Turn with me to John chapter
16 and let's start reading together in verse 25 to the end of the
chapter. I've said these things to you
in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will
no longer speak to you in figures of speech, but we'll tell you
plainly about the father. In that day you will ask in my
name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on
your behalf, for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved
me and have believed that I have come from God. I came from the
Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the
world and going to the Father. His disciples said, ah, now you
are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech. Now
we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question
you. This is why we believe that you came from God. And Jesus
answered them, do you now believe? Behold, the hour is coming. Indeed,
it has come when you will be scattered each to his own home
and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone for the father
is with me. I've said these things to you
that in me you may have peace in the world. You will have tribulation,
but take heart. I have overcome the world. Beloved, we are At the last public
words of Jesus in the gospel of John, the last thing that
he said to his disciples, the last thing that they heard before
seeing him die on the cross, the last thing that he did in
the context of his earthly ministry from a perspective of teaching.
This is it. And I know we've been here at
this discourse of the Last Supper for many months, and it seems
redundant. It could seem exaggerated and
just sort of just going on and on and on. Some of us may even
consider, well, pastor, you've skipped a lot of theological
things that could have been handled, but yet to do that would to come
outside the text. Why is it written? that your
joy may be full, that you may know that Jesus is the Christ,
and that you may believe in his name, and that by believing you
will have eternal life. And for we, the beloved, we are
encouraged, we are equipped, we are provided for. When Jesus
says, my peace I give you, not like the world, but my peace,
my love I give you, my joy I give you, the comforter, the paraclete,
I give you. The answer to your prayers I
give you and so forth and so on. He is not showing in a figurative
way something that we should just dream about. He's declaring
in a real and divine and a supernatural way that which is ours in him
this very moment. This very day. I spent some time this week praying
and listening as much as I could find pastors within 30 miles
of us all week. Can I find this? Get in the car,
listen to it, put it in my ear, listen to it. I'm just listening.
What is it that the spiritual evangelical world of our culture
is being fed and what is it that they are hungering for? Why is
it that 9 out of 10 people that I see on a daily basis will just
rejoice in what they heard on their Lord's Day assembly? And say to me, isn't our God
good? I want to know. Sadly, few people
publish what they teach. And those that do, probably shouldn't. But there are some that there
is hope. There are some that even though
they cannot see the gospel and they have not been converted,
they are at least trying to stick to the text. In that sense it
reminds me some of what Paul taught to the Philippians. When
there were people who, in His arrest, took advantage of it
to cause harm to Him, they went out and took His mantle and began
to emulate and recapitulate that which Paul preached from their
mouths, but they knew it not in their hearts. And Paul said, let them preach.
Let them preach. For they do it in pretense to
bring me shame and harm, yet the gospel is proclaimed. Beloved, if everyone who was
in Christ, or everyone who professed to be in Christ was in Christ,
the gospel would not be lost. If every, the context of every
denomination and every congregation, if every Reformed church had
the gospel, why would it, it would not be
so vague. so obscure, so divided. Remember this. A false gospel that's easy to
see is no threat at all. Someone that tells you, you must
do this or you must do that, simple. Someone who comes and
says, well, you know, in order to be saved, you must be baptized.
In order to be saved, you must accept Jesus as your Lord. In
order to be saved, you must pray for God to come into your heart.
Those are obvious. But no gospel, no gospel can
be so subtle. We could have no gospel amongst
us so quickly. If I were not born of God, and
you were not born of God, we could easily come up with another
gospel that is so close to the truth, that includes 99% of everything
that is true concerning the doctrines of Christ, but yet, by implication,
expressly damages the gospel. In God we trust. It's been the mantra of our society
by and large since the 50s. Yet Jesus, the God man, is not
that God. The revelation of Jesus, according
to scripture, is not that God. Friends, we are. A minority. in the world. Not just we as
a spiritual family that we call Grace Truth, we as Christians
are a minority in the world. And no matter how many people,
no matter how passionate people may be for the things of Christ,
for religious things, for spiritual things, for doctrinal things,
it does not prove them born of God. Yes, we take a man's doctrine
as the first test of his authenticity. But beloved, we can only fake
it for so long. As a child, one of my grandmothers
used to always remind me that a drunk man can tell no lie.
Never really understood that till I became a man and hung
around some drunk men. And they only cannot tell a lie,
they can't stop talking. And they will say things that
they never intended to share with you. Such is the unconverted Christian. After a while, when the carefulness
of their language is laid to rest, when the comfort level
rises and there is this somewhat intimate relationship with other
people, they begin to say things that do not match the truth. It will walk into a historical
position, it will walk into a traditional position, it will walk into a
customary position to the point where it begins to sound a little
off. It's right, but what's that mean? And I can say to you, and I pray
that you don't even know that which I'm speaking of in real
experience, but I can say to you that the gospel, even in
Reformed churches, is going down the drain in a great capacity. There was a time 20 years ago
where one could say, well, you know what? I'm Protestant. I'm
evangelical. For the most part, everyone would
know what you meant. There was a time even 15 years
ago where one could say, well, I am Calvinist in my soteriology. People go, okay, I know what
you mean. Now, those labels mean very little,
if nothing at all, until you clarify. And knowing the truth of the
gospel is not a label of historical significance. They shall all be taught by God.
And they shall all be taught by the Word of God. And we who
are His people will always be reforming to the Word alone. Never thought I'd see the day
when the authority, the sufficiency, and the efficacy of the Word
of God would be under attack by people who claim the gospel
of free and sovereign grace. Now let me show you how it works.
How is it under attack? A small addendum to the gospel
of grace, a small addendum to the covenant of peace, to the
covenant of grace, to the covenant of redemption, to the promise
of God for the salvation of His people alone through His Son
alone. It's just step one. Let's add
a little here. Let's emphasize this a little
bit more. Let's expound on something that's more philosophical than
anything else. And then through that we begin
to cover up or obscure the simple grace of God. You have been saved
by simple grace. It is by grace that you have
been saved alone. God saved you in His love and
mercy and grace toward you and there is no other effectual means
by which you will have eternal life except that God has given
you mercy and caused you to see it and gifted you faith and birthed
you anew in the Holy Spirit. And all these amazing words and
realities of salvation, you've been regenerated, you've been
justified, you've been sanctified, you will be glorified. All these
things are yours and done and finished in Christ because of
God's mercy alone. And God does not offer His mercy
for anyone who will take it. He gives it to whom He pleases.
And when He gives it, it works. Another way that the Word of
God is under attack is to begin to under-emphasize
the pastoral epistles. To begin to say, okay, we've
got the gospel right, let's take Romans and let's charge through
the doctrine of salvation, let's charge through the doctrine of
Christ in the book of Colossians, let's deal with the false gospels
of Galatia, and let's really get this down. Oh, well, you
know, the other parts of those letters? Don't worry about that. Keep your mouth from evil. Let's
don't worry about that. Don't lie. Well, we'll get to
that one day in a 700 years. You see, it's undermining the
power and the word of the power of the word of God. And that's why in our culture
we have this false satanic gospel of works affirmation. Well, you know that you know
that you know that you know that you have eternal life because of
your life change. Really? You know that you have eternal
life because Jesus paid it all. And if you don't know that Jesus
paid it all, you don't know Jesus. If you don't know that Christ
alone satisfied all of your guilt before the father, you have not
been born of God because that is the instrumental reality of
being born again. When your mind is regenerated,
it is because God has gifted you faith. These things do not
come in sequence. That's called a logical order,
not a temporal order. Get away from theologians. And get into the word of God.
Please. But we have this attack on the
authority of scripture in that way. Well, we just we don't need
to deal with how we deal with church discipline. Brother Trey
and I have had a billion hours. Now, that's not an exaggeration.
No, a billion hours of discussion. It's like every time we get together,
we come to one particular topic of dire need. For the church
of our day, and that's proper ecclesiology, understanding the
cause of the free and sovereign grace of God, who we are and
how we're to live together. It's important. To divorce the
true church, the true assembly from the true gospel is a false
gospel. To ignore it is to refute the
word of God. It's the same thing atheists
do. The same thing all sorts of the cults do. But there's
another way. And there's relevance here. We make gospel issues in our
culture about things that are not gospel issues. And the list goes on, but I'm
just thinking of the three that I just have to just breathe, ignore,
be patient, drink more coffee, go to the range. I mean, you
know, whatever else. We make gospel issues out of
The means of baptism. It's important. The mode of baptism,
rather. Sorry. It's important. That's
very important. It's important. We make gospel issues out of
the philosophical covenants of theological study. You want to
get a good biblical view of covenants, go listen to what Trey's been
teaching on midweek. This past Wednesday, he good
job, brother, by the Lord's mercy. It's hard to work all week and
preach. But we divide over these things
in a culture, and the reason we do so is because the authority
of God's word is not drowning us in everything else we do and
everything else we know. Therefore, we do not submit to
the word of God on these issues. Are there gospel issues concerning
doctrine? Absolutely. The doctrine of Christ and all
that he is and all that he does, all that he's done and everything
that's taught in scripture is a gospel issue when it is related
to the salvation of God's people. And then there are further ways
in which certain teachings and certain philosophies and certain
theologies can implicate a gospel issue. when you chase them down
the road, but the problem is we assume too much instead of
just inquiring to find out. We've come to a place in our
culture where men are not subject to one another in any real biblical
way, but yet they have a platform with thousands to hear. Like the old adage I heard early
in my ministry, the mama called and daddy sent preacher. And
it sounds like this, oh, look at my little preacher, says mama.
And when he turns 18, daddy sends him on his way. Yep, time for
you to be a preacher, son, get out of here. And since the mid
of the 19th century in our country, that's been the principle application
of one man called to the ministry. Not the word of God. And when
there's division, when there's problems, the word of God is
being ignored on how to handle it. Church discipline is not
exercised correctly. It's not exercised precisely.
It's not exercised swiftly and patiently. The world and the
culture at large is about doing what we want to do to make us
look good in the way we want to look so that we can build
a better tomorrow. Today. It sounds really good,
doesn't it? I mean, just that pause in a
statement like that is almost something you could get behind.
And thousands of companies have used that mantra and thousands
more. Friends, the body of Christ is
not a company. Our mission is not to make a better tomorrow
or a better today. That's not our mission. It wasn't
the mission of Jesus. It wasn't the mission of his
apostles. It wasn't the mission of the first, second and so on
century church. It was not the mission of the
reformers. It was not the mission of God, and it never will be
the mission of God. And I've entitled today's message,
I actually was able to entitle it before I preached it. The
failure of our founders. I can't tell you the number of
people throughout the years who have argued and debated with
me. They want to talk about a position of Scripture. They want to talk
about something doctrinal, but they don't want to use the Bible
to discuss it. They want to use history. They want to use this
guy's writing, or this guy's sermon, or this guy's book, or
this guy's idea, or this particular group of people's thoughts, or
this confession, or that confession, or this paper, or that paper,
and the list goes on and on and on, and I want to go to the Bible
because I'm too dumb to deal with all that other stuff. Yeah, they don't want to go there.
They want to deal with it from another point of view. But people
forget that the founders of the church is singular. His name is Jesus. And what we've
been hearing over the last few years in the Gospel of John is
we've been seeing and hearing the teaching of the founder of
His body. The One who has prepared us for
the presence of God, who has done all the work of God and
declared all the Word of God, who is the Word become flesh,
and He has done everything required, and He will build His church. He will build His church. I remember the days in ministry
when multi-campus ministry was so appealing. And I could get
my teeth into that, and professionally, we can do it. All it takes is
a good vision statement, and then it takes clear, identifiable
goals and parameters through which people will adhere, and
then subordination to a specific head or heads to replicate the
mission and vision. And that takes a whole lot of
money. a whole lot of money. And everybody goes, look at this
church, it's growing. We've got five campuses, we've got six campuses.
We baptized 300 people. That's not success in ministry. It's not success in ministry.
Can God do that through the true gospel, through the true church?
Yes. I've yet to see the example of it. The founders then, the founder
of the church is Jesus Christ and the men who established by
the Holy Spirit in their writing the parameters for the body of
Christ are the apostles. So let's look at the apostles
in view here. Verse 29. His disciples say,
oh, oh, now you're speaking plainly and not using figurative language. Isn't that awesome? Jesus is
speaking and teaching for three and a half years. Here's his
last supper. That's what they call it. Remember?
It's his last supper. He sends Judas on his way. He
tells Peter he's going to deny him. And he teaches them who
they are and what they have in him. through His passion, which
is His death on the cross, through His humility, which is His death
on the cross, through His subordination and submission to the Father,
which is His death on the cross, and all the things related therein. And He said, I'm not going to
speak to you in figures of speech. And we saw that two weeks ago.
It specifically deals with what? He's going to show them when
He dies. They're going to see very clearly, all of a sudden,
everything that Jesus has been saying. And they've been having
those side conversations. Remember a little the way I joke
about it. Ask him. I'm not asking him. You ask him.
We don't know what he's talking about. That's the heartbeat of
the disciples throughout the entire ministry of Jesus. Oh,
we got you, Peter, especially. Oh, Master, we understand. We
got it. What's he talking about? We don't
have a clue. I don't know who the dumb one
was in the apostolic circle. But even he was smart enough
to not ask Jesus over and over and over again. And nothing's
different. We don't see the disciples during
the ministry of Jesus as these strong, faithful, awesome, solid
Christians. We don't see them walking lockstep
with sword in one hand and the Torah in the other. The closest we see is Peter going,
I'll never deny you. Bring it on. And then they brought
it on. He's like, I don't know what
you're talking about. I don't know Jesus. Jesus who? And then
we see Thomas. Yep. He's going to die
when he goes into Jerusalem, he's going to die. So let's just
die with him. I've had enough of this. I'm
so tired. Let's just do it. Let's go down with the ship.
They did not understand with their human minds what Jesus
was trying to teach them because it was not yet granted for them
to understand. But they were born of God. Now, let me give a caveat. That
is then. This is now. God shows you the
truth through his word and you see it. You cannot be ignorant
of the substitutionary work of Jesus and say you believe in
the substitutionary work of Jesus. Because God in his timing. So
we say, well, it's always at the time of the hearing of the
word of God, not necessarily, but the hearing of the word of
God will always come before regeneration. That's why when I say there is
no means through which God regenerates, there's no external means. God,
the Holy Spirit, according to John 3, can regenerate His people
whenever He chooses. He did not regenerate Nicodemus
at the hearing of the gospel through the teaching of the gospel
giver. And some of you have the testimony,
you heard the gospel, you heard the teaching of the scripture,
but you never believed or you believed in a false gospel, then
one day, boom, you see it. You've been born again and you
have faith given by the Holy Spirit, not your brain, not your
mind, not your daddy, not your grandma, and not your tradition. So you heard the Word and the
Spirit of God used that Word that you heard maybe last week,
maybe yesterday, maybe a year ago, maybe ten years ago, maybe
a lifetime ago. He brought it to you, He birthed
you anew and you believed in it. But never does God regenerate
and somebody's out there born again without believing in Christ.
It's not possible. These Christians believed in
Christ, but they believed in Christ only in a way that God
the Spirit had permitted them to believe. Because the full
revelation of the finished work of Christ was not yet clear. Why did God do it that way? Because
had God given the disciples, before the finished work of Jesus,
a full supernatural understanding, you know what we would not do
today? We would not look to the Word of God. We would look to
them. We would look to be like Paul. And we would teach our children
to be firm and faithful and strong. Be like Peter. Be a zealot for
Jesus. Go out and change the world.
Take it by the horns and destroy it and bring it back up again
for the name of Jesus. Hogwash. God will not use the
strong, will not use the famous, will not use the popular, will
not use the things of this world that are to give glory to His
name. He will not do it. And the people that are in that
category, until they become nothing, God will not bring them anywhere. And the only way they'll become
nothing is when God makes them nothing. God uses the nothings
of the world to bring to nothing the things that are. Jesus, who
is God, became a nothing. And He is exalted. Ah, you are speaking plainly
and not using figurative speech. Are you going to get to the text?
I just preached it. Everything I just said goes with that verse
right there. All 20 minutes of it. They as a way of thinking, thought,
now we're getting it. And they promote that idea by
verse 30. Now we know. Now we know that
you know all things and do not need anyone to ask you of these
things. This is why we believe that you came from God. Now I
want you to understand something here. What was the faith of the
disciples at this very moment? That Jesus was the one come from
God to save them from their sins. That's all they understood. Years and years and years of
Old Testament learning. And that was the culmination
of it. As Paul tells Timothy. from your childhood, those holy
scriptures that you've been acquainted with, that your mother and your
grandmother have taught you, that are able to make you wise
unto salvation. It's the Word of God and it's
breathed out by God and it's profitable and useful for teaching,
for rebuke, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be equipped
and competent, successful in every good work There is no leadership quality
required of God's people to be effective. There's no communication training
that's necessary to teach scripture. It's just grace. God has come
down. We know that God has sent you.
In a way of saying it, they knew that Jesus was God by the Holy
Spirit. Who do you say that I am, Jesus
asked. Peter, speaking for the twelve, says we know that you
are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. For man
has not taught you these things, but the Spirit of God has taught
you these things. My Father who is in heaven has
taught you these things. Now there is an extremely dry,
cracked, blind ignorance when it comes to understanding how
to read narrative. Because we just don't do it enough.
And some people try to impose a metaphor or a figure of speech
as a literal copy or point to be made as a fulfillment somewhere
in truth. And the same thing happens when
we see this and what I just said out of my mouth. People go, oh,
well what you're saying then is this. No, what I say is what
I just said. which is what the text teaches.
I'm not giving implication by way of transferring where the
disciples were in their faith to where we are in our faith.
You can't do it. We're not in the upper room.
We're not having a meal with Jesus. He's not pre-cross. Judas didn't just leave to go
turn him into the authorities. We didn't just see our Lord and
Savior get naked and wash our feet. This isn't us here, this is them
here. But the encouragement that comes through this teaching is
that all the while we see it, don't we? Have you ever read
through John's Gospel and you think, what's wrong with these
idiots? Why can't they see that? Because they had not seen the
risen Savior. They had not seen Him die and come to life. They
didn't have that aha moment. We have it by the mercy of God,
so it's always in view. You cannot, even if you're extremely
brilliant in your ability to become very objective in your
thinking, you cannot separate what you know by the Word of
God concerning the resurrected Christ from pre-resurrection
doctrine. You can't do it. So the application
here is to know that God does not want us to look at the people
and the characters of antiquity or history and conform our lives
and our zeal and our passion and our ministry to them. We have a lot of open air preaching
brothers. Brother Jesse does too. We know
a lot of the same people. And some of them throughout their
ministry have articulated what they do to such a degree of importance
that if they weren't open air preaching, the gospel would vanish.
That would be like me saying, if I didn't stand up here and
preach, all y'all would be lost. Silly. Go preach outside. Good, do it. God's Word is not going to die.
The Gospel is not going to be lost. God's people are not going
to be lost. And they're saying, we know that
you came from God. We know that you know all things concerning
the work of God, the redemption of God, the promises of God.
Nobody has to ask you to prove it. Nobody has to inquire of
you to see if you know it. We now know that you know it
all. Now the funny thing is, if someone said that to me, and
said, we know the gospel now, everything is so clear, I would
be like, I'm so excited. I'm so happy. The Lord has granted
you to see it, and I'm so excited we'd throw a party, we'd be telling
everybody you saw the truth, Jesus knew what was in man. And
here Jesus rebukes their profession or confession of faith. Not that
it is false, but that it is hyperbolic. That they are saying that they
believe a lot more than they actually believe. They are saying
that they understand and see a lot more than they actually
understand and see. We know that you came from God.
We know that you know all things concerning God. We see it now. Thank you so much. But Jesus
was not saying, I'm going to stop talking this way and start
talking plainly. He's saying, when I die on the
cross and when I come back from the dead, there ain't going to
be no figures of speech around here, boy. You see what I'm saying? That's if Jesus were a redneck.
That's how it would sound. Jesus says, do you believe you
believe now? You believe in now? After all
this time now, you finally see it. Now, they still didn't see
it. But as you'll see him pray for
them, as you'll see him pray for them in the next chapter,
Beloved, this is, it answers our questions. People that assert
the disciples were not regenerate have never read the Bible. And
that is a dogmatic, ridiculous thing to have to say that proves
nothing. So I say it anyway. And you'll
see it as John 17 unfolds. I know the Father, Jesus says.
You want to know the Father, you got to know me. You know
me that I know all things, you know that I come from the Father,
then you know me. But it's not just that confession
alone that prescribes faith, it's the work of God by the Holy
Spirit that gives faith. Do you believe now? Behold, 32,
and he said this several times in this discourse already, like,
is the time now? Is it now? Is it now? Is it now?
They're still looking for that articulated answer. For that
moment when things are going to be so clear through the teaching
of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus is over. Now they shall be taught by God.
That what they see concerning the Son will make so much sense
now because of what they've heard, because of what they've seen,
because of what they've heard, because of what they've seen.
You see? Behold the hour is coming, verse 32, Indeed, it has come when you will be scattered, each
to his own home, and you will leave me alone." No, we see, you're speaking to
us clearly now. We believe in you. We know that
you are from God and that you know all things. Okay, Jesus
says, and you're all going to leave me hanging. That's the
strength of your faith right now. That's the foundation of everything
you believe is going to be proven that your flesh is insufficient
for faith. And I'm going to show you that
the only hope you have is my faithfulness, my work, my promises
and my power. You're going to leave me alone.
Now, can you see the disciples? Can you see John weeping? I see
John weeping, holding back tears. Because they weren't dumb. They
knew that Jesus was telling them he was leaving. He was going
where they could not go. But now Jesus was telling them
as a whole, they were going to scatter. When I leave and I speak
clearly, because when I leave, I'm speaking clearly about the
father. See, this is what Jesus is telling him. When I die, I'm
speaking clearly about the father. When I raise, I'm speaking clearly
about the father. When I ascend to the father,
I'm speaking clearly about the father. No more will you have
to figure this out. You'll see it. You'll see it and you'll
hold fast. But in the meantime, when you're
wondering where I went and what's happening and how this is clear,
you're going to abandon me. You are my friends. I love you. I will not orphan you, but you
will abandon me. You will leave me alone. That's tough, isn't it? And John
is distraught. I imagine Andrew is pretty distraught.
Peter's over there gritting his teeth. There's no way, not me.
They're whispering around the table. How can he say this? I mean, just put yourself in
those shoes for a minute. Don't impose upon the scripture what
the scripture doesn't teach, but just impose. The Gospel of Mark
at the arrest of Jesus, you know the narrative, right? The Gospel
of Mark, it talks about an unnamed man who ran away naked. You know
who that was? Mark. Because they put hands on all
the disciples to arrest them, and homeboy pulled a Joseph.
He gets away, and the man that grabbed him is holding his tunic.
That's what happened. So Mark's running through the
wilderness naked, because he's not getting arrested with Jesus. That was the first episode of
Cops. You're going to leave me alone.
You're going to be scattered. You're going to go back to where
you came from. You're going to do the things that you did before.
You're going to pretend and try to put away everything that we've
ever done. Now, get this. None of them would agree to that.
But why is it necessary? The Christian faith, the doctrines
of Christ, the power of God is not contingent upon the faithfulness
of man. And you've heard me say in the
months leading up to this that there is no such thing as a sorry
Christian in the sense that you need to
be better. Of course we do. And the guy standing up here
is preaching every week, and the person barely making it to
service and cussing out his employees because he's so stressed out
he doesn't know what to do. And then going home every night and
praying, Lord, forgive me, help me not be like this. There's
no difference in us. Yet we will perceive differences
in each other. There's no difference in us because
we are all saved by the grace of God alone. We are all taught
by the word of God alone, and we are together in the big bag. I remember when I was a child,
I would fish a lot as a kid. But I liked cricket fishing,
not that reeling rod mess. I liked the cane pole fishing.
And you'd catch brim. And when you're 8, 9, 10, 11
years old, you didn't care. I mean, I'd clean a fish the
size of my thumb. What is a fish nugget? Long before
there was ever any fast food fish to be bought. And I remember many times coming
back to the house, coming up to my grandmother's. She loved
fish, too. What you got? And I would have
strung fish no bigger than this microphone head on this little
stringer. And there'd be like 60 of them.
And you could use them as bait, but I got them, buddy, you know.
And she'd make me take them things off, put them back in the water
and go dump them back in the pond. And when you'd see a bucket,
a five-gallon bucket full of fish, you can't identify one
from the other. And you drain the water out and
it's just this big slimy, glossy mess of fish. You know what a
mess of fish is? And even the ones that were cleanable,
when you got a mess of fish, you just do it in the bucket
and you're cleaning them and you're scaling them, it's just a mess of fish. You
got a mess of guts and a mess of fish. That's how I look at
the body of Christ. We're just a big bucket of mess
with a Savior who's cleaned us completely. And to God our Father, He sees
us in the perfection of Jesus Christ. None of us should be the example
of assurance except we point to Jesus. None of us should be
the example of profitable and successful Christian life except
that we point to Jesus. None of us should labor against
another by judgment, in any sense, because none of us are better
than the other. So we must always point to Jesus. Here's Jesus being abandoned
by His own. He told them that they would
be, yet He says in the latter part of verse 32, I am not alone,
for the Father is with me. Now I want you to think about
this for a second. What do we see at the crucifixion of Jesus? What are some of the words that
we see in the crucifixion of Jesus? My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me? But he says right there, the
Father is with me. We'll talk about that one the
time. But what we know here through
the teaching of Jesus is that while all of His sheep will abandon
Him in this moment, the Father is with Him. The beautiful thing
is, we've already learned in this same discourse, what? The
Father is with you. The Father is with them. The
Spirit is with them. The Son is with them, even when
He's not with them, because He is God and God is with us. I know that sounds like a platitude
when things are hard. I know it. And the last thing
you want to hear, I've been there, beloved. I get there often in
life when I just feel like I don't care anymore. You ever feel like
that? It may be an hour a day, it may be a week, month, season,
it may be years. You just go, I don't care. The stress of all
this makes me not care. You've been there, don't lie.
And someone comes along and says, OK, the Lord is with you. What's
the first thing that you think when you're in the middle of
that, I don't care, pity party? You think, I don't want to hear
that. I want to hear about Jesus being with me. Because there's
a couple of things at work when we hear that. Well, the Lord
is with you. We know it's true. And we're hearing it in our head
the whole time. Pity party, pity party. I'm with
you, pity party. I don't want to hear that. So we go, pity party. And we
start writing music for our pity party. And we try to over-sing
the chorus of heaven in our hearts. We try to make the choir of pity
greater than the choir of grace in our own minds. A new hymn. We should start writing hymns.
The Hymn of Pity. We could all add a line to that.
Be a hundred stanzas. Every week, a hundred new stanzas.
We could all add two or three a day. So we know it, we don't
want to hear it. It doesn't really effectually
do anything for us at that moment because we're so obstinate or
we're so pressed or we're so frustrated that we don't want
to hear what we know is true because in some way in our flesh
we don't want to give up the party. Because it's better to
be pitied in our minds. And Jesus was destroyed. Jesus
was sacrificed. Jesus was abandoned. Yet he never pitied himself. The application there is not
stop being in a pity party. The better application is when
someone reminds you that the Lord is near, Because ultimately, at the end
of that, why do we not stay there? Crushed, but not driven to despair. Perplexed. Broken. Always given over in the flesh
to death, but we are alive by the Spirit. These are the words
of Paul. And in the hardest pressings of our lives, God is with us. Not because of what we do, not
because of the amount of faith, or the essence of our faith, but because of the trueness and
the promises of God through Jesus Christ His Son. And if you think that I'm just
trying to be kind, to give you a hope that's not necessarily
prescribed in Scripture, just keep reading verse 33. See, I've been in a real bad
habit of teaching the text and then showing you I'm right. Because
the text is right. I have said these things to you.
I have said you're going to scatter. I've said you're going to abandon
me. I've said you're going to break. I've said you're going
to not have faith. I've said you're going to not know what
to do. I've said you're going to struggle with loving each other. I've
said all these things. I've said that you don't see
me, but you will see. It's okay. Because I've said these things
to you that in me you may have peace. I am your peace. In the world you will have tribulation. Now stop there. I want to give
away the punchline. You can read it. My peace I leave with you, Jesus
has already said, not the peace that comes from the world or
like the world. What is the peace that comes
from the world? The peace that comes from the world is the peace
that says we just got to get along. The peace that says, look,
we've got 10 years of no stress. We've got no illness. We've got
no famine. We've got no fighting. We've
got no discord. We've got good eyesight. We've
got health and prosperity and kindness and generosity. There's no war. There's no more
bipartisanship. Now this goes on and on. We're
going to have peace, and yet the world strives for peace over
and over and over and over again, yet even when it sees it, it
is not peace. As the Scriptures say, they will
say, peace, peace, but there is no peace. Jesus says, I did
not come to bring peace to the world, but to bring a sword to
divide, even households. Your children will be your enemies,
your parents will be your enemies, your own brothers and sisters
will be your enemies. Because of me. The world hates me. It'll
hate you. You will have tribulation in
the world, so stop looking for the world to grant a season of
peace for you. See, this is when we start to
see, when someone comes along and says, the Lord is with you,
we start to see. You know why? Because I've been
looking for peace without it. I've been looking for peace in
the world and there's no such promise. There is no promise
of a better life. There is no promise of a better
society. There is no promise of a better
culture. There is no promise of a more moral future. There
is no promise of God that people will stop killing and murdering
and lying and stealing. It will not happen. But it's a promise to the elect
of God. There's peace in the midst of it all. And beloved, I have a lot of
fears. I have a lot of fears. I'm an anxious person by design. Dirt causes me anxiety. Dust on many blinds. Little things. I just, I need to mitigate it.
I need to clean it. I need to do it. You can't do
it. You just sort of let it go and then it overwhelms you. Got
to check the tires. Got to go to the eye doctor.
Why? Does that bother us? Because
that's how we are. And we see people who don't care
and aren't bothered by anything. How can you live like that? Get
up and clean your clothes up. And they're like, man, I'm 460
years old. You're 20 and you look older
than me. I mean, you know. Some of us are just wired. How
do we find peace in the midst of it? Is it about getting all
the work done? No, it's never going to be done. That's the
promise of God at the fall, that the work is never going to be
done. It's always going to mess up. It's always going to have
to be redone. It's always going to have to be overworked and
overlooked and somebody's going to screw it up. How do you screw
up raking yards? It can be done. If you want a
reference, I'll send you one. And the world feels like sometimes
has drowned us and overcome us. But take heart. Jesus says, I
have overcome the world. Feels real good right now, doesn't
it? It's real easy. Jesus has overcome the world.
I trust in that. I believe in that. I feel good. I got my brothers
and sisters around me. There's critical mass. Everybody's in
agreement. We're going to sing some songs.
We're going to the Lord's table. It's all good. Hallelujah. Step outside.
Oh, the world's still here. Problems are still here, the
people are still here, the pattern of life is still here that bring
about all the stress and the anxiety. And this is not a sermon
about stress and anxiety. It's a sermon about the sufficiency
and the power of Christ, who is the God of heaven, who came
to this world to save His people, you beloved, from their sins. And to promise He is victorious
over it all. And as long as we keep looking
for peace in the world and from the world, we will always be
at war. Embrace it. When it comes up,
go, well, there's my daily blessing. Because now I get to hold fast
to Christ who holds fast to me. And it's not contingent upon
my faith, my faithfulness, my attitude, my desires, my affection,
my words, my morality, my holiness, but it's dependent upon Jesus.
And by His mercy, I pray that He would lead me out of temptation.
And sometimes He does, and I kick the door that He's put up open
and I walk right up in there. And sometimes I step back in
pride to see just how good I've not been tempted all day, and
I fall right into the pit. And my only hope in either place
is what? Jesus. The Gospel. The Gospel. Jesus gets through saying these
words, and in their presence, He prays for them. In their presence, He prays for
them. In Romans chapter 8, Paul tells
these suffering Christians in Rome that God the Holy Spirit
prays for them according to the will of God. And throughout their
life, they were all persecuted and put to the sword. So that
as God Himself prayed for God the Father's will to be done,
they died. You ever thought about that? But Jesus has overcome the world. How? Through His body, through
His blood, because He is God. Let's pray.