And John's gospel is different. I don't think it's any more important
than anything else in scripture, but it is through the writing
of John whereby God brought me to life. And so when we have
those testimonies of salvation, it's oftentimes I find myself
giddy studying John. I just love John. If the apostle
John were to walk in here, he'd be like, oh, wow, it's John.
Let's talk to John. But it really isn't about John at all, is it?
Because John is just like the rest of us. A nobody, nothing
that was used by God to do something miraculous. Someone that without
the Spirit of God speaking through him, he would not have written
these things. As we look at this gospel, I
want you to be, and I say this every time we start and every
time we finish a series, Please do not make this an academic
adventure. Because John did not write this
gospel under the utterance of the Holy Spirit so that we could
have a treatise on the life of Jesus and his work and ministry
and his person. He wrote these things that we
may believe that Jesus is the Christ and by believing we may
have life in his name. That's why he wrote these things.
And so John's gospel is very dear to my heart. It is something
that will always be dear to my heart because it is through it
that God brought me to salvation. And not only is it the place
in Scripture that God brought me to life, as Paul would desperately
tell the Roman Christians, it is by faith that comes to hearing
alone and hearing that comes to hearing the words of Christ.
I hear the words of Christ more in John than I hear anywhere
else. And you'll see why, because it
is in John's gospel that is so different. Why is he not part
of the synoptics? Because it is so different. It
deals with Jesus personally and his interaction with individual
people. John's gospel is not Jesus preaching to the masses,
but Jesus interacting with individual souls. Jesus speaking one-on-one,
Jesus doing things in the midst of his disciples, not in the
midst of the masses. And then these small conversations
that most of us would never even imagine existed. Because that's
what we do. We look at God in such a way,
we look at Jesus in such a way, and I know in our question time
Tuesday night this past week, we had the question about visual
images sharing gospel truths. And we talked about the second
commandment and what it means to violate that in the context
of displaying Jesus Christ and our fondness based on what we
see with our eyes rather than what we've read from the word
and how it can replace truth. I would suggest to all of us
today that we do in some way have a skewed view of Jesus. That we view Jesus as some incredible
man in our mind's eye. And He was an incredible man.
But He's not at all like what we depict Him to be in our mind.
Because what we see Jesus to be has been influenced by culture. It's been influenced by generations
of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. It's been
influenced by media. It's been influenced by stories.
I mean, there's not a doctor's office you can go to in these
parts that you don't see the big volumes of Bible storybooks. And you see the blonde-haired,
blue-eyed, hippie Jesus walking around with children in His arms
and lambs around His neck. weeping over Israel and all this. And that is a side maybe that
we can see of Jesus here. But friends, John does not start
there. John does not start there. He
does not allow us to be invaded by culture and by presuppositions
and everything else. And that means things that we've
known before, that we've always took for granted as truth. He
comes to the very heart of it when he begins his gospel. The
other gospels start out with genealogies, start out with a
little history. This has been written so that
you may know the account of these things, the doctor would say.
But John's gospel is not like that. And at the arrest of Jesus
Christ, everyone fled. Remember this, beloved. But John
went back. And John stood at the crucifixion.
And so when I hear the words of John display Jesus, I understand
Jesus words when he says he is the disciple that he most loved.
Why is John's writing so intimately entangled with the person of
Christ? Because Jesus loved John. Intimately. There is a revelation
that the Spirit gave John that he gave no other person. You
know what the beauty is about that? We have it. So now it is
revealed to us. And this entire gospel is so
that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ. The Hebrew word
for Christ is Messiah, the Holy One. The anointed one, the one
come from God, the very one that Nicodemus, as you'll see in John
three, would say that we know you are. And Jesus would say,
you cannot enter into the kingdom, you cannot see the kingdom except
you be born of God. And I'll have to tell you, church,
that I'm really debating in my mind as to how to offer other
opportunities for us to be together so that we can dig deeper into
this gospel because the preaching of this gospel week to week is
not going to be enough. It's not going to be enough for
you. It's not going to be enough for me. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe
we'll just get together after church and have questions. Because
not only is there a narrative of the life of Christ, not only
is there depictions of Jesus throughout his historical ministry,
but there are deep and heavily seated foundational theologies
that are here. And it starts from the beginning.
I mean, if you were to do a search on sermons for John 1.1, you
will come up starved. You will come up starved to find
anyone who deals with this other than just in passing. Well, today
I pray that I might could preach the first two verses, but I doubt
it. The purpose of this writing is
that you may believe because you've seen Jesus Christ, because
you know who he is, and because the Father has made you alive.
And you might say, well, that's sort of evangelistic. It is.
The church, that's one of the biggest deceptions that we've
bought. To think that the church doesn't
need the gospel. For two reasons. One is that
we just assume everybody's here, we're in church. We're not in
church, we are in church. We're in a wig shop. Not everyone here is born of
God. Not every one of you who firmly holds to something that
you may think is the gospel of Jesus is truly born of God. So
this teaching will just solidify to you what the true gospel is.
Beloved, if we were to look at the writing to the region of
Galatia, and we were to see that there's many, many, many churches
to that region, it's like southeastern United States, that's what Galatia
is, a region. Many churches, they have been
bewildered and bewitched and drawn into another gospel, which
means that any so-called gospel that adds anything to the truth
that says it is by faith alone, Anything else which is by grace
alone is no gospel. Do you hear that, church? When
we rest our souls at the end of a weary day and we say, oh,
it is so good to know that God has saved me, I am glad that
I did X, Y, Z, we have added to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
If that X, Y, Z is not one thing, believed on the sovereign grace
of God through the Son, It is another gospel. And Paul,
as he says, as he shows, adding to the gospel actually subtracts
from the life, adding to the gospel, putting something on
to the gospel, cuts one off from Christ. Beloved, let not your
pride keep you from believing. There is no shame in saying at
65, I've believed on Christ today. There's no shame after being
a pastor for 50 years. I've believed on Christ today. There's no shame. But just rejoicing. Let's start. In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Let's just stop there. The second reason the church
needs the gospel, I didn't finish that thought, did I? It's because
it is the power of God unto salvation. And it is what seals us in our
hearts and minds to believe. We need to be reminded of the
truth because it is through this truth that we worship truly.
You want to worship God in spirit? You can't if you do not have
the truth. You want to worship God in spirit?
You cannot unless you know Christ from scripture. And John is telling
us who he is right here. Now, see, we know what comes
next. We know that it says he was in the beginning with God
and all things were made through him. And then in verse 14, the
word became flesh. Now, it's an interesting term
to use logos. word. It was a word that is very
well known to the Stoics and the philosophers and the Greeks
of that day, as well as to Hebrew people and to Christians throughout. And there are many people who,
even in our present day, have come to understand differently
the philosophy around the idea of logos. And let me tell you
something that happens when man's philosophy begins to define God. It brings error. You hear me? We are incredibly creative when
we think, but our creativity pushes us into the corners of
heresy and heresy puts us in damnation and leaves God's condemnation
upon us. So though there may be incredible
thinkers throughout antiquity as well as in our current age
who can give us all sorts of understanding of what logos means
and what it could be taken to be. John is not playing games
with a philosophical theology. He is declaring to us this very
day the essence of who God is. And he says that God is the word. But what have we done, beloved?
We've made the Bible the Word of God, which is not a bad thing,
but we've taken the Bible as just something written down to
be reviewed or looked or referenced. Liberalism does not come out
of intelligence. It comes out of negligence. Let
me explain that. Liberalism is to take that which
is foundationally true and to shove it to the side for the
sake of man's creative thought. And it doesn't come because we're
so smart and intelligent. It comes because we've been negligent
to the Word of God. We have pushed it aside. We have
relegated Scripture as just something that we use when needed. But
we're smarter than we used to be. We're wiser than we used
to be. We're more in tune than we used
to be. We have the World Wide Web, for Pete's sake. We don't
need a book that's thousands of years old, people say. Yet if we do not use Scripture
as the absolute sovereign rule of faith, we do not know the
God that is contained therein. So that in that sense, the Word
of God is God. Yes, we can worship these things
because they're so nice and pretty. Oh, this is the such and such
edition with the nice goat skin or the snake skin or the, you
know, the parchment hand done by ancient Chinese men. It doesn't matter. We can worship
the actual book itself as a masterpiece, but friends, we worship the God
of it who is the word. Now, Paul, excuse me, John, I've
been preaching to Paul for so long, John is showing the foundations
of why God is and why we believe in Him. Henarke. What's the Greek word there?
In the beginning. Two words, actually. In the beginning was
the Word. I want you to think about that
for a second. I mean, how many times have we
spent, have we spent, I don't know, hours contemplating that? None? Minutes? Seconds? Never? See, that's what's wrong
with the church today, y'all. Now, let's get down to where
he healed somebody. That's incredible. Let's read that. It is incredible.
Oh, let's get down there where he came to us. Oh, I want to
see when he rebukes the Jews. Let's go to John 4 and 5 and
6 and see these miracles and see these discourses. Let's go
see. And we skip right over the foundation. John's gospel has
written to us about the foundations of God. Now, I have avoided a
conversation over the last few weeks with someone who has intersected
my life in a strange way, but this person believes that she
can use the Scripture to actually prove to me that God had a beginning. To which I went, okay, I am on
my way somewhere. We'll meet up again. But where do we get those things?
Negligence. Philosophy. Vain theories. Here John is saying in the beginning. Now let's stop there for a second. Rabbinic tradition historically says that John's
gospel is the most Jewish of the New Testament writings. Did
you know that? You know why? Because John was a very devout
Jew. And he wrote John's gospel centered on the feasts of Israel. And he alluded to the Old Testament.
He recorded Jesus who undergirded the Scripture of old. He even says, Jesus says to the
Jews that I will not indict you in the day of judgment, but Moses
will indict you, for he wrote of me. Talking to the woman of Sychar.
She appeals to the genealogy of her forefathers. She appeals
to the heritage and the lineage of her religion. Are you greater
than our father Jacob? She asks. Who gave us this well? Give me the water that you say
that you have for me that I may never come back here. But how
can you even get it that you don't have a bucket to draw it
with? John goes back. in a very clear way, to the beginning. To the beginning of what? To
the beginning of everything. Now see, some people misunderstand
this, and they say, in the beginning was the Word. So therefore, that
God the Word started there. No, it didn't say, in the beginning
became the Word. It said, at the start of all
things, there was something already. Before anything was, there was
something. Well, logic tells us that everything
has a beginning. And if everything has a beginning,
then something has to be the cause of such things. And we'll
just move on with this. But what is that first cause? What started it? Its cause. What
started it? Its cause. There is no such thing
as something from nothing. And John is saying from the beginning.
Nope. In the beginning, in the beginning
of all things, there was the word. Now you might think, well,
wow, that's incredible. Let's take that and run with
it. Let's make all systems of theology based on that. That
in the beginning of all things, something already existed. And
it was the Word. You know what that means? It's
intelligence. That's what some people argue.
That means that intelligence existed. There's some spiritual,
metaphysical presence. Well, God is the God of wisdom.
God is the God of intelligence. God is the God of logic. God
is the God of reason. God is knowledge. God is wisdom. God is truth. So we can say,
okay, then who is this word? What is this word? And what is
it doing? Well, the word was with God.
Well, that assumes something, doesn't it? This Word was before
all things and this Word was with God. Oh my goodness. So
if we don't go ahead, if we don't peek, we ask the questions in
sequence. Okay, so this Word is a person.
This Word is a personality, not a presence. Because you can't
be with something if you're not something. You see that? You can't be with anything that
doesn't exist. So it's not just an idea. It's
not a philosophy. It's not a presence. It's a person. The Word is a person. The Word
is with God. So this assumes several things,
two things, or three things specifically, that before there was anything,
God existed. And before there was anything,
God existed, and the Word existed. And before there was anything,
God and this Word existed together in a relationship, the personhood. And that's what John wants to
show us. John wants to take all ideas,
all philosophies, he wants to take every argument that ever
existed about where everything began, and he wants to set it
on the right place this day. He wants to settle it. John is
saying, in the beginning. Now, what do you think of when
you hear that? What do you think of? When you hear, in the beginning,
it should automatically point us to the beginning of Genesis.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The
Spirit of God was hovering over the waters of the deep. And if
we go on down, look at verse 3. All things were made through
Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.
You see that. So now John is alluding, he's
pointing back to the beginning days, to the story, if we'll
use that lightly, the story, the narrative, the description,
the scripture of Moses, where he said, in the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth. And then he reinforces it. See,
few people who claim to be God's people discredit that. Did you
know that? Now, I know there's a lot of
discussion, there's a lot of philosophy, there's a lot of
things and a lot of scientific things that people try to say,
well, the earth's this old or the earth's that old or maybe
it was a gap or maybe it was a long period of time. I am not
going to say to you that that does not matter because it matters
deeply. But I'll say to you that what
the Scripture is revealing to us today, in the beginning was
the Word, and that this Word created all things, that we need
to hold tight to understanding that this is not a process of
natural occurrence, is it? This is some supernatural work
that's happening. And this Creator, this Word who
is with God, created everything And maybe we should also have
in mind not only is John referring to the Genesis account of creation,
but he's also alluding to it very specifically, very myopically,
very centered. How? Because he's saying the
word did it. The word did it. The word was
there before all things. He was, the word was with God
and God is before all things with the word. And he was, and
the word was God. You see that the word was God. Now I could preach several hours
or teach several hours on the concept of God's word. But if
we just understand how God created, we'll get a little bit of a glimpse
of what He's trying to show us here. In the beginning was the
Word, and what does this Word do? We've already said it, He
exists with God, He is God, and He is eternal. You understand
that? You see how different the Jesus
of our imagination looks? The Jesus of our culture, the
Jesus of the caricature, you've heard me talk about a lot in
the last few months. The Jesus that everybody just sort of assumes,
is he the eternal God of heaven? Is He in our mind's eye? Is He
Elohim? Is He Yahweh? Is He the God of
creation? As Paul would tell the church
of Colossae, that in Christ all the fullness of deity was pleased
as well, and He created all things. Not just the things that can
be touched and seen, but those things that exist. Rulers, and
kingdoms, and powers, and authorities. He created them all. That He
might be preeminent. He is the first of all things.
He is the head of the church. Jesus Christ. I think Brother
Jesse was in this text last week and I'm like, just preach the
whole thing. Let's just go through all of Colossians 1. John is reminding his readers
of who Jesus is. He's not allowing us to just
settle with this idea, oh, I remember Jesus. Could you imagine when
this letter shows up? When this gospel shows up with
the people of this day? some 60 years after the ascension
of Christ. And people are going, oh yeah,
I remember Jesus. Yeah, I had lunch with him one
day at the Fluffle Place, or I had lunch with him over there
at the Fish Place, or you know what? He fed me and my family
from a basket. Wasn't that great? And then he
told us he was gonna feed us his body, so we left. We enjoyed
lunch with Jesus until he went crazy. We don't know what happened.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that people would say. Oh yeah,
we know Jesus. Yeah, we know Jesus. You know,
his brother James and I used to fish together. We were really
cool. I remember Peter. Yeah, Peter
and I were neighbors. And I used to mend Peter's nets
for him. And boy, was he a talker. Yeah, me and Jesus, we were pretty
tight. I saw him every now and then,
you know, because he'd hang out with Peter and they'd play cards. I mean, you see what I'm saying?
Doesn't that sound like today? Well, I know this guy and I know
that guy. I know the great-great-grandfather of a great-great-great-grandson
of such-and-such. I have John Owen's sock. We love
to name throw and just jump out there and begin to start making
a big to-do about everything, because it makes us feel important.
Jesus is no different in the minds of the world. Jesus is
no different. Everybody during this day has
an idea, oh yeah, we've heard about Him. If we didn't know
Him, we knew somebody who did know Him. We knew somebody who got a selfie
with Him one day. Isn't that the way it works?
People photobomb celebrities now. I took a picture with me
and so-and-so. He's like 600 yards in the back.
But it makes us feel special. Well, no man living in the time
of Jesus had any more special relationship than John did with
Jesus. And John does not take this relationship
something to make himself known. He doesn't even name himself
in his writing because people knew they had that relationship.
And He does not want His readers to come from an earthly relational
situation in their own minds. He wants His readers to come
from the beginning of all things and recognize that who He is
about to disclose to them, that they may believe in His name,
is the God of heaven who existed before all things in perfect
harmony with Himself and at perfect pleasure with everything that
He is. Jesus Christ is the eternal God of heaven. If we don't grasp
that, beloved, we're not going to understand any of this interaction.
If we don't grasp that, we're not going to understand anything
that Paul taught to the church of Philippi. Have this mind among
you, he says, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though
he was equal with God, did not take equality with God, something
to be grasped, but made himself nothing, a slave, obedient unto
death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted Him to
be the name that is above all names. And at the name of Jesus,
every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus
is Lord. Folks, when we worship Jesus
Christ, we're worshiping the God of creation. We're worshiping
the God who breathed life into you in your mother's womb. Who
dared by a culture because it's easier to go and murder babies
at an abortion meal. He created you and purposed you
to give glory to Him. And friends, every living individual
who has ever taken the breath of life in their lungs did so
by the grace of Jesus Christ. It's a bad word. By the pleasure
of Jesus Christ. God's grace is effectual unto
salvation, so we don't want to mix it up. Prevenient grace doesn't make
sense. God's grace saves always, every
time and always will. And so everyone who's ever breathed
has done so by the pleasure of God's providence. And every person
that has ever breathed air or ever will breathe air in this
world, friends, listen, they will give glory to Jesus Christ,
either in His redemption that He purchased with His own life
and body, or in His judgment when He comes, as we saw in Revelation
19, to make war with the nations and strike them down with what?
The word of His mouth. Even Paul tells the church of
Ephesus that we are standing against Satan by the word. He
doesn't use Logos there, he uses Rima, the word that is spoken. And this word here is not to be confused with a
force, it's a person. And he is God. And He created
all things. And His name is Jesus. I have
to skip down to verse 14. You see that. And the Word became
human. He took on humanity. He took
on flesh. And then it's that flesh that
we see in John 6 that God, that Jesus offers to satisfy us. This Word creates It starts and
makes something out of nothing. The Word of God, Jesus Christ,
when God spoke, how did he create the world? See, in our day, the
culture of Hollywood shows people with power doing stuff like this.
It's like a Chi Master or Bakugan or whatever it is. or maybe a
wizard, and they shoot things out of their hands, and they
work with energy, and they do all sorts of stuff. They've got
to do the right incantation, or they've got to produce some
force. Friends, this is myth. It's just a few weeks ago that
I preached about the decrees of God out of Isaiah 46. That which God decrees happens,
and nothing else. You hear that? Jesus is not the
God of heaven who spun a top in creation and lets it just
run itself to its end, hoping it comes out in the right place
by tilting the table a little bit. He decrees it. The Word of God,
by God speaking it, it became. See, that's where a lot of what
we call Word of Faith people get their heresy. We call it
what it is. It is heresy because we are not
God. And there's never been a person
to put God in a rear naked choke or into shackles or into a stranglehold and force him to do anything.
And you Judo people got that, but nobody else did. Nobody. Nobody can twist God's
arm and make Him do anything. Nobody can command the Spirit
of God. Nobody. Why? Because it says so right
here that the Word is God. So the Word is not a force. This
is what I'm talking about. Some people say that the Word
is a force that we command. No. The Word is God. And God does
as He pleases. And God brings everything to
pass because He speaks it. This will happen. I shall raise
Pharaoh up. Let there be light. Which is
important to this text in a few weeks. Let there be, let the
heavens, let the earth, let there be, let the waters be teeming
with life. He didn't get into a factory
like an elf and begin to make every little molecule and go,
oh, I messed that up next. Oh, I messed that up. He just
spoke it and everything existed. Jesus Christ, in creation, spoke
the stars into being. He set them in their places.
He put them in the right distance. He put them in the right orbits,
or He put things in orbit around them. He put them in their place. And then He sent people from
the east to worship Him when He was a toddler. By the very
stars He hung in the sky. Beloved, listen to who Jesus
is. The word creates. The word not only creates, it
does more than that, as we'll see, the word gives identity.
If I tell you who I am, I could be lying. I could say, hey, my
name is Charles and I'm 70. But it's not true. My name's
James and I'm something, 40-something. But God doesn't lie. And if it
weren't for God revealing Himself through His Word, we would not
know Him. God spoke to the prophets of old, and they said, Thus saith
the Lord. So the Word, who is God, who
was there in the beginning, who is eternal, And who was with
God reveals himself, gives identity through what he says. So that
this idea that we can experience God apart from scripture is foolishness. According to scripture. It's
foolishness. So then what is it that we could
consider about who God is or who Jesus Christ is that's not
in scripture? A lot of things. And friends, I want you to really
think about as we go through this gospel, as we learn these
teachings, which is called doctrine, as we learn about Jesus Christ
as God, which is called theology. You realize those are not academic
terms. They're terms of worship. Though
you can become very academic in them. You begin to see just how small
the body of Christ is. Because one is not saved under
a false faith. Hear me. I cannot put my faith
in my fruit or even my own faith and say that I'm with Christ.
It does not happen. It cannot work. It is ill effectual. It
is non effectual. It is lostness. Yes, there can be theological
ignorance and theological silliness and there can be doctrinal ignorance,
but I'm not talking about... I'm talking about rejecting who
Jesus is and what He's done. Like you would see John later
in his letter, in his first epistle. He would argue that those who
say that Jesus has not come in the flesh, which means that he
could not have accomplished what he said he accomplished as a
human being, are of the what? Antichrist. Now I don't think
there's a stronger rebuke that we would know in our culture.
But yet everybody that I come across comes to this place where
they say, oh, I'm a Christian. I remember when we moved to California,
one of the first things people would ask me is, where are you
from? And it depended on where they were from, they would either
misguess, mistakenly guess or assume I was either from Europe,
are you British? Oh, sweet girl, no ma'am. I mean, you know, or Texan. You know, they don't think anything
else. Neither are true. But then the second question
they would ask is, why did you come to California? How did somebody
from Southeast Georgia end up in the Bay? And I would always
answer, sort of tongue in cheek, I'd say, well, everybody's a
Christian in the South. And they look at me sort of strange
and say, if you don't believe me, ask them. You see? I've never met a majority of
people in an area that is so proud of their Christianity yet
to have no truth in them. And it has been called ugly and
judging. Friends, how weird is it when
we see people who are dying to just let them die when we have
an answer as to how they could live? It's unloving. Now yeah,
we can be nasty and unloving in our actions and attitudes
and the way we speak to people, but friends, it is never unloving
to proclaim the gospel. When people ask you about your
faith in Jesus and you get offended, I want to warn you about that.
It is an opportunity. Listen, it's not rare either. People ought to be asking you
about your faith. They ought to question you about
your faith. And when I question people in
church parking lots, So are you born of God? Are you saved? Do
you have eternal life? Or whatever question might be
in that conversation, a lot of them, 80% of them, get upset. They get mad. And they say, how
dare you question my faith? I'm like, brother, if I can call
you that, I'm asking for your testimony. But see, the problem is they
can't give an answer. How do you know that you have eternal
life? What is your security? And it goes back to what I said
when we talked about how people would view Jesus. We view Jesus
in our culture much like that. Oh, you know, well, I met Jesus
one time at a church picnic. And some guy there led me through
the Romans road and I checked the box. I got Jesus that day. Really? Show me that in scripture
where checking the box is believing on Christ. Well, I got Jesus
that day because the pastor repeated something and I followed along
with him. And he said, if I said those words and I really, really,
really, really, really meant it, that I was born again. And
I said, so when you stand before God, if God would dare to ask
and he's not, but this is an old, this is an old evangelical
trick we used to learn. We were kids. If God were to
ask you why you have eternal life, what would you ask Him?
What would you say? Oh, I checked the box, God. Yeah, I checked
it. Oh, I was supposed to initial
it. Man, I just didn't do it right. Oh, well, I repeated the
prayer the pastor said. Doesn't that count? No. Nicodemus
is the teacher of all Israels, we'll see. Confessed that Jesus was from
God as Messiah, and Jesus said, you can't see me. And you can't
enter into me, as we'll see next year. This Word displays identity. It tells us in whom we are to
believe. The Word, who is God, who was in the beginning, who
was with God. It is only through this Word
that we know the Word. Listen, it is only through the
Word that we know the Word. We cannot have faith in our relationship
with Jesus. We must have faith in the person
of Jesus. This Word displays identity and reveals
Himself. because it reveals the thoughts
of God. If you want to know someone,
what's the best way of finding out? Talk to them. Huh? Say it again. Oh, you could ask somebody. You
could! But what's the best way to know? Ask them. Talk to them. My friends, if we want to know
who Christ is, we must hear His Word. But see, that's what's happened
in our culture, isn't it? Not you, beloved, but many don't
hold fast to the Bible. Many sit in, I'll give Trey credit,
special interest groups this morning with platforms and orators. We're going to run with that,
make t-shirts. Are you in a SIG or a church? And they don't know the God of
the Bible. because the Bible no longer has authority. The
Bible no longer has authority in the lives and the hearts and
the minds of so many people who profess Christ. Just like the Bible does not
have authority in the hearts and the minds of those who profess
Christ in the Jehovah's Witness cult, or in the Mormon cult,
or in the Greek Orthodox cult, or in the Roman cult. Man, those
are harsh words. What had you rather me do? Call
them brothers and smile while I go to hell? And in the Baptist cults? Here
we go. Now we can all shake hands. And
in the Methodist cults? And in the free will cults? And
in the piety cults? And in the Puritan cults? Let
me tell you something, friends. Every name under the sun has a cult.
And there's special interest groups amongst us all. By the
grace of God would He not let us push the Word of God away. We then know by the Word the
very heart and mind of God. And without the Word revealing
Himself to us, we would not sit here today worshiping in truth.
We would be worshiping in error and the judgment of God would
remain upon us. Do you see that, Church? This Word reveals the mind of
God. It reveals who He is. Jesus would
explain it very clearly with humanity. He would say, out of
the abundance of the heart, what? The mouth speaks. My grandmother
Tippins was a grand theologian and she would say, a drunk man
could never lie. Out of the overflow of the heart,
the mouth speaks. You want to know the heart of
God? You have to listen to his word. Who is this word? Jesus
Christ. You can't get to God without
Christ because he is God. You can't get to the father without
Christ because as you'll see soon, he is the only way and
the only truth and the only life for he is the light. As you'll
see that this light that reveals God to this created world. Are you listening? If he does
not shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge
of his glory, we are condemned. Second Corinthians, chapter four,
verse six. Because the God of this world, who is Satan, blinds
unbelievers, eyes and minds. How do we ever come in? In the
beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was
with the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the
beginning with God. What's happening here in this
beginning? God is revealing himself. God is creating and thus that
he makes, is created and reveals who he is. And all the while, blind people look and they see
and they don't believe. Do you believe? Do you believe? Do you believe
Jesus Christ is God? Do you believe Jesus Christ has
revealed himself to us through his word? Do you believe that
Jesus Christ created the world and everything in it? Do you
believe what the Bible reveals the word about the word? And not only do you believe it,
do you believe in him, on him? Is he your righteousness? Because
God has revealed, the living word has said that none are righteous. The word has said that none can
be right with God. The word has said that no man
under the law can be obedient and fulfill the righteous requirements
of God. The word has said that no one can have eternal life
in their works. And the Word is said, He is the
living water. He is the bread of life. He is
the bread that came from heaven. He is the first. He's the last. And only through Him do you stand
righteous before God. Is your faith in Jesus Christ
alone today? Believe. Believe. Believe on
Christ. and no other. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your glorious truth, for
your word, for your revelation to us. Lord, we thank you for this gospel,
and as we begin it today, Lord, it's a good place to begin, as
John did in the beginning. Lord, it's a simple truth with
deep implications. And no matter what example I
give and no matter how desperately I preach it or how loud or soft
or enthusiastic I may appear, Father, none of that will save
anyone. But your Spirit will save us through the hearing of
this truth. Lord, you sent Jesus Christ,
your Son, the Word, who is God, to this earth to obey and to
live wholly as we have been commanded to do. And then he died and was a worthy
sacrifice and took our guilt upon him that we are now your
children and your righteousness. Let us worship in these things.
Let us celebrate in this way. Father, allow us to see and to
behold and to believe and to be encouraged in our faith that
we may go out into this world that we live in and celebrate
the gospel and share the faith and live for the glory of Christ. So that people will know you
are our father. Let us be patient with those who doubt. Let us
be gentle with those who have fallen for falsehood. Father,
for if it were not for your grace, we would also be with them. Never
to be haughty. Never to be arrogant. And certainly,
Father, never to be self-righteous. Seal us into Christ in such a
way that it is supernatural when we share it. Bring us to a place
of intimacy that we've never seen before. You will do that,
Father, through Your Word. And we pray that You will this
day, for it is Your will that Your people are so. In Jesus'
name we pray. Amen.