Nobody else, nobody important believes this guy is what the leadership goes on to say after verse 47. And instead the guards are basically saying that argument doesn't hold water just after being around him for a while. It's an unconscious verdict. They're weighing in on Jesus. They're just sort of confessing the reality of who he is and what, just from what they've seen.
Here he comes, because we're told without formal training, no, why it's important when it says that, I believe it's in verse 15, where it says, it says, where did he get this kind of learning? Where did this guy arrive here without training? It's not just saying that he hadn't studied. It's saying that he hadn't been educated at the right places. He hadn't come from the right seminary, so to speak. He hadn't studied under the right rabbis. Because back in those days, the way that a rabbi taught was basically using a bibliography. The longer your bibliography, the more authoritative you were. You could cite sources. You could cite the people that you studied under. You could cite all the commentaries on a different passage. But sometimes what would happen frequently, they would lose sight of actually what it said. And here comes Jesus just expositing the text. Just here's what God's word says. You get it? And people were knocked back by that and that he knew how to navigate the word faithfully. And he was getting after the central point of it. And then he starts to judge these guys by challenging them. I mean, verse 17 just really starts to beat on me. This is kind of where I want to camp out this morning. Because he basically is saying, why do you come to me? Why do you talk Jesus? Why do you talk about God? Is it for your glory or somebody else's glory? And he's calling these guys out. He's basically saying all of your teachers who should have faithfully understood what God is up to instead are building up their own glory. I mean, his Paul said in 1 Corinthians 8, knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. That God has an agenda with his word. And it's not to build you up in your own glory, but to run you straight to him and his glory. And that's the reason he comes right out and says, you're out to kill me. They scoff at it, but obviously we wouldn't be here telling the story of the cross. If it didn't happen, he's exposing their hearts before they're ready to admit it. All right, I'm jumping down on you, but look at look at verse 19. This is this is one of those piercing moments for Jesus says, not one of you has kept the law and he's talking to all different walks of life who are standing there. Jewish people, some faithful, some maybe completely secular, some leadership, not one of you's kept the law. Echoes Romans three that no one does good, no one seeks God. But this is this is the bad news of Christianity. In order for us to get the good news, we've got to get the bad news first. Every other religion says, put your hope in what you can do. Follow the rules. And Jesus starts off with not one of you can keep this. That's why I'm here. Not one of you can do this. And the closer you get to my law and to what you're called to do the more evident, it'll be as part of this problem with the rabbis as they've backed away from it and insulated themselves enough that they can pretend they're good with God. I was watching a tonight show a few months back and some guy was on talking to Jay Leno. He has a huge car collection and one of the things he has is a jet bike. Now I haven't seen a picture of it, but if I understand correctly, I mean it literally is what it sounds like. It's a motorcycle that's got a jet engine on it. Think of the Batmobile. You know, and this huge jet engine on the back has got exhaust coming out, just like a jet engine would, you know, the intake and it forces out the back and it's incredibly hot coming out of the back. And the guy he's talking with says, I mean, that should melt stuff, right? He said, yeah, I've had people pull up too closely behind me at the, you know, at the stoplight. He said, I've looked at the rear view mirror and I watched the bumper just sort of and he said, it went blur, you know, it just folded in from the heat of this jet bike. I think that's what we're talking about. You get close enough to God's glory and His holiness and the heat will actually, I was just absolutely undo you. The house of cards that we build of our own glory, the things that we've accomplished or the things that we've done, it just melts under the heat and purity of what He stands for. If you come hoping in what you would accomplish anything other than what He has done, it will undo you. All right, just imagine, you know, somebody installed an invisible MP3 recorder, you know, maybe down deep in your ear or something. I don't know. And everything that you do for the next two years, it records. After two years, you go before a judge on a morality board who says, all right, you're going to be judged today. We're not going to judge you by any religion. We're not going to judge you by any particular version of God. We're simply going to judge you by the way that you've interacted with people based on the way that you've judged them. The conclusions you've come to, the things you've said about them, we're going to judge you by your own standard. There's not one of us that would make it. They were deluded if we think that we're all walking, living hypocrites, religious and non-religious alike. It's what we do because we dodge the reality of our brokenness, even as Christians. This is the thing that presses on me about this passage. I said, verse 17, it's a place I want to camp out. You know, good conservative Southern Presbyterians like to talk about God's grace about the fact that it's not what I do, it's what Jesus does. And then we throw ourselves on God's sovereignty. He's going to take care of it. He's in control. All those things are true. But then Jesus comes along and says something like this. Just let it press on you. Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. That beats on me because if I'm hearing him correctly, what he's saying is, yes, Russ, you have said you're putting your faith in me, you're trusting me in what I've done instead of what you do. But still in an active ongoing way, if you choose to shut me down and you're life with me, you will increasingly be blind to what I'm up to. You will increasingly miss what I'm about and you will increasingly misunderstand what life is about, that we push God away even as Christians. If I harden my heart to God, what happens? That's what we're talking about. Because I think even especially in Southern churches like ours where we talk about Jesus and we rejoice over what he's done, the question that hits me hardest is, have you changed, Russ? Do you want to change? Do you actually want to let these things pierce you? Because the picture of God's leaders in this chapter, I mean, if you read on from verse 47, even what we read in verse 40 to 46, people are taking God's word and saying, well, the Messiah is supposed to come out of Bethlehem. This guy didn't come out of Bethlehem. Well, first of all, he did. If they'd taken a few minutes to do a little more research, just to ask the right questions, they would have found that he did. All right, which application for us, wherever you stand with Christ, have you interacted and asked the question? Sometimes it's just a matter of asking the question. But at the same time, look at the hardness of heart of the leaders. If you read on, they say, they say to Nicodemus when he objects about their law, they say, look into it. No prophet ever came out of Galilee. Well, guess what? Jonah did maybe even Elijah and name him. See, they're taking God's word and using it against God in the flesh. They're recasting life as they want to see it so they can push God out. They won't consider the evidence. Let me put this a little bit differently. There was a tragic, I mean, the discussion's been raging since the Tucson event, just in politics. This side screams that that side's a problem. This side screams that that side's a problem. Everybody's just screaming louder and louder. Who's listening? And oftentimes in religious circles, it becomes about who can shout louder the longest and then you convince people that that's the way it is. And if we as God's people are guilty of that, we've missed the entire goal of the early church. See, it's not about propaganda. It's not about shouting Jesus name the loudest. The early church didn't say, take a blind leap of faith. Just jump really hard. Just jump. If you just listen to me, get excited and jump for it. That's not what happened. I mean, I've thought about this before. Why didn't Jesus choose to come in the day of DVDs? You know, we have video footage. We could just, you know, each day we'd have a big screen back here. We'd pop it in. We'd be like, worship time, watch Jesus. There he is walking. There he is. We could just worship Jesus by watching. But that's not what he did. He came before video. I mean, if you're not cynical about that, if you're a believer, you begin to think, why did he choose to do that? Why did he choose to make words the way that he conveys himself? It says in the Bible, the word is living in active. It's dynamic. You interact with words and you have to go deeper in. You have to think, you wrestle. I mean, if we had video of Jesus, we'd just worship the image of Jesus instead of who he really is. Think about this. Jesus showed up on the scene. He's God in the flesh. He could have said whatever he wanted to say, he quotes the Old Testament. He quotes himself from earlier on. Why? Because he is who he is yesterday, today and tomorrow, but also he's showing us how to interact with him. I am who I am. Now dig in. David said, I've hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Pat looked at me this week. He goes, how are we doing memorizing scripture?
And it's not just about how many, can you check off how many scriptures you memorized? Do I want to know God? Or I soak on who he is from out for something else?
Yet Tim Keller said when he was in college, you know, you're at college to get a degree, to get a job, to make money to do what you want. That's how he lined it up. He said, well, I had this music appreciation class and I had to listen to Mozart. I didn't like Mozart. I didn't want to listen to Mozart, but I had, but to get it a degree, to get a job, to make money to do what I wanted, I had to listen to Mozart. So he listened to Mozart. And in order to get an A on the test, you had to listen and listen and listen so that when they played the music, you would know it. And you could say, oh, that's, that's this. So that's that. You had to study it and soak on it and know it. He said a really weird thing happened. The more I listened to Mozart, the more I wanted to listen to Mozart. And he said, as he grew older, as he, you know, got the degree and got the job and started to get the money. Then what did he use the money to do? He went out and bought Mozart because soaking on it and the beauty of it had changed him. I don't have to tell some of you to watch football this afternoon. You can quote stats. You can tell me about Tom Brady versus Mark Sanchez. You can tell me the details because you soak on it. You live in it. It's the thing that you love and you do. You know, for some of you, you can tell me the latest fashion coming out of Hollywood. You can tell me what you're going to go shopping for and where to get the best deals when you head to Jackson.
I mean, we just do it naturally. Turn on the radio. What station do you turn to? We soak up certain things. What channel do you watch? What internet sites do you go to? And we cultivate love by taking an evidence of that thing that's our passion and the whole point of the gospels was to put you in the evidence of the greatest thing there is, the greatest passion that could ever be had,
that we would dig in God's word not to pat ourselves in the back and say, good person, Russ, but to say, oh my goodness, there is nothing like this, that the challenge of the early church and that disciples of Jesus was not, hey, let me shout really loud so you'll just take a blind leap of faith that was, look at the evidence. Look, no one ever spoke like this. Just listen and soak it in.
But evidence isn't enough alone. I think that's why verse 17 eats at me so much. We're not just talking about information, but transformation. We don't just, you don't need to come here and let me give you lectures each Sunday so you can go away and be a well-informed Christian. You know, I know church history, I'm good to go. No. I remember driving through Philadelphia in the middle of winter when I was in seminary, went down to visit somebody and driving past the hospital, it just struck me how many nurses and doctors there were outside this hospital and the freezing cold smoking. And I was like, wait a minute, they see better than anybody else. I mean, they're opening people's chests up and like, they see the evidence of a soft geocancer, all this kind of stuff. Information isn't enough to change how they live. And just a couple of years later, I was prime evidence of it. I watched, you know, this documentary supersized me. Anybody seen it? This guy goes to McDonald's and he decides, I'm going to eat McDonald's food every day all day for the next 30 days. He's in great shape. He goes to the doctor to check it out beforehand because he's doing a documentary. They say, man, you are an excellent shape. I as a doctor and convinced that you're going to be fine. So every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, he eats at McDonald's and if they say, you want that supersized, he says, oh yeah. And he has to eat it all. Well, things start happening to his body. And 20 days into it is wife makes him go to the doctor because things are getting so bad. And the doctor says, I can't believe what I'm getting on these reports. Your liver is shutting down. You will die if you keep eating this. Die. And so it ends when like, there's extras on the DVDs where you can see what the McDonald's food does. And I'm not picking on McDonald's. There's tons of different places. You know, my wife is actually impacted her. Me, I'm eating there later all that day. You know, I'm right back to McDonald's. See, the evidence alone isn't enough to change your hearts. They are hard toward God. The reality of what Jesus did, the evidence that he did it, that alone will not be enough to transform you because our hearts are hard. Do you want to know him? Are you willing? Are you willing? Well, the answer is no. Unless he changes. The really cool thing about the Bible is it doesn't back down from both challenging us and giving us the hope of God's grace. Paul says, work out your salvation. You work out your salvation with fear and trembling. Why? Because it is God who works in you to will and to act. See, if Christ is in you, it begins to change your heart. I don't know what y'all are struggling with. Maybe a couple of y'all do. I don't know. I hope somebody knows what you're struggling with and can get in the mess with you and is asking you the hard questions that you actually want to change and you invited somebody to ask you hard questions. This is what Wednesday nights about. You're studying the words you're digging in but you're doing life alongside each other so that you can say, how are we doing? Because man, I would be ashamed as a pastor if I lead you to be puffed up with knowledge instead of to grow closer to Jesus. It's so dangerous, y'all. His words are so powerful and yet our hearts are so hard. We need grace every day. Not just once, all the time. Do you want to be changed? Can you point at something last year that is different now about your spiritual life? The only way you're going to have a willing heart is if you see how willing he was. I put that a little bit differently. The only way you're going to understand I'm not asking you to be held captive by Jesus. I'm not asking you to be put in a prison cell by Jesus. I'm saying I want you to be captivated by him. These guards went and saw him and were willing to come back and tell their bosses. I'm willing to lose my career over this. I've never seen anything like this. That's what will melt your heart. They went to arrest Jesus and instead he arrested them. Same thing happened in John 18. They came to take Jesus and he said I am and they all fell down and then he let them arrest him. I want you today to be arrested by Christ, literally to be stopped and taken in by the joy of who he is. Let me give you this. Charles Dickens at the end of Tale of Two Cities. He tells a story of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay. There are these two guys who happen to look a lot alike and they don't just have that in common. They happen to love the exact same woman. Well Charles Darnay wins out. He gets the woman. He gets married. They have kids. The story develops near the end of the book. They're in Paris during the French Revolution and Darnay gets taken in. He's in prison. He's going to be executed, guillotine the next day and Sydney comes into the prison, comes up to him and says here's my plan. We're going to trade places. He sneaks in and says we're going to trade places. I've got it all set up. I'll take on your clothes. I'll die in your place and Darnay says no way. No way. So he hasn't knocked out and they trade places. He hasn't taken out the prison. He puts on his clothes. He's in the shackles and he's standing there and as far as anybody can tell he is Charles Darnay except that there's one seamstress who knew Charles Darnay well enough. She comes over and starts talking to him and suddenly she realizes you're not him and she says are you dying for him? He says yes and for his wife and his kids and she said oh brave stranger I'm having a lot of trouble facing my death because it was coming immediately the next day. She said but if I could just hold your hand as we go see if we like her get a glimpse of what Christ is up to in trading places with us that he was arrested so we would be set free from the captivity of the very thing that you're hardening your heart about. The very thing that you're saying God just let this go. Will you run? We try to kill him or will you surrender yourself completely to him the only way we get this is if we see how willingly he died in our place then you'll be willing to give him everything
to be captivated by the power of his words because no one ever spoke like this. Let's pray. Lord Jesus let all the basics let all the routine let all the all the things we dress up Sunday morning and let it fall away pull us to you our hearts don't want to change there are things that we do not want to relinquish this very morning. Lord for the person here who's never trusted in you I pray you would show them why there is nothing greater no one whoever loved them better that every other taskmaster will require them to die and for those of us who claim your name Lord I pray for the thing it is that we're unwilling to relinquish the thing that maybe we were blind to even before we got here this morning why it is that we need the cross we need you to die in our place or thank you that you were willing make us willing that we would go and be willing like you were to point to you by dying for others to lose in this life in order to be a part of what you've gained or may what you accomplished change us this morning we pray in your name amen