If you have your Bible, I want to invite you to open up with me to John chapter 18. We're gonna be looking at verses 28 all the way through chapter 19 verse 16 and I believe that is on page 904 of your Pew Bible if you'd like to turn there with me to John chapter 18. I've been thinking a little bit about this passage and thinking about it in light of the Advent season and in light of the Christmas season and in light of where we are in John's gospel. And it's reminded me of the fact that the birth of Jesus Christ shows us that God is on a mission. That is what he is all about. That it is God's mission to seek and to save an obstinate and rebellious people. And he does so by sending himself by coming in the flesh to become one of us. This is something that no other religion has where God actually comes and dwells amongst us in the flesh and lives ordinary life with his people. But he lives it perfectly. He lives it in perfect obedience to his father. What we are supposed to be all about all the time is living in perfect faithfulness to our father and we have failed him in every manifestation. But the great hope of Christmas is that Jesus has succeeded at every level where we have failed. And the great hope that we have in the gospel is that he dies a death. He lives and endures this condemnation on the cross which is something that we deserved. But we don't have to suffer it because he endured it in our place. And so Christmas points to that. It points to the mission that God is on to bring people as obstinate as you and me into his family to adopt us as his children so that he can say, you are mine. And I will never let anything snatch you out of my hand. That's the hope that we have. That's the hope that we have is we read this rather disturbing passage this morning. This passage where Jesus is being unjustly convicted and being led to the crucifixion. So let's turn our attention now to the reading of God's Word in John chapter 18 beginning in verse 28. This is what John says. He says, then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor's headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor's headquarters so that they would not be defiled but so that they could eat the Passover. So Pilate went outside to them and said, what accusation do you bring against this man? They answered him, if this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you. Pilate said to them, take him yourselves and judge him by your own law. The Jews said to him, it is not lawful for us to put anyone to death. This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die. So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, are you the king of the Jews? Jesus answered, do you say this of your own accord or did others say it to you about me? Jesus answered, am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done? Jesus answered, my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not of the world, then Pilate said to him, so you are a king. Jesus answered, you say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. Pilate said to him, what is truth? After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, I find no guilt in him. But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews? They cried out again, not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber. Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. They came up to him saying, hail king of the Jews and struck him with their hands. Pilate went out again and said to them, see I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him. So Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns in the purple robe. Pilate said to them, behold the man. When the chief priests in the office saw him, they cried out, crucify him, crucify him. Pilate said to them, take him yourselves and crucify him. For I find no guilt in him. The Jews answered him, we have a law. And according to that law, he ought to die because he has made himself the son of God when Pilate heard this statement. He was even more afraid. He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, where are you from? But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to him, you will not speak to me. Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you? Jesus answered him, you would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given to you from above. Therefore, he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin. From then on, Pilate sought to release him. But the Jews cried out, if you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar. So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at the place called the stone pavement. And in Aramaic, Gabatha, now it was the day of preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, behold your king. They cried out, away with him. Away with him, crucify him. Pilate said to them, shall I crucify your king? The chief priest answered, we have no king but Caesar. So he delivered him over to them to be crucified. Amen, this is God's Word to us this morning. Well, if you are a person who has been a Christian for some significant length of time, or you're someone who has some measure of acquaintance with the church, I want you to do something with me this morning. I want you to stop and to think and try to get into the shoes of someone who does not have that background that you have. Someone who is not a Christian. Someone who either is adamantly against Christianity or someone who just doesn't even think very much about it. To get into their shoes and get into their mindset. Ask me for just a minute as to some of the reasons why they refuse to bow the knee to Jesus Christ, why they refuse to worship him and to receive him as he is offered in the gospel. Why do you think that might be the case? If you were to interview any number of people who are unbelievers, people who do not believe in Jesus Christ, you probably get as many answers to that question as you would ask number of people that question. But I think that many of them would say that one of the reasons why they do not want to become a Christian, why that is something that does not interest them, is because they perceive that Christianity has a whole bunch of boundaries and rules which govern our life, that if we didn't have those boundaries, then we would all be having a lot more fun. We would have a more fulfilled life. We would have more freedom on our hands. And the perception is that Christianity is something that inhibits that freedom, that stifles joy. It seems unreasonable, especially as we live in a culture now that is multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, it's pluralistic in every manifestation, to build our whole lives and our whole identity upon the teachings of a Jewish rabbi who lived 2,000 years ago who spoke to that particular people in that particular time and place. They may not have any particular resistance to Jesus Christ other than the fact that they just see Him as being irrelevant. And they see those restrictions as maybe being good and right and true for those people in that particular context. But we live in a different world today. And it's just hopelessly naive and freedom limiting to build our lives upon what Jesus had to say and who He was all about. Because Jesus comes at us and sometimes He doesn't allow us to do exactly what He wants us to do and He doesn't give us exactly what He wants Him to give us. And that reality right there presents a tremendous challenge and a tremendous opportunity for us who seek to live out the Christian life in this particular day and age and culture in which we live. Because in a world that is less and less familiar with Jesus and less familiar with the vocabulary of the Bible and the things of Christianity and could frankly care less about that, we as Christians have to learn how to live and to think in Christ-exalting ways in this world without capitulating to it. In the world that is increasingly hostile to Christianity and unbelieving, we have to figure out how we're going to live out our faith without caving in to that world. Our message stays the same, no matter how the world changes. The gospel does not change with the changing culture and the changing tides. But because that's the case and because we stand firm upon that truth and upon that grace, we should not be surprised if we experience some measure of pushback because Jesus Himself, when He called the world to repentance, He was crucified for it. And so as His people, it shouldn't shock us if we experience some resistance as well from a world that does not embrace Him. The reason why Jesus is standing before Pontius Pilate here, the reason why in just a few hours Jesus going to be nailed to a cross between two criminals, is because Jesus would not give the people exactly what they wanted and He was not the person who they wanted Him to be. And so one of the things that gets in the way of people's happiness in this life is their perceptions of those things. And one of the things that got in the way of people's happiness in this particular time and these particular people in this particular culture was the fact that they lived under a very oppressive political regime. It was a foreign regime. It was a political system that was imposing foreign thought upon them, foreign political philosophy. It was godless. It was liberal. It was unjust. They had all kinds of unjust tax laws and all sorts of corruption going on. And the people were wildly dissatisfied with this government that was subverting their cultural and religious values. Can any of you sympathize with that at all? That's the case in this particular day and age and these people were resistant to this government. So what they were looking for was someone to liberate them from that, to liberate them from the oppression that they were enduring at the hands of the Romans. To get them out of that. They wanted a king to come and be the writer on the white horse, to be the Messiah, to deliver them from all of that, to give them a better and easier life. A life that didn't have to undergo all this nonsense that they were experiencing at the hands of the Romans. And it's in the midst of that context that Jesus comes to His people and that He says before Pontius Pilate that He says my kingdom is not of this world. And I think He means a number of things by that. One thing I think that He means is that He didn't pose any political threat whatsoever to Rome. He posed no political or military threat to Rome. He was accused by these people wrongly, hypocritically of trying to create some kind of insurrection against Caesar. And Pilate doesn't even buy that because he knows that that's not what Jesus was all about. Jesus did not come to bring in His kingdom by bringing about political change or bringing about military force. It's actually kind of strange when you think about it because when Jesus has just resurrected and Christianity is about to spread, it's about ready to spread in the midst of a very corrupt government system. And He's not talking at all about how corrupt it is. What He's focusing on is how the Bible speaks about Him, about how it points us to our need for Him. That's what He's pointing to. And then you get into the New Testament and the political situation just gets worse. It becomes more and more of a colossal disaster. And you read Peter and you read Paul and what they're saying about the government is that Christians should submit to it. That we should pray for our leaders, that we should live as good law-biting citizens, live out the implications of our identity in Christ in the kingdom of this world. And the point behind all this is that it is so good and so right and so wise for Christians to be involved in these spheres, to be involved in the military, to be involved in government. And it's important for the church, it's important for human flourishing, it's important for the liberties that we have in this country, but it is not in those realms where our hope ultimately lies. It isn't our hope lies in the one who is the kingdom of a kingdom that is not of this world. That's where our hope lies. Jesus doesn't bring people into His kingdom through political power or military force. He brings people into His kingdom as He brings His Word and brings His grace and truth and gospel to bear upon people whose hearts are hardened to Him. And He opens their eyes and opens their ears and opens their hearts to embrace Him and to repent and to believe and to walk after Him and to mirror Him in this kingdom, in this kingdom of this world. That's where our hope lies in what Jesus has done for us in the gospel, not in what gets passed and who governs us and things of that nature as important as those things are. That is one thing that Jesus means when He says that my kingdom is not of this world, but I think there's another thing that He's getting at as well. He's not only not a political threat, but He also means that His people are to go about living as citizens of the kingdom of this world. As if ultimately we were citizens of the kingdom of another world. That makes sense that we live out our lives in the city of man, in this life, in this context in which we live as if ultimately our citizenship were in heaven. Look, the great equalizer in everybody's life is that everybody just wants to be happy. There is no one anywhere that says, I really just want to be a grumpy old man when I grow up. Nobody says that they want to be that. Everybody wants to be happy. It's no wonder why Joel Osteen can write a book entitled Your Best Life Now. And it can sell millions of copies. Because who doesn't want that life? Everybody wants to have their best life now. I want to be able to take the hand off and run 90 yards for a touchdown. But most of what life looks like is taking the hand off and getting tackled after two yards. And sometimes it means taking the hand off and getting tackled for a two yard loss. Sometimes it means fumbling the ball. Sometimes it means you're tackled and you don't get up off the ground. You have to have the trainers come and scoop you up. Every now and then you get a nice big game. But most of life is about resisting friction, isn't it? It's about plotting along, getting tackled after two yards and trying to head forward to achieve that sort of happiness. But what we want is the touchdown. We want our best life now. And so we seek it through all of these avenues and try all of these tricks when we play all of these games and try to follow all of these rules in order to get it immediately. Right now, all of our lusts are born out of that desire, my friends. All of our lusts are born out of that desire. The insatiable need for sex, for money, for power, for significance, for whatever it is, comes from imbibing the mentality that the kingdom of this world is all that there is. This is the saying that's not the case. We get all the things that we want in this world. Perhaps you do get the touchdown. You get all that you want in this world and you get to the end of the road and you say, that's it. That's all there is. I got my dreams. I got my ambitions. I got all my hopes. And that's all that I got. I've received my reward and full. That's it. Some of you will remember Dion Sanders, neon Dion, the great Florida state defensive back and baseball player who went on to play major league baseball and in the national football league. He was the only person ever to play in a world series and in a Super Bowl. And in 1995, he got his life's goal met. He won the Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers. And after the Super Bowl, after getting an interception in that Super Bowl, playing a fantastic game, he goes back to the locker room and balls his eyes out because he had received his dream all there was. It was him and friends. The reason why that's the case is because we weren't created to find our deepest satisfaction in getting all of our dreams and hopes met in this world. That's not what we were created for. That's not where our deepest happiness was designed to be. Our deepest happiness comes from delighting in living by faith in placing our hope in a God who has been merciful and compassionate to us to the point that his very own life and by living that out in ordinary aspects of life. But we live mercifully and compassionately and graciously towards one another. Living God directed, Christ focused, gospel centered, Bible saturated lives and the ordinariness of our going to work and going to school and living with our families and living amongst our friends. There's a deep seeded joy in that. It's not a Super Bowl victory. It's a deeper thing than that. It's like when you look at the love that a couple of high school, sweet hearts have that are going to break up in two months. It's pretty intense love, isn't it? Compare that to the love of a couple who's been married for 60 years. Still holding hands. It's not all the gobbly, goo-cormonal craziness that happens in the life of a couple of teenagers. It's something that's deep and grounded in historical and something that has weathered all of the dangers and toys and snares of this life. It's a deeper joy than what it appears to be on the surface. And friends, that's what Christianity is to be about. It's about living that kind of life before your Heavenly Father who loved you and gave his own son for you. See, the people, that's not what they wanted though. They wanted their best life now. And so because Jesus didn't give that to them and didn't validate them and he exposed them as hypocrites, he wanted them to be crucified. And these were moral people, conservative people, religious people, people who many of us would have had a lot in common with. People who saw the biggest problems in their lives as being all the junk out there, the sagesis, the Roman oppressors, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, all those sinful messed up people. And they completely failed to see the biggest problem in their life live within. They missed that completely. That the enemy is within, not outside of us. That the enemy is at the level of our hearts. And it's making us cold and call us to Jesus Christ. They had no ability whatsoever to see that they were far more sinful than they ever could begin to imagine. And Jesus exposed that in them. And people don't like to have that exposed, do they? I don't get particularly fired up when someone comes up to me and exposes my hypocrisy. It's uncomfortable. And Jesus did that. And so it shouldn't be any surprise when our Christianity confronts the world, when Christ confronts us and when he confronts the world, that there's going to be some measure of pushback, because people do not want to naturally embrace the truth. They want to embrace their own temporary happiness. We believe, when we look at this, and we see that Jesus claims to be the way the truth and the life and that no one comes to the Father but through him, and we see that when he stands before his oppressor here, Pontius Pilate, and he says that he is the truth, we understand that Jesus, Christianity, the Bible, is not just our story, it's not just true for us to give us some kind of meaning and significance. It's something that is transcendent. It's something that is true for everybody in all times and in all places. And it's a message that everybody needs to hear because we are all ultimately hopeless and without God and without hope unless Jesus comes and invades our soul and brings us to Himself. And that is taken to be a wildly, wildly intolerant message in a day and age that looks like ours. I mean, Pilate could not have asked a more relevant question for 21st century Americans than to ask what is truth. I mean, we don't particularly live in a day and age that has a very good understanding of what that is. Truth is wildly relative. There's no consensus over that in our culture. But some of you will perhaps remember a bygone era where many of the people, most of the people in your life had similar values, similar ethical standards, similar religious beliefs. There were differences, but by and large, the whole way of thinking, the view of the world, the view of God with somewhat similar. But as the world has changed and as we move into the time in which we are, we understand that that world doesn't exist anymore. It left several years back and we don't live in that world anymore. We live in a world where we have more access to more information, to more worldviews, more close contact with people whose lifestyles and beliefs about God and presuppositions about what life is all about. Life is all about our so wildly divergent from Christianity and as we intersect in that particular world it makes it so easy for us to embrace those things. I remember when I was in college and I was taking an early modern European history class and we were talking about the crusades and we were talking about the atrocities that so many people had committed in the name of Christ and in the name of their Christianity. And my professor did not waste the opportunity to tell us that if any one religion claims to have a monopoly on the truth that needs to raise a red flag in your life and you need to run for the hills, that was the point where the history lesson ended and the point of personal conjecture began. But it was clear that truth in our day and age is something that is only individually applied, you cannot pass that off as being universally authoritative. It's okay for Christians to have our truth just as much as it's okay for the Jew and the Muslim and the secularists and everybody else to have their own personal truth and their own story but when you start imposing that on other people and you start saying that it applies to everybody else that's when it's taken to be intolerable. And that's when it's taken to be something that promotes division rather than harmony. And when people start to see that about Christ and they start to see that about Christianity, that's where everything that Jesus did and everything that he taught and everything that he was all about becomes hurtful and harmful and offensive because it's intolerant, which is really the only remaining sin that our culture really embraces anymore. And it's just as much as much the case now as it was the case back then that when the world is confronted with Jesus that they're going to want to crucify him because he confronts us at the most sensitive levels of our lives and it's all because Jesus claims to be the truth and the people want nothing of it. And so despite the fact that in this story, no less than three times, Pilate says that he finds no guilt in Jesus. He still caves into the people, caves into their demands and behaves like the spineless politician that he is and he has Jesus vlogged and he has Jesus crucified. And it's because he has no grounding in the truth. He has no interest in the truth. He has interest in just getting out of this political predicament that he's in, getting people off of his back. And that's what we will do as well. When we don't have a grounding in the truth, it is going to be wildly difficult for us to be people, a boldness and conviction as we live out our Christianity in this world. Because if our truth is just one of the items on the smorgasbord of truth who is to say that our truth is true or that anybody else is true, it's just one of the 31 flavors. But because that's the case for Pilate, because that's who he is, because he has no grounding in the truth. He delivers Jesus over to be flawed. My friends, I don't want you to miss that one verse in this story because to have Jesus vlogged meant that Jesus was basically stripped down naked, bent over a pole with his skin on his back stretched as thin as it could be and whipped with a leather whip that was impaled with bone and rocks. People died that way. And that's what Pilate had done to Jesus prior to having him crucified just in order to pacify the crowds, but it didn't pacify him because the people didn't want Jesus whipped. They wanted him dead, dead a custom at this time, right before the Passover. I don't know where this came from, but it was a custom where they would release a prisoner who was in prison. They would release a prisoner right before the Passover. And they're given the option. Pilate gives them the option. Do you want the king of the Jews released to you? And they say, no, we do not want this Jesus. We do not want the king of the Jews released to us. We want Barabbas. Barabbas was a robber. And so what happens is Jesus gets crucified and this thief gets let go free. And my friends, I don't think there is a more beautiful picture of the gospel and all the Bible other than that because I want you to imagine Barabbas. Someone sees him walking around Jerusalem the next day, the next week, a year from now. And they see him and they say, hey, I thought you were in prison for robbing that guy. And what does he respond? How does he respond to that as to why he's out? The only thing that he can say is that I'm free because Jesus died for me. That's the only testimony that he has. The reason why he's out, the reason why he's free, the reason why he's no longer in prison is because Jesus died for him. And that's the testimony that every Christian has. And friends, you and I will not be able to make sense out of Christianity at all until we begin to see ourselves as Barabbas in this story. As the one who belonged in prison, who deserved to be crucified. And yet the reason why we're not, the reason why we are not condemned and we don't incur the wrath of God is because Jesus endured it for us. Amazing love. How can it be that that oh my God should die for me? That's the power of the cross. Christ became sin for us, took the blame, bore the wrath we stand forgiven at the cross. That's the good news. And that's the good news that Barabbas would have had to tell because that's the only reason why he's free. Jesus in this story, he has blamed for two crimes. He's blamed for treason and for blasphemy. He's blamed for refusing to bow to Caesar as king and for claiming to be a king himself. But here's the thing that you need to understand about the gospel. The same charges that were brought against Jesus Christ are the charges that he brings against us. He charges us for refusing to have him as our king and for making ourselves the God of our own lives. Friends, the problems that we face in our lives and the way in which we respond to those problems ultimately boil down to our failure to submit ourselves to Christ as king. And our absolute autonomous assertion that we are the God of our own lives. That's where our issues lie. But the gospel is about Jesus giving us his righteousness in exchange for our charges, for our guilt. He gets condemned and like Barabbas, we're giving life. And that's the hope that we have. And if you want your best life now, my friends, if you want your best life now, that is the message that is going to fuel your life. That grace and that love, that mercy that you receive because Jesus died is what's going to fuel your life. And that is going to change the way in which you relate to your husband and your wife and your children and your colleagues and your friends and your family and the way in which you do work and the way which you spend your money and all that stuff. It's going to change everything that you value in life because you'll know that you have been purchased at the cost of Jesus's own life. That nothing can snatch you out of his hands. It's a beautiful story. It's going to make you increasingly holy. That's where your happiness is going to lie. Look, eternal happiness is not getting what you get on extreme makeover home addition. It's not getting the big house with the beautiful landscaping and the spectacular view with the man cave and the HDTVs everywhere. Last night, this is the funniest thing. We were at Target and Sarah, my four year old, looks up at me and says, daddy, I do not want to go to heaven. I just want to stay in Baloxie, Mississippi. I mean, I'm glad she's grown accustomed to her new hometown and that she likes it here. But my friends are something much greater than Baloxie, Mississippi or anyplace else for that matter. There's something much greater than this life. There's the hope of heaven and we get it because Jesus endured the flogging. He endured the cross. He endured an unjust trial. He endured the wrath of the Father so that we wouldn't have to. Friends, if that doesn't change your life then you're not getting the gospel. It changes you to the very foundations of the core of your life. And it's my prayer, first Presbyterian Church, that is we leave here today. We go about all this stuff that we have to do during this Christmas season, that we would pray for and strive for and encourage one another to be people who are finding the truth of Jesus Christ and finding His gospel and finding His grace to be the ground and the source of our joy as we go about our lives. Let's come before him now in prayer. Oh Jesus, this is a hard passage. It is a passage to where we look at it. We see that we deserve to be in the place of your son and you deserve to be in the place of bravest. Father, in our place condemned Jesus stood and that is our hope. Father, change us with that. For anyone here this morning who is yet to believe, yet to bow the need of Jesus Christ, may they see you as beautiful and glorious, as gracious and compassionate and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and forgiveness. And may they turn to you this morning and for those who are here today, who do believe in you, who are plotting through this life after two yard gains. May we set our sights on Jesus Christ, the one whose kingdom is not of this world and take great pleasure in who you are and what you've done for us. We ask at all and the name of Him who came such a distance for us, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.