Now this morning's message comes
from a later portion here in John chapter 12. John chapter 12 will begin at
verse 37. Even after Jesus had done all
these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not
believe in him. This was to fulfill the word
of Isaiah the prophet, Lord, who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed. For this
reason they could not believe because as Isaiah says elsewhere,
he has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts so that
they can neither see with their eyes nor understand with their
hearts nor turn and I would heal them. Isaiah said this because
he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him. Yet, at the same time,
many, even among the leaders, believed in him. But because
of the Pharisees, they would not confess their faith, for
fear they would be put out of the synagogue. For they loved
praise from men more than praise from God. Then Jesus cried out,
When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only,
but in the one who sent me. When he looks at me, he sees
the one who sent me. And I have come into the world
as a light so that no one who believes in me should stay in
darkness. As for the person who hears my
words but does not keep them, I do not judge him, for I did
not come to judge the world but to save it. There is a judge
for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words. That
very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day.
For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent
me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that His
command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what
the Father has told me to say. Now, our subject this morning is confessing
Christ. Confessing Christ, and I picked
that up from verse 42 where it speaks of those who believed
him but wouldn't confess him out of fear that they'd be put
out of the synagogue. And yet in chapter 12, we find three
different reactions or responses to the Lord Jesus Christ. And
I'm gonna use those three responses to show the significance of confessing
Christ. Now first of all, what is it
to confess Christ? Now some might see this as an
opportunity, that is Baptists, some Baptists might see this
as an opportunity to promote the idea of believer's baptism. And that would not be an entirely
bad thing to do, though I do not think that's the issue that's
being dealt with. Now, a believer's baptism is
most certainly a visual confession of Christ. It is an identification
with Christ. It is saying, I follow this man. I mean, that's part and parcel
of what a believer is doing when he is baptized. And it is the
means by which God called on every believer to confess him.
In Matthew chapter 28 verse 19, it says, therefore, go and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Now actually the command
there is not to those who believe, it's to those who preach, the
way that that's worded. He tells them to go out and preach
and then, or actually tells them to go out and make disciples
and then baptize them, who? The ones who are made disciples. Now here's the reason that we
don't baptize infants here. We don't baptize infants because
they can't be disciples. The Lord said baptize disciples.
He didn't say baptize disciples and their children. He said baptize
disciples. Now, children, I love them, you
know, and we tend to, you know, fall for that thing that the
babies are innocent. I mean, it looks like they couldn't
be anything but the most wonderful people. But, you know, you give
them long enough. They're just like us. They're sinful. We don't
baptize them as a confession of what we hope about them. Why? Because the Bible says make disciples,
baptize them. And we train our children, but
we can't make our children into disciples. The truth is only
God can do that. We can teach them, But there's
a difference between a student and a disciple. A disciple, well
a student listens and gains instruction from a teacher. A disciple listens,
gains instructions, believes what he's told, and walks according
to what his teacher tells him. Now that's what a disciple is.
And those are the ones who are to be baptized. But baptism isn't
the subject here. Though I might say this, those
who claim to believe Christ but refuse to be baptized, they might be guilty of not confessing
Christ. It all depends on why they're
not being baptized. Now, we live in a community. I guess in this town, we're the
only ones that practice believers baptism by immersion. Every other
church has the practice of baptizing infants and or sprinkling them. And I'm not going to say all
these people are lost by any means, certainly not on that
account. They don't practice believers
baptism primarily out of ignorance, and I don't mean ignorance. You
know, I'm just saying they don't understand. Our relationship with God is
never determined by what we can do naturally. But often what
we do visibly reveals what is in our hearts. And if a man says,
well, I believe Christ, and you say, okay, our Lord said that
those who believe, who become his disciples, should be baptized. Well, I don't know if I, no,
I won't do that. I would just say, well, then
I'm not gonna believe that you believe him. I'm not gonna believe
that you're his disciple if you won't do what he clearly said
to do. In fact, our Lord said, why do you call me Lord and not
do what I say to do? But again, baptism's not the
subject here. What is this confession that's
being spoken of here when it says that they wouldn't confess?
Well, the word itself tells us, in the Greek it literally means
to say the same thing. So the sense of confession is
to express agreement with something that's been said. Something that's
been said by someone else. Now you can, and I'm just using
English words here, you can profess your own thoughts. Because profess just means to
speak in favor of. But you can't agree with yourself.
That word, to say the same, carries a sense of agreement. Well, you
can't say the same thing as yourself. It takes someone else saying
something, and you agree with it, and you say the same thing.
Now, that's all that this word confess means. But other words
that could be used are words like acknowledge, or to profess,
you say I profess what he professes. Each of these has a little different
connotation, but all contain this concept of agreement. But the key in professing Christ,
as is being used here in John chapter 12, is that confession
of Christ is public, public. These people, and this is what
drew me to this passage, these people that believed, they would
not confess. They wanted to be secret believers. Now, as near as I can tell, and
I believe this scripture bears it out, there's no such thing
as a secret believer, at least not for long. It's going to It's going to slip
out. If you really believe Christ,
you're going to say so. You may have a mental conviction
regarding what he says, you may believe many things about him,
but if you actually trust him, you will confess him. It says here in verse 42 that
there was those who believed, but they would not openly confess. And they wouldn't confess because
they were afraid and they wouldn't confess. And
isn't this an amazing thing? And maybe they didn't even realize
this was what was keeping their mouths shut, but John. knew why. They loved praise from
men more than praise from God. Can you imagine consciously thinking
that? That's why I say these people
might not even realize that's what was motivating them. It
may not have occurred to them, well, you know, the only reason
I'm refusing to confess Christ is I prefer to have these men
he prays on me than for God to praise me. So it's a startling thing when
there's someone who believes but will not confess. Now, this
confession that's spoken of is something more than words from
the mouth, though. Strictly speaking, only the mouth
can confess, for only the mouth can say anything, and the word
means to say the same thing. But in the gospel, confession
of Christ is always understood as an expression of the heart
through the mouth. It is written, out of the abundance
of the heart, The mouth speaks. Now we can discipline our mouths
and say things even that we don't believe. That's just called lying. People do it all the time. We
do it, don't we? And so not everything that a
man says is a true expression of his heart. But you get him
talking when his guard is down. You get him to speaking honestly. Whatever comes out of his mouth
is what's in his heart. Now, we know that people can
lie, and they often do. And a person can, with his mouth,
say the same things as God says about Christ, but not truly believe
them in his heart. And we don't try to judge another
person's confession beyond whether or not they are confessing the
truth. Why? Because we can't see their hearts.
They might confess the truth with their mouth and not believe
it in their heart. Of course, here you have people
that claim to believe it and they won't confess it. But there
are many people saying, well, I'm a Christian, I believe Christ.
We'll take their word for it. Because we don't have any right
not to. unless they make confession of something that is so contrary
to the gospel. We're saying, well, you say you
believe Christ, but evidently the Christ you believe is different
than the Christ I believe. But if a person says to us, I
am a sinner, but I have seen that Jesus Christ is God's son
and was sent into the world to save his people. And I have put
my trust in him and he has saved me. We have no right to say,
no, that's not true. We take their confession at face
value, because the face is the only thing we can see. God will
judge the heart. And most false confessions eventually
do reveal themselves on the outside. You know, a lot of preachers,
it seems that they want to continually prove people aren't believers.
I say, leave them alone, they'll prove it all by themselves. If
I have to make a real hard and meticulous argument to prove
that somebody doesn't believe, maybe I'm wasting my time on
things that I shouldn't be looking into anyway. It becomes rather
obvious with time when someone confesses Christ and it really
didn't come from the heart. We can judge whether or not a
person's confession is a true confession of the word of God
concerning Christ. That's merely the work of comparing
what they are saying with what the scriptures say. If they profess
something like God loves you so much and wants to save you
and Jesus died for you and is so hoping you won't let his sacrifice
be in vain, we can correctly judge that while their words
may be a confession, it's not a confession of Christ because
Christ never said anything like that. And God never said anything
like that about Christ. You can't agree with God about
that because God never said it. You know, you can't agree with
a person about something he never said. So we can say, well, if someone
makes a confession like that, we could say, well, you know,
that's a confession for sure, but it's not a confession of
the Christ of these scriptures. Paul wrote that if we confess
with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in our hearts
that God has raised him from the dead, we will be saved. So there we are taught that true
confession involves not only the things that are said with
the mouth, but what is actually believed in the heart. You see,
to believe that God has raised Christ from the dead, is to believe
that he is Lord. You say, where do you get that
connection? Well, remember the resurrection
was not an event all by itself. When our Lord was raised from
the dead and came out of that tomb, that was just his first
step on the way to the throne. There would be no such thing
as Jesus Christ being raised from the dead and then not be
set upon the throne of glory as Lord of all. It was prophesied concerning
him, sit here until I make your enemies a footstool for your
feet. That was the promise to Christ.
And that promise was fulfilled or it began to be fulfilled by
his resurrection. So if I believe in my heart that
God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead, that means I believe
that he is Lord and I'll confess that with my mouth. A good confession involves confessing
Christ as he has revealed himself. In Matthew 16, beginning at verse
13, we read, when Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi,
he asked his disciples, who do people say that the Son of Man
is? They replied, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah,
and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. But what
about you, Jesus asked. Who do you say I am? Now here he's asking them for
a profession. Simon Peter answered, you are
the Christ, the son of the living God. Jesus replied, blessed are
you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you
by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. Now what's
the Lord saying there to Peter? You are saying the same thing
the Father says about me when you say that I am the Christ,
the Son of the living God. Peter truly confessed Christ
that day. That's confession. and it involves
confessing him for who he is. People had all kinds of things
to say about Jesus in his day, but they were not confessions
of Christ because they weren't saying what Christ said or what
the Father said. Now, scripture declares a Christ
who is God. In John 8, verse 24, the Lord
says, I told you that you would die in your sins. If you do not
believe that I am, you will indeed die in your sins. And then in
John 8, 58, Jesus said, before Abraham was, I am. And in John
13, 19, the Lord said, I'm telling you, speaking to his disciples,
I'm telling you now, before it happens, so that when it does
happen, you will believe that I am. Now why does the Lord keep
saying, I am? Most English translations will
add a word like, I am he. Or they'll add a phrase, you
believe that I am who I say I am, and all that. But it's not there
in the Greek. It just says, believe that I am. Three times in the
book of John, at least those three times, our Lord identifies
himself as I am. And there's only one other place
where a person, here in the scriptures, identifies himself as I am. And
that's the one who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, God. And Jesus says, I am. Who are
you? I am. In fact, when they came to arrest
him, they said, he said, who are you looking for? And they
said, well, we're looking for Jesus. And he said, I am. Now again, most translations
will say, I am he. But the he is not there. He just
said, I am. And it says that the guards that
came to arrest him fell backward when he said that. Now if all
he was saying, well, that's me, I don't think that would make
them fall backward, would it? What power is there in a statement
like that? He said, I am with all the power and the force of
him who spoke to Moses out of the bush and declared himself
to be the eternal self existing, I am. And when he said his name
to those guards, they couldn't even take him uttering his own
name. He is God. The scriptures declare
that Christ came to be the savior of his people through the sacrifice
of himself to God as an atonement. Now, to confess Christ as a mere
religious teacher, or a moralizer, or a martyr, or some say, well,
he was a good man. To confess him as anything that
does not include his identity as the savior is not a valid
confession. listen to these scriptures. Matthew
121, she that is Mary will give birth to a son and you are to
give him the name Jesus because He will save His people from
their sins. Mark 10.45, For even the Son
of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His
life as a ransom for many. Isaiah 53 8, he was taken from
prison and from judgment and who will declare his generation
for he was cut off from the land of the living for the transgression
of my people he was stricken. 1 Peter 3.18 says, For Christ
also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous,
to bring you to God. And the book of Hebrews says
that Christ offered himself without spot to God. Now, from the very
beginning, really, way back there in the Garden of Eden, when God
first confronted Adam and Eve in their sin, He began promising
salvation from sin, and it always involved the death of a substitute.
And that substitute is our Lord Jesus Christ. And the scriptures
constantly set him forth primarily, primarily in that office as the
one who, by the sacrifice of himself, redeems the people of
God. One of the key deceptions in
our time concerning religion comes from those who change the
purpose of our Lord's coming from being the savior from sin
by the sacrifice of himself to being the one who fixes our lives. Now you know the devil is a subtle
deceiver and he plays the long con. You know there are some
people who are con artists and it's just a real quick deal they
pull something you know, some little trick on you and then
take off with whatever they get. There's others, they call them
the practice in the long con. They set something up that takes
a long time to come to maturity. Back when I was a kid, one of
the popular expressions for believing Christ was asking Jesus into
your heart. But before I had fully grown
up, that was changing to ask Jesus into your life. Well, you know, you can't find
anywhere in the scriptures either of those phrases anywhere in
the scriptures. Ask Jesus into your heart or ask Jesus into
your life. Quite frankly, He's already in your life. He's in
everybody's life. He'll come into my life. And
the reason they did this is because it appeals to people. Their lives are difficult and
they got troubles. They may be in trouble. And the
way the preachers are presenting this is that Jesus Christ came
to get them out of trouble, to fix whatever they've messed up
in their lives. Well, you know, sometimes our
Lord does that. Who of us here are watching on the internet
can say, I have received in this life according to my sins. No, the Lord has delivered us
from so many troubles in this world. But you know, he does
that for the godless too. And sometimes the godless have
better lives than the godly, better in terms of how you naturally
think of your life. Last week, I read a story of
one of these guys that got caught up in the investigation of Trump's
alleged collusion with Russia. I'm not here to make a political
statement. It's just I know that a lot of guys, they ask testimony
from them, and then they catch them in some kind of lie. And
so this guy has been is like that and he's been sentenced
to 40 months and he just can't stand the thought of going to
prison. And he went to see the son of the most famous evangelist
from the 20th century. I don't want to name names. But
you can probably figure out who it is. And he's trying, this
son of the evangelist, he's trying, well, he's got a pretty big name.
He's always sticking his nose into politics and all kinds of
stuff. Well, this guy, you know, if you're a big shot sinner,
you go to a big shot preacher. So this fella goes to this preacher
and this preacher says, if you'll just ask Jesus into your life,
he will fix everything. Well, at least that's the way
it was reported. And this man believes, he's saying, Jesus
is going to get me out of this. Jesus is going to save me from
jail. Really now? Well, he has saved some from
jail. Peter, Paul, and Silas. But Jesus didn't come here to
save us from jail. In fact, the Lord Jesus Christ
in his grace has put some people into jail because he's going
to send a preacher to that jail and they would be quite literally
a captive audience and they would hear the gospel. Why the Lord
Jesus Christ took one of his chosen and nailed him to a cross
next to the Lord Jesus Christ so that he would hear the gospel
for the first time and believe before he died. Jesus Christ
did not die on the cross to make this life better. Now, I think of the life of believing
Christ is a better life. I don't want a life of unbelief.
But that wasn't the purpose. The purpose was to save us from
our sins. It doesn't take the sacrifice
of Christ to deliver us from jail. Angels did that on at least
two occasions. He could have sent angels to
get his people out of jail. He could have sent angels probably
to heal their bodies and do all these kind of things that folks
are all excited about. And they're going to church because
the message is being preached there that Jesus Christ is going
to fix their family problems, and Jesus Christ is going to
fix their health problems, and their financial problems, and
that's simply a lie. He didn't come to do that. He
might do that, but He never promised to. He came to save us from our
sins. He did not come simply to change
our destination from hell to heaven. He came to change our
destiny from miserable, wretched rebels against God to glorious
beings like Jesus Christ Himself. People get all upset at the doctrine
of predestination. The only two times I'm aware
of that that word is used with regard to people It's not talking
about their destination. It's talking about their destiny.
It's not talking about where they're gonna be. It's talking
about what they're going to be. We're predestined to be adopted
as children, says Paul. And we are predestined to be
conformed to the image of God's Son. And that's what Jesus Christ
came to do. A good confession. Good confession of Christ confesses
him as worthy of all things and of such surpassing value that
nothing, not even one's own life, is as valuable as he is. Before prayer, we read that,
those seven verses there at the beginning of this chapter. You
know, I love Mary. I've never met her. Boy, I highly
esteem her as a sister in the Lord, don't you? Every time you
see her or hear of her, you hear of her in her connection to Christ,
her love and devotion of Christ. And she's representative of every
believer in his heart. Now, we may not do as good a
job of showing it as she did, But if this attitude is not in
your heart, then you're none of His. Because anybody who has
seen Him, seen Him in His glory, anyone
who's been saved by Him and experienced His grace is in love with Him. And I think about Mary, you know,
here comes Jesus. He's on His way to observe Passover
according to the law. Bethany's just a couple of miles
out of town, and that's where he stays for that week. Each night, he would go back
to Bethany, and they took care of him there. And Martha, as
was typical of her, and I'm not gonna take away from what Martha
did, Martha loved the Lord, and because of her love for the Lord,
she felt she needed to give extra service. making sure the food
was the best and the house was the cleanest it's ever been,
you know, and he gets the best room and the best bed, and that's
good. Not trying to take away from
Martha, but it says, was served by Martha, but in comes Mary
and she's got this container of a very expensive perfume.
Now, I don't believe she went out and bought that all at once. She'd been saving it up. In fact, it says, the Lord says,
it was intended that she should save this perfume for the day
of my burial. I don't know how long Mary had
known the Lord, but I just envisioned her, whenever she got enough
money to buy a little of that perfume, she'd go buy it and
put it in that bottle. And she'd go buy some more and
some more. And it just kept piling up. She
never put it on herself. She just saved it up. And then
the day came. And she didn't say, Lord, here,
put a little of this here, you know. She broke the box open,
and she poured the whole thing out on his feet. Normally, they just poured water
on your feet, washed your feet. She said, he is so wonderful. I'm not going to wash his feet
with water. I'm going to wash his feet with a year's worth
of perfume. It says 300 denarius, but a denarius
is what a man earned for a day's labor. That's common wage for
a day's labor. Three hundred, that's about a
year's worth of work. And she said, I'll pour it all
out on him. And of course, when it was seen
through the eyes of the flesh, Judas said, that's a waste. Nothing,
nothing given to our Lord Jesus Christ out of love for Him is
a waste. She confessed Him as good as anybody ever confessed
Christ. If you heard that story and you
didn't know anything else about Mary, you knew this about her.
She loved and adored the Lord Jesus Christ. And she thought
that he was worth everything she could do, everything she
could give. Yes, even her own life was worth
nothing to her apart from Christ. There are three responses, and
I'll go through them quickly. There's outright unbelief. We read over here in verse 37,
after Jesus had done all these miracles, including raising Lazarus
from the dead, these miraculous signs in their presence, they
still would not believe in him. Now that's just plain old stubborn
unbelief. And it's the unbelief that every
one of us was born with. Miracles, outward miracles, do
not make people believe. They may make them scratch their
head. How do you do that? These people never denied that
Jesus Christ raised Lazarus from the dead. They just refused to
believe him even though they knew. that He did that. Now you
talk about stubborn unbelief. It didn't matter what our Lord
did. It was not enough for them. And why? This surprises many people because they've been raised on
the idea that God wants everybody to believe. God wants everybody
to end up in heaven. It says in verse 39, for this
reason they could not believe. Now, normally in the way we speak
in English, we use the phrase for this reason to refer to what
we've just said. But these guys might do it, might
say it for what they're about to say. And so we might translate
this. Now here's the reason they could
not believe. As Isaiah said elsewhere, he
has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts, so they can neither
see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn,
and I would heal them. Why couldn't they believe? Because
God blinded them. You say, well, the Bible says
that Satan blinds them. Well, that may be the agent he
uses. But if I drive a nail with a hammer, it's still me driving
the nail, not the hammer. See what I mean? The devil's
just a tool God uses. But God, according to His divine
purpose, blinded these people. And you say, I don't know if
I like a God like that. Well, like Him or not, that's
what He did. And instead of getting upset over the reality that God
blinded people so that they couldn't believe, we need to thank God
He didn't blind us, because we are no better than them. We were
no more stubborn than they are, or they were. There's not a sinful
person described in all the scriptures that's any worse than us. And then there's these people
who believed him and wouldn't confess him, and that's the scariest
bunch to me. They heard what he said, saw
what he did. They said, to themselves, well,
yeah, there's no denying he's who he says he is, and there's
no denying he did what, I just saw it right there. This man's the Christ. They wouldn't confess him. To
be honest, as I look at this, I'd rather die and go stand before
God as a stubborn unbeliever than as someone who believed
but wouldn't confess. Now the word believes used in
different ways, but here it's just talking about someone who
saw it and believed things like we believe the sun comes up in
the east because we see it happen. And they believed him in that
way. But they stopped short of confessing him. Why? They were afraid they'd get put
out of the synagogue. And they loved the praise of
men more than the praise of God. Sometimes I am glad to hear that
people listen to our radio broadcast and, you know, they can tell
a difference between what I preach and what others Some of the others
around here preach, and you know, they'll say, I mean, I've even
heard them say, you know, that he's telling the truth. But then
they don't do anything about it. And you find one of the reasons
they don't do anything about it is they're afraid how their
family will react. They're afraid of being set to
the outside, being scandalized because of their association
with the gospel we preach. Do you know, that is sobering. hear of a person recognize the
truth and what we preach here and yet they will not leave what
they don't think is really the truth. They won't leave it and
align themselves with Christ and His church. And then lastly
there's that wholehearted public loving confession of Christ in
all His precious worthiness such as Mary exhibited. You know, my dad had a sister. Her name
was Dorothy. Dorothy, my Aunt Dorothy, she
was older than dad. She suffered terribly from depression
and anxiety, but Bonnie and I were attending 13th
Street Baptist Church, and lo and behold, Aunt Dorothy showed
up with her husband. That kind of shocked me. I didn't
know they went to church anywhere. Didn't even know that they realized
Henry existed. This went on for a while. One
Sunday night, I went to church. Henry said, we're going to have
a baptism after church tonight. Dorothy Bosé has professed faith
in Christ and she's going to confess him in baptism. And my
jaw just about dropped on the floor. Why? Because my aunt,
because of her emotional troubles, she did not like being the center
of attention. She didn't like being out there
in front of people. Certainly didn't want to get
dunked in water and come up with your hair a mess. And you know
what I mean? You can see. But she loved Christ enough that
she'd do that. She was convinced enough of who
Christ was that as terrifying as baptism would be to a person
like her, she would do it. And brethren, If you claim to
believe Christ, you will confess Him. And if you won't confess
Him for some reason or other, it means there's something that
you like better than you like Him. Well, maybe I'll use the
word love. There's something or someone you love more than
you love Him. May God grant that all of us
confess Him in truth, our Heavenly Father, Bless your word as only
you can. In Christ's name we pray it. Amen. Okay, you are dismissed.