Introduction to John
Tom Shrader begins an overview series through the Gospel of John, explaining that John wrote his Gospel so people might believe Jesus is the Christ and have life through Him. From John 1, he presents Jesus as the eternal Word who was with God and was God, the Creator through whom all things were made, and the Light who came into darkness. Shrader emphasizes that real life is not found in material possessions or circumstances, but in receiving Jesus and becoming children of God through faith.
“Jesus said, I've come that you might have life, and not just have life, but that you might have life abundantly.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: John: The Essence of Life
Recorded: 2026
Duration: 43 min
Themes: life, faith, identity, purpose, light, darkness, creation, salvation, new believer, seeking meaning, searching for purpose, questioning faith, materialistic struggles, spiritual seeker, doubting salvation, young adult
Scripture: John 1:1-29, John 20:30-31, Luke 12, Colossians 1:16-17, John 14-17, John 3
Theological Themes: incarnation, word of god, eternal life, christology, soteriology, gospel message, divine nature, adoption
Full Transcript
We are going to start today a new series. It is an overview, and I mean that literally, an overview of the Gospel of John. So if you have Bibles with you, so often in the studies we do they're topical, we're moving around, or sometimes it's even hard to figure out what verse we're in, and I understand that. This won't be the case for these next 12 weeks, so if you have a Bible with you today, great. If you don't, let me encourage you to bring one with you. There's something powerful about having that Bible with you, and you can open it up to the Gospel of John. That's what we're going to take a look at.
When I say overview, it is indeed that. You may look at this and say, how long could you possibly spend in this book? Well, you could spend a ton of time studying the Gospel of John. My favorite story is of a lady in our church. She and her husband hated each other desperately, and both fantasized that the other would die. In fact, she tells this wonderful story about fantasizing about him dying, and two huge things. One, how cool it would be that he was dead, and then two, how great it would be to be this weeping widow and getting all the sympathy on top of it.
Well, in the midst of this, God saves her, and that presents a problem because she still has him. And she comes to me and talks about a variety of things, and most of my counseling, this is why my counseling load is not very heavy, most of my relational counseling goes something like, why don't you eat something, have sex, and then, I don't know, then it all works out after that. He falls asleep, and everybody's happy. Pretty much, that's why I don't do a lot of counseling. And she said, I just knew you were going to say that, and I said, okay.
The Power of Extended Bible Study
Well, he ends up coming to church, and it just so happens that he comes the day that I start the Gospel of John. And so they're driving home, and there's that tense moment where you want to go, what'd you think, but you don't really know, but finally she said, what'd you think? And he said, I didn't like him, that would be me. I thought he was cocky and arrogant, and thought he was funny, and he isn't. And I rarely hear that.
I remember this, I digress here, but the first DUI I had, I remember, because I don't, I'm guilty, I was the only guy, everybody in this, so I'm in this counseling thing, and everybody blew a 1.5, but I was the only one that was guilty. It was amazing at that. But I remember standing before the judge, and the prosecuting attorney saying, and I didn't hire an attorney, I'm guilty, I shouldn't get out of it, you should not get out of it, you're guilty. If you got kids that are in this, they're guilty, they ought to pay the penalty. Don't get them out of it, you're not helping them. So I'm standing there, and the arresting officer, and I'm embarrassed as can be, I mean, I'm just humiliated, and the arresting officer described the defendant, that would be me as cocky, but cooperative, which I thought was a great way of, anyway, I digress.
And he said, I didn't like him, but you know what, it wasn't too bad, the music was okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll keep going, since he did the interjection, I'll keep going until he finishes the Gospel of John. Well, it took me, and I flew through the end of it, four and a half years to do the Gospel of John. And I will give this guy huge credit, because to his credit, he in fact stayed through the whole four and a half years. And at chapter three, which is the chapter we'll look at next week, God saved him. So that's how I think of the Gospel of John. I think of four and a half years, and a fly-through at the end of that, so when we say 12 weeks, we're moving very, very, very quickly.
The Essence of Life
Significant, I think, is the title of the series, the essence of life. Where am I going to find life? In fact, in this Gospel, in the tenth verse, Jesus declares that I've come that you might have life, and not just have life, but that you might have life abundantly. And this is contrarian thinking, this is contrary to human instinct.
In Luke chapter 12, Jesus tells this wonderful story, this parable. Someone in the crowd said, teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me. And Jesus has a discourse, and then he says this, beware and be on your guard against every form of greed, for not even when one has an abundance, does his life consist of his possessions. All the stuff.
A Different Kind of Christmas
So I told, so people said, how was your holiday, how was your New Year, how was Christmas? Of all the Christmases that I can remember, let's say in the last three decades, this is the one more than any other where I had more people saying when I asked, did you have a good, I had a great Christmas. I had more people saying I had a great Christmas than ever. And I can tell you why.
Because we got rid of all the junk, by and large. We got rid of a bunch of parties, nobody had enough money to go buy Johnny Water Red, so we didn't have a bunch of parties. Nobody's buying shrimp, we're not buying a bunch of gifts, we toned everything back. We did a church, we did something that was incredible, and you got to understand, this is in the midst of hard times.
We challenged our people to give gifts, but to cut it back, to not keep the money for themselves, and not give it to us for ourselves, but bring all your money on Christmas Eve, we're gonna take everything that we get to Morocco. And we just ask you, just do that. You don't have to add a bunch of money to it, just do what you would have spent on gifts, and put it in there. And we raised about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars or something on that one singular night. And it was the happiest, I had more people had the happiest Christmas.
And this is the wonderful thing of this, okay. So just so you know, you know, the bailout's not gonna work, I assume you understand that. And this isn't gonna get better, and $500 is not gonna
save your house, and it's not a tax cut, because your rate didn't go down. This is all a shell game, it's all a scam. I digress here a bit, but it's okay. It's okay that it's going to get bad, it's okay that some of you are going to lose your homes, and maybe us too. It's okay, because it's going to drive you to the fact that life isn't about these things.
Do they still hurt? Yeah, but it's going to give us new and creative ways, even for the body of Christ, to make Christ real. It's going to remind us that life is not about stuff. Do we like that stuff? Sure. I tell people who ask about my life and what I do and how I live, one of my lines that I throw away is, it costs my friends a great deal of money to keep me in poverty. I love laughing about that. Do I like vacations? Sure you do, but the problem is when you start to equate that to life.
The Essence of Life
The essence of life is what we're going to look at today, and for these next 11 weeks. It's a great time. We don't find the answers to the big questions of life in stuff. By the way, if you think that what I just said is crass, or somehow it's not sensitive, or I don't care, I do, and I get it, and I understand it. There is not a day goes by at church that we aren't meeting someone, or having someone come in who is really hurting, and it breaks my heart. I am not minimizing that, but it's reminding us that that's not life.
What we're going to do is look at what will ultimately provide for you and for me legitimate answers to the real legitimate questions of life. Those big questions can take a different form, but at their core, they're questions like: Who am I? Why am I here? And where am I going? Where do I find life?
Somebody asked me if you can still get Larry Wright tapes, and the answer is yes. What you need to do is go on their website, which is discover-life.org, and everything is on there, so you can listen to it, and then you can order tapes off that site as well. If you listen to Larry and his testimony, he would say, here's what I want more than anything else: I want life. I want real living, and I'm not going to find it that way.
What Really Isn't Life
I remember, I don't know if it was Corona or Budweiser, but they had an ad where they got two guys sitting on lounge chairs on a beach, and they got a beer, and there's girls' volleyball going on. The one guy says to the other, "This is really living," and even followers of Christ buy into some version of that. It may not be watching girls' volleyball, but it's having a glass of wine, or whatever the equivalent is of that, a Diet Coke, sitting in a nice restaurant, listening to wonderful music, and going, "This is really living." That's really nice, but that isn't really life.
Jesus said, "I've come that you may have life, and have it abundantly." Does it consist of stuff? For those of you who are not going to be horribly affected by this, meaning you're going to keep your jobs, you may be in an industry that somehow even grows, or you're going to keep your jobs and maybe even make a little less money, it's your responsibility now to step up and pick up the difference. Your giving has to increase, your service has to increase, your love for everyone else has to increase. That's how to get through this thing.
Introduction to the Gospel of John
We're going to look at the Gospel of John. I hate the fact that we picked four Ps for this. An introduction to the purpose of the book, the person of the book, the period of the book, and the participants of the book. I'm just going to do an introduction into this. We'll navigate our way through why John wrote and these big bullet points. If you want something more in depth, which I would encourage you to do, then you start to explore and navigate into the Gospel of John.
Of all the teaching that I do, and this bothers me a bit, Susan's favorite part of my teaching is the introductions, which is boring. But she points out I tend to stay on message in them. Let me give you a five minute introduction to what I would typically do as an hour introduction into this.
Recently in a survey, 43% of the public, which I thought might be amazingly high, could name none of the Gospels. They couldn't get any. So just to help: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.
The Author and His Unique Perspective
John, who wrote this, also wrote the book of Revelation. He kind of bookends the New Testament in a way. He wrote the book of Revelation and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, and then this book that we have in front of us, the Gospel of John. He's one of the sons of thunder, brother of James. There is a high level of intimacy to this book, and that probably flows from even John's description, which would give us a hint. He describes himself as the disciple that Jesus loved. They had a very special relationship.
If you see the pictures, the portraits of the Lord's Supper, and you'll see the one disciple that's leaning next to or sitting next to Jesus, the young one, that's this John.
What Makes John's Gospel Unique
The Gospel is unique as compared to the other three. There are no parables in this Gospel. There is more personality, really, in a way. He introduces you to flesh and blood people: Thomas, and Andrew, and Peter, and Philip, and Nathanael, even glimpses of Judas. He gives us, in this Gospel, incidents from the life of Christ that are not recorded in the other Gospels: the marriage at Cana, the coming of Nicodemus (that's what we'll look at next week), the raising of Lazarus from the dead, Jesus washing the feet of the disciples.
Particularly significant, as you launch a new year and you're going, "I'm going to get back into this and I'm going to study a bit." One of the things that you want to
A little way to do this, and I think this is a great recommendation, is to take John 14, 15, 16, and 17, and study those. There's some powerful teaching in there from a very deep theological perspective, somewhat unique to John, especially His emphasis on the Holy Spirit, which is this third person of the Trinity. Conservatives like me tend to minimize, I think, the power and the influence of the Holy Spirit. Study those four chapters in a really in-depth way, and by study, I don't mean necessarily go in and start breaking it apart, but maybe spend a week or two just reading it.
Go online and Google Bible study, and one of the early ones would be Crosswalk, and you can go on there and pull down three, four, five different versions. Pull down the NIV, and the New American Standard, and a paraphrase like The Message, and two or three others, and just read those four chapters, maybe all four of them, every night from a different translation or paraphrase. Then begin to just ask God to open your eyes to show you some stuff out of that. John's Gospel really lends itself to that.
Why John Wrote His Gospel
One of the things that happened to me over the time I was away is I did a ton of reading. I did a lot of thinking and a lot of reading. I also had compiled over the year a list of people that I wanted to have coffee with, many who typically I wouldn't, meaning they're not part of the rotation, but for whatever reason, the course of the year, I thought I'd like to get to know them a little bit better, so I tried to schedule some of that time in there as well.
I read a lot of books, and I noticed among all the books that I read, and maybe now more than ever, maybe it's always been there, but I'm just more in tune to it, is that virtually every book I read in the introduction explicitly states this is what I want to accomplish with this book. Maybe it's always been there, I probably tended to skip introductions, I don't know, but maybe it's always been there, but it's like, here's what I want. When you read this, I want you to get this. So that virtually every book I read had a big circle early on in it, in the book, going, this is why the guy wrote it.
John tells us that, but He tells us at the end of the book, not at the beginning of the book. So if you flip to the end of John's Gospel, John chapter 20, John tells you why He wrote this book.
John's Editorial Process
John chapter 20, verse 30: "Therefore, many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples that are not written in the book." So here's what He's telling you. I edited the life of Christ. I'm not telling you everything He did. I think probably I made that mistake just as coming fresh to the Scriptures, thinking this has got all of it in it. And John's saying, no, no, no, no. There's other signs that He did.
Now, let's get our arms around that. What's a sign? Well, it's something to point me in the direction of the real thing. There's a sign that leads me to something. So John's saying, He did a whole bunch of other signs, and they were oftentimes in the form of obviously teaching and miracles and all that stuff. There were other signs He did, but I've edited them out. I've kept these for this reason, verse 31.
"These have been written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." That's my whole point in why I wrote this gospel. I wrote this gospel so that at the end of it, you would go, that's the Messiah. That's why I wrote this. That's why that material's there. That was the intent of it. We understand He's under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. All that works together, but that's the whole point of this.
The Purpose of Belief
So that when I first met Larry years ago, back in 1980, and we met right down here at the Humpty Dumpty, and I'm talking to Him about, here's what's going on, and I'll read some stuff, and He said, start with the Gospel of John. And maybe friends have told you that, or you've told friends that. And you don't even know why, other than somebody said, do it. Well, here's why, because the whole intent of that book is for a guy like me in that booth at the Humpty Dumpty who's trying to figure out who's Jesus. That's the whole point of this book. Are there other things that haven't? You bet, but that's His major emphasis.
Now, He tells you something that brings us full circle back to the title, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the one you need, the one to deliver you, and by believing, you will have life. That's why. You're going to have real life.
Salvation from Multiple Hells
One of the things I read, and I think it was over break, was that God saves us from hells. Plural. That our mindset is to think God saved us from hells. And I thought, what's He talking about? That's got to be a typo. Well, He unpacks it, He goes, we get this, I'm in jeopardy, my soul's in jeopardy, if I die, I'm going to hell, but most of us, especially in this room, and this is a great exercise, how many of you became Christians after age 18? So put up your hands. Way up.
See, that's a whole bunch of them. Well, in all likelihood, part of that conversion was also to get delivered from hell on earth. There was a precipitating event. It was me walking out of a jail and going, there's got to be more to this than, there's got to be more than this. And when I first asked my friend, what is it? He said, Jesus. I said, you got anything else? Any other option?
Got a pill, something I can smoke or shoot or something? Well, eventually, I was looking not only to have my soul delivered from eternal damnation, but I wanted out of the hell hole I was in here. That's a wonderful thought, as you percolate on that. Well, that's real life. Get me out of this. I'm so stuck in this. I'm stuck in this relationship. I'm stuck in whatever it is. I'm stuck in this crisis.
What's interesting is that sometimes He gets you out of those circumstances. Sometimes He doesn't, but always He joins you in the midst of them. So all of a sudden, that hell can become a giant blessing. It's amazing. This is great stuff. So that's why he wrote this book. That's what he has in mind.
The Person of Christ
So let's go back to the very beginning and we'll deal with John introducing us to the person of Christ. Who is Christ? His role as creator, the centrality He has to creation, His availability to us, the person Himself, why is He here, all that goes with that.
John chapter 1 verse 1: "In the beginning was the Word"—capital W speaking of Jesus—"in the beginning was the Word Jesus, and the Word Jesus was with God, and the Word Jesus was God. He was in the beginning with God."
This is bombshell stuff here. Maybe not to us because we're so familiar to it, but this is huge to them. Wait a minute, this is God? God come in the flesh? That's what this is?
Going Beyond the Christmas Story
John doesn't go back like Luke did. So if you were in church at Christmas, you noticed when they're reading, they're reading a bunch out of the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. They didn't read you anything. Well, that's not true. They might have gone, "He came into the world" stuff, but generally they're getting the Christmas story out of Matthew and Luke.
John goes way before that, way before there was anything, way before there was Genesis 1:1. John predates the whole deal and says I'm going way, way, way, way back, and back there He was. He's eternal. He's self-sufficient. Again, it's so foreign to our concept. He's not growing, He's not developing, He's not maturing, He's not morphing, He's not learning new information, He's not changing, He's changeless.
Not only this, "all things came into being through Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that's come into being. In Him was life and the life was the light of men and the light shined in the darkness and the darkness didn't comprehend it."
Jesus as Creator
Let me just read you a passage, two verses from Paul's writing, Colossians 1:16 and 17. Paul writes this: "For by Him all things were created both in the heavens and on earth visible and invisible all things have been created through Him and for Him and He is before all things and in Him all things hold together."
Jesus is the creator. Now from this we get all sorts of wonderful comforting truths that this God is not a distant God who began all of this and then walked away. He's not a God who got everything started and said this is going to be kind of cool. How do you think this will turn out? What do you think is going to happen?
He's an all-knowing God, an all-powerful God, and again for some of you this is big stuff. This raises a ton of questions and that's good. He's a God for whom everything that occurs is either caused by Him or allowed by Him.
A Personal Story from 9/11
So on 9/11 Susan and I were in, we had just left Washington, we're staying at the Pentagon, we just left Washington and we were going to Virginia somewhere. Two days before, Susan loves to tell the story, we're standing at the Washington Monument and I'm saying this and they're taking off a rig and I said why would guys not fly planes into these buildings? That just makes, I don't know why you wouldn't do that, that just seems like it'd be so easy to do. I'd be a heck of a terrorist.
We're driving along in the middle of all this and then 9/11 takes place, we're at Appomattox when the 9/11 hits. We have a little Kia, it was the only car we could get. I had mistakenly thought renting a car in Washington would not be a difficult thing but I got the last car in Washington on 9/10 or 9/9 whenever I got it.
We're now I think at the Homestead and I'm getting ready to teach something to a group from MasterCard. 9/11 happens, they all leave. It's time to come home. We have two planes out of Reagan on 9/12 and we sense this isn't happening. The trains aren't running. I call the guy at budget and said I've got this Kia, can I trade it in for something bigger because I'm going to drive it back to Phoenix. He said well why don't you bring that in and I said well I'll talk to you when I get to Phoenix because I can sense that isn't going to happen and we drove home.
The Church's Response to Crisis
So we're driving home and I'm checking in with the church and they said this is unbelievable. All of the businesses around us want us to open the church so they can come in and pray, which we did, that's good. And then they're going Tom this is unbelievable. People are showing up all day long, all night to pray. Revival was breaking out in the land.
I periodically tend to be a bit skeptical and so I said we ought to give this a couple of weeks before we declare that this is the Great Awakening. The next Sunday was like an Easter. The next Sunday was half an Easter. The next Sunday was right back to normal.
Where Was God?
In the middle of this I had, and it took us four or five days to drive home, whatever it was, in the middle of this I got all these emails. Where was God on 9/11? Let me tell you where He was. The same place He was on 9/10 and the same place He is on 9/12 and the same place He's always been on the throne.
Why didn't God stop it? He might have caused it. I don't know. He's God. He's big. That baby that gets sick, and I understand this, I mean this is tough stuff. That cancer that's there. So in whatever it is, now in 45 minutes Susan goes in for another chemotherapy. We got four and a quarter years of this. She's tired, she's worn out, her body's tired. And it's very easily to go, why would God? Don't know why, but He did. He's God. And I don't mean that—
God's Sovereignty Over All Things
If your God's not big enough to either cause or allow 9/11, then you're worshiping some God other than the God of the Bible. Is that problematic? You bet. Is that mysterious? You bet. Does it take me into a bunch of areas where I can't answer the questions? Absolutely. But He's God. He doesn't owe me anything.
When I start getting into this attitude of "why would God allow this to happen to me?" I'm saying God really owes me this. It usually comes from an attitude that says, "look how good I've been, look at what I've done." I'm going to give you a book to read. One of the great books I read is a small book called *The Prodigal God* by Timothy Keller. People buy big books, read small books. As Grandpa says, that'll jar your preserves because it's the prodigal story - not just of the prodigal son who ran away, but of the older brother as much as the younger brother. It's a wonderful book.
This is God. He causes it. He holds it together.
A Scientist's Discovery About Gravity
One of my favorite guys that I've had the privilege of meeting is Bob Hage. I met Bob first through some event where he spoke and shared his testimony, and I've seen him at two or three Priority Living studies. He wrote a book on the first hundred years of aviation, from 1903 Kitty Hawk to 2003. He was a scientist who worked for McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas developed the Mercury capsule, Gemini, and then joint-ventured Apollo.
When Kennedy said we're going to the moon and back, someone at McDonnell Douglas said, "How are we going to do that? We don't have a booster rocket. We don't even have the material. We don't have the equipment." Bob Hage's job was to work on the project, and one of the things he did was serve as a liaison between McDonnell Douglas as they developed the Mercury capsule and the seven original astronauts. That would be cool.
One of the things they were trying to figure out was how to get these guys to the moon and bring them back. One of the calculations had gravity as part of it. They could rely on gravity, but they could never really explain it or understand it.
The Maid's Simple Explanation
When you get into astronomy or space, you quickly realize there's something out there. I may not know what it is, but there's something. This didn't just happen. It is beyond reasonable thinking to think that it just came from nothing.
Bob starts this search that takes him all over the world. He's at L'Abri with Francis Schaeffer. He's at home one day on the phone, and apparently in the conversation, he says something about gravity and how we can't understand it. He hangs up. His maid happened to be cleaning and said, "I couldn't help but overhear, but I can fully explain gravity to you."
He said, "Really?" She said, "Oh yeah." He said, "Have you got a Bible?" She said, "Yeah, somewhere." She said, "Here it is, right here: 'He is before all things and in Him all things hold together.'" God holds it all together. God's the one who keeps it in place.
John the Baptist: Witness to the Light
That's the whole point John is making here. In Him is life, and the light shines in the darkness. Darkness doesn't get it, darkness doesn't like it. There came a man, verse 6, his name was John - this is John the Baptist. He was a witness who testified about what? The light. So that all might believe through him, that is John. He wasn't the light, but he came to testify about the light.
Here's a sub-point: think about the humility of John, because we get that when we get to about verse 19. They're all coming to John going, "Hey, are you the Messiah? Are you the Messiah?" Think about that. You're walking in today and they're going, "Are you the Messiah?" What do you do with that? There's a lot of ego attached to that. I feel the same way when I walk through and they go, "Are you Brad Pitt?" and I go, "I'm not saying I am."
He points Him to the light. What does the light do? If you know anything about light, there are three functions of light: measurement (light years), life giver, but light reveals.
Light Reveals What's Really There
When I was back home, the bar that I hung out at was Circle Tap, which was a bar - not like Kona Grill or TGI Friday's (those are restaurants) - I mean a bar. You couldn't see because there were windows, but the windows were masked over with all the Pabst Blue Ribbon stuff. We always said you'd never seen light in there.
I was in there one day during my earliest conversion - I was in there when we were converting from a Pabst Blue Ribbon bar to a Miller Light bar. That was my first conversion experience. To do that, they stripped all the dark sheets off that kept out light with their advertising. I walked in and honestly, I'm just looking around going, "Oh my goodness, this is the dirtiest..." I mean, whoever...
The health inspector had to come out from Chicago. "Show me a little grease here," he said. It was just a dirty, filthy bar. Well, the light did that. I didn't know that until the light came in.
The same thing happens, by the way. Let me just stop for a second, because there's the possibility that some of you at this very moment are experiencing the light coming into your life. Here's what that would look like: all of a sudden you're starting to get a view of yourself. One of the biggest problems you have is when you think you are okay.
The Sensitivity That Comes with Light
J. Vernon McGee, who is dead—and I always say that because there are people who still make the pilgrimage, because they hear him on the radio and they want to go to Pasadena and meet him, and you'll be very disappointed because he's dead—tells this wonderful story. It's a Monday, he's in church, the phone rings. There's this lady from the church—every church has one—little 90-year-old lady who never could do anything wrong. She said, "I need to see you, I need to see you soon because I have sinned and I have committed a grievous sin."
Well, as a pastor, just out of curiosity, you want to hear what this is. So he said, "Yeah, I'll wait for you, sister." So in she comes and she looks distraught. She said, "I've been up all night, I'm just sick about this." He said, "What is it?" And she said, "Do you remember seeing me at church yesterday?" "Yes I do." "Do you remember talking to me at church yesterday?" "Yes I do." "Remember what I said to you at church yesterday?" He said, "No I really don't." She said, "I told you when I left that the sermon was good. It wasn't."
Now, we laugh at that because we can't even fathom going back and cleaning that up. But her heart was so filled with the light and so sensitive to the Spirit of God that what we laugh about and blow off—"Are you kidding me? You're going to waste gas to go back to talk to him about that?"—she can't help but do that because she's walking in the light. That's what your life ought to be. You become more and more sensitive to sin.
God's Progressive Revelation of Sin
When God first saves you, Tim Maughan, one of our staff guys, was talking about this very thing the other day. He said, "I remember when I got saved, I remember saying to God, 'Okay, I got a couple of things here we got to get fixed, but once we get these things fixed, we're going to be alright.'" He said, "Then I got married, and she said, 'Well, I don't think those two things were the all-encompassing list of things that you need to be working on.'"
And so God does that, doesn't He? God shows you a few things. I realized something the other day about humor: most people really are not funny, and most humor is at somebody's expense. It's easy to make fun of somebody and get a laugh. It's very hard to circumstantially be witty, clever, pull things together, and see fun and humor that way.
I was in a meeting yesterday. This guy had a bag, a backpack, and I made a comment about it. We all laughed. And we were sitting there, and I'm thinking, "That was totally inappropriate comment. That didn't really make me look good, probably made me look worse in the guy's eyes." We were praying, and I felt this huge conviction—this is not like me at all, but this is a very good sign. We finished, and I said, "I just have to apologize for that comment. It was inappropriate, it really wasn't funny, it was at your expense, and it was hurtful, and I'm sorry." That wouldn't have happened to me five years ago, ever. That's when God starts to work in your life. That's that light that comes in.
The World's Rejection and God's Reception
He's in the world, the world was made through Him. Verse 10: He came into the world to His own—to the Jews—and they rejected Him. Verse 12: "But to as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name."
That word "received" could be translated in other places as "believe" or "have faith." If you wanted to age-grade it and you were dealing with a young kid, you may say something like, "Ask Jesus into your heart." By the way, just a cautionary thing there: be very careful with that. With our girls, Susan and I were careful about presenting Christ, presenting sin at the level we thought they could comprehend it, but we never pushed them to ask Jesus into their heart. We never even asked them if they wanted to ask Jesus into their heart.
You may disagree with that, but if you can get a four or five-year-old to pray to ask Jesus into their heart without any conviction on their part, something's wrong. Both of our girls at age five—and I hear a lot about age five, for whatever reason God seems to work a lot at age five—both of our girls at age five, independent of us, one night went to bed, came back out and said, "I asked Jesus into my heart tonight." And both were legitimate, because that's what I'm talking about.
Becoming Children of God
"To as many who received Him"—something happens. Look what happens: they become children of God. What does that tell me? Well, here's what that does: that puts a bullet in one of the gigantic myths in the world you live in, that we're all children of God. I can't become something if I'm already it. So you have the whole world saying, "We're all children of God." Well, in some broad sense, God created us all, but that's not what this is talking about.
The Exclusivity of God's Family
There is an exclusivity about Christianity, I got that, and I understand how narrow that could sound. If you're here, that sounds very, very, very narrow. The issue is not whether it's narrow or not, the issue is, is it true? That's the issue. I got that it's narrow. The question is, is it true?
We're not all children of God in the way that God's talking about it here, and it's about a relationship with Him. We're not all okay, we don't all religions pray to the same God. To the Pharisees, the religious people of His day, Jesus said, "You are of your father, the devil." We are not all children of God.
How do I become a child of God? By coming to Him in repentance and faith.
A Direct Response to God
At this very moment, you may be in the room going, "You know what, this is the first time this is remotely made sense to me. I don't have all the answers. I do see that I'm a sinner. I do see that I need a Savior. I do see I'm in trouble. I'm now here and Jesus died on the cross for me," and God, for whatever reason, is putting in you this desire to respond to that.
You don't need me. You don't need a priest. You don't need somebody to go through. You got direct dial on this. You can call Him. You can open your heart to Him. You tell Him how you feel. You tell Him that you accept Christ and you respond that way and right now you're a child of God. That's a huge deal and that will change all the way that you live.
The Christmas Story and John the Baptist
Again that's His whole point. Verse 14 is the Christmas story: "The Word became flesh, dwelt among us," tabernacled with us, Emmanuel, God with us. And then it's the story in here of John and John comes and he is a bulldozer. He's clear in the way. Verse 23: "I'm a voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord."
Then there's this moment, there's a little bit of confusion. Are you the Messiah? You the one? Verse 29, it's the next day. I'm taking liberty here—it doesn't say it in the text so I'm okay if you disregard it—but I get a sense that there's a whole bunch of people around and the next day John says, "Behold!" and points, "Behold, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"
The Misunderstood Messiah
"That's the one you're looking for! The Messiah we've been waiting for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and it's here!" And they're going, "Which one? That one? It can't be because our Messiah is going to blow Rome out of here. Our Messiah is going to come with a tax cut. Our Messiah is going to come and bail us out. Our Messiah is going to redeem us. Our Messiah is going to defeat all our enemies."
Well, our Messiah is going to defeat our one big enemy, which is sin. That's our problem. That's why He died. That's the Lamb. All these other lambs that the Jews had slaughtered, hundreds of thousands of lambs, they were all pictures pointing to that Lamb, that moment roughly three years hence when He would then die on the cross. He would die on the cross so that you could have real life—life abundantly.
Looking Ahead to John Chapter 3
I said overview, we fly over chapter 2. Next week we titled it "Nick"—it's Nicodemus. Nick at night. Nick comes to see Jesus in the nighttime. He asks Him some questions, and Jesus gives him this answer: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again..."
What's it mean to be born again? For you personally, it may be something we need to settle. You may have people in your sphere of influence or life that you need to talk to, or you think this would be a great message for them. Feel free, as we'll be looking at that John chapter 3 next week. It's going to be a great study—12 weeks of this, just coming back to this again and again, these wonderful truths of God and who He is.
Let's pray together. Father, thank You for Jesus. Thank You for salvation that we find in Him and Him alone. Help us see what sinful people really are in the provision that we find in Christ, in Christ alone. God, thank You that indeed Jesus became flesh, dwelt among us, and was the Lamb who came to take away our sin. Take that deep into our life. Help us see it, understand it, apply it to our heart. We ask it in Christ's name. Amen.