2023-05-03 What do you say about yourself (John 1 Part 2)

John the Baptist is confessing that he is not the Christ, Elijah, or the prophet. He is there to prepare the way for Jesus. John baptizes with water, but Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit. John sees the spirit come down on Jesus and testifies that he is the Son of God. John emphasizes the importance of recognizing our unworthiness and the worthiness of Jesus. He warns against the idea that we are inherently worthy and stresses the need for accepting Jesus' sacrifice. Sin distances us from God, but Jesus, the Lamb of God, takes away our sin. The idea that there are multiple ways to get to heaven undermines the necessity of Jesus' sacrifice. Let's just take a moment to pray before we start. Heavenly Father, we just thank you for this moment, that we are here in this room, that we're not here in this room by accident, Lord, but that you saw this day coming and you've put circumstances in our life to prepare us for this moment, whether we've realized it or not. And I just pray that you would continue to prepare our hearts now for what your word is trying to tell us, that we would be open to receive it, Lord, whether there's mentalities, whether there's things in our life that are distractions, things that we're thinking about, that may be legitimate things to think about, but it's just distraction for us. I pray that you clear that all away so that we can hear what your word is trying to teach us tonight. And I pray, Lord, that you would guide me as I speak, Lord, to accurately convey what your word, what the scripture is trying to say, Lord, and that you would guard my mouth from deviating from that at all, Lord. And I just pray that you would take a hold of this service in Jesus' mighty name, amen. So we're gonna be jumping back into the gospel of John in John chapter one, verse 19. Now, this was John's testimony, that is John the Baptist. When the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was, he did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, I am not the Christ. They asked him, then who are you? Are you Elijah? He said, I am not. Are you the prophet? He answered, no. Finally, they said, who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself? Jesus replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, I am the voice of one calling in the desert. Make straight the way of the Lord. Now, some Pharisees who had been sent questioned him. Why then do you baptize if you are not the Christ nor Elijah nor the prophet? I baptize with water, John replied, but among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan where John was baptizing. The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, look, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This is the one I meant when I said a man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me. I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel. Then John gave that his testimony. I saw the spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me the one on whom you see the spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. I have seen and I testify that this is the son of God. I want to point out a few things from this passage that I want us to take away from this. The Pharisees asked him, what do you say about yourself? It's interesting, right? Like we ask people, you meet somebody, what do you, so what do you, you know, this is your name, I'm so-and-so, I'm Chris, what do you do, right? We want to get a gauge on who they are, what they're about, so we ask them what we do. It's kind of a funny thing though, right? Because many, many of us, lots of, there are those of us that are blessed to be in a position where we're doing something that maybe we really enjoy, that really lines up with kind of like what makes us tick, but many of us are not in that situation. Many of us may be working in jobs that we don't care about or that kind of thing and that sort of thing, so maybe to ask that person, well, you know, what do you do? Doesn't really give you a good gauge on who they are, right? And there's a lot more to us than those things, but everybody seems to want to know what we're about, right? And giving us these opportunities to share about ourself, to promote ourselves, you know, and our culture is very much about making our life about ourselves, right? What we like, what we're comfortable with, but John, his whole deal, what he was about, was about proclaiming Jesus. They said, what do you say about yourself? And I find this so interesting, right? He says, they want to know about who he is and his immediate answer is, I'm the guy talking about someone else. Who are you? I'm, it doesn't matter. I'm here to make straight the way for the Lord. I'm here about letting people know about him. And he did it with such a humility, right? He points out that he's here baptizing, right? But the one who comes after me is, you know, the straps of whose sandals I am on, I'm not worthy to untie. And some of the, I think the blue one there, it's like a slightly different edition of the translation saying the thongs, same difference, it means the straps. He's basically saying, I'm not worthy enough to even tie the guy's shoelaces. Which is pretty significant, right? And I might say, I think in our culture, if John had said that to us, we would probably tell John, you need more self-confidence, right? Oh, John, don't put yourself down, you know? You need just a little more confidence, right? We'd send him away to a leadership training camp. We tell him to, you know, know his strengths, know the good things about him. And I'm not saying that there's no good things to those things, but he had this humility. He recognized in himself that he on his own was not worthy of Jesus, right? Which I think is different than a lot of our culture. We weigh ideas, we weigh religions, we weigh the idea of Jesus. We're not asking the question, am I worthy, right? That doesn't even enter our minds. We're asking the question, is Jesus worthy of my belief? Not whether or not we're worthy of him. And I think the world wants to tell us that we're all worthy, we're worthy of everything. We all deserve whatever we want. And interestingly, the gospel, it doesn't say that. The gospel is not a self-help and empowerment message. It's the message that without Jesus, we're lost, we're hopeless, dirty, and the enemies of God. You know, I have it, let me see where I have it here. In Romans 5, it says, since we've now been justified by this blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him? For if while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life? And not only in this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. A lot of $10 words in there, but basically what we're trying to, what is the point that I want you to see from this is that without Jesus, we are not indifferent to God. We're not apathetic to God, we're not meh. We have become enemies of God because of our sin. And the message of Christianity, the message of Christianity is that he is worthy. It's not that we are worthy. It's not that he came down to die for us because we were so worth it. It's he came down to die for us because he loved us, whether or not we were. Because I think we can all agree, like I'm not trying to shoot, I think you guys are all wonderful people. I'm not trying to shoot anyone down, but even just speaking about myself, Jesus dying on the cross to save me was a bad deal for him. Because no matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I do anything, no matter all the good things that I do, I will never give him praise and honor and an obedient life enough that would ever be even a fraction of a grain of sand worth the sacrifice that he did for me, right? So it's not about him being worthy enough for me. And I think the thing that we have to recognize is that hearing this message that's so opposite from the way that our culture is, and there's good intentions behind the way, the reason that our culture is this way. There's good intentions behind the fact that our culture is going out of its way to try and say, like, hey, we want people to feel this sense of worth and all those kinds of things and everything like that. And there is that part of it too in the gospel, but it comes as a result of his sacrifice. There's a reason that we feel dirty, shamed, and unlovable. There's a reason. And it's not because we don't have enough self-confidence. You can have confidence to the moon and still feel dirty, shamed, and unlovable. You can have all the money in the world and still feel dirty, shamed, and unlovable. You can have all the success in the world and still feel dirty, shamed, and unlovable. You could have a loving, wonderful partner who genuinely and authentically loves you and still feel dirty, shamed, and unlovable. None of those things are going to get you there. So there's a reason for that. And there's two possible reasons for that that I think can address anyone that's feeling that way in this room right now. Number one, either we've not accepted the love of Christ yet and dedicated ourself to following him in obedience, and so we're still existing in that place of hopelessness because he's made the sacrifice, he's offered the gift, but we haven't accepted it, right? Julie's having a birthday. Somebody gives her a gift, that's awesome, but if she doesn't take it, it doesn't have the impact that was intended by that gift. Right? The other reason could be that we have accepted it, but the enemy's trying to remind you of your past and you need to remind him of his future because God sits on the throne and the devil has no place anymore. We know, like, we've got it in the back of the Bible. You'll find out what happens to him, right? We will be victorious in the end there. We have the opportunity to live forever and ever with Christ acknowledging how holy and amazing and wonderful he is. And if you're like I was once, that sounds corny. Can I be honest with you for a second? Even growing up in a Christian family, there was times I thought heaven sounds pretty boring. Like what, we're just gonna stand around and just be like, holy, holy, holy all the time. Okay, that sounds boring, that's gonna get old. After like five minutes, that's gonna get old, right? But I also wanna tell you that it is possible to see the beauty in that. It is possible to love Jesus so deeply that you could care less if you were doing anything but that, that worship of God. And maybe you've gone through a time in your life where you're like, that sounds awesome. You've been in praise, maybe you've been singing a worship song, maybe you've been in prayer or just reading the word and God's just really bringing it alive to you and you're like, yeah, I just wanna do this forever. I don't wanna do anything else right now. And then maybe you've had other times where it's just a chore to even do any of those things. There's going to be ebbs and flows in all relationships, whether it's with God or with a person or all those things and we have to work towards those things but it is possible to love him in that way. And so I just want to extend to you right now that if you are feeling that dirtiness, that shame, like you can't be loved, that Jesus has paid this price for you. The price that came as a result of our sins, he's paid that for you. And so if you're feeling that way, you have a gift that you can accept. And if you've accepted that gift and you're still feeling that way, don't think that just because you've accepted Jesus that the devil doesn't care about you anymore. You have a target on your back now, right? Jesus did not promise that the Christian life would be easy. In fact, we talk about the promises in the Bible. Here's a promise in the Bible. Jesus said, in this world, you will have tribulation. You will have trials. You will have hardships, but take heart because I have overcome the world. Right? So he's with you. He's with you. How did he do this for us? John says that Jesus is the lamb, right? He says, let me see if I can find it again. Yes. The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, look, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Right? He called him the lamb of God. Why did he call him the lamb of God? Not the starfish or the penguin of God, right? There's a reason he chose that. It wasn't because lambs were his favorite animal. It's because there was a practice of sacrifice. You know, we talked in that song, Promises, talks about, it said, God is the God of covenant. A covenant is a promise. It's more than a promise. It's a legally binding agreement between parties, right? And that's what God had set up with man. And there was this system of sacrifice. And you might think, well, that's weird. Why would God set up a system of sacrifice and then be like, that's not good enough. I need to send Jesus. Like you made the system. Why wasn't it good enough? That doesn't make any sense, right? He made the system, not because he wanted it to be that way, but because we as humans are people who like systems. We like rules. And he needed to show us that in and of ourselves, we could not achieve it. So he had to set up a system that he was going to step in and say, I'll be that sacrifice. I will be that sacrificial lamb. He needed to be that sacrificial lamb, because as Romans 6.23 put it, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. That just means that there's a natural consequence to everything. And sin, I mean, what is sin, right? People love to sit around and ask that question. Is this a sin? Is that a sin, right? And we're looking to like, let's make an encyclopedia of what is or what isn't sin. But simply put, sin is anything that distances us from God. Anything that misses the mark of what he has for us, right? Put it another way. You have someone important to you in your life, a wife, a husband, kids, a significant other, just a family member, any of those people, you know instinctively the things that bring you closer to them and the things that take you further away from them. Not necessarily things that are even on paper, like, okay, every single time, this is a bad thing. Every single time, this is a good thing. It could be something that is innocent. I've used this example before. I'm not trying to pick on this particular thing, but let's just say sports, okay? Sports isn't good or bad. It's what we would call amoral. It is not immoral. It is not moral, right? It's not gonna get you into heaven. It's not gonna get you into hell. It does, it's just a thing, right? And the, so it's, but if it is something that becomes an obsession that takes you away from being able to spend time with family, if it's an obsession that takes you away from being able to spend the time that you say that you want to spend with God, then that is something that has become sin for you because it is distancing you from God, right? All this means is that God had a standard and we fell short. Romans 3.23 says that for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. This is the thing I think about all the time. People say, you know, I'm a good person. Okay, like by your standard? I mean, everyone's a good person by their own standard. The most vilest person in history was a good person by their own standard and they might be, if they have some level of self-awareness, might be like, yeah, there's some things about me that aren't so great, but overall, I'm a good person or I'm doing bad things, but I'm doing them for a reason. You know, there's things have to, whatever, right? They justify these things. Now, I always think it's funny when people say, you know, it's just, you know, as long as you're good enough, you'll get into heaven. They, okay, good enough by whose standard? Your standard, their standard, whose means, well, it certainly, the standard can't be you because you're biased in your own favor, right? The standard can't be your culture because this culture says this is okay and that culture says that's okay. We can't agree on it. So the standard can't be even a human culture. So who's gonna set it? Find someone who's perfect. Okay, who's perfect? Well, if God exists as I believe that he does, then he's perfect. What standard is a perfect God gonna have? Perfection. So guess what? We all fall short, just like it's saying. There's no way around it, right? So what does it mean when John said that he's a lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world? It doesn't mean that he ignores it. It doesn't mean that he just comes in and says, sin doesn't matter anymore because that doesn't make any sense. It sounds like it makes sense. It sounds like it makes him really loving and tolerant. It sounds like it makes sense when we think of sins as this huge encyclopedia list of do's and don'ts. But when we think of it as anything that keeps, that distances us from God, how does he ignore it? How does he say that that's not a problem anymore, right? If I'm trying to get closer to have a conversation with Kelly and I keep walking back further and further and further away, Kelly can't just go, just abracadabra zippity doo. The distance doesn't exist anymore. Either I can move closer to her or she can move closer to me. And if there was a chasm between us that I could not get across and Kelly just has amazing jumping abilities that I don't, for example, that's not a great analogy, but you get what I'm trying to say. She can close the gap when I can't. It's still sin. Oftentimes we hear people, both inside and outside of the church, they say, well, this thing, God didn't like that. And they say, that's Old Testament though. That's in the old part of the Bible. God doesn't care about that anymore. He does. Nothing, people will read the Bible sometimes and they'll say, God seems different in the Old Testament than the New. He does not. You gotta look closer. There's a lot of grace in the Old Testament. So many times that God looked at the Israelites doing things that any one of us in this room would not be okay with. And he's like, there's a part of me that wants to wipe them off the face of the earth, but I'm not going to. That takes restraint. Because I think if we're all honest, let's just, you might think I'm extreme for a second here, but be honest with yourself. If you were God, there's some people you'd wipe off the face of the earth. Can we just, can we just like, don't pretend, don't pretend. There's, don't, don't look at them. So let's not pretend that, that. So there's, that's an, that's a, some older translations of the Bible use a more old English way of saying, instead of patience, saying long suffering. I like that word because it makes it a little more understandable what the person who's being patient is going through. It's a suffering for a long time to deal with that, right? So it's still sin. But the difference was that instead of him saying, this is no longer sin anymore, I don't care about it. He's saying, I will take the punishment for it, right? If you owe a debt for whatever reason, you have a debt. Maybe you've got car payments you can't make. And the guy at the car dealership says, look, I know you're going through a rough time. I decided I'm going to pay for your car payments. That's a whole lot different than him just saying the company is just like, there are no car payments anymore. Everybody gets a car for free, right? He personally chose out of his own pocket, this particular sales guy to pay for your car payments. And I think one of the problems that a lot of us have when it comes to Christianity is some of us feel that this is a nice idea, but only one of many ways to get to heaven. And I want to quote Scott Lair. I guarantee you've never heard of him. He's from a church called South Bridge Fellowship. They're not widely known, but I just saw a sermon from them today. And I really like what he said. He said, if there were a lot of ways to get to heaven, what does it say about God that Jesus has to go to the cross? Think about that for a second. If there's many, many ways, why would he send his son to die? Is he a monster? Because if there's other ways, right? It doesn't, that doesn't make a lot of sense. There's no other way. And that's why Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, the life. You don't get here by being moral. You don't get here by asking deep questions of the philosopher. You don't get here by listening to teaching or agreeing to facts. You get here, you've got here to have a relationship with Jesus. And that is the key. If Jesus is not the only way, it's unreasonable to assume he even is a way. It's illogical, right? If there was a fire and we needed to get out of these exits and all of the doors were wide open, but for some reason, for you to get out one exit, one of us had to die so you could get out of there. That would be a dumb thing to do when there are three other open doors. Why would you do that? So either he's the only way or he's not a way at all. There's no in between. I think the problem is, this is something that I've seen and this is a uniquely, in my opinion, a very uniquely Western issue. I think our problem is we don't believe that as the Bible is saying that we're enemies of God or that there's evil inside of us. We don't believe that. Most people experientially, they don't believe that. We just talked about how everybody sees themselves as basically good, right? And that there's a good inside us. And if we just try hard enough, we'll be able to overcome our baser traits. I love Star Trek, I'm a big Trekkie, but the most science fiction thing about Star Trek is Gene Roddenberry's vision that in the future, humanity will have just gotten over all of our racism, all of our problems, all of our infighting. When they made the series, Star Trek The Next Generation, they had a revolving door of writers because Gene Roddenberry in the first two seasons, I promise I'm going somewhere with this, would not allow the writers to write any interpersonal conflict with the crew. Because he said, in my version of the future, humanity has gotten over all their issues. The problems are only gonna come from the space aliens in these situations. They've all got to get along. The writers instinctively knew that's dumb. That's not going to happen, right? Because we have something inside of us. You can't become a good person on your own. Can I be honest with you? Good people go to hell every day. I'm just gonna say it. They do. Hell is full of good, well-intentioned people. God's not looking for good people. Because I say good people, but there really are none. He's not looking for people who pray a prayer of salvation and go to church every week. What he's looking for is people humble enough to recognize their sin, not just yesterday, but today too. And make him the Lord of their life and obey him and dedicate their whole being and life to him every day. And I say not just yesterday, but today too, because while he has forgiven us, we're still working out the experience of contending with this world, contending with our own unhealthy desires and all these kinds of things, right? And the devil loves people who go to church week after week, thinking they've got it all together. Those are his favorite people, because at least the people outside know they still are missing something, right? There's still an opportunity for them to acknowledge it. So he loves people coming at week after week. We have to recognize it. Why don't we take a moment to pray here. Heavenly Father, we just ask for that humility that John the Baptist exercised, Lord, that when we will be asked what we're about, that we will find the opportunities to share what you're about. Help us to be genuinely about you, about your purposes, about sharing who you are, Lord. Help us to make Jesus known. Lord, I just pray that we would be able to recognize our need for you, that we wouldn't walk out of this room feeling like we're the worst scum of the earth or anything like that, Lord, but that we would walk out of this room knowing that you chose to die for us, despite any of our bumps and bruises and all of these things, and that you are offering to us a chance for the adventure of a lifetime to live with you, Lord. And we pray, Lord, that as we walk through that journey, Lord, that we could continue to put in that effort, Lord, to show our love for you, to grow in our relationship with you, Lord, and that when we make mistakes, we would be honest with you, and we would let you show us how to grow through those things, Lord. Lord, for those of us in this room, Lord, that maybe we still feel like we've kind of got it together, Lord, I pray that you would convict us now, whether we're a believer, whether we're not a believer, whether we've been a believer forever, Lord, that you'd convict us of the areas and the opportunities to grow closer to you. It's not about a guilt thing for sin, Lord, but help us to want to be closer to you. Help our ultimate desire to be a closeness with you as much as we can. In Jesus' name, amen.