Simon says, after the Confederates defeated the Union Army of the Cumberland just outside of Chattanooga, the Union troops took refuge in the city of Chattanooga, and we're under seized there for a couple of months. Confederates took up all the high positions around the town with cannons, and his grant prepared us troops for battle was maneuvering them, getting ready to respond. Some of them lacking orders from their superiors, surprised everybody by charging missionary ridge early. They were so unexpected they took it. When Major General Phil Sheridan got to the ridge, he was so overcome by joy, he hopped on one of the freshly captured Confederate cannons, twirled his hat, and rode it like a horse. Well seeing his leaders, antics and joy, one of his brigadier generals, Charles Harper, saw that he would follow suit. He hopped on the cannon next to him, however, that cannon had been fired more frequently and more recently. He burned his backside so severely he couldn't sit in the saddle for two weeks. What does it mean to follow the leader? What does it mean to be a disciple? Is it just mindless imitation? Well, what would Jesus do? Is Jesus meant to be simply our role model? Jesus come to think of it. If Jesus was a role model to copy, he was a pretty big failure because not a single one of his disciples became a Messiah. What does it mean to follow the leader? John 1's where we're going on this page, 1647 in your Pew Bible, we're picking up where we left off last week, how do we go know what it means to follow Jesus? It always helps to take a look at the guys who did it first. So let's hear from the eyewitnesses, beginning at verse 1, let's hear God's word. I'm sorry, beginning at verse 35 of John 1. The next day, John was there again with two of his disciples, this John the Baptist. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, look, the Lamb of God. Just before this, the day before. When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus, turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, what do you want? They said, rabbi, which means teacher, where are you staying? Come he replied and you will see. So they went and saw where he was staying and spent that day with him. It was about the 10th hour, that's 4 p.m., Andrew, Simon Peter's brother was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, we found the Messiah, that is the Christ, and he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, you are Simon son of John, you will be called Cephas, which when translated is Peter. The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee, finding Philip, he said to him, follow me. Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethesda. Philip found Nathaniel and told him, we have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, of in about whom the prophets also wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph, Nazareth. Anything good come from there, Nathaniel asked, come and see, said Philip. When Jesus saw Nathaniel approaching, he said of him, here is a true Israelite in whom there is nothing false. How do you know me, Nathaniel asked, Jesus answered, I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you, then Nathaniel declared, rabbi, you are the son of God, you are the king of Israel. Jesus said, you believe, because I told you I saw you under the fig tree, you shall seek greater things than that. He then added, I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man, so God's word, let's pray. Jesus, we come wanting what they got to spend the day with you. Lord, show us what you showed them. We ask it in your name, amen. Come and see, what does that mean? First of all, contrary to what we often hear, it means to think, to process. Now notice, if we just had the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke, it'd be easy to think that when Jesus first came across these guys, they just, he said, follow me, they just dropped their nets and they went. I'm thankful for this account in John, because it lets us know there's a history there. This is their first encounter with Christ and there's a process, there's a soaking in that happens before they go. Now I want you to think about that because, well, if you're not a Christian, you hear this morning, I probably need to apologize to you because of how often people like me, on occasion unfortunately, has been me, how people have put you under the gun on the spot. Let me put it a little differently. Let's say you're a 25 year old single man, it's Saturday morning, 9 a.m. and I come to your door, hey, how you doing, it's me. You know, I know you're single, you're 25, you're thinking about getting married, there's this woman sitting in my car, and she wants to get married, so I'm a pastor, we can do this thing right now. You know, I appreciate the sentiment you'd say, but you know, I haven't even met her. Well she's beautiful, you guys have worked great together, I think, you know, we can get you married right here and now. You'll love it. It's fantastic, I know, you say, well, you know, I think I would really like to at least go on a date first, then my demeanor kind of changed, I say, look, yeah, she's a beautiful woman, she's willing to get married and you know what, honestly, if you, you need to make the decision right now, because if you turn her down, she's kind of angry and she's got a gun and you know, things could be bad for you. I mean, you should look at me and say, if what you're offering is for me to marry a well-armed associate path that I've never met right now, then the answer is definitely no, but that frequently is how Christians do evangelism, right now, right now, now listen, there's an element of truth in the old stories of you could draw away from here and die today, but generally speaking in scripture, people think, they think out their faith, they wrestle, the encounter and they process, look at what these guys, they come and they say, where are you staying? Now I want you to think about that because a lot of people, one of the arguments about the Christian faith is that it's a sacrifice of the intellect that you just got to throw your brain out the window. I mean Karl Marx famously said it's an opiate of the people, don't question, just do whatever. The great thing about a passage like this is you see completely otherwise, God welcomes our thoughtful dialogue, come and see, come and think and process. There's a verse in Jude that says, be merciful to those who doubt. Remember, in Mark 9, when the guy whose son is demon possessed comes to him and he's like, please help, please help me, Jesus says, do you believe? He said, I think I do, I want to believe it, help my unbelief. I got some doubts, help me. Jesus doesn't say, well, here's the deal, you go away and deal with those doubts and come back once you've got them settled. No. He helps them right then and there. They come and they say, after they've been told by their mentor, that's the one, they come and say, he says, what do you want? Where are you staying, they say, which is, it's almost like they say, you know, the conversation we got to have here, Jesus, it can't happen in 90 seconds. It might not even be able to happen in 90 minutes. Where are you staying, they're inviting themselves over for dinner. I want to be where you are because I want to get to know you, they spend the day with him. The word that you use there for stay is the same word to use in John 15 that translated abide, abide in me and I'll abide in you doing life together alongside one another. We want to be with you and see he's inviting further inquiry, come and be with me. What are you looking for? You want to know?
I'm going to give you two examples of thinking this out because of the fact that I think we do so poorly at this, especially among conservative evangelicals. So oftentimes, you know, God said it, I believe it, that settles it. That is not helpful for a conversation with people who don't believe it. So we need to be able to entertain some thoughtful questions. I told you last week, a lot of, there's a repeated use of the term witness or testimony. Same word in the Greek, not only throughout this chapter, but really the full first half of John. It's a theme. It's a courtroom term that witnesses came to prove history, truth. I mean, this is news. It's the good news. It was an event and they're testifying to what they saw. And this is important because a lot of people will say modern scholarship, it's really popular to say, you know, the Bible is full of lots of myths and legends, but we're smarter than that now. We know you can't take that kind of stuff seriously. That developed and these stories are made up. Good scholarship won't allow you to do that. I love the CS Lewis was a specialist in myths and he gave an essay once in front of a lot of modern scholars in his day, challenging them about how they, they're saying, you're saying the Bible is nothing but myth. He said, you haven't done your homework. I study myths for a living. It's not possible. Myths aren't written like that. You don't include extraneous detail. I mean, you kept setting verse 39. It was four o'clock. We hung out with Jesus and then it was four o'clock. I mean, you aren't reading a myth and it says, Hercules slayed the Hydra. It was about 330. Myth isn't written that way. We have modern, realistic fiction and so we've come to expect that fiction has a ring of the truth, but that didn't develop until the 1700s. So Lewis looks at him and he says, understand what you're saying is untenable in scholarship. You're saying that there is a genre of literature that the Bible represents that has no known predecessors. Nobody did it before and no known successors until the 1700s. Nobody did it after for 1700 more years. It's an untenable position. You have two options. This shows itself to be reporting of historical fact, either it is or it isn't. Either it's a historical event or it's a fraud. It will not let you categorize it as myth when we think out our faith. It challenges the categories that we've got. It challenges how we engage God's word and it even is shown among the disciples here because in Nathaniel, he has a good question. I mean, this is, if you're out trying to share your faith with somebody, this is the Christian nightmare that somebody would have a good question in response to what you've said. I mean, a lot of people use smoke screen questions. You know, if somebody, you're talking with somebody and they say, yeah, but what about all the starving people in, you know, in Ethiopia or in India? You know, honestly, what about them? I mean, you have you shown interest in them before? I mean, it's not really entirely germane to your question. That's not the real issue. A lot of times it's a smoke screen kind of question, but they're legitimate questions people ask. All of which need to be engaged in Nathaniel has a good question. Wait a minute. If it's the Messiah, where's he from? Nazareth, everybody knows everybody studied. Messiah is supposed to be from Bethlehem. What's he doing from Galilee? That's way up north. It's a good question. I mean, Philip comes and he tells him, this is the guy. All of Moses, you know, Moses in the prophets. This is a term that means all the Old Testament basically. It's a representative term. I'm just going to pause on that for a second because this is why we preach like we do here. If you've heard preaching where people don't go to Jesus at the end of the sermon, it's not about Jesus. This is why right here we're getting it. We get it at the end of Luke. We get it throughout scripture. All of scripture is about Jesus. And the claim that Philip is making is all of this, all the scripture, thousands of years of writing has come together in the Messiah. He's here. It's an incredible claim that Christ is the center of history. I'm just going to pause for a second. If you're thinking about that as a, if you have a young family like mine and you want to teach your kids, Sally Lloyd Jones has put out a great book called the Jesus Storybook Bible, Get It. It will teach you. It is excellent. And it shows how every page whispers its name. Every page is about Christ. But recognize that when these guys were hearing that for the first time, maybe like you, if you're hearing it for the first time, all of history is about Jesus. That's preposterous. It's ridiculous. And people will have good objections in the face of it. What did Philip do when Nathaniel had a good objection? Did he say, now hang on, you can't challenge the Messiah. How dare you? He didn't take a big bat of the Bible theology and smash him over the head with it and say, you better believe this. He said, I don't know. But let's go and see. Come and see. The answer wasn't, here's systematic theology. I'm going to drop that on you. It was come and see, come and encounter, come and bring your questions to Jesus. I don't want to say that to you because if that's where you are, are you willing to engage Christ in that way? Are you willing to come and bring your questions? And if he has answers for your objections to lay aside your prejudices and consider the possibility that he is the center of history. But understand, the Christian faith is not one of throwing your brain out. It is one of thinking out your faith to come and see is an invitation to come and consider and evaluate and wrestle. But also to come and see means that we're going to change. And if you're going to come somewhere, you've got to move from one location to the other. It means that something about you is going to change and in the South, this is changing. But generally speaking, you say to people, you know, what do you think about Jesus? Oh, I like Jesus. You know, I like what he said. I'm believing in him. I trust him. He's really important to me. I go to church every Sunday. Let's see if we can get some categories to think critically about that. It's that time of year. You can smell the fresh cut grass Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, football. And some of you have that coach that you just love. Some of you hate him, but some of you love him. And you can't help it. You're talking about it all week long. You get together with the fan club. It's the Houston nut or Dan Mullin or Les Miles or an even Nick Sabin fan club. You sit down and you talk about what coaches do and how wonderful it is. And you can't believe what your team's up to and I mean, it gives you joy all week long. You're thinking about it. You go, you scream and cheer. You watch what the coaches do and you appreciate it. You're in the fan club. Well, let's say one day you find out coaches coming to town. Well, you and your boys are all excited. You go, he's going to speak at the lines club and you come in, you listen and the coach gives a speech afterwards, you just overcome, you go up, you shake your sand. You have brought so much joy into my life. You don't even know it. I'm one of your biggest fans. Now understand a lot of people think of Jesus this way. He's brought a lot of joy into my life. He's had an impact in my life. I really, really appreciate him. Let me give you an alternative understanding. Let's say you're a woman and you decide to marry coach. See before part of your life was touching part of his and you appreciated that. But now all of your life is touching all of his and there are implications for that. To a wedding yesterday, that couple is waking up this morning and it used to be, I want to go to Walmart. I go to Walmart. Now, I got to tell, I want to go get a loaf of bread. I mean, before I didn't have to tell coach that I wanted to go get a loaf of bread, there are now implications because everything, all of life, all of his life touches all of mine. And it means there are going to be some changes, some priority shifts, some movement on how I did what I used to do. Maybe things have to be different. Tim Keller loves to, on this point, talk about the Stepford Wives. I've never actually seen the movie but I've heard about it so much. There's the old version where these men decide to kill their wives and replace them with robots. There's the newer version where they just put microchips in them but in both cases, they change their wives to where they do whatever they're asked to completely complicit, completely whatever I desire you do. At first, they think this is wonderful, what a dream come true. But then slowly, the realization sets in that if there's a person in my life and they only do whatever I ask them to do, they never cross me, they never push back, the dialogue is only one way, I really have no access to who they are. There's really no personal interaction at all. They're virtually a non-entity. Now, I want you to think about that because a lot of people come to the Bible, they come to the Jesus of the Bible and they encounter him and say, I really don't like that. And the Bible is broad enough, it's got something to offend everybody. If this is God's word and God is personal, he gets up in your face and he may tell you things that you don't exactly like at this point. Maybe you don't want to hear. But if you claim to be a follower of Jesus, but what that amounts to is you know I really like this but this over here is I don't know if I can buy into that and you assemble a Jesus, you call it Jesus, but it's not the Jesus of the Bible, not the Jesus of history, recognize what you've done. You've just kind of assembled something else, not Jesus, that looks a lot like you if not is you and you're calling it God. It's a self-projection and there's absolutely nothing personal about that. If your God does whatever you want to do, you do not have a personal God. Let me put a little bit differently, I've told some of you this before but I really think this is critical. This is the test. When your God tells you things, you don't want to hear because you better believe that my wife never tells me things that I don't want to hear. We don't have a personal relationship, personal, I mean expect it especially with what the Bible tells us that we need help. God gets up in our business and pushes on us to move somewhere. What does he do? What he says will change you. You notice this Peter comes to him and he calls him Seifas, the rock. You don't even know me and you've already named me rock. Sandy Wilson says he's Simon son of John, he says he's renamed him rock Johnson and it sounds like a WWE match, you know, throw down kind of name, he gives him a totally different name. What am I going to do with this? Who has the right to rename me and what in the world? Earl Hirschhizer tells a story of when he first came up from the minor leagues into the majors and Tommy Lasorta was his manager, all of a sudden he's with big time team, big time manager larger than life. Tommy Lasorta is known for his abrasive personality and he has a horrible outing and the next day Lasorta calls him and he knows he's going to get reamed out, he's going to get chewed out. He says, you know, Tommy Lasorta sits him down and he says, look, I'm changing your name. It's no longer oral, I'm calling you Bulldog. He says, listen, you got the ability, you're just not doing it, you're intimidated. He starts a sermon, he's preaching out of it, if I could take a surgeon and chop open your chest and pull out your heart and stick in mine with my heart and your arm, you'd be a hall of famer. And he said, he was just getting started on the sermon, he's winding up and he says, you need to get in there. From now on, I'm calling you Bulldog because you need to be tenacious and go after him. Earl Hirschhizer said he was a little bit aggravated and felt like it was a childish speech but somewhere underneath he had heard a compliment that Tommy Lasorta actually thought he had something. There's a reason he brought him up from the minor leagues and so he went out in his next game. Actually the next game, somebody else was pitching and he was having a rough outing and Lasorta looks down the bench and he goes, is there anybody down there who can pitch? And Hirschhizer takes the opportunity, he goes out and for three innings he said, all he hears is, come on Bulldog, you're my God, I know you can do it, come on Bulldog and it was aggravating. But Earl Hirschhizer became Bulldog. He became now Hall of Fame pitcher that he is. He got renamed by somebody else who functionally did take his heart and put it in him. Now let me put that a little bit differently because what Jesus does, he doesn't recognize talent because Earl Hirschhizer had a special gift. He doesn't recognize talent and then say, I believe in you get out there and do it. This is the difference. He calls Peter a new name that Peter's not and when he calls somebody by a new name he gives them that power. Now remember for three years Peter's flip flop, flip flop, flip flop. But he becomes the rock. When God calls you something, he changes you into that even as you wrestle through it. He changes your identity. How does he do that? Because come and see also means that we will have all. When Nathaniel comes, he comes to Jesus and Jesus says, true is we're like, you're completely honest. Nathaniel says, how do you even know me? And then Jesus says this really curious thing, I saw you under the fig tree. Now, you'd expect that if the answer meant what it sounds like it means that Nathaniel would come back and say, yeah, I was there and, but that's not the response we get. The response is teacher, you're the son of God, you're the king of Israel. We have no idea what Jesus meant when he said I saw you under the fig tree, but it's very clear that Nathaniel understood something deeply spiritual, a deep insight. That nobody could know Jesus just nailed out of the park. Nathaniel goes from skeptic to encountering Jesus to hitting his knees in a matter of moments. He's asked good questions, but now he gets a definitive answer. Christ reveals I have supernatural knowledge. I know you all the way to the bottom and he praises him. He praises him. When you encounter the living God who knows you all the way to the bottom and praises you, you're going to want in on that. You're going to want in on what he's up to. You're going to be in awe, but what Jesus tells him is what stuns him. CS Lewis says, you know, when people are dabbling in religion, and then they actually, they actually have a realization one day. As we actually encountered God, suppose he's really out there. What next? What do we do? He says almost as if the mice were searching for the cat. What in the world are we thinking? What are we after here? If we actually found God, what would happen? What would it be like? And that's what happens here in Nathaniel says, you're the son of God, Jesus says you don't even know, I gave you one insight and you're praising me. You're going to see greater things and then he goes on to tell him what that greater thing is. Angels ascending and descending, he's making a reference. He's making a reference to Genesis 28 when Jacob was running for his life in the wilderness and has a dream in the middle of the night, what we call it, Jacob's ladder, that there was a ladder leading up to heaven and angels were ascending and descending on it. Now we use the term ladder, but the word they're actually probably better be translated ramp, more like a cause way, like a huge bridge. It's meant for armies to move up and down. Forty years after Jesus, the Romans tear down the temple and a few of rebellious Jews, they go and find shelter and hide and rebel in a fortress in a place called Masada. It's got sheer cliff sides on every side. There's just a little path leading up to it and they barricaded themselves into this fortress. Well, eventually, 72 AD, the Roman army surrounds them, ceases them and then they build this huge ramp, 300 feet up a cliff side, wide enough for the whole army to come up and attack. It was 2000 years ago, it's still there today, you can go see it. It's a cause way that moves armies. That's a better picture of what Jacob sees. He looks and he sees not cherubs, little babies with wings flying up and down to Jesus, but warriors of light, the army of God moving up and down to the throne. Now notice what Jesus says. This is the difference between Christianity and every other religion. He doesn't say, let me point you to the gate to heaven. Let me show you where the ramp is. Let me show you, here's the tools, go build your ladder. Every other religion says, here are the rules, here's the way to get there, go follow them and you'll get in heaven. Jesus doesn't say that. He says the angels are ascending and descending on me. I'm the ladder. I'm the way to heaven. I'm the point of access. Not you do it. I do it. See every other religion, I mean, if I can just boil it down in a way that hopefully is not offensive. It's spiritual advice. This is how you do this. You go do it. Christianity is the only religion that says no, no, no, faith is God's action. Come and see what God has done. Not what you need to do. It's what God has done. He's made a way where there wasn't one. In March of 2009, I had a privilege of being at Sherman Hickson's funeral in Chattanooga. There's a suburb of Chattanooga called Hickson. He was the last living descendant in the area after the suburb, which the name was, the suburb was named after, and they were telling his life story at the funeral. He had been a World War II airplane mechanic, and so he was in England. He saw the bombers come and go. He did tons of work on these machines, and he saw them riddled full of bullet holes. He want a medal for developing a way to thicken up the armor and save people's lives, sending them out. So he spent his time thinking about how to save lives. Well, they had this recurring problem where some of these bombers would get the front wheel shot off of them. When the bomber would come in for a landing, the tail would hit the back wheels, and after a short distance, it would nose dive and kill everybody in the plane. So Sherman Hickson said, I got an idea. Get a Jeep and get ready. He got on the back of this Jeep, a plane comes in for a landing as slow as it can go. He says, Florida, they've floored in this Jeep. He gets behind the tail, and he's riding on the back of this Jeep, and he launches, leaps up, and grabs the tail of the plane to help balance it longer until the plane can slow down enough that the nose drops and everybody lives. He risked his life to save theirs. You better believe those bomber pilots were buying him some meals to thank him and eat with him and be with him. These guys didn't get what Jesus was going to do, and yet they wanted to spend the day with him. Jesus doesn't just risk his life. He gives his life. See, Jesus isn't hanging on the tail of your broken vehicle to help you land it. Jesus is the vehicle that was broken to bring you home. He is the one that was riddled with holes to bring you back from death. That's the gospel, not you go do, but come and see how God loves you. There is no other love like this. There's no God like this, and when they encountered this, they wanted in. They didn't get it completely, they're still soaking it, but they wanted in on that one last thing. You got to do this in community. Did you notice this? I mean, immediately Andrew finds out what's the first thing he does. The first thing he does, he goes and tells his brother, he can't keep his mouth shut. This news is too good, I got to go tell. Their family and friends hear about it. It's not some awkward push at the door. I don't know you, you need to get married, come on. I can't believe what I found. You need to come and see this. It's a very different message. John Sartel tells a story of a mission in India in the early 1900s. It was in a remote area of India, and there were doctors who went there to do surgery on folks, and there was a unique form of blindness, a progressive blindness that was passing through the district, and people would be born with sight and then around puberty, they would begin to lose their eyesight and eventually go blind. One of the surgeons, one of the doctors there, figured out a surgery that would solve it when people started coming in droves, and they wanted to thank him, but in the dialect there, the vernacular, there was no term that's the equivalent of thank you. Their equivalent was it translated literally, I will tell your name. The way they expressed it is, this is so good, I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to tell somebody, very similarly, there was a mission in China in the 1930s, and they had a surgeon who was doing, doctor who was doing cataract surgery. People would come in virtually blind, if not blind, they would do surgery, and they'd send them out. Again, people coming in droves, they would see people from all over, there's a rural area, all over people walking to come see them, and there were so many people coming and going, they knew they'd never see them again. One man walked 250 miles to have the surgery, and when he left, they thought, man, he walked a long way, I don't know, we'll ever see that guy again, three weeks later, here he comes holding a rope with 48 people behind him. People who have been exposed to Jesus Christ, expose other people to Jesus Christ. This is not some head bashing, you need to understand the truth. This is, I was blind and now I see, I will tell your name, all of your life has changed all of my life. I won't end, I'll go and tell others, but I'll be back because I just want to do life at your feet. What does it mean to follow the leader? To go be with him, sit at his feet and just soak him and let's do life together, let's pray. Jesus, so much of our lives has spent running from everybody else hiding ourselves, help us to do life together, Lord. Help us to want small groups not just to be a place where we shake hands and small, but where we get down and dirty, because we want to know you, we want to know how you change us, or to dig in your word, to dig in together, that the joy of who you are would be something, we got to tell, not out of some guilt trip, but just out of the mere joy of being loved like this, Jesus, that you are our bridegroom would melt us and change us, that we would want to hear from you, we would want to be changed and we would want to share that love with others. Help us understand what it means to do life alongside one another, that following you would not be a weight, we've got to carry, but it would be the joy of just coming and seeing who you are. We lift all this up in your name. Amen.