We Would See Jesus, John 12:20-26 (February 12, 2017)

We Would See Jesus, John 12:20-26 (February 12, 2017) 20 Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. 21 So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, Sir, we wish to see Jesus. 22 Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23 And Jesus answered them, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25 Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. PRAY If you go into a lot of the older church buildings in the south, they have fixed, wooden pulpits. This isn t a pulpit; this is a stand or maybe a desk. A pulpit is a permanent fixture, that the preacher steps into when the time comes to preach the sermon. In a lot of those pulpits you ll find a brass plate screwed into it, where only the preacher can see it. And on those plates you ll find the words, Sir, we would see Jesus. That s from the King James translation of John 12:21, one of our verses for this morning. Sir, we would see Jesus. Now I don t know how the tradition got started of putting those little brass nameplates in pulpits, but I like it it s a reminder of what the preacher is supposed to do every time he gets up to deliver the sermon: his job is to show the people Jesus. It s appropriate that we look at this passage today, because we are now nine weeks before Easter Sunday, and this is the time of year in the church calendar when the church has historically focused on showing Jesus being clear about who he is and what he has done. My question for you is this: would you like to see Jesus? And since you can t see him bodily the way the people in John 12 then how can you see him? And what does it mean for you to see Jesus? I ll address all those questions this morning like this you can know you ve seen Jesus if, first, you see the breadth of his ministry. Second, you see how to follow him in a ministry of your own. Third, you see the glory of his ministry First, you see the breadth of his ministry. 20 Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. 21 So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, Sir, we wish to see Jesus. 22 Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23 And Jesus answered them, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. John 12:20-23. 2017 J.D. Shaw 1

All the commentators I read last week pointed out that with these verses we reach the climax, the high point, of the gospel of John. I guess I never realized that before for a long time I could have told you what was in John 11 and what was in John 13 but I would have drawn a blank on John 12. Yet it makes perfect sense for a couple of reasons. First of all, there is the hour, which is one of the great motifs of John s gospel. Seven times prior to John 12 Jesus talks about his hour, and how it had not yet arrived. But now, in verse 23, Jesus says, The hour has come. Now is the time. More on that in a few minutes. But second, it s the climax of John s gospel because of these Greeks who want to see Jesus. Before this point in Jesus ministry, it s almost unnerving how little Jesus is interested in anyone who is not Jewish. If you re not Jewish, it s almost like he wants nothing to do with you. Frankly, if you don t know how to read it Jesus can sound bigoted. For example, in Mark 7, we read of one of the few times Jesus traveled beyond Jewish territory to Tyre and Sidon, and when he gets there a Gentile woman, a woman who was not a racial Jew, fell down at his feet and begged him to cast a demon out of her daughter. How does Jesus reply? Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children s bread and throw it to the dogs. Mark 7:27. You see what Jesus is saying? He s telling the woman: You re not of the right nationality. You re not Jewish. I can t help you right now. On its face, Jesus sounds racist. Is Jesus racist? And the answer is: no, of course not. After all, two verses later he heals the woman s daughter anyway. Jesus is not a racist. Jesus was no respecter of persons. He didn t have a bigoted cell in his body. And you know, there are probably a lot of reasons why Jesus limited his ministry to Jews for all but the last week of his life, and probably a lot of those reasons we ll never know about. But I think one of them was simply love for the Jewish people. The Jews had this special relationship with God for two thousand years. Ever since Abraham, they were literally God s chosen people, to be a nation of priests who through their lives and their practices were to point the rest of the world to the one true God. But the Jews didn t do that. They took this special relationship they had with God for granted and abused it. And so for three years Jesus devoted himself totally to them, trying to get them to acknowledge their sins and turn to God. He focused on them out of love, because once Jesus ministry was to Jews and Gentiles, it was going to be that much harder for the Jews to hear Jesus message and do what they needed to do. These Greeks in verse 21 coming to Philip and saying, Sir, we would see Jesus initiates the final countdown to Jesus hour. And from this point forward the breadth of Jesus ministry is worldwide. Friends, this is what I want you to see: Jesus ministry is for everyone. There are no racial, gender, socio-economic, language, no ethnic, no educational barriers to Jesus at 2017 J.D. Shaw 2

all Jesus is for everyone. There is no one more inclusive than Jesus Christ. He is available to anyone. There aren t even any religious barriers. It doesn t matter what faith you are or what religion you grew up in. I don t care if at 8:30 this morning you were slaughtering a goat to try and worship the devil, I don t care if you sold your soul to the devil, Jesus is available to you right now. That s what these verses mean. Every tribe, every tongue, every people, every nation. His ministry is worldwide. And, therefore, no one is ever outside Jesus reach, no one is too far away from Jesus for him to get to you. No matter where you are, no matter how isolated you feel, Jesus can find you. Years ago I read how a man was driving to a particular church in Clay County, Mississippi to preach. This wasn t his church. In fact, he d never been there before; he was doing what we call in the preacher business pulpit supply. The pastor of the church was taking a vacation and he asked this man to come in and preach for him on this particular Sunday. Now this church is way, way, way out in the country Pine Bluff Baptist Church it s way out in western Clay County. In fact, it s so far out in the woods that they have to pump in their sunshine. But this is what the supply preacher wrote: As I was trying to find the place, I reflected upon how [as isolated as they were, still] God had obviously found these people, and after visiting with them that day, studying the bible with them, answering questions I was humbled again at the goodness of God s heart, at the nonfavoritism of His grace I see a vast amount of beauty [in the world], incredible bursts of renewal and quiet explosions of gratitude and flowering of new love for Jesus, worldwide but I saw the same thing here in this little country church hearts receptive, eyes tearing up at the stories of His grace, faces which seemed a bit calmer when they left, souls thinking about what God would love to give them in their lives Jesus ministry is worldwide, which means to the uttermost parts of the earth, but also to the uttermost parts of Clay County. No one is too far from Jesus. No one s life too insignificant for Jesus. So, if you have heard of Jesus, certainly if you re here in this room this morning, and if you don t think you ve been found by Jesus, there can be only one reason: it s because you ve wanted to stay lost. No one who wants to be found by Jesus stays lost. All you have to do if you want to be found by Jesus is to say to him, Jesus, I don t want to be lost anymore. I want you to find me. And he will. Some of you need to do that this morning right now, in the service, ask Jesus to find you. You don t have to close your eyes, you don t have to bow your heads (though you can), but take time right now and say, Jesus, I know I m lost. I want you to find me. And he will. You may not feel it right away, but that s just because your hour has not come if Jesus had to wait for certain things, you can be sure you will, too. But he will find you. And once you ve been found, you must, second, see how to follow him in a ministry of your own. Ministry is just a fancy word for serve. Service and ministry mean the same 2017 J.D. Shaw 3

thing. So, once Jesus finds you, you then have an obligation now to follow him in a life of service to God and to others. And now, we get to verses 25-26: Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. The struggle I had for so long as a kid growing up in church, as a college student, as a young married man, on into my years even as a pastor was, What does this mean? How can I know when I m loving my life as opposed to hating it? Jesus says I ve got to hate my life, so I want to hate my life. I love Jesus, I want to do what he says, so I want to hate my life. But how does someone do that? Have you ever wondered that? It s not that you don t want to obey Jesus, you re just not sure how. Jesus connects hating your life in verse 25 with serving him in verse 26, so whatever else hating your life means it must, at the very least, mean obeying the clear commands of God. If you re going to hate your life, you must give up those sinful behaviors in your life, even if you really enjoy them. For example, if you really enjoy robbing liquor stores, if you find robbing liquor stores to be life giving (I think that s the buzzword these days), it doesn t matter, because you have to hate your life. That s easy a harder example is when it comes to forgiveness. We all have people in our lives who have wronged us, and some of you have been horribly abused, mistreated, slandered. And if you love your life, you know what you ll do? When it comes to that person who wronged you, you will not forgive them. You will pay them back, you will hold a grudge, you will run them down to everyone you can talk to. You ll try to punish them, to even out the karma between you and that person. But when you hate your life, you will entrust yourself to him who judges justly God himself. And instead of trying to punish those who have hurt you, you do them good. You serve them. You will not let yourself dwell on those who have hurt you. You may not be able to ever get back into a relationship with them, but you re no longer trying to pay them back. That s hating your life. Yet still this whole idea of loving verses hating your life really gets a lot tougher when we start talking about those parts of your life where there s no obvious sin involved. How do you hate your life, in other words, when it comes to sleeping, eating, or working in a job you enjoy, or raising a family? What does that look like? Some people have said, Well, you just have to give all that up. If you re going to hate your life, you can t take those things on, or you ll wind up entangled with the world. And some of the things Jesus said, read in a certain light, seem to support that view. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:26. That was the monastic movement in the middle ages you take a vow of celibacy 2017 J.D. Shaw 4

and poverty, so you just don t have to deal with sex or money, you don t sleep much at all (in fact, you re constantly getting up in the middle of the night to pray the Psalms), and you eat the bare minimum bland, basic food. When you do that, then you can know you hate your life. But, of course, that doesn t work, either. Because there are all these affirmations in the Bible about how good regular (I don't know what else to call it) life on earth is. He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD. Proverbs 18:22. The Bible says marriage is good. Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men Colossians 3:23. It s okay to enjoy and take pleasure in your work. 17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Romans 14:17. You can enjoy what you eat, you can enjoy good food the kingdom of God isn t about those things. In short, you can enjoy your life. Listen, there are religions and there are faiths that say that unless you are absolutely miserable then you aren t pleasing God, but Christianity is not one of them. So what does it mean to hate your life? It means you live as if your life belongs to God, not you, and everything you do you run past him first. It s his life, not yours. It means living with intention. I ll give you two examples. I used to be the world s worst about coming home, sitting on the couch, and just watching television for hours. No plan, no rhyme or reason to it. Just vegetating for hours on end. It s still a struggle for me, except now it s YouTube. Thanks to YouTube, an hour can disappear like that. But what if instead of doing that with your time, you do this: you come home, and you don t have anywhere to be or anything you have to do between 5:30 and bedtime, and instead of immediately going to the couch you pray: Father, my life belongs to you will you please tell me how to use this time? And it might be that a friend is brought to mind, a friend you haven t talked to in a while and that last time you heard from her she was really hurting, so you take this time to call her and see how she s doing. Or you realize you haven t read your Bible in a few days so you sit down and do that. Or you remember that you have a leaky faucet in your guest bathroom, so you go and fix that. Or maybe what comes to mind is this movie you ve been wanting to see for weeks. You say, Really, God would want me to take the time to watch a movie. Yes, it is entirely possible. So you sit down and you watch the movie with that time. But the point is you offered it to God first, you acted purposefully, with intention. You hated your life. One more example: you have come into some extra money, and you re not sure what to do with it. You and your spouse think you want to spend it on a little trip for your family, for yourselves and your kids, but you re just not sure because, frankly, you re afraid of turning into a family that is completely self-involved and doesn t try to sacrifice for others in the community. So you take this money and you pray over it, and you say, Father, our family belongs to you, our money belongs to you everything we have you have given us. Will you please tell us how to use this money? God answers prayers like that. Maybe not in five minutes, but he does answer them. 2017 J.D. Shaw 5

And, perhaps, over the next day or two you both are convinced that you need to apply this money to an outstanding debt, so you do that. Or, maybe, in a week or so you become aware of a family with a need in your neighborhood, so you see to it that the money gets to them. Or, maybe you give it a missionary. Or maybe, just maybe, you walk away from that prayer a few days later and you both feel like a trip with your kids is exactly what you need to do with that money. God does delight in giving his children good gifts. But the point is you offered it to God first. You lived purposefully, with intention. You hated your life. Obviously you can t hate your life if you accumulate wealth and stuff and live for your pleasure. Jesus does say, Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. Luke 12:15. But please don t make the mistake of thinking you can grovel your way into the kingdom of God, or that God will be happy with you only if you re miserable. That s not how you hate your life. We are called to be a living sacrifice, but that doesn t mean we take everything we have that matters to us and throw it on a fire in the backyard. It means we offer everything to the Lord Jesus every day. Corrie Ten Boom: He knows, He loves, He cares; Nothing this truth can dim. He gives the very best to those Who leave the choice to Him. We tell him, All that I am and all that I have is yours: tell me how to use it for your glory. But how? How do you get to the point where you want to offer your life to Jesus daily, hourly, like that? Third, you ll know you ve seen Jesus when you see the glory of his ministry. To the extent we use and think of the word glory, we use it to describe bright, shiny, beautiful things. We might say that a car, or a house, or a piece of furniture is glorious, as a way of saying that we really, really like how it looks. We might use it to describe someone who is beautiful guys, you might say to your wife, You look absolutely glorious tonight. Now when it comes to God, certainly there is glory in that sense. God himself is spirit, so he has no physical beauty, but his creation is full of his glory. You go outside on clear night, away from the lights of Oxford, so that you can see the stars in the sky, and you ll agree with the Psalmist who says: The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Psalm 19:1. Certainly glory can refer to physical beauty, but you can see that beauty in creation and still be lost. Still not know Jesus. It is not enough to say that God is great and that God is powerful and even that God is glorious. None of that makes you a Christian. What is the glory you must see? The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. John 12:23-24. Jesus is saying that he s the grain of wheat, and it s in his death on the cross he will be glorified. 2017 J.D. Shaw 6

A lot of you have been to funeral visitations and you ve seen the diseased there in the parlor of the funeral home or at the front of the church auditorium, by the stage, lying in state. Now, here s the thing: no matter how hard the make up artists at the funeral home work on the body, nobody walks away saying, Wow, that corpse is beautiful! They might say, He kind of looks like he s sleeping, but no one talks about the glory of a dead body. And a corpse after a crucifixion is all the less glorious. Crucifixion was just about the most cruel and inhumane form of execution ever conceived by men, and men have conceived a lot in that area over the history of the world. It involved a severe beating first (which sometimes was bad enough to kill the victim), then the actual crucifixion, putting nails through the hands and feet, and then often several days of hanging on the cross. The worst part of crucifixion, believe it or not, was not the pain of the nails, but the dehydration and the asphyxiation, which what was most often the cause of death. You get too tired to breath if you stay long enough on a cross. A body that goes through that has no earthly glory. Yet Jesus says his crucifixion will be the hour of his glorification. Why? There are five bridges that go across the Potomac River at 14 th Street between Washington, D.C. and Arlington, VA. One of the 14th Street bridges is named Arland D. Williams. Do you know why? January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 took off out of what was then Washington National Airport, with ice on its wings. It made it about half a mile after takeoff, before it hit one of the 14th Street bridges over the Potomac, and went into the river. When the police rescue helicopter got there, the plane had sunk in the frozen Potomac, and only the tail was sticking out. Everybody was drowning or drowned except a few people in the tail. The police in the helicopter lowered a rescue harness down to one guy they could get to, a man named Arland D. Williams. But every time they pulled it up there was somebody else on it. The first time he put somebody else in it. The second time he put somebody else in it. The third time they came to him, he put someone else on it. Every time he gave his place of salvation to somebody else. He ended up passing the line to five different people, all of whom lived. But when they came back a sixth time, the plane had rolled over in the water and pulled him under, and Arland D. Williams drowned. He died saving others. He substituted himself, so that others might live. Why do stories like that grab our attention? Why are we amazed by stories of sacrifice like that? Because to give everything you can to save someone else is the most glorious thing you possibly do. Here s what I want you to see someone has already sacrificed himself for you. We are all sinners. We have all refused to be a living sacrifice. None of us have lived the life we ought to live, and we all know that. We have loved our lives, lived for ourselves, instead of living for God. We ve hurt others and ourselves. And God can t just look the other 2017 J.D. Shaw 7

way at our sins. When you look the other way at sin, when you see one person hurting another person, and you just walk away like you didn t see it, it makes you unjust. God is not unjust. Because God is a just God, he will punish sins. He won t look the other way. But because he is a loving God, both the Father and the Son agreed that Jesus would pay for our sins on the cross. He gave up his place of salvation to find us. Jesus never loved his own life. He hated it, so that he could love us. Jesus was the grain of wheat that fell into the ground and died. He didn t just fall into the ground, but he fell into hell. On the cross, he endured not just the physical torment of the crucifixion but the unimaginable agony of the wrath of a just God who won t look away from sin. Jesus took the wrath we deserve for our sins. And with all due respect to Arland D. Williams, because he did an incredibly heroic thing, for those people he saved he only kicked the problem down the road. Death was still going to come for them. Jesus, though, saves us not just from death, but through death and gives us eternal life. If you believe the gospel (you are a sinner, you justly deserve the wrath of God, and that Jesus hated his life for you), that means that one day you will be in a place where you will be totally safe, loved, satisfied, full of glory. The good news does not promise that everything will be easy until then, but it promises one day you will be in that place. Lost in wonder, love, and praise. If you know that s where you will wind up, won t that make you able to face anything between now and then? Any loss, trial, disappointment, betrayal? That s what you re offered in the gospel. If you see how Jesus hated his life for you, you can hate your life now and love him. The Greeks said, Sir, we would see Jesus. Friends, here s how you can know you see Jesus: when the story of his death for you on the cross becomes the most glorious, beautiful truth you could ever imagine. Behold the man upon the cross, my sin upon his shoulders; ashamed I hear my mocking voice call out among the scoffers. It was my sin that held him there until it was accomplished. His dying breath has brought me life; I know that it is finished. Does that move you? Does that smite your heart? Then you ve seen Jesus. I m going to pray now that we would all see Jesus, and find peace and joy that comes from seeing him as he is. PRAY 2017 J.D. Shaw 8