The Story - Chapter 26

I saw on the news this week that basketball game, Frank Martin, who used to be coach at K-State, has never had two seasons in a row in which he had a losing season, so the pressure is really on him in South Carolina, his new school, and his team wasn't doing very well. He called a timeout and called his guys over there, and they had the cameras on him, and he was what the school called inappropriate communication, that's public relations for cussing real bad, and so he said after it was over, he was withheld from the game, they played the next game by the school, and he said, you know, 24 hours a day and every day, and that day there were 24 hours and only 12 minutes of that day did I do anything that was inappropriate. And he said, I'm going to look over my life and I'm going to look at myself and I'm going to decide how I can make sure that there's 12 minutes like that never happen again. Something inside of us allows us or causes us to do things that are terribly destructive to us or either terribly helpful to us. What is it inside of a person that makes such a big, big difference? I know many of you have been reading in the story about Jesus and his crucifixion. You look at Jesus' life and you say, how could someone do something like that? Go through all the suffering, all the pain, all the agony. How could you give yourself to someone who hated you, treated you so badly? There was something in Jesus that was different. I think we tend to think that it was because he was God's son. It was because of some innate human quality he had in him that allowed him to be so different than all the rest of us. But that's really not the case. Jesus lets us know what it is that's inside of him that makes him different than all the other people in the world. In passage of John, in chapter 14 of John, I want to read that passage this morning. Jesus is getting ready to leave his disciples. He said to them he's going to be leaving soon, but he's going to leave the Holy Spirit with them. He tells them that in this time that he's going to be gone, they'll have some help. This is the way the conversation strikes. Jesus says to them, you know the way to the place that I'm going to. He tells them he's leaving. You know the way to the place I'm going to. Now they're thinking about a road. How do you get to Larned? You get on the highway and you travel to Larned. Jesus is talking about something entirely different. He corrects them. Verse 5 of chapter 14. Thomas said to him, Lord, we don't know where you're going. How can we know the way? Jesus answered, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and you have seen him. Philip said, Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us. Philip jumped right into this mistake that he made, thinking that he was talking about something insignificant. Jesus was saying, when you've seen the Father, you've seen me. He was saying, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Those three qualities about his life he gives to us. I am the way. I am the person who shows you how you walk so that you get where you need to go. I am the truth. Everything that I tell you is true and anything that conflicts with that is a lie in the world. I am the way, the truth, and the life. And if you want to find out how to live in this world, you look at my life, you look at what I say to you, and you live according to that. And you'll find life in its fullness as you were created to find. I am the way, the truth, and the life. And if you live this way that I've been teaching you, you will find the Father in your life. Jesus answered when he said, show us the Father and that will be enough. Jesus answered, don't you know me, Philip? Even after I've been among you such a long time, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, show us the Father? Don't you believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own, rather it is the Father living in me who is doing his work. Believe me when I say, I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or at least believe the evidence of the miracles themselves. Jesus is saying to us, as he said to his own disciples, I want you to understand the secret of my life. It wasn't that I was virgin born, that's not it. I grew up the way all of you do. I was born as a baby, had to learn to walk, had to learn to talk, had to learn the rules, had to learn how to live, just like all of you. But the secret to my life has been this. The Father and I have gotten to know each other. Jesus indicated as early in his life, 12 years old, that he was concerned to be about his Father's business. From that time until year 30 in his life are hidden from us. We don't know what took place. We can only know what the end of those 30 years came. He was a man different than most of us. He understood his purpose in the world. And he understood what the Father was like. And he was passionate about living the way God wanted him to live. The language that he uses here, physical language in this world, the way, being in something and something being in that other thing, like they're capsules or something that you could use. This language tends to lead us to think in terms of the physical world we're around. But that's not what Jesus was talking about. I want you to understand, he says, that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Now we could use this in relational language in a different way. To say, I know the Father so much and I know exactly what he's like. And I've put into practice in my own life the things that he does. I've learned how to think like my Father. I've learned how to value things like my Father. I've learned how to be able to see the world through his eyes. Those of you who have been reading in the story are familiar with the concept of talking about the upper story and the lower story. Here Jesus uses it in a different way. He uses it to talk about what as human beings we see and what we think and the way we understand things. And the difference between that and the way God thinks and God sees things and the things that are valuable to him, these are far different. I was born in this world and I saw things as ordinary humans do. But as I began to learn about the Father, you know how he learned about it? From the Old Testament. That's how he learned it. It's a critical thing to have. I always make sure that Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, that one of those that I'm using a passage is in the Old Testament because it is so critical. It's where Jesus learned how to be the man he was. And through all the Old Testament, I learned how the Father thought. I learned the way he saw things. I saw what was important to him, what he hated and what he loved so that I began to shape my mind and character around him so that when you see me, you see the Father. We know when we talk about a child growing up in a home, we say, well, you're just like your mother or you're just like your father. I sound there like, say, you don't like your parents. I say, well, you're just like your father, you're just like your mother. We say, you've been around them so long that their nature and character is rubbed off on you. Jesus was saying, I have been so close to my Father in heaven that I've learned to think like him. I've learned to act like him. I know what he wants. I know what's valuable to him. I know what he hates. So when every circumstance of life came, he could look at it in two ways. He could look at it through human eyes and see what was taking place or he could look at it through the eyes of the Father. So he was tempted 40 days in the wilderness. Satan came to him and said, here are some stones. You could just say the word and these stones would be turned into bread. You haven't eaten for 40 days. His human eyes could see those stones and a human mind could say, yes, I have the power to turn those into bread and I am really, really hungry. What does the Father want me to do? And he remembered a verse from the Old Testament. Man does not live by bread alone but every word that comes from the mouth of God. See he was so saturated with the thinking of God that in that moment he had a choice. He could act on his human nature or he could act as the Father would act in a circumstance like that. I am so much like my Father that it's like we are joined together in one unit. I've learned to think like him. I've learned to act like him. I've learned to talk like him. Now you know, you may think that that's a hard thing to do so you get up every day and live exactly the way God wants you to. Well it's a learning curve, you know. Now if I were to tell you, you are going to act and live the way God acts and lives. You might think, whoa, I'm not sure about that. Okay. Then if you were to go outside and you were to see laying there somebody's billfold and you saw the money sticking out of it and you reached down to get it, the thought might occur to you, I sure could use the money. That's a way a human being might think about it. Then you would say, this is wrong. Your mind would say that because all of us know some things about the way God thinks. We're not to murder, we're not to steal, we're not to lie. Those are things that we've learned. So many of us know the things of God instinctively like Jesus talked about, but what he did was he learned those things so that it controlled every single part of his life. My guess is that most of you have learned about stealing and lying and killing and so you don't do it. You learn to act like the Father in that dimension of your life. What was different about Jesus is he kept expanding that until it covered every single part of his life. I think, no way to prove this, that that's what was happening in the 18 years from the time of 12 years old when he said he had to be about his father's business till the time he really started in his ministry. He was learning what the Father was like and how to put it in practice with his brothers and his mother and father and his grandparents and his neighbors and all the people around him. He was in the construction business, he had to learn how to work with people and please them. That's not easy. What would the Father do if he did his very best on a job and some gripey old guy just complained all the time? He learned how to do that. So he could say at this stage in his life, it was at the end, when you see me, you know that I and the Father are like one person. I've learned so much about him and incorporated his nature and character into me that when you see me speak and hear me speak and you see me act, this is how the Father acts and lives. Now when Jesus came to the cross itself, his human nature didn't want to suffer and he sat down with the Father and he said, Father, what should I do? I would rather have this removed from me. And then he ended up saying, I understand that your will is, excuse me, is always better, so I will say, your will be done. It doesn't mean that every time you come to a choice, you automatically want to do the thing that God wants you to do. But it means when you've reflected on it and you've gone to God and asked him about it. Some things are black and white, you know, don't kill somebody when you see them, don't get mad, cut their head off. Some things are a little bit difficult, you know. I'm not sure, God, exactly what I should do about this. But when Jesus on his knees before the Father was not sure, he said, here's what I would really like to do in my own human nature, but what do you think I should do? Three times he went to the Father with that. Finally he got the answer, your will be done. The choice in the end was the will of the Father. I think that's what he was talking about when he said, in a little while you're going to see the Father more clearly. You're going to see in the apex of my life what it means to live as the Father, hanging on the cross, saying to those who are killing you, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. This miraculous character of Jesus, who lived in such a perfect way, is awesome to us. All of us look at this and say, how could a person ever live that way? Jesus addressed to his disciples, he wasn't finished with this, whoever has my commands and obey them, he is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and show myself to him. Jesus addresses now these followers, this is us, let me tell you the secret to my life. I've shown you the result, I and the Father are so close together you can't tell us apart. We're alike. How did I get this way? Whoever has my commands, it starts by saying, you have to learn what is right and wrong, you have to learn what God wants you to do, you have to learn what I've told you to do. That's why the Bible and reading is so critical to us, it's not our second nature. It's not the way we normally would react to circumstances. So you read the Bible and you think, would I do that? And when you come to a passage where you say, man, I don't think I would react that way, you stop and say, this is the difference between my human nature and the nature of God. That's where he teaches us. If you want to have the life I have, Jesus said, you must learn the commands of God. What he tells you you should do, what he tells you never to do. You must learn those so that they're embedded in your mind, so that you know instinctively what you ought to do. Every culture in the world has different sets of standards, and when you go on a mission trip, one of the things the missionaries often do is set you down and say, now, in this culture, this is the way people act. One time I went on one and they said, now, when you get to this place, never put your hand on the head of a kid and roughly his hair. That's very demeaning. Well, that's a playful thing for us. So in a different culture, you learn that culture. The Bible tells us the culture of God. You can't do this until you learn what I say you should do and what I say you shouldn't do. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, this is the key ingredient. Now we oftentimes talk about having faith in God and trust in God, and sometimes we use this language to describe simply something in your mind. I believe in God. I trust God out there. But it doesn't seem to affect our actions and behavior. Jesus is talking about faith, faith that says, I trust God enough that what he tells me is true, I'm going to believe it and do it. So if I'm facing eviction from my house and I have no money and I find somebody's billfold with exactly the right amount of money in it to pay off the payment this month, I could pick it up and say, God has answered my prayer. I remember a story one time, a lady who had a checking account and they made a mistake on her checking account. Instead of putting $10 in her checking account, they put $10 million in. And they finally caught up with her after she'd spent a lot of that money and she said, well, I'd been praying for God to send me some money. So when it appeared in my bank, I thought, this is an answer to prayer. God's given me what I asked for. You could do that or you could stop and say, I'm going to make sure that I do the right thing. Even though it might cost me my house, see that's hard thinking, hard thinking. I want you to obey me regardless of the apparent consequences of your actions. So you learn all of my commands and you obey them. For the person that does that, he says, he is the one who loves me. Learning the commandments of God, putting them into practice is what love is. The Bible uses three words, maybe more than that, but three that come to me, faith, obedience and love, all in the same way. I trust you enough to do what you tell me because I really love you and I want to do the things that please you. So love, putting the interest of God ahead of my own, that's what love is. Sacrifice, self-denial, service to God. I obey your commands because I know you have the truth. And I do that even at great cost to myself. Now what he's describing is what it means to become a follower of Christ. You say to him, I believe that you have the light and the truth. I commit myself to live in obedience to you regardless of the cost. I commit myself to do that because I respect you and I love you more than anything in the world. What he's talking about is what it means to be a follower of Christ. If you want to have the life I have, that's where you start. That's where I started. I learned what God was about. I loved him more than anything in the world. I was prepared to live for him even though it meant my death. And that's what's happened. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. That is a powerful, powerful sentence. If you let God come into your life so much that you know him and he is in you and you are in him, you will do powerful things. Why? Because now it is God working in you and through you instead of yourself. He gives you the ability to make tough choices. He gives you the confidence in circumstances that look disastrous to believe if I just keep on doing what I know he tells me, somehow or other it's going to work out on the other side. God wants to show this over and over again to us. We can face the most impossible and difficult circumstances and no way that we see that we can get out of them. Doug Flick was telling me this week he had one of those. I prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and when it was over it was better than when it started. That's what God does in the life of every follower of his. We see these miracles of God because we think that if I do what God tells me to do, something more than human is going to take place in my life. This person will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father. What God says to each of us, I will do greater things in your life than even you've read about me. Now you know what happens when you first hear that? You say, well I see Jesus fed 5,000 people that means I'll get to feed 10,000 people with a can of Spam. No. We're thinking about the wrong things. The greater things Jesus did was to deliver the message that God gave him to people around him. You know Jesus never got out of Palestine. I bet every one of you have traveled farther in your life than Jesus ever did. You know more people than Jesus ever met. Your influence is far more spread than Jesus. You touch the lives of people that Jesus never touched. You have the ability and the power to do the work of God far greater than Jesus ever had in the location that he was. But you know what Jesus did? He did what God told him to do and the people who are following Christ do what God tells them to do and the results in our lives will be far greater. When you give money this morning, you're supporting 5,000 foreign missionaries. Jesus never had that opportunity. And when you ask God, how can we help with this Lottie, this Annie Armstrong offering in the United States? There are over 4,000 missionaries in the United States in different places who are working. You can give one dollar and support every single one of them. You can do greater things, more wide things, more spread out things, more people can be touched than I've been able to do. It doesn't mean that you're going to have higher miracles, but you're going to have greater impact in your life. That's the promise God makes for us. He will do even greater things than these. Here's why. Because I'm going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name and I will do it. If you love me, you will obey what I command. He goes back to that if you have faith. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever. The spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him and the world can't accept the Holy Spirit because it hasn't pledged itself to live in obedience to him. The people around you who are not willing to give themselves in obedience and love and faith to God cannot have the spirit of God. But if you've done that, you have it. You have the spirit of God in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore but you will see me because I live, you also will live. On that day, you will realize that I am in the Father and you are in me and I am in you. See what happens? As you learn about Jesus and what he's like and it becomes in your mind the pattern of your life, you find that you are becoming just like Jesus. He was just like the Father. So you are now just like Jesus and just like the Father. This is what God wants to do in your life. So that as you live your life, you can make the choices that are real, that are informed by God and they might powerfully make that difference in your life. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he's the one who loves me and he who loves me will be loved by my Father and I too will love him and show myself to him. What Jesus was telling us is if you marvel at my life and how I've lived, don't think it's an exception to you. You learn about me as I learned about the Father. You begin to put into practice those things that I tell you to do, saying to me, Lord, I'm going to do what you tell me regardless of the cost and as you live a lifestyle of doing that, it may take the whole life of yours on this earth before you get to the place where you feel you're confident that God is in you and you're in him in the same way Jesus had that. But in your life, I will bring my power to bear. What you'll find in your life as you're walking with God is the further along you go, you learn more and more about the things in your life that need to be changed. One of the great problems most of us have is we grow with Christ a little bit and then a little bit and we stop. We're no longer looking over our lives day by day and say, God, would you do it this way? Would you treat people this way? Would you value these things? Would you spend your time the way I'm spending it? Would you spend your life for the things I'm spending it for? We just settle in and comfortably say, well, that's the way I am. I'm going to live this way. If that's happened to you, you'll find your life gets dull and boring and your spiritual life loses its interest to you. What makes it really critical is when you discover that there's something about you that God wants to change. It's easy for us. I mean, you can look at the time you lost your temper and say, well, that's just the way I am. Or you can stop and say, that wasn't the way Jesus would have done that. What's wrong inside of me? Why is it that I got so angry? Why did I want bad things to happen to someone else or even cause bad things to happen to them? God, I need to learn what you're like. How would you have done this? And as that happens in our lives, then we find the power of God. He causes us to hate the things we used to love and causes us to love the things we never thought we could. As this happens with the Holy Spirit's guidance in your life, now see, we have the Holy Spirit as Jesus had it, we have Christ as he was in this world, and we have the Father all in our lives helping us. Why don't I get better? Because we don't listen. We're satisfied with where we are. I'm satisfied knowing a little bit about God, and so I quit. Jesus said, what I want you to come to the place where you can say, Jesus and myself are one. Seem impossible to you? Then that's your goal. That's what God wants for you. And if it seems impossible to you, think why it's impossible. And that one thing in your life God wants to get out or to transform. And if you will do it as I did, then you will experience in your life the same power you saw in me. Are you satisfied with your life? The way you react? Oh, I know you think there's some things over here that might need to be changed, but they're not very important. They're very, very important to God. And they're critical to your growth as a follower of Christ. Jesus tells us, here's the secret to my life. When you've seen the Father, you've seen me. I want you to say over in your mind, think of somebody you know and would you say to them, when you've seen me, you've seen Jesus. Hard to say? Why? What you've discovered is a part of your life that God wants to change. He doesn't want you to change it. He wants to change it. He wants you to say, I want to admit to you, this part of me needs to be changed. I am asking you to teach me what's different about that. How would God handle this? And I want you to give me such a passion to be different that I'll no longer love the way I am, but love what you want me to be. Would you bow your heads please for a moment? We live in a really wicked world and it's easy to fit into that world. No one's going to complain if you do. Only God. And if you ignore him and don't read the Bible and don't go to church, then you can silence him, but you're going to have to face him someday and you're going to have to explain why you were not in him and he was not in you as the Father was in Jesus and Jesus was in the Father. I'd like you to start this morning. What has God already said to you that needs to be different? Would you promise him that you will ask him to change that? It starts by saying, God, I intend to live my life in obedience to what you tell me is right. I intend to do that regardless of what it costs me. And then you ask him, what do you want me to do now? Father, this world needs you. It doesn't read the Bible, but it does see all of us. If we were in you as you were in the Father, we believe that the world would see the Bible alive in us. I ask for myself that you would cause me to see the things that hinder, keep you from expressing your nature in me. This week, alert me to those things. I ask that for all of us, that we might find life in the way to the Father that you promised us. I'm going to ask the pianist to play. I want you to reflect on what God has said to you today. Maybe you've never told him, okay, I'm going to make my life devoted to you. I'm going to learn what you tell me to do, and I'm going to put it in practice no matter what it costs. If you've never made that promise to God, this morning I want you to do it. If you're going to make that promise, I want you to come and stand publicly and say to the whole world, my life direction has changed. I'm going to follow Jesus. If you've done that, what we ask is that you make a declaration to the world by being baptized, showing your old life is gone, your new life has started. If you've never made that witness, ask God if that's what he wants you to do. If you've made that promise to God, he wants you to be with a group of people who are trying to do the same thing. That's what the church is. So he may say to you, I want you to join this church, to become a part of these people learning about me and serving me. If you want to make a promise to God, I'll be here at the front. Kathy's going to be here. You come and share your promise with us, and we'll pray with you. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Do you need to say anything, Carrie? Brad has told us several times he has great difficulty with not cussing. I'd like you to pray this week for him, that every time he says some word that he shouldn't say, that the Spirit of God would make him know that God is very displeased with him, that he might be able to put behind him this practice that's become so habitual in his life. Would you stand, please, for a moment of prayer? Our business meeting this evening, we're going to talk about two things. One of them is what we do in terms of our small group Sunday schools in the future, and the other is what we're going to do with regard to our seating direction. So we should have the numbers to give you about what people have suggested, and talk about the next step we're going to take in that. Father, we trust you. Nothing in this world ahead of us is bigger than you. Nothing inside of us is more powerful than you. Give us the humility to turn our lives into your hands, that we might reflect to the world the way, the truth, and the life. In the name of Jesus, we ask this. Amen. We're just going to sing the chorus to Sing to the King. Come, let us sing a song, a song declaring we belong to Jesus. He is all we need. Lift up a heart of praise. Sing now with voices raised to Jesus. Sing to the King.