John 8:37-47 A Spiritual Paternity Test March 30, 2014

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1 Transcription of 14ID1474 John 8:37-47 A Spiritual Paternity Test March 30, 2014 Shall we open our Bibles this morning to John 8:37 as we continue our study with John through the gospel that he wrote near the end of the 1 st century to convince his readers that Jesus was God come in flesh; and that you needed to believe in Him and in His sacrifice to be saved. We ve spent a lot of time in chapters 7 and 8. John is very good at giving us the dialogue, the sermons, the fallout of the miracles that Jesus performed. And so, chapter 7, Jesus had gone up to the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem, from the Galilee six months away from the cross. And He d been dealing, really, with the people there gathered many from different areas to worship the Lord; and then when they left, chapter 8 began because that next morning, the Lord came early to the Temple, met with the folks who were still hungry to know God, and He wouldn t disappoint them. He came and met with them. But what followed was a bunch of confrontations between Jesus and the religious men of the day. And the distinction between religion and a relationship with God always came to the forefront. So, with time running out, six months to go, the Lord increasingly turned the microscope over to these fellows, if you will, and talked to them about what the consequences would be of them continuing to refuse Him. He said back in verse 21 of John 8, Where I go you cannot come. Your time is short. It s time to make a choice, to make a decision. Now understand, the Lord loved these men. He didn t want them to be lost. But with every passing day, they bluntly and sought to refuse; and their decision was to continue in the darkness. They loved the darkness - not the light. They loved the lie - not the truth. And they were unwilling to come along. So, they come along to try to discredit Him. They had failed in the week before to have Him arrested or maybe put to death. So now, they seek to discredit Him in the eyes of the people. They argue loudly in the Temple for all to listen, and they try to lead Him astray. So I think this is our fifth week in chapter 8. I know it s a long time, but it s important that you hear what Jesus has to say to religious people because I suspect that you re going to run into religious people you want to tell about the Lord. So you can fall back to what Jesus told them. These are answers that were good enough for Him; and then they re certainly good enough for us. 1

2 We ended last week s study on how the best and the worst way to live was by talking about the freedom that you are given in Jesus to do what He wants. The world talks about freedom in terms of doing what I want. But the neat thing is when you get saved, you can do what God wants. Not only does He work in you to will, but He also works in you to do of His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13). So, we ended with verse 33 where the Pharisees said to Jesus, How can you say we can be made free? We re Abraham s descendants; we ve never been in bondage to anyone. And we laughed at that last week because, literally, the history is filled with bondage, and Jesus wasn t talking physical anyway. He s talking about spiritual bondage of sin that we needed to be delivered from. So this morning we pick up at verse 37 down to verse 47, where Jesus turns the heat on, and He really gets very blunt and straightforward. But it s something that we, I think, need to hear because we want to be sure that we re right with God. In these ten or eleven verses, the Lord uses their statement of confidence in their physical descendancy to say to them, Yes, but spiritually you re not God s children. And He speaks about the devil and the fact that the devil has children too; in fact, that every man is born with the devil s DNA because of sin. And then He gives to these religious men a paternity test, a spiritual one, to determine who their spiritual father really is. So we called our study this morning A Spiritual Paternity Test. But He starts to talk to them first about the devil. You know, there s been a concept, for years, among men - it s called universalism that basically says everybody that is created is a child of God. And because of that, He is everyone s Father. Now, that sounds good, but it s totally incorrect biblically. God is, indeed, the Creator of all men. He made all things. But our focus this morning is, who is your Father? Because there are some folks like these men who claim God as their Father, but God doesn t claim them. And that s a problem. How do we know who is a child, spiritually, of God? Is there a test that we can take to see whose DNA we possess? Last year, in the United States, there were a little over 300,000 paternity tests taken mostly by men looking to see if they were really the father of these children that they were paying for; 90,000 of those paternity tests proved that the men were paying for the wrong child. So, you can tell descendancy sometimes by how people look. My kids look pretty much like me. To their chagrin, they look a lot like their father. That s not good. I always like when kids are born, they look 2

3 like their moms. I think they re better off. But the resemblance begins in the DNA, and Jesus, in our paragraph that we already read but we ll read through again makes a couple of assertions about the devil that are important for us to see. For example, He compares the devil s fatherhood of the world to God the Father. And He clearly says in verse 44 to these folks, You are of your father the devil. He makes it clear that the devil is a real, historical figure like Abraham. Not only that, but Jesus refers to him here, throughout, as a person using personal pronouns. It isn t it, but it is he. He does not stand in the truth in verse 44. It says he doesn t abide in it. We know from Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, especially, that Lucifer, at one time, was an exalted angel who may have been the chief worship leader in heaven. He had a glorious position. But like all of us who get to choose, he chose to want to be more. He wanted to sit in God s seat. He wanted to get worshipped like God. He wanted to be God, and it became his downfall. And this angel in God s presence left his first estate in rebellion and became the father of liars and murderers and deceivers. His name was changed to Satan, to liar, to the devil. But Jesus declares everywhere, the Bible does, that the devil is a real, historical person that is fallen and now with whom we have to contend. Now you might say, Well, that s an obvious point. It s not. The Barna Group, in 2009, which does a lot of surveys across the country to get the spiritual kind of pulse about people s beliefs, found that among self-described believers, 40% of them did not believe that the devil was an actual person. They believed that it was just a metaphor for evil. There s no real devil, but there s a devilish, if you will, kind of an idea. So, it s kind of like those two little figures that sit on your shoulders, you know? Do it. Don t do it. Do it. Don t do it. One s the devil, the other one s you, I guess. I don t know. Now that s what the Christians conclude. If you go to the world and begin to ask questions about the devil, then you go a step further down. You hear them say things like, Well, a real, historical, fallen personal devil that s nonsense. That s the stuff of cartoons, you know. That s mythological. That s ridiculous. We wear costumes on Halloween with the tail and horns and a pitchfork and a red hat. Well (laughing sound), but that s a joke. Come on, man. Come into this century. I heard of two little boys, six years old, talking in Sunday school. And the one boy said to his friend, I don t believe in the devil anymore. And his young friend said, Well you gotta believe in the devil. He s everywhere in the Bible. He says, No. I don t believe anymore. And the kid says, Why? He says, I think it s kind of like Santa Claus. You believe in him for a while, then you find out it s your dad. (Laughing) Wait a minute. 3

4 Well, let me tie this in. According to Jesus, the devil might, indeed, be your dad spiritually. In fact, all of us are born under his power. This fallen angel, who is now seeking to wreak havoc, is the god of this world and the overseer of sinners. And all of us, at one time, either have or have had a relationship with him because of our sin. And unless you ve jumped ship and defected to the other side, and gone to Jesus for forgiveness and changed kingdoms, the devil is still your god this morning. He still is the one the spirit that works in the children of disobedience, and there s no getting around that. When you come to Jesus, you are adopted into His family. You become a child of God. He becomes your heavenly Father. Jesus said to the disciples, You pray like this Our Father who art in heaven. (Matthew 5:9). But that requires a new birth. It requires a new relationship. It requires getting out of where you came from into a kingdom that He came to establish. Now, a lot of people when you tell them that they bristle; the suggestion that the devil is real they look at you like, You should be locked up. And that he s personal and that he s historical and that he s fallen, and that they are under his influence. But I ll tell you what - the devil s greatest ability, his greatest skill, is to dominate your life and all the time have you thinking you re fully in charge. Well, John does it again. He does what he constantly does, and he takes those absolute minimums born again or not born again; saved or not saved; going to heaven, going to hell; child of God, child of the devil. He doesn t give you three choices. You re not like Switzerland when it comes to spiritual things. I m kind of in the middle. I haven t decided. No, no. He s either for you, or you re against Him. So, the good news is once you get saved and come to Jesus, your relationship to the devil becomes an adversarial one at best. He now is your enemy, but as the Lord said through John, now Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4), and you have overcome them because of that. So once you come to Jesus now you re in His kingdom, now you re protected, now you have the light and life and hope and His Spirit to guide you. But until then, you re still part of the world s system. So Jesus speaks first to them about the deception where they believe that physical descendancy or their Jewishness, if you will, somehow assured their future spiritual standing. And it made them feel superior to Jesus, in fact. They exalted themselves. Well, here s what He said to them in verse 37, I know that you are Abraham s descendants, but you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. I speak what I have seen with My Father, and you do what you have seen with your father. 4

5 They answered and said to Him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, If you were Abraham s children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. Abraham did not do this. You do the deeds of your father. Now those are pretty strong words. And you have to understand He spent three years with these men, giving them the truth. So at some point, I guess you pull out the plug and give them all that you ve got. And the Lord was giving them some last-ditch, I think, words to speak to them. He said, Look, I acknowledge that you are physical descendants of Abraham, but that makes your rejection of Me far worse. Paul had written in Romans 9:6-7 that, It is not that the word of God has taken no effect. For they are not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are they all children (of God) because they are the seed of Abraham. And Paul goes on to talk about the spiritual relationship that God wants to have, that really has little to do with your physical condition, if you will, or the position that you find yourself in. Today there are many people who consider themselves Christians simply because they live in this country, or their parents have gone to church all their lives, or they ve never missed a Christmas Eve service. We are believers. But Jesus points out the inconsistency between religious claims and actual behavior, and He said, The reason you re not God s child is you don t act like one, and My Word has no place in you. And if you were Abraham s kids, spiritually then you d have some hope you would be listening to Me and following Me and loving Me. God was not their Father, and they could find no place for His Word in their life. And so, in a spiritual sense - by the way, a spiritual sense is the only sense that matters - Abraham wasn t their father at all. Now, notice that Jesus, in verse 37 here through the first part of verse 41, differentiates His Father from theirs simply by saying that He and they were both doing what their fathers would want. That s the distinction He made. Jesus had come to share the Father s love, the Father s plan of salvation, the Father s Word, the Father s concern. I didn t make this up. I didn t come here on My own. I didn t even make the trip on My own. I don t deliver to you words that I made up. I heard these from My Father. This is what My Father in heaven wants you to know. They, on the other hand, were doing what their father wanted to murder, to kill, to destroy, to hamper, to resist and to refuse God and His Son. So both of them were doing what their fathers wanted. And they had said, Abraham is our father, and Jesus would say, Not spiritually. It s not. Because physical descendancy is not a way of life. Talk is cheap. A distant relative is of little benefit. And there was no evidence that they walked with God like Abraham, 5

6 their physical father, did. If you really knew the Lord, you would walk like he walked. Now, if you go back and read the book of Genesis, 25% of the book is devoted to the life of Abraham. It s a huge chunk of the book. He came from a family that worshipped hundreds of gods both his mother and father. When God spoke to him, he left his homeland and the security of all that he knew to separate himself for the Lord, to go to a place God said He would show him. When he finally got to the Land of Promise, he wandered around in it for years, simply by the promise of God never really gathered or gained. God just said, You ll have it, you can trust Me, and he did - until the day that he died. He was even willing to bring his son.later in life - the Lord said, I want you to sacrifice your son. He went, Well, you promised children through him, so I guess You ll have to raise him from the dead. And he believed that more than the fact that his son would just die without children. And so he was obedient to the Lord in every respect. James called him a friend of God (James 2:23). It s a nice title to have when you get that title there are only a few folks that have it in the Scriptures. Yet these guys, what were they trying to do? They re trying to kill Jesus, to shut Him up, to discredit Him, to take Him out of the system because the word of God verse 37 had no entrance into their lives. Abraham obeyed God. They defied God. When Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians, he said (2:13), We also thank God without ceasing, because when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe. David wrote in Psalm 19:11 that the word of God, by them Your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward. The Psalmist in Psalm 119:11 said, Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You. But these guys. There s no place for God s Word in their life. They had no, as James said (1:21), implanted word which is able to save your souls. So, Jesus told them in no uncertain terms that Abraham did not refuse God s Word and that they had, that they were absolutely different from Abraham. They were plotting His murder. And in all that they were doing their sneakiness, their deceptiveness, their lies they were simply reflecting the heart of the god that they served, their spiritual father. And, by the way, the Bible only gives two camps you re in God s kingdom, or you re in the kingdom of darkness. There s no third kingdom. There s no door #3. It s doors 1 or 2. And you have to say - whose child am I, to whose family do I belong? 6

7 Well, the response of their hearing Jesus make those distinctions in verse 41 was vicious. It was a slur. They said, Well, at least we were not born out of fornication. And by the way, we re Jews. We have one Father, and our Father is God. They tried to bridge the two, if you will, together. Now, people knew well the story of His birth. The story had been well-circulated that Mary was betrothed to Joseph when she was found to be pregnant. She told the story it was the work of the Holy Spirit. No one wanted to buy that. They talked about Jesus being an illegitimate child and that His mother fooled around. Their first boast was that they were children of Abraham. They were privileged. Their second boast was tied to it. We are Jews. We only have one God and one Father. Now, historically that s correct. The Jews were the one and only people on the face of the earth that worshipped one God. It was, indeed, the truth of God. However, they had absolutely no relationship with that God. They had a relationship, in that sense, by name only. They didn t walk with God. They didn t serve God. They didn t seek to know God. They were in a group of people that, historically, were correct in their opinions of God, but that s as far as it had gone. It was an outward kind of an association, but they had no relationship with Him. Well, back in chapter 31 of Jeremiah, verse 9, the Lord said, I am a Father to Israel, and they went, He s our Father! But the rest of the verses in the chapter said, If you will listen and follow and believe. He wanted to be a caring Father to His people. They didn t want anything to do with Him. So neither physical dependency nor being in the right doctrinal group will make God your Father or deliver you from the devil. You ve heard of Aaron Burr. Do you remember him from history - the third Vice President of our country, under Thomas Jefferson? Well, in 1804, Aaron Burr killed, in a duel, Alexander Hamilton. There were plenty of historical suspicions that he just didn t like the guy and figured out a way to get him killed, but whatever the motivation, he was never charged as a crime, but it ruined his career. I mean, his political life was over. Aaron Burr s grandfather was a man named Jonathan Edwards, who is, by far, America s greatest, premier preacher, philosopher and theologian. But, look, God doesn t have any grandkids. So even though Jonathan Edwards went to lead thousands upon thousands of people to Christ, that doesn t have anything to do with Aaron Burr, his grandson. He s going to have to come and make peace with God and believe in Him directly. Well here, beginning in verse 42, Jesus, having made His statement about who they belonged to and why, gives to us, in verse 42 through verse 47, four paternity 7

8 markers, four DNA markers, if you will, of those who have God as their Father in terms of true relationship of belief and of behavior. Starting in verse 42 with these words, Who do you love? Verse 42 says this, Jesus said to them, If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Now Jesus sweeps aside all of their assertions by beginning to talk about commitment, behavior, and the issues of the heart by saying, If God were your Father, as He was to Abraham, then you would love Me because God, the Father in heaven, sent Me. I m His Son. He sent Me to save you. He s not your Father, and the reason is you don t love Me. Marker one of the paternity test do you love Jesus? Well these folks certainly didn t. They said they loved God, but they hated Jesus. They wanted Him dead, and yesterday wouldn t have been soon enough. But to have God as your Father would have you loving His Son whom He sent to save you. Now Jesus will define, in the coming chapters, what it means to love Him in terms of obedience. He ll talk a lot about that as we go. But the bottom line is if God is your Father, you ll love Christ. So often you ll run into people, and you ll say, Are you a Christian? And they ll go, Yeah, I believe in God. I love God. You ll say, What about Jesus? Well, I m not so sure about that. Well, Aaahhh (buzzer sound), you failed! You can t have God the Father without Jesus the Son. He came to bring you into God s family, to redeem you from the world in which you were born and under the power of the devil with which you operate. You need to be saved. Boy, that makes a whole lot more meaning now. Saved! And the first prerequisite is I fall in love with Jesus. The devil, who seeks to kill, steal and destroy, was still their spiritual father. Oh, they had robes and hats and books and power and position, and the devil was their father. And Jesus said it pretty clearly to them. I don t imagine this went well. I can t imagine saying to anybody anything along those lines. You are of your father the devil. Conversation over. But Jesus is giving it this last-ditch effort, trying to make it clear to them because He loved them, and they were so unwilling to bend. Peter, when he wrote in 1 Peter 1:6-8, said that God will allow us to go through various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And then he said, whom having not seen you love Him. That s what Christians do. They love Jesus. If God is your Father, Jesus is your love. If He s not, you can be very religious and very popular, and you can stand out. People can know you, but that doesn t mean He 8

9 knows you. You have to love Jesus. That s the first work, if you will, of God s Spirit in our life that we would love Him. In John 21, Jesus sets Peter down who had denied Him and He, three times, lets him say, I love You Lord. Peter, do you love Me? Yes, Lord, I love You. You know my heart. He even backs up from it and says, I have great affection for You, because he realized he d been boasting before. And God restored him to ministry. But those were the same questions that Peter, who wrote whom you have not seen and yet you love, was the one who was allowed to sit and tell the Lord how much he loved Him. So, want to know if God is your Father? Do you love Jesus? Do you like spending time with Him? Do you want to know what He has to say? Desire to know His will, eager to please Him. That s what love does. Do you love Jesus? If you don t love Jesus, you may fail the paternity test even though you re a religious person. Second of all, not only who do you love, but what do you know? Verse 43, Jesus said, Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. How can you tell whether God is your Father? If God is your Father, you will understand the Word of God. You ll be able to hear what God has to say. A child of the devil will not. The word understand, here, the word gnosco in Greek, is a word that means to know by experience. In other words, I ve heard it, I ve put it into practice, and I see the result, and so I m convinced of it not just intellectually but experientially. I ve put into practice what God has said, and I ve been able to, then, see the result. The problem for someone who is not saved is that they have a flesh nature but no spiritual life. And being dead to the spiritual things of God, when God speaks, they can t hear Him. God speaks a different language than they do. It s just out of touch. He speaks a different language. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:12-15, Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things. So, when you get saved, God sends the Holy Spirit to live in your heart, and He opens your eyes to spiritual truth. And the Bible, which was darkness to you before, makes a difference. That Gideon s Bible you picked up sometime in a hotel - Please, God. I m too drunk. I don t want to get sick. This doesn t mean anything 9

10 to me..i don t get it - all of a sudden comes to life. Maybe you ve had the opportunity to sit down with somebody that you care about, share very clearly everything that God has done in your life, and by the time you got done giving them your testimony, you say to yourself, I nailed it. I covered every point. That is as clear as it s going to get. And then the person goes, Huh? Huh?!!! Were you not listening to anything I was saying? Huh?!!! Yeah, you re nuts, man. What do you mean? Didn t you hear? Didn t you listen? Spiritual. John 20 and Luke 24, is the account of the Lord s appearance, on Easter evening, to the disciples in hiding, out of fear. And not only do we have the things that we remember, but here s something that maybe you hadn t thought of. Jesus said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). And then the next verse says, He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures (Luke 24:45). That s one of the ways you can tell God is your Father. The Holy Spirit has come to live in you, and He turns on the light, and He teaches you His way, and the Word of God makes sense. Oh, not that it doesn t take work and study, because it does. But, like a guy digging for gold, the harder you dig, the more you ll get, and the more God ll give you, the more rewarding it ll be. Not only who do you love, but what are you doing? What are you doing in response to the things of God? The unbeliever lacks the ability to hear God s Word. That s why every person who s saved must have their heart opened by Jesus. You can t come to Him on your own. You re in darkness. There s none that seek after God (Romans 3:11). But the minute the Lord turns on the light, if you respond, something happens within, and you begin to understand what God has said. Here, these guys - constantly arguing. I ll make you free. Well, we ve never been in bondage. Yeah, you guys are catching it. Totally missing it is what you re doing! Why? Because God s not your Father, and His Word has no place in you. Who do you love? You have to know that one first. Who do you love? Secondly, what do you know? Thirdly, what are you doing? Verse 44, Jesus said this pretty powerful words, You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. Now, these religious men were seeking to kill Jesus. They hated Him. And like their father, the devil, they were doing exactly what he would do. Look at verse 38 again at the end You do what you have seen with your father. Verse 41, You do the deeds of your father. Verse 44, You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you 10

11 want to do. So, they were acting in the fulfillment of the desires of their father in the treatment of Jesus. Satan, Jesus said, doesn t stand or abide in the truth. There s no truth in their father, and if there s no truth in their father spiritually, there s no truth in them. Now, like I said, this is plain language for very hard hearts, and you certainly would have to be led of the Lord to make this your opening statement if you re witnessing to others. But you should be aware of the fact that this is truth. And the issue for you is that the rejection of the Word of God will leave you there with the desires of your father to fulfill. How does the devil control the lost? Usually through lies and lust and hate and self. A murderer who deliberately kills, a liar who deliberately deceives. You ll find him in the Garden of Eden doing that. You ll find him at the end of the Bible, still seeking to rally men to hate God and seek to destroy Him. What are you doing? A child of God acts like God would appreciate and receive and bless. A child of the devil acts exactly like the god that he serves the devil in hatred and bitterness and selfishness. It s pretty powerful. He doesn t stand in the truth. How far he fell. Man apart from God follows the same course. We read in Psalm 58:3, The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies. That s because they are in the wrong kingdom. Psalm 62:4 says, They only consult to cast him down from his high position; they delight in lies; they bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly. The description of someone who lives in the world from God s point of view. Isaiah 28:15, the Lord said, Because you have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we are in agreement.for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood we have hidden ourselves. The way of the world. How do you know if God is your Father? It ll show in what you re doing. There re lots of people who say, I love the Lord, but their life, quite frankly, is anything but. And it causes a dilemma for us because we don t want to go, Well, you re not a believer! Because we can t see the heart, but we can certainly see that the life doesn t seem to line up to it, and then we just have to go, Well, God knows. But Jesus said, You ll know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16). So, Jesus will say, in the chapters to come here in John that, if we love Him, we will keep His commandments. In fact, in John 10, speaking of the believer who loves Him, follows Him, He says, To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear His voice; and He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out (verse 3). My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me (verse 27). Marker 11

12 three of the paternity test is what are you doing - because you will do like your God. You will do like your God. Conformity to the will of God is a mark of a child of God, and obedience proves your relationship to Him. Which is why Jesus, there in Matthew 7, said to the disciples, In that day, many will say to Me, Lord, Lord, and I ll say I never knew you. I don t know you. Well, didn t we do all these things? Well, not for Me, you didn t. Erma Bombeck, who was an American humorist who died several years ago, once had a very funny line that I remembered. And she said, You should never go to see a doctor whose office plants have all died. (Laughing) And I said well that makes sense. The same is true for the saints. What they tell you will show you what child and whose child they are - not in an isolated situation but as an overview. No one is going to follow your lead when you live like the world. And these men were certainly guilty of that. They were doing what their father, the devil, wanted get rid of Jesus, have Him killed, take Him out, let s not preach His Word anymore, let s not share the good news anymore, let s keep Him silent, let s keep Him away from our people. Finally, the fourth marker of the paternity test that Jesus gives these men is how do you hear, or how do you respond or listen? Notice what He says, But because I tell you the truth, verse 45, you do not believe Me. Which of you convicts Me of sin? And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe Me? And here s what He says, He who is of God hears God s words; therefore you do not hear. Why? Because you are not of God. Isn t that interesting that, from Jesus perspective, one of the qualities of a person who knows the Lord as their Father is that they are quick to hear what God has to say. What God says is important to them. It s serious to them. They make an effort to learn it and to know it, to apply it, to incorporate it into their lives, to submit to it. There are plenty of folks who hear God s Word, and it goes in one ear, and it goes out the other. And they are in church every week, but let s face it God s Word means nothing to them. Those aren t God s children because, according to Jesus, he who is of God would hear God s words. And He said, You don t hear them because you re not God s kids. Those are powerful words, aren t they? Ezekiel 3:7, But the house of Israel will not listen to you, because they will not listen to Me; for all the house of Israel are impudent and hard-hearted. Jeremiah 26:4-6, the Lord sends Jeremiah to the people, and he speaks for the Lord, and he says, You shall say to them, Thus saith the Lord, if you will hear My words and 12

13 listen to Me and walk in My law, then I ll give you life. But if you will not, then I will destroy this city and make it cursed among all the nations of the earth. Ezekiel, in chapter 33, is sent by the Lord to speak, and he said (verse 31), They re going to come to you as people do, and they re going to sit before you as My people, and they re going to hear your words. But they re not going to do them. With their mouth, they re going to show much love. But their hearts, they re just going to pursue their own gain. That s not a child of God. Yet, you should ask yourself - what do you get out of coming here every Sunday? Does it matter to you? Does it make a difference to you? Do you take notes? Lord, change these things in my life. I hear what You re saying. Now let me live it out. Or, is it just an exercise in attendance? When Isaiah wrote, in chapter 55:2, the Lord says, Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in abundance or in fatness. I like the King James better delight yourself in the fatness. But listen carefully. The children of God want to hear from God. They listen carefully and willingly. They take what He says seriously. The child of the devil may listen, but he won t hear. He ll excuse himself, he ll discount God s Word, he ll mock Him, he ll leave just doing exactly what he wants. And it turns out to be that s exactly what his father wants him to do. Jesus said, Which one of you is going to point out that I ve lived a life of sin? Point out My sin. And of course they couldn t do that. And He said, Well, if you can t, if My life proves that I m telling you the truth, why won t you listen to Me? I do what I say. And His answer is, Because you re not God s kids, and God s Word then has no place in your heart. And really, what He said in verse 37 He says again here in verse 47 before He changes the subject with them in this last little paragraph. The fact you refuse My word shows you re not of God as you claim you were, and My life proves My words are true. Who do you love? What do you know? What are you doing? How do you listen? Tough test, but a great bunch of questions for folks that you may get a chance to share with who aren t saved and think everything is fine. Ask them these. You know what Jesus said. Get them to think about where they stand. Submitted by Maureen Dickson April 2,