The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me

Transcription

1 Transcript August 23/24, 2014 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me Aaron Brockett John 1:19-34;3:22-30 Well go ahead and open up your Bible to John 1. If you don t have a Bible with you, you can download our church app with the free Bible on there. We would love to give you one at Connection Central as our gift to you. And these passages will be up on the screens. For any of you who are visiting today, last weekend we started a message series through the Gospel of John. I told you that we would probably take some breaks through the series, but by the time we are done teaching through all 21 chapters, we would have probably been in this for 33 weekends. I had a number of you come up to me afterwards and thought I was joking. I am not joking about that, but you are kind of like mildly A.D.D. and you are freaking right now. Like, Thirty- three weekends? Calm down, we ll change the colors and just kind of keep you engaged and keep you fixated on this. We will divide it up into parts and then I am going to take a break. It has been about two- and- a- half years since I ve taught on marriage. I want to come back to that and teach on that and maybe a few other things. Then we will finish it up Memorial Day The Gospel of John, last week as we were kind of laying this thing out, we said that the gospels are the written, recorded events of Jesus life and ministry. There are four of them and they kick off the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now Matthew, Mark, and Luke were the first ones to write their gospel accounts of Jesus life and ministry. They are known as the synoptic gospels. The word synoptic means viewing or seeing together. They give us a synopsis of Jesus life and ministry. They all write in a very similar time period and they all share very similar material, they just have a different audience in mind as they write it. So they write about 30 years after Jesus resurrection and His ascension. Their primary purpose is to give an accurate, historical account of what Jesus did and said down on paper for future generations to have. That was the primary thing that was driving them. Luke even says that in chapter 1. He says, I want to get an accurate, historical account down on paper. By the time John writes his gospel, things are very different. Another 30 years or so have gone by, so about years after Jesus resurrection. So I want you to think about our own country and how much has changed in the last years, culturally. Something very similar would have happened in the First Century. The culture is dramatically different. John, himself, is one of the disciples and he was the youngest of Jesus 12 disciples. So John would have been a young teenage boy when Jesus called him to follow Him and it says he became one of the inner three: Peter, James, and John. Out of that John was known as the disciple that Jesus loved. I think what was going on is that John was the youngest of the 12 disciples. Jesus sees a lot of potential in this kid, and He is like, Hey man, come with me. I ve got your back. Come under my wing, I want to disciple you. I want you to grow. But by this time John is an old man and John has seen a lot. John followed Jesus around. He saw His death, His crucifixion, His resurrection. John has become an apostle, he has become a pastor, and he is Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved.

2 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 an old man. He has become a seasoned pastor and the culture has dramatically changed. John says, Here at the very end of life, I want to write a gospel. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have already given you the details of what Jesus said and did. I am not really interested in regurgitating what those guys gave you. If you want to know what they said, go back and read their gospels. I want to give you something new. So that is why 90 percent of what is in the Gospel of John is unique to him. He spends about two- thirds of his time focused on the last week of Jesus life. So while Matthew, Mark, and Luke were primarily writing to Jews and Gentiles, many of whom were eye witnesses, many of whom didn t need to be convinced that Jesus was the Son of God, John is writing to a very different culture. He is writing to Greek pagans. He is writing to a culture that actually parallels the culture in which you and I live today. A culture that says, I don t know that there is any right or wrong. I don t know that there is any absolute truth. I don t know that Jesus is the Son of God. I don t think this is the primary way. Now we are open to you talking about Jesus as one of the ways, we are open to you talking about some of the interesting things Jesus said and did, but don t you dare say that He was God. That is the audience John is writing to. This is the reason John is the most theological of the four gospel writers but he is arguably the most accessible. He is not interested in impressing you with big theological words. He wants to show you that Jesus life and ministry matters. So he serves it up in an accessible way. This is one of the reasons why the Gospel of John is one of my favorites and the reason why I want to spend 33 weeks in it. It is kind of like a public swimming pool. You ve got the deep end for people who have been following Jesus for a while and are pretty strong swimmers and they could probably do a half- gainer off the diving board. You need that when you show up at church. Some of you, you still need to stay in the place in the pool where you can touch, and there are some of you who have your floaties on and you are still over in the baby pool, and everybody in between. This is the Gospel of John. Everybody can play regardless of what you believe, regardless of what has happened to you in your past, regardless of questions you have and you are struggling with. Bring your questions, bring your concerns, and bring your brokenness to the Gospel of John. John wants you to know this is not just what Jesus said and did, some interesting First Century Mr. Rogers, He is God. This is why it matters. Let me give you a little bit of background. Last week we studied the first 18 verses. If you missed it, you can catch up online. That was known as the prologue. John starts off and he says, In the beginning was the Word, and we said the Word meant logos, which means everything derives its meaning from it. That is where we get our English word logic. So John begins his gospel by saying, In the beginning was logic. And the logic was with God and the logic was God. John wants us to know that Christianity isn t just for simple minded middle- Americans. But Christianity, when it is truly seen in its essence, can sweep through, just like it swept through the Roman Empire like lightning, it can still sweep through today. You see many of us are rejecting everything we have attached to Jesus, instead of really getting a good look at Him. John wants us to see Jesus for who He is. So today we are going to pick it up on verse 19. I want to look at two sections of Scripture: one in chapter 1 and one in chapter 3, focusing around a different John. So we ve got the Apostle John who wrote this Gospel, and then we ve got another guy named John the Baptist. He is one of the most fascinating characters found in the Bible. Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

3 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 Let me give you a little bit of background on this guy. His father is a guy named Zachariah, and Zachariah was a priest who worked in the temple. So you could say the John the Baptist was a preacher s kid. He is a PK. If any of you are PKs or you know PKs, then you know to pray for them. They ve got a lot of baggage. I ve got four at home and you be praying for them. John kind of grows up underneath a father who is a priest. His mother was a lady by the name of Elizabeth. Now the two had been married for a long time. They have grown old together, never were able to have kids of their own. The angel Gabriel came to Zachariah one day in the temple and he says, Buck up, your wife is about to get pregnant. She is going to give birth to a baby boy and he is going to be kind of a prophet, kind of along the lines of Elijah, and you are going to call his name John. Zachariah thought that was funny. He was like, Oh, are you kidding me? I am an old man and my wife is an old lady. There is no way we are going to have a baby at this stage in life. Because of his lack of faith, the Bible tells us that for the duration of Elizabeth s pregnancy, Zachariah couldn t speak. Maybe she liked that. Maybe she was like, Dear God, thank you for the healthy baby boy growing in my womb and the quiet husband. I just appreciate that. I ll be ready for him to speak when this baby is out but if he could just zip it, it would be awesome. I don t know what was going on there. Anyway, Elizabeth gets pregnant with John. She is an older lady and there is an interesting twist in this. She has a young, teenage cousin by the name of Mary. And Mary lives in a real dumpy town known as Nazareth and they are talking on the phone one day, or texting, or something. Elizabeth is like, You are never going to believe this news but I am pregnant. Mary is like, I think I can one- up you. I happen to be pregnant as well. People are having a hard time believing my story. Elizabeth is like, People are having a hard time believing my story. We ve got to get together girl. So they get together for a little ladies brunch. They go to Toys- R- Us for strollers or whatever. The Bible tells us that when Elizabeth and Mary, Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist and Mary is pregnant with Jesus, when these two ladies finally meet up for the first time, the babies leapt within their womb. I don t know what that is all about. I don t know what they are talking about. I don t know if Jesus was like, What s up bro? And John the Baptist was like, We are going to take the world by storm, Bro. I don t know what is going on, but that is what it said. There was this immediate connection between these guys, even from the womb. John the Baptist was born a few months before Jesus and Elizabeth and Zachariah raised him right. They raised him to know the Scripture. God had given them instructions for how John the Baptist should be raised. They said, Don t let any alcohol touch his lips. But here is the fascinating thing about this guy. He is raised in a good, moral home and his dad is a priest. But he grows up as this crazy looking character. John the Baptist wears camel hair and he is eating locust and wild honey, he is wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T- shirt. He has long hair. You are like, Man, what happened to you, and he is just this kind of interesting, charismatic character here. He grows up and his ministry only lasts about a year. He grows up and he begins to prophesy. He is beginning to point people to Jesus. His boldness and his courage ends up catching up to him, and he gets sideways with a guy named King Herod. Herod has a brother who is married to a beautiful woman. Herod wants his brother s wife and so he takes her. So they are having an affair together and no one has the courage to call out the king on his sin except for John the Baptist. John the Baptist says, You need to stop that, and the only person who disliked that more than Herod was the woman he was with. She didn t like John and she wanted him out of the picture. Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 3

4 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 But Herod wouldn t act on it. Herod was interested in what John has to say, he saw that John had a large crowd, so he couldn t pull the trigger on that one. So the woman took matters into her own hands. She had a daughter who was very beautiful. Herod throws a party, the daughter shows up the party and she dances scantily clad in front of Herod and his friends. Herod had a few drinks in him and then he says to the girl, You are so beautiful. I will give you anything you want, up to half my kingdom. She is in it with the mom. She says, I don t want anything in your kingdom, I want the head of John the Baptist on a platter. That is the end of John the Baptist. That is the overview of his life. The question that I have is why is he in here? Why all the setup? Why the setup with Zachariah and Elizabeth? Why the dramatic flair? Why his one year ministry and then he is beheaded. That is the question I want you to hold onto as we study through this. So look with me in chapter 1, verse 19. John has begun to gather a really significant crowd around him and this makes the religious leaders really, really nervous because he has the attention of all the people. They are trying to figure out where this guy came from. He is not running for any political office. He is not educated. He looks like he crawled out of a box in the woods, bugs stuck in his teeth and sugar in his veins. He probably smells like BO. He comes on the scene and they are like, Who is this guy? That is the question they are asking. Look what it says in verse 19. The Apostle John is writing about John the Baptist. And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who are you? He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, I am not the Christ. And they asked him, What then? Are you Elijah? He said, I am not. Are you the Prophet? And he answered, No. So they said to him, Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself? That is a question I want you to hold onto. That is a question I want to ask of yourself. What do you say about yourself? Who are you? Verse 23, He said, I am the voice of the one crying out in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as the prophet Isaiah said. What I want you to see here is that John the Baptist was put into a position where a lot of good men and women have faltered in the sense that he is in this place where he could actually grab a whole lot of prestige, a whole lot of fame, a whole lot of popularity that would probably benefit him in every way. He s got that in his reach. He s got a crowd. He s got a following. These guys want to know, What gives you the credibility to stand up and to teach these things? So they start kind of fielding questions. They are like, Man are you Elijah? Now in the Old Testament Elijah was a prophet who actually looks very similar to John the Baptist, kind of a rough kind of lifestyle. He was known as the prophet who never tasted death, because he got swept up into heaven. So they are thinking, Man, are you Elijah reincarnate? They go on and say, Are you the Prophet? Now to understand what they are talking about you have to go back to Deuteronomy 18. In Deuteronomy 18, Moses says, There will come a prophet who will be raised up out of the Hebrew people who will do things very similar to what I have done. What Moses had done is Moses had gone as kind of a Christ- like figure and he had led the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery and now the Jewish people were waiting for that type of character to arrive again. Little did they know but that could be found in the person of Jesus Christ. Man, are you that prophet? Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 4

5 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 Now here is the thing. John the Baptist could have just kept his mouth shut. I don t know. Would you be tempted to do that? It is not like you confirmed it or denied it. You are just like, I don t know. Maybe I am, and then he could have gotten all this notoriety. People could have said, Man I think he is Elijah. They would have rallied behind him. He was faced with this question of identity, which is a question every one of us is faced with as well. Who are you? Who am I? Who am I really? The temptation is to maybe think less of ourselves than we really should, or more of ourselves than we really should. Either way it leads to delusion. In this moment where John is faced with a question of his identity, here is what I want you to catch. He responds with Scripture in Isaiah 40:3. He is quoting a prophet. He says, No I am not any of those guys. I am just a voice. Jesus is the Word. I am just a voice. I am just a microphone. I am just the mailman. Nothing really special to see here. I have just come to tell you about the One who can change you forever. This is remarkable. It is remarkable. Now look with me in verse 24. This kind of gives you a clue as to what their angle was. They were trying to trap John. (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) They asked him, Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet? Hey you ve got to hand it to them. That is a good question. They are like, Okay, if you are just a voice, if you are just a nobody, then what gives you the cred to stand up here and say these things and to baptize these people? So John responds in verse 26, John answered them, I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even He who comes after me, he is talking about Jesus here, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie. Now John has basically just said here, I am not even good enough to untie the sandals of Jesus Christ. Now that doesn t mean a whole lot to us today, but in First Century culture you didn t get in your nice clean car and drive somewhere, you didn t walk on a cement sidewalk, blacktop. You walked everywhere in open- toed sandals, so your feet would be exposed. You would walk on dirt roads, muddy roads, roads where animals had relieved themselves. You walk through that. So when you would go into somebody s house, your feet were disgusting. By law, you could not tell somebody to untie your sandals and wash your feet. It was demeaning. And John here says, I am not even good enough to untie the sandals of the one who it is not like Jesus is here and I am slightly under Him. No, I am not even worthy to wash His feet. Verse 28, These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, now what would you have done? If you are the guy who had been getting the notoriety, the spotlight, the crowds and all of the sudden you see the main event coming? Would you tend to kind of down play it? Would you ignore it? Listen to what John says. He said, Behold, that word behold means look draw your attention over there. Stop looking at me and look at Him. Behold, the Lamb of God, that is how he chooses to describe Jesus. It is fascinating. Now to us, we kind of are looking at it from this angle, it doesn t seem like such a big deal. That is a big deal right there. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is He of whom I said, After me comes a man who ranks before me, because He was before me. And he is not talking about Elizabeth giving birth to him first. He is talking about the fact that Jesus is eternal. Jesus has been around since the existence of time. Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 5

6 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 Verse 31, I myself did not know Him, Do you know what that means? John is like, This is my little cousin. I shot bee bee guns with Him, we went fishing together, and we pulled pranks together. I put Him in a full nelson once, He almost passed out. I am really glad that didn t happen because He is God. I didn t see it at the time (and it would be kind of cool to put God in a full nelson), but I see it now. He is like, I myself did not know Him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that He might be revealed to Israel. And John bore witness: I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know Him, but He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is He who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God. What I want you to see is that John introduced Jesus as the Lamb. I think one of the reasons why John the Baptist is in here, why he plays such a prominent role, is because, maybe aside from Mary and Joseph, John knew Jesus identity before anyone else. The disciples hung out with Jesus for three- and- a- half years and never got it. Like He had to die on a cross, resurrect from the dead, and a couple of them were still holding out. Like, I don t know, show me the scars. Jesus shows them the scars. Then it even says, When Jesus ascended to heaven, there were a few of them standing there watching Him go to heaven going, I am not so sure about this. I don t know. I saw David Blain do this one, I don t know. They are doubting this but John, before Jesus even begins His earthly ministry, says, That is God. That is the Lamb. John is a good Jewish boy. His dad was a priest. He would have gone to go to work with your dad day. He would have seen what would have happened in the temple and how for years they would have taken a sacrificial lamb, slaughtered it, and the blood of the lamb would have flowed out of the temple on behalf of the mess (sin) of the people. The problem with the whole sacrificial system is that it was not working, and John knew that better than anyone. How much longer will we slaughter these lambs? How much longer will we try to scrub the stain of our brokenness out and it just won t get out. We just keep smearing it. John says, There is the Lamb who has come once and for all to finally stop with this whole sacrificial system. You can finally stop trying to scrub your own sin away because Jesus has come to cleanse you once and for all. Now skip over to chapter 3, verse 22. This is one more snapshot that I want to look at to make an application with. In chapter 3, verse 22, the Apostle John mentions John the Baptist again, and Jesus has begun His earthly ministry by chapter 3. Jesus isn t real well known yet, but He is beginning to gain notoriety and popularity. Look what it says in verse 22, After this Jesus and His disciples went into the Judean countryside, and He remained there with them and was baptizing. John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because water was plentiful there, and people were coming and being baptized (for John had not yet been put in prison). So what is happening here is you have Jesus baptizing and John baptizing. The question that maybe you are asking is, Okay, why are they baptizing? They are not baptizing for salvation as of yet, for a couple of reasons. Jesus hadn t gone to a cross and Jesus, Himself, was baptized by John. John didn t want to baptize Him, something to do with that I am not worthy to untie your sandals thing. He is like, You are wanting me to baptize you? The question is why did Jesus have John the Baptist baptize Him? Jesus was offering credibility to John s ministry. Jesus says in Matthew 11:11, There is nobody greater than John the Baptist. Jesus thought really highly of him. He put him on par with Elijah, and Moses, and Abraham. This guy is a prophet. He s got it figured out. And Jesus and John were baptizing, basically to prick people s consciences, basically to Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 6

7 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 say, You need to know that you need a Savior. Baptism is a picture of cleansing. They are saying, You need to be cleansed. You need to be washed free. So they are baptizing. Here is the deal. John and his crew are over here baptizing. Just down the river, Jesus and His crew are baptizing. The competitive juices start to fly, not between Jesus and John the Baptist, but between their crews. Look what it says in verse 25. Now a discussion arose, that is a mild way of putting an argument, between some of John s disciples and a Jew over purification. What apparently seems to be happening is that John is baptizing and a Jew walks up and says, You re not doing it right. John is not baptizing the way that our traditional Jewish practices say you should be baptizing. They ve got a big problem with the way they were being baptized. I m really glad that we ve moved beyond that today and we don t have to deal with any of that. That is a groaner, I know. Verse 26, And they came to John and said to him, Rabbi, He who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness look, He is baptizing, and all are going to Him. So what is happening is that John s disciples come up to him and they are like, Hey, do you know this Jesus guy? He is cutting in on your turf. What gives Him the right to start baptizing people? Didn t you baptize Him? You ve got Baptist in your name. I think you ve got the copyrights to this. He is cutting in on you. So what is happening is they are noticing that John the Baptist s lines are getting smaller and Jesus line is getting bigger. Jesus church is getting bigger than John s. And the followers of John are threatened by this. They are like, We don t like this. How would you have responded? Put yourself in John the Baptist s sandals, and you ve gotten a lot of fame, a lot of notoriety, and all of the sudden Jesus is cutting in on your crowd. Look at what he says in verse 27, John answered, A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. In other words, that gift that you have, that capacity that you have, that skill, your personality, even the skill set or the cognitive abilities that you used to dismiss God, all of that was given to you by Him. Nobody is a self- made man or woman. John had that figured out. Verse 28, You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before Him. In other words, he said, Guys, have you not been hearing me say all along that I am not the Christ? That I am just the mailman? That I am just the microphone? Verse 29, The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom s voice. In other words, John is like, Guys, I am not the groom. I m not even the best man. I am the groomsman all the way down at the end. I am the least favorite friend of all the other guys. That is my role. And then he says this, Therefore this joy of mine is now, this is a great word, complete. And verse 30 is the peak of this passage. It is what I want you to grab a hold of, He must increase, but I must decrease. That right there, if you fail to grasp it, you will never grasp the Gospel. It won t make sense to you. It shouldn t make sense to you. Because this is not about me and you, it is about something much greater than us. The NIV translates it this way, He must become greater, I must become less. I taught on this passage about three- and- a- half years ago and this phrase kind of swept through our church for a while. I was even talking to somebody between hours and they said they got this tattooed on their shoulder three- and- a- half years ago. I didn t know that. It was kind of interesting. But he said, Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 7

8 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 He must become greater, I must become less, until it is Christ alone. He must become greater, I must become less, until it is Christ alone. Now Christianity spoils unless you get that. In fact you may not be able to be genuinely converted unless you get that. If you still think, I must increase and He must decrease or Jesus is here for me, you ll never get it. It will spoil, you will be let down. You will be broken by that. But He must increase and I must decrease until it is Christ alone. Now John was able to grasp this. He knew the purpose of his life was not to make much of himself but it was to make much of Jesus. And humility, at its core, is not self- deprecation. I can t imagine anybody in this room, if I were to say, Hey do you want to be an arrogant person? I can t imagine anyone saying, Yeah, I want to be arrogant. We all want to be humble. Isn t it so hard to get there? Humility is so confused at times. I think we all want to be humble, but we go about it in the wrong way. Honestly, we are afraid other people won t notice our humility. So we ve got to kind of like prop ourselves up. Oh we are humble for a while thinking eventually it will pay off and then we ll get notoriety. And if that doesn t happen, we are like, Forget this humility thing. I am going to take matters into my own hands. Humility, at its core, is not thinking less of yourself, it is not self- deprecation, it is not self- hatred, it is trust. It is trust. It is getting to that place where you can let go. It is getting to that place where you are like, You know what? I don t have to be wrapped up in myself. I don t have to worry as to whether or not I am going to get mine or get what should be coming to me. I can let go and trust. This brings me back to this. John the Baptist is a perfect model of this. John had an accurate understanding of who he really was and he knew who Jesus was. And you take those two things and you put them together and there is this strength of character that emanates out of that. This is why, whenever we do the baptism videos, the baptism testimonies, I am always looking for that. Does this person have an accurate view of who they are, an accurate view of who Jesus is, and out of that comes a genuine humble response to make Jesus Savior and Lord of your life? John says, I am unworthy. I don t know how that hits you. For some of you in this room, you may not like that statement. There could be a couple of things meant by it. When John says, I am unworthy, you could interpret that as John doesn t really like himself that much. John has self- esteem issues. I think John needs Tony Robbins or Stuart Smalley, somebody to come around him and say, John you are good enough and smart enough. John, people really like you man, just keep your head up. Does John need that? The answer is no. The reason why is because John could say, I am unworthy, at the same time he is courageous enough to call Herod out on his sin. That does not sound like someone with an inferiority complex to me. It is this beautiful combination of humility and courage, humility and right- footedness. Have you met people like that? They are confident, but they are not arrogant. They can take some feedback, they can take some criticism. This is a person who rightly understands who they are. And John is a model for us in this. And John said, I am not driven by others evaluation of me. I am not driven by my own evaluation of myself, but I am freed by what God says about who I am through Jesus Christ. What I want you to see is that is what being a Christian is. It is not checking your brain at the door. It is not being a nice church attendee in Middle America who doesn t ask the tough questions. What it means to be a Christian is to grasp your true identity in Jesus Christ. That is what happened to John the Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 8

9 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 Baptist. John is like, I am unworthy, meaning, I know I am not much to look at, I know I am in desperate need of Pantene, I know I need dental flossing and a nutritionist. But I want you to know that I am confident of who I am because of Jesus Christ. The question I want to put on your plate this morning is simply this. Who am I? Who am I? Who are we? My guess is that in this room is we have people who think less of themselves than they really should. You are like, If we could sit down in a room together and just talk, and you look at me you would say, Man, if you only knew. If you only knew what I ve said. If you only knew what I ve done. Aaron, do you realize that I ve broken up somebody s marriage? Do you realize that I did this to somebody else? Do you realize that my finances are in shambles? If you really, really knew every single thing about me, I think you would have security escort me out of the building. I want you to hear this. You are dead wrong. There is no such thing as damaged goods where God says, Get out of my sight. You are too messed up for me. Do you want to know why the cross was over the top gruesome? Because that is what it took to deal with your sin and mine. That is what it took to deal with our mess. It is a lie straight from the pit of hell if you are throwing up smokescreens saying, Really, basically this issue is. I don t think I m lovable. I ve spent so many years of my life growing up in church and knowing what was right and wrong. Maybe there would be a certain temptation that I would be wrestling with and maybe there would be something I would mess up with. I always had this view that God was sitting on His throne in heaven watching me, watching it develop. Like, Oh here we go. Brockett is tempted again. Brockett is going to mess up again. Watch this Holy Spirit. J.C., are you looking at this? Here he goes, don t do it, don t do it. Oh, he did it. I ve got to deal with him again. Talk to the hand. You really liked that, didn t you? Here is what I want you to see and understand. Nowhere in Scripture is that picture painted. Actually when you read about the infinite truth, and grace, and love of God that comes through Jesus Christ, it is just the opposite. It says in Scripture, Jesus has been tempted in every way that you are, yet is without sin. Why do you think that is in there? Do you think He really like wrestled with that and you think He almost sinned? No, He didn t. It s because He identifies with us as to what it is like to be tempted. So when we are tempted with something, God is like, I know. I know it is enticing. I know it is a struggle and I sympathize with you. It s like when I watch my kids. They don t know that I am watching them, but I am watching them mess up. I ve told them, Don t you hit her again. Don t you say that again. They don t think I am watching but I am looking around the corner and I can watch it unveil. Here is the thing. God leans in through Jesus Christ and He is basically going, I know what you are wrestling with. I know what you are dealing with. Will you please just call on Me and I ll offer assistance in this. But even then, even if you mess up, it is not like He is going, Forget it, you had your opportunity. No. Afterwards He is going, Would you please call upon me? I am here to extend grace and truth to you. You are not so far gone that God s grace cannot reach you. Some of you need to hear that. Some of you need to hear the opposite because it is not an inferiority complex you are dealing with, it is a superiority complex. You are like, Well I am pretty smart. Honestly, Aaron, I don t see a need for a Savior. Life is pretty good. I ve made the right decisions. So what that has done is it has put you into this realm where there is no desire, there is no need. What I just simply want you to know and understand is eventually the weight of all that will catch up to you because when life is all about you then it all depends on you. That is a weight that you and I were never designed to carry. Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 9

10 The Gospel of John: More of Him, Less of Me August 23/24, 2014 The Gospel will never make sense to you until you come to this place where you don t think so lowly of yourself that you are not lovable and you don t think so highly of yourself that you don t think you need a Savior. You come to an accurate understanding. I am unworthy but I am loved. I am broken but Jesus wants to make me complete. You come to that understanding and you come to understand who He genuinely is, that He doesn t want something from you, He wants something for you. That is when it clicks. That is when it takes shape. My prayer and desire is that through this series, you and I together will come to be reminded of that great truth. Father we come to You right now and I just ask, I invite Your presence into this room. I know right now there is somebody here who is broken and hurting and messed up and confused. I pray that they would be able to resist the lie that they are too far gone for You to reach. God there is somebody else here who just needs to be humbled. They just need to realize that they do need a Savior, that there is a mess that they can t clean up on their own and if they attempt it they will just smear it around. God I pray that You would make us humble people. Make us a humble church. That we would have a right understanding of our true identity, the identity of Jesus Christ and out of that would come the strength of character that would be grounded in the Gospel, that would be so attractive to the culture around us. I pray that people would see that. So we come to You God empty handed. We come to You in whatever state we may be in baby pool, or deep end, or anything in between. I pray that You would meet us right where we are. We ask this in Jesus name. Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 10