killed among others. As I started watching the coverage of the horrible events that it unfolded yesterday, they interviewed one of the other representatives from Arizona. Gabrielle Giffords was the one who was attacked. Trent Franks was the one being interviewed and they said to him, what do you think is the possible motive here? And he's on the opposite end of the political spectrum. They said, do you think it was a political motive? He said, no, look, I've got differences between me and Gabrielle, but we're friends and I think it's the details of this attack come out. It'll be clear that I mean this was a lunatic. This took lunacy to do this kind of thing, this attack and they kept talking about it because I think people begged to know what was he thinking to do something like that and now he stands accused of murder, potentially a second suspect. The difficult task for me this morning is the Bible, Jesus, the cross come and say that we're standing accused of the very same thing with God. John 7 is where we're going this morning. I'm putting this starkly for a reason. I don't want to water it down. Jesus is finding the crowds are abandoning him. What about his own family?
So your Pew Bible page 1659 beginning at verse 1. Let's hear from the Lord. After this, Jesus went around in Galilee. He did not want to go about in Judea because the Jewish leaders there were looking for a way to kill him. But when the Jewish festival of tabernacles was near, Jesus brothers said to him, leave Galilee and go to Judea so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world and then John adds for even his own brothers did not believe in him. Therefore, Jesus told them, my time is not yet here. For you anytime will do. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil. You go to the festival. I'm not going up to this festival because my time is not yet fully come. After he had said this, he's stating Galilee. However, after his brothers had left for the festival, he went also, not publicly, but in secret. 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's a good man. Others replied, no, he deceives the people. But no one would say anything publicly about him for fear of the leaders. This has got to work. Let's pray. Lord, this morning, we simply asked that you would show us our hearts, and then you would show us your heart so that we would run to the only real place for hope in your name we pray. Amen. All right, we've come in our study in John to a shift. The first six chapters we had, various thumbnail sketches, Jesus interacting with individuals, and you got all kinds of different people. And now there's a shift that goes on in the gospel of John. So we moved from these, it's almost tried for me to call them lighter scenes because I've been some pretty heavy things Jesus has said, but it's about to get really dark and the chaos comes in and the difficulty in verse one just throws it right in our face. Here we are, not even a third of the way through John, and people are already out to kill Jesus. Let's unpack it a little bit. It's easy for some people to look at this and think, all right, what's the backdrop is John being anti-Semitic. He keeps talking about Jews wanting to kill Jesus, but remember John is a Jew. Most of the disciples were Jewish, and most of the people Jesus interacted with were Jewish. This isn't an anti-Semitic statement. What Jesus says in verse one and did in verse seven, lets you know that Jews are simply a microcosm of the bigger world. It's a small portion of the bigger picture. He's just taken a slice of culture because the Jews are out to kill him in verse one, become in verse seven, the world's hatred, everyone. So now I'm here to bring you the wonderful news this morning, whether we believe it or not, what this text is saying to us and what the cross says to us is given half a chance, we'll kill God. Given the opportunity, we'll take our maker out behind and smash him. It's that raw, the picture that Jesus is giving of how people feel about him.
The first group was the leaders, some of you are saying hang on a second, hang on a second of us, you're pushing way too hard. What about these other groups here? What about the people? They seem confused, they're interacting, they seem, oh, he's maybe a good man. Well, let's talk about that because not only do we have the leaders who feel that what Jesus teaches so presses on them that they've got to kill him, but you've got this other group. Jesus, brothers, I got a pause here for a minute. Some groups, some Christian groups, there's some question here about whether or not Jesus has siblings and just take a quick moment to say, if you look at the gospel accounts, it's very clear, biblically, Jesus had biological brothers and sisters. At one point, they even come to him while he's in the middle of teaching and he says, when people say, your mom and your brothers are outside, he says, well, who are my mother and my brothers? He contrasts his family over against his spiritual families, biological versus spiritual. Now, I think that's worth pausing and saying because people in an attempt to guard the purity of Jesus have come up with a doctrine that's not biblical, that Mary was pure in a way that we can lift up something and call it good, that's not actually good. The perpetual, the doctrine of perpetual virginity of Mary actually is troubling if you're Joseph. Let me put that a little bit differently. I want you to understand the dynamics of family. If we come and we say, look at Mary, she was such a good person, not only do we miss who Jesus is, but we can miss the reality of the family he interacted with and the tensions on it. I'm going to push on this a little bit differently. First Corinthians 7.5, we're told Paul says, it's not good for a husband and wife to be a part for extended periods of time. It brings indentation, Satan will use it against him. Do you really think it would be good news for Joseph if God's plan was that? It's destructive for the marriage, actually. Now, some of you are like, how in the world do we get here, Russ? Track with me because I want you to think about the real dynamics of a family, of a life growing up together. We aren't told all the details, but we know Jesus has at least four brothers and Mark were told their names and at least two sisters. He's got at least six siblings. They grow up in the house with him. We oftentimes talk about his disciples who knew Jesus for three and a half years. These people knew him for 30 or more. They ate breakfast with him. They washed clothes with him. They drew in the dirt. They made jokes. They talked about mom and dad and what they were up to today. They grew up around the table with one another. Family's messy, y'all. How in the world could the people who were closest to Jesus for that long were hit with a statement in verses four and five? The brothers don't believe in Jesus. I want to say it to you because some people are under the impression that well, if I live back in Jesus' day, if I could just get a time machine and zap back to when Jesus was around and sit and somehow have a Hebrew interpreter and hear all the things that he's saying, you know, air may it can know Jesus and watch him do his thing. Then suddenly I believe, no, you wouldn't. That's not what it's about. See, Jesus speaks explicitly about that when Peter makes his confession. Accessory of Philippi, Jesus says to the disciples, who do they say that I am? Well, your teacher, your prophet, your all these various things. Well, who do you say that I am? And Peter says famously, you're the Christ. And then Jesus says in Matthew, flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my father who's in heaven. In other words, being in Jesus' biological family gives you no special standing. Only spiritual, miraculous awareness of God opening your eyes to who he is saves. Now, let me apply this. Some of you are like, this is great, you know, theological gymnastics you're doing, Russ, what does that have to do with me? Well, point blank. Some of you just came from Christmas. Some of you love your family members. Some of you have family members you care about who could care less about Jesus. And you are ringing your hands over wondering, man, if I just done something differently, if I'd just been a better person, they'd believe. Well, Jesus was a perfect person. He was perfect and his family didn't believe. I want you to hear that and be encouraged because it's not down to what you do that saves people. We find ourselves believing that all the time. All right, but there's more there to it. I want to draw it out a little further. All right. His brothers now, they come to him, they've grown up with him and it actually probably the same way that you are. I mean, let's reverse the story. You know, if you had a sibling who was virtually perfect in every way, it didn't track well for you as you came up through school. If you were the younger sibling and the older one, you know, the teachers are like, I know your family. Well, your older brother, your older sister would have done it differently. I know they would have. Stop talking to me about that. You hated the track record of living with that. Jesus was the perfect sibling. I mean, these guys, sinners that they are, it would have driven you, I mean, I don't know about you, but I would have driven me up a wall. It hardened them. You can see it as they are there dealing with him and now what it certainly seems to be almost passive aggressive as they come to Jesus and they say, well, buddy, boy, miracle worker. I mean, they saw them do miracles as far as we know from Scripture. And what we saw in John 2, it certainly seems Mary saw him do miracles before his first public one in Canaan. Who knows what he was doing around the house growing up? We don't know. But they know they saw back in John 5, the withered hand, the guy, they saw, they knew. They were blown away. Go down to Jerusalem. You want to be somebody? You got to go to the right place. You got to be at the right thing. You got to promote yourself. This is dangerously close to Russ High Towerville. Start with the far off and come near. Churches are deadly in this. It is right now in America a big part of our culture. You got to market yourself the right way. A church that is well marketed. People will come and droves if we do the right thing. You know, if we just had the right mix of stuff if we had the right music and the right ambiance and you know the right beat going in the background, that kind of stuff people will come for. We used to deal with this in youth ministry and the joke among youth pastors in response to it. Well, you may get a lot of teenagers out. Let's just get a keg of the next youth meeting. Well, of course, we don't want to do that. It presses out the idol. What do we really after? See these guys are saying, Jesus, you want to be somebody? You got to go to the big city. You got to be the right kind of person. You got to be there at the right time. You got to go promote yourself. We were back in my hometown. There was one of the biggest churches in town. 13,000 members was having a big New Year's Eve celebration. An alternative New Year's Eve for Christians. You know, it's one of those things. I'm very cynical about this kind of stuff, but I went on their website because I was curious and studying what it is they're about and they want you to discover your potential. You know, you come and be a part of the church. We want you to understand all that you can be in Jesus, but all that you can be. And it's a huge celebration to come and just, woo, we're going to be entertained. We're going to have a good time. Christian fun on New Year's Eve, you know, but really what it's about is a moral event where we get to do the fun things we like to do. And the way that they would gauge whether the event went off well was, I mean, how do you put it in the wind column? Well, we got a lot of people out and they had a lot of fun. And you don't hear so much about Jesus and about who he is and what he accomplished. So what Jesus understands here is these guys don't believe in him as John tells us, but they're out to market him. They believe Jesus is a good miracle worker, but they don't believe in Jesus. In other words, you can be all in on Jesus miracles on his ethical teachings that he was a good person that you would like to be like and you can still go to hell. That's harsh. Well, let's flip it back on Russ. What scares me most about this is that one day when my son gets older, he will look me in the eye, and he will say, Dad, or maybe he'll just think it. I'm really scared that he'll just think it never verbalize it. You know what? The difference between my dad and a successful businessman is, my dad's business just happens to be religion. Just happens to be spirituality. He does it. He does it pretty well. He's a pretty good businessman. But all the trappings of success, all the things that that we want to be about in this world, he's about that stuff. He just happens to use Jesus to get it. That scares me. That scares me growing up in the south because it is so close to my heart. It is so close to how I operated for years and how I still battle with operating, warming my hands at the fires of people's affections, using Jesus to get what my soul cries out for, marketing Jesus for my benefit. This is deadly, insidious, Christian ease, and the Southern Bible belt. We live in this stuff and we call it good. And sometimes it's not about Jesus at all. This is what Jesus is after, I think. This is the reason that when they suggest this, he withdraws from them. All right. And even the brother's anger, which comes up in a passive aggressive way, I think, it may be a covert form of hatred, but it's still hatred. What is it about Jesus that people seem to hate so much? All right. Hang on, Russ. Hang on. We talk about God's love all the time. For us to understand God's love, we've got to understand why he evokes such a reaction. Why Jesus would say the world hates me. Well, what does he tell us in verse seven? Did you catch it? He says, they hate me because I testify that their works are evil. Buddy, mine, back when he was in high school, he grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. He told us the story one day, which tells you a lot about him that he would tell this story. He told the story one day of being downtown as a teenager in Greensboro on his 10 speed. Remember those days, he had a 10 speed. He's riding through downtown Greensboro. They have these huge speed bumps, not the little ones, you know, like the ones we have in our parking lot, but the big mogul ones, or you feel like you're going over a small mountain. And he's riding along through downtown Greensboro, and he looks, he catches something over here, catches his eye like a big poster on a bank, or one of those things hanging outside somewhere. He's not paid attention. He hits the speed bump and death and destruction. He flies everywhere, but he gets up in this that moment where you're worried about cool points and whether people have seen, you know, and he gets up, he looks around, and it's downtown and people are doing things that nobody seems to be paying attention, so he gets up, he gets back on his bike, and he starts going a little bit and he said, out of the shadows, out of nowhere comes this homeless guy he'd never seen before. Pointing at him and going, I saw, I saw you fall, and he's just, I got to get out of there, you know, he's hustling out, but the thing is if somebody comes and testifies against you, they can be a complete stranger there instantly, you're enemy. I don't know who you are, but what you're about, but if you're going to say that, if you're going to say those things about me, you're my enemy. I mean, why do you think we need a witness protection program? You're going to testify something about the bad things I've done. Well, if I'm a mafia boss and I've got power, you're going down. I mean, this is the way it operates, and we may be more subtle, we may use different means, we may try to be more nuanced in how we go about it, but it's the human heart. You come against me, you're my enemy. If Christ comes to testify that the things we do in the darkness as John 1 reminded us, he came bringing the light and the evil deeds we do in the dark, we hate for him to see. We run. We want to hide them away. When Christ comes into clairs, what isn't isn't the case, we're exposed. I mean, this is why we hate when we push back. One of Tim Keller tells a story when he got to New York. He met a New York City cop who had been out on the beat and he was a young cop when he first went in, he's starting to learn the way he goes out with his partner in a car and they go into a building, you know, into a shop or whatever. When they come back out to the car, he noticed that they would find sometimes stashed on the vehicle little note with money in it. Some of the local street corner hustlers would leave them a little envelope with money or a little note with money and he said, what is that? His partner is like, oh, you know, everybody does this. We just kind of like tips. And most of the guys in his precinct on the force thought of it is, you know, just kind of a tip that came with the job. Well, he felt really convicted about this and he decided he was going to turn his in. Well, when he did, the heat came down on him because everybody else had convinced himself had rationalized that this was okay. This is just the way things were. And when he brought light into the darkness with his conviction, even though he wasn't pointing to everybody else and saying what they did wrong, he was just turning in the ones he got. But all of a sudden light was brought in, this is going on and it begged questions and people were mad that he was messing with their life.
So let's go two different ways with that. On the one hand, when God comes in and messes with your life, how do you respond? You know, I've said this before, if you don't know as a Christian that there's a part of you that hates Jesus, then you may not be a Christian because unless you know what he's saving you from, you're probably not being honest about who you are. You're probably not being, you're not being honest about what the cross says. He had to die and I put him there by what I do and I do it again. See, there's not much of a difference between me and Charles Manson saying in a parole hearing, you let me out. I'll do it again. If every day when I sin, what I'm doing is not just breaking a rule. It's not about the rules. It's about a relationship between me and the one who would be my father and I'm saying get out, get out and leave me alone. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I want the whole grace thing. But can we do this gradually? I mean, can you just back off a little bit? One of my former pastors said he went to the office of his mentor when he was in seminary and the guy was a godly man but he was just, you know, one of those talking to yourself kind of Yosemite Sam type moments and he finally said, Roger, what's going on? He said, well, being Presbyterian as he was, he said, well, you know, lately God's been talking to me and I don't like his tone of voice. See, when you start digging in and discovering who God is, we talk about God's love is this kind of amorphous thing that's out there that just gives you warm fuzzies. If you come in the church today and you don't believe in Jesus and you just hear God loves me, you go away and you think, well, of course, I'm a great person. Of course, God loves me and there's no transformation. It doesn't actually help you and it actually is a lie because of the way that you're hearing it. See, if we think God loves me because of who I am, we've missed it and it just, it's like a sedative. It puts you to sleep spiritually. You're not interested in the reality of what his love says and does and so when God in his love starts to aggravate you, then you hate him for it. See, we want sometimes a God who will just follow, you know, the latest fad and a church that will run with the latest fad can be popular for a time, but if the goal isn't simply to be popular to run with culture but to transform culture, not just to be against culture for the sake of a knee jerk reaction, but to change it. It's the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. See, a thermometer you can go to at any time and it'll tell you what the temperature is in the room. It adjusts the mercury moves up and down according to the temperature of the room, but a thermostat you go over and you adjust it to change the temperature in the room and if Christ came to change things and then he commissions us with a goal of changing things when you start messing with the thermostat like the New York City cop found the heat comes down. Let me flip this a little bit. Not only should God be aggravating you, but if you are living as the Prince of Peace lived, you will be persecuted. Second Timothy 312 says the godly will bear persecution. Now, let me give you two options here. If you're being persecuted all the time, you're probably just obnoxious. There's a difference between, you know, Jesus just spills out of my mouth and I go to work and I don't do my job. I just talk about Jesus. I walk around from desk to desk to desk and I don't know if you ever met that person. Only do they get fired pretty quickly normally, but they're an annoyance to everybody including the Christians and they actually oftentimes are stumbling block for people to to discover Christ because why don't I want to be like this person who doesn't do their job and comes in and always means keeps me from doing my job. I mean, doesn't God want us to be faithful in the workplace? On the opposite extreme are those of us who see that and look and say, we'll see. I'm just not going to cause those waves and you're you're a nice person to be around and everybody likes you and nobody has any idea that your life has ever been changed by anything. And seminary, there was this guy that one of my friends nicknamed the chameleon and it kind of stuck. I don't know they ever called him to his face which would have actually been a Matthew 18 approach, but they called him the chameleon because he could move in any circle of friends, but when he did he would become like that circle of friends. And now that can be a gift, but I think at the end of the day, I began to realize he doesn't know who he is. He just adapts to the context. I'm not sure if he knows what his true color is. Let me put that a little bit differently. If you've never been persecuted for your faith and you claim to be a Christian, you got to be chickening out somewhere. When it comes down to it, you know, I know as a pastor that feeling when I'm on the plane and we're having the conversation as strangers that they're going to ask what is it that you do and I can't hide from it. And the fact that I want to run from it lets me know not only that I see Jesus as an antagonist in my life, but I'm also just a chicken. I'm a coward about the thing that matters most.
See, so you can be obnoxious or you can be a chicken, but both of those are to be trapped. If your life has been changed, well, how do we get there? How do we get there? Look at what Jesus says. When he says to his brothers, my time has not yet come. Now, notice in verse 10, he goes up. I'm not going, I am going as Jesus contradicted himself. Unlike other places in John where he says my hour and he's talking about his death, here he uses a different term that actually has the meaning of a particular moment. He knows there will be a moment where he goes publicly to present himself as who he is. And he knows he wants that to be at the fullness of his ministry. He wants that to be at Passover because he wants people to make the connection of all that it is of what it is he's doing that his death represents. If he goes and dies now, we'd miss it. Just like if Herod had actually gotten him before he was two, we wouldn't understand it. So Jesus goes in secret. Now, would I dare call Jesus a coward? Of course not. Martin Luther pointed at this passage when he was told, he put the 95 feces on the door and people were saying, well, go, go talk to the emperor, go talk to to the Pope. And they knew it, get him killed, but they wanted to see, they wanted to see the battle. And Martin Luther pointed at this, he said, that's dumb right now. I have a ministry. His goal wasn't to start Protestantism. It was to see the church be faithful. You know, the goal was Jesus, not Lutheranism, just like the goal isn't Presbyterianism. It's Jesus. And Christ understanding that new now is not the time for me to act in that way. So what am I telling you? I'm saying for you and for me, we need wisdom. You know, when and how do you take a stand for Christ? You need wisdom. Bible didn't say in this circumstance, when this is happening, this, then you need to do this. No, you'd ask for wisdom. When do I speak up? When do I lovingly challenge my friend or family member? When do I? And how do I? He'd wisdom. So he'd ask for wisdom that Jesus had to know when is the time because we don't know the exact time. But we do know that we are called to step forward faithfully. And how he did that is what should set the parameters. Let me, let me push on you and me this morning. This is what I think we walk away with. His brothers didn't believe in him. And the cool thing about this text is you can add an implicit yet. Because in Acts 1, 14, we're told that Mary and many of the brothers, many of his brothers, his biological family believed in him. Now outside of the Bible, our best sources let us know that Jude was written by one of his brothers. And James, there's several James in scripture. You got James, one of the sons of Zebedee. You got James son of Alphius. But you also have James, the brother of Jesus, called James the just. And in all likelihood, he wrote the epistle of James that we now have. I want to encourage you with that this morning as you think about your own relatives, you think about your own family, you think about your own life. If you were here this morning and you know, you do hate Jesus down, dude. Wherever you are in the awareness of that recognition, whether you've given your life over to him and said, help or you've already done that in your saying, please help more daily. I want you to hear the story of James. See, James was probably standing there saying, yeah, go down to the city. Wouldn't mind seeing you get killed older brother.
And yet after he saw all that he saw at the cross, when he saw God love a world that hated him. See the very world that hates God is the same world that God loves. Until we cast God's love in light of our hatred, we won't be transformed. See, John 3, 16 is only good news when you get how much you hate God. I'm not looking to unnecessarily beat you over the head with how bad you are. You won't celebrate how much God is doing to change you until you see how far he's bringing you. Let me celebrate in the bad things. It just means realizing they are that bad. They were that bad and I won out of it somewhere along the way and watching his older brother James got it. And because it's Acts 114, it seems like it was right after the cross. Let me tell you how we got it. James went on to become basically the Bishop of Jerusalem in the early Christian church, which realized they were undergoing huge persecution at this point from the Sanhedron which all of them is a cult. You know, a false sect of Judaism. And so they wouldn't attack them just like with Jesus. They wouldn't attack them when the political environment didn't allow it. But one day when Rome was in between governors in the district, the Sanhedron came and they arrested James, the brother of Jesus. They took him up on top of the temple mount, overlooking everybody. And they said there, Christians have become too numerous. You're one of their leaders. We want you to announce Jesus from here overlooking all of them. And he refused. They started yelling out the truth of who his brother was. Well, they got so agitated. They threw him off. And they thought he would be dead, but he actually lived through it. So they went down and had people pick up stones to finish the job. And now with people picking up stones, throwing them at them to kill him. You know what James did? And the face of a world that was hating him and the face of a world that Jesus had told him, if you make peace like I make peace, you'll get nailed. You'll get stoned. You will get killed. He saw the way his brother loved him and he loved them. He turned and he started praying. Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. Some of the people close by, I saw that he was praying and said, look how holy the man is. We can't do this. And one of the leaders picked up a stick and came over and finished the job, smashed him in the head.
I don't want us to have any delusions about this. Even in Brookhaven, as Christian the town as it is, it was Jerusalem, the center of God's people and they hated Jesus.
If you see the way that God loves, it will lead you into situations where you will get nailed. But if you see the way that you hate God and yet he loves you, it will transform you to love the world that hates him and hates you. Because you are just like him. And sometimes you still are. The testimony of Jesus' biological brothers is the testimony that makes you and me his family. Let's pray. Lord God, you use James. And even as this passage showed us, God hater that he was, you made him a God lover. Lord, we come confessing the same thing and asking for the same thing. Use us. Make us God lovers that we would go out in Brookhaven and Mississippi and throughout the world. And whether it be people doing unspeakable violence like happened in two sun or whether it be the subtle ways that we gossip and slander one another as Christians that we demean one another, you would convict us of our own sin. Show us your love and transform us that we would pour it out to others. Not because we can do it but because of what you did at the cross Lord that you loved us that much. Transform us by that love. We pray this morning in your name.