The Death of Truth | Why Rejecting Jesus Changes Everything | John 18:28-40 - Dallas Herndon

Don't be deceived. The truth is Jesus is returning. He's coming soon. Remain faithful till he gets back. That's it.

If it's next week, great. Your job is not to figure it out. Your job is to be faithful, make disciples, love God, love others while you're waiting for him to

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What god's doing. Amen? So we praise god. We don't only have prayer requests. We have also praise reports.

So we thank god for that. So make sure you just check your bulletins for all that this morning. If you have your bibles, go to John chapter 18. John chapter 18 will be starting in verse 28. We've been in a series the past, I guess, month now called The Death of.

John 18 · chapter mention John 18 · chapter mention

Look at your neighbor and say, the death of. The death of. Last week, we looked looked at a story and that was really good and this week, we're going to be looking at the death of truth. The death of truth will be in John chapter 18. If you have your Bibles, go there.

John 18 · chapter mention

It will be on the screen behind us as. Well. When you're ready, say, I'm there. I'm there. If you need a minute, say hold up.

Alright. We're good then. Let's roll. John eighteen twenty eight, my friends. This is the word of the lord.

Then, the Jewish leaders took Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor but now, it was early morning and to avoid ceremonial unclean uncleanness. They did not enter the palace because they didn't because they wanted to be able to eat the Passover. So Pilate came out to them and asked, what charges are you bringing against this man? If you were not a criminal, they replied, we would have not handed him over to you. Pilate said, take him yourselves and judge him by your own law, but we have no right to execute anyone.

They objected. This took place to fulfill what Jesus had said about what kind of death he was going to die. Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, are you the king of the Jews? Is that your own idea? Jesus asked.

Or did others talk to you about me? Am I a Jew? Pilate replied, your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done? Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world.

If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now, my kingdom is from another place. You are a king then, said Pilate. And Jesus answered, you say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth.

Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. What is truth? Retorted Pilate. With this, he went out again to the Jews, gathered there and said, I find no basis for charge against him. But it is your custom for me to release one prisoner at at the time of Passover?

Do you want me to release the king of the Jews? And they shouted back, no, not him. Give us Barabbas. Now, Barabbas had taken part in the uprising. My friends, this is the word of the lord to us this morning.

Would you just bow your heads and pray with me over this time together? Lord, we are quickly approaching the cross, your death, your burial, and your glorious resurrection. And Lord, this story takes place right before all those things. And there's something in here, Lord, I think you really are speaking to us today as we are preparing our hearts for next week. Lord, help us to understand the death of truth in this story and help us to live in you and to live out the truth in our lives.

Lord, we love and we thank you. In the name of Jesus, everybody said, amen. Amen. What a interesting, beautiful story. In our text, we find Jesus standing before Pontius Pilate.

Truth is on trial. And it reminds me of a moment of my life. I remember going to church camp every year growing up. And I remember this one particular year at church camp. There was this kid.

There's always this kid at church camp, right? This is the kid who doesn't go to church but shows up at church camp. Right. You know what I'm talking about? And this kid's at church camp and he has this bright idea this one day to while everybody's taking a shower to find all the empty trash cans, fill them up with the coldest water he could find, and dump them on people's heads while they're in the shower.

Right? Well, there's always that kid. God bless them. And they're always at the altar too crying out to God. It's beautiful.

It's beautiful. And I remember getting so frustrated though because that's not nice. You that's a horrible feeling. That's what your siblings do to you when you're young. Right?

And I did it to my sisters many many times. This is something you don't do at church camp. And I remember looking over in the corner and he's filling up this massive can. It's probably gonna be like 10 gallons and someone's gonna get drenched and this is gonna be a problem. So I remember telling the kid like, that's ridiculous.

Quit it. And I remember knocking the can over, ruining his plan, and then I walked out and got dressed or whatever whatever the I I don't even remember how I left. But here was the problem about the whole thing, the whole bit. Later that night, we're all sitting together about a 100 of us campers and and the camp leader, I think it was actually Fiona at the time and Fiona says, hey, we have a problem. We heard that there was a kid upstairs dumping water on others with trash cans and one of the showers is full of trash, and mister so and so had to clean it up.

And then they nail exactly who that kid is, and he gets punished, greatly punished. It was awesome. Here's the problem though. I'm the one who put the trash in the shower. I thought I was doing a good thing.

Right? Like he was going to fill it up so I just knocked the can over. I didn't realize there was a bunch of trash in this can. And so he got in trouble for filling the showers with trash and had to do tons of punishment while I'm sitting there in my seat like, well I don't think I'm gonna say anything. So I didn't.

I did not say anything until like a few years later and I told Fium that was me and she's like, what? That was you? I'm like, yeah, sorry. He deserved it though right? That was the whole bit.

That was the whole part of the story. But the point is as I was sitting there in my seat and this dude is getting grilled for what I did. I knew the truth but I just didn't want to say it. I didn't want to speak up and so I just remained quiet and that raises a good question for us all. Thank you for allowing me to be humorous about my past.

Here's the question, what is truth? Look at your neighbor and say, what is truth? A textbook definition would say that truth is consistent with fact or reality not false. For example, the truth is it is springtime not fall. It's not fall.

It's not summer, it's not winter, it is springtime. Another truth is is that gravity is real. If you go up you will come down. That's a fact. That's reality.

And another true thing is the reality is is that the Dallas Cowboys will not win the Super Bowl this year and that's a fact. That is reality. That's the truth. Right? They're awful.

It's just not going to happen. That's the truth. Truth is reality but according to Jesus truth isn't just something you define with a dictionary or something that you scientifically approve. Truth is a person to know. According to Jesus, truth is someone you follow.

In John chapter 18 the passage that we just read, Jesus tells Pilate that he came into the world to testify to the truth. John eighteen thirty seven, what is the truth according to Jesus? He is the truth. That Jesus Christ of Nazareth is the truth himself. Do you remember what he said in John fourteen six?

John 18 · chapter mention

Jesus says to his disciples, I am the way, the truth, and the life. You cannot define what truth is apart from Jesus Christ. He is the truth. And Jesus came to this world to reveal the truth that there is one true God, that we humanity are God's beloved creation, but we rebelled against God and we are sinful and we are we are destined to be apart from God for all of eternity. That's the reality.

That's the truth. But the also the truth is, and this is why Jesus came, that he came to redeem us through his life, death, and resurrection. And that's why next week as we celebrate Easter, next Sunday, that's what makes it so glorious. He came to tell us the truth that we are sinful human beings in need of a savior, but also presents the truth that we have the ability to be saved because of him and have eternal life. And because of who Jesus is and because of how trustworthy he is, we can trust everything Jesus says about anything.

We can trust what Jesus says about life. We can trust what Jesus says about relationships. We can trust what Jesus says about money. We can trust what Jesus says about sexuality. We can trust what Jesus says about eternity.

Anything that Jesus says about life is true. And anything apart from that or half truth is not the truth. Whatever he says goes. Because he himself is the truth. He's the only reliable authority that has ever lived.

Only him. There is no lie in him whatsoever. He is fully truth, holy, transparent, and reliable. Here's the problem. That's not what happens in this story.

In John chapter 18, truth himself is standing before the Jewish leaders. The truth himself is standing before Pilate who represents the Roman government and they're standing face to face with the truth and guess what? They reject him. They reject the truth that's standing right in front of them. It's what we just read.

John 18 · chapter mention

It's not because they can't find the truth. It's not because they can't prove the truth, it's because they don't like what the truth says. Right? Sometimes we don't want to hear the truth in our lives. I think about that old movie with Jack Nicholson, A Few A Few Good Men.

I don't know if you've ever seen it. And and and and one guy says, hey, I want the truth. And Jack Nicholson says that famous line, you can't handle the truth. Right? So many of us can't handle the truth.

We look truth right in the face but because we don't wanna be faced with the own lies and sin we are living in our own lives, We reject the truth right in front of us. Slam the chocolate milk. That's exactly right. No, I don't. Oh, yeah.

Sorry. Throwback. You know, and this is not just a problem in the Bible. My friends, we live in a live your own truth culture. Get on Facebook, you live at all.

You understand this. We live in a culture that whatever you feel is true to yourself must be real. If you just feel like you should leave your spouse because, well, I don't I don't like them anymore. That's fine. That's true to you.

Be yourself. You know, if you feel like inside that, hey, I was born a man but you know, I really feel like a woman. I guess that's true. I guess it's true if that's really what I feel about it. Right?

Or if you feel I've heard comments in just the past few months, people will say something like, you know, I feel like, you know, white people and black people shouldn't get married. Just it doesn't seem true to me. I'm like, what? Are you serious? And we could just go down the line.

So many of us have these things in our life we just believe to be true but they're not necessarily true. And we know they're not true but we don't wanna deal with the ramifications of those things. We don't wanna be confronted with the truth because we don't want to change. That's the biggest issue. And my friends when truth is rejected, it always produces something.

And so that that's what we're studying today. It's the death of truth. We see a few different things in the story. I wanna point out three things to you that I see and I think can be really helpful in our lives. When the truth dies, it gives rise to three things.

It gives rise to hypocrisy, deception, and apathy. Hypocrisy, deception, and apathy. Look at your neighbor and say hypocrisy. Number one, here it is. When the truth is rejected in our lives, hypocrisy rises.

Let's look back at John eighteen twenty eight. John eighteen twenty eight. It says, Then the Jewish leaders took Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness they did not enter the palace because they wanted to be able to eat the Passover. You got to think how silly this is.

Watch this. So the Jewish leaders are getting ready to practice Passover. Passover is getting ready to transpire. It's this old ancient practice in Israel for them to remember what God did when they brought when God brought them out of Egypt. Right?

And so in order to be able to practice this you had to be ceremonial clean. But here's the issue, if the Jews were gonna go into Pilate's house and you know tell Pilate, hey Jesus is a criminal you should kill him, it would make them unclean and it would take them seven days to become clean again. The problem is they didn't have time to become clean again. Passover was that night. So they're willing to stand outside of Pilate's house and say, hey we're not going to come in there but we want you to kill this guy.

Like they're okay with like not breaking the law being ceremonial unclean but they're okay with murdering an innocent man. The hypocrisy is just unreal. Like they're not willing they're not willing to go in but they're willing to just kill someone for no reason. They don't want to break the law in order to break the law. It doesn't make any sense because it's just hypocrisy.

They were more concerned with looking right than being right. They wanted to look like they were doing the right thing but in reality they were just really lying to themselves so they could do whatever they wanted. Jesus confronted this topic of hypocrisy in Matthew chapter 23 with his famous woes to the religious leaders. These religious leaders would even would even be so careful to tie their herbs. Does anybody have a herb garden?

Matthew 23 · chapter mention

Or anybody have a garden? Raise your hand. Any gardeners? No. Where's Herman?

I know you're gonna have a garden okay? They'd be so careful to just tie their basil and their mint and they'd be so careful. I gotta make sure I cut a tenth of this mint and this basil and this cilantro and give it to God But they would outright just reject people and not show anybody justice or mercy or love. But they cut them, they cut their herbs but they rejected this. It's hypocrisy at its finest.

I remember this story though And this was one personal to me. I remember being a waiter in college. I got to be a waiter at this wonderful restaurant called Chewy's. They serve some of the best Mexican food in the world. And I remember sometimes I had to work on Sunday mornings, that's just the way it was.

So I would wake up early and I would always loathe going to Chewy's on a Sunday morning. Not because I would rather be at church because I usually went on to church on Tuesday night. So I had a community that was a part of, but because I knew going to church on Sundays I was going to be faced with the worst crowd of customers and that was the after church crowd. And I lived and I worked right next to one of the biggest mega churches in the world. I could see them right outside the door and right when service let out we could see the cars rolling to say here they come.

And let me tell you my friends, the people who left there came dressed in their Sunday best were the rudest customers I had. The most ungenerous cheap tippers I've had and they would just disrespect and leave a mess everywhere. Now I have kids now so I'm okay with leaving a little mess on the table. But I tell you what, I loaded all my all my coworkers and I just hated it because we knew we were gonna work harder than ever and get nothing in return. It was tough, it was hypocrisy.

They would go worship across the street and praise God for all the great things they've in their life. And they would talk about how we should love others and they would come disrespect us servers right across the street. Hypocrisy at its finest. But it wasn't just them, it's us too if we're honest. Because sometimes we will talk about grace in here, we'll sing about grace, we'll study the topic of grace but we won't extend grace to others in our own lives when they mess up.

Right? We talk about forgiveness but we hold grudges. We talk about loving people but we tear them down with our words. We worship on Sunday but we ignore him during the week. There's some level of hypocrisy in all of our lives.

Now, look, the Christian life's not easy. Learning to follow Jesus and everything he says is not an easy task and it takes a lifelong to master it. But the truth is a lot of us have some areas where we're hypocrites. And there's maybe not anything in this world that's more distasteful to unbelievers than Christians who don't do what they know they're supposed to do. Right?

This is one of the reasons why the famous Mahatma Gandhi, the famous Hindu activist in the 19 in the I guess the twentieth century. He said, I like your Christ but I I don't like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ because we're hypocrites. And so when truth dies, when we take our eyes off Jesus and we believe some other things, we become hypocrites and truth dies. If we don't confront own lies and our own lives, we will live as hypocrites and that's not something I want to do my friends.

Number two today, look at your neighbor and say deception. When truth is rejected, deception spreads. I want you to look back at John eighteen twenty nine through 32. This is not something I'm just coming up with out of there. This is right here in the text.

Now, watch this. It says, so Pilate came out to them and asked, what charges are you bringing against this man? Verse 30, if he were not a criminal, they replied, we would have not handed him over to you. Pilate said, take him yourselves and judge him by your own law but we have no right to execute anyone they objected. This took place to fulfill what Jesus had said about the kind of death he was going to die.

So look, the religious leaders come before Pilate but they're not gonna go in the house because they don't wanna get unclean because they wanna kill this guy. Right? And they wanna be able to celebrate Passover. But they come to Pilate and Pilate asked, what charges are you bringing against this man? They're claiming that Jesus is this criminal who deserves to die the worst possible death imaginable which would be crucifixion on a cross.

And he's saying, what charges do you have against this man? And the best thing they can come up with is trust us. He's a criminal. You can just believe our word. We know he's a criminal.

We have no evidence. We're just making it up. But we have deceived ourselves into believing that he really is a criminal and he deserves to die. And then that's when Pilate says, look, I don't like like Pilate says, take him yourselves and judge him by your own law. Pilate saying, first of all, you have no charges to bring against him.

So I can't do anything about this. Rome can't kill him the way you want me to. And they're like no no no no like if you can't kill him the way you can't like we're not allowed to kill him. We can't execute him. And that wasn't even true.

Because if you remember in the book of Acts remember that guy named Stephen? He gets stoned for blasphemy against the religious leaders. They had the ability to kill people. They could stone them. We read this all throughout the Old Testament.

If they do this, you can stone them. They could kill him. But they didn't want him to die that way. They wanted him to die the most grotesque, most painful, most humiliating death ever and they're willing to deceive themselves so that it will happen. He's a criminal just trust us and Pilate doesn't fall for the bait either.

He's like, come on guys. Are you serious? And then we'll look at that next to what happens next but here's the truth. When you reject the truth you don't become neutral, become deceived. You don't remove truth from your life you replace it with a lie.

And sometimes replacement sounds spiritual but is false. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about deception wise. One of the most popular topics people get deceived on is the end times. The return of Christ. Back in 1988, there is this Christian scientist who wrote a book called 88 reasons why Jesus is returning in 1988.

It sold 4,500,000 copies. And when it didn't happen, he wrote a sequel called 89 reasons why Jesus is turning in 1989 and that's comical but this man deceived people claiming to know exactly when Jesus would be returning. My friends, we don't know. Mark 13 says this, that no one knows the day or hour of Jesus' And that's one of the most popular topics I see people get deceived on. And and as I'm crossing because there's a lot going on the world right now, right?

Everything in The Middle East is just going crazy and we're thinking to ourselves, what's going to happen? I don't know. There's been wars for two thousand years. There's been people killed and murdered and crucified for two thousand. There's been there's been tons of stuff like this.

Is Jesus coming back soon? Everybody said yes. But is it tomorrow? I don't know. Is it next week?

I don't know. That's not the point. It's one of the greatest areas of deception in the church today is people who make lots of money deceiving others convincing them, hey, it's gonna happen just like this on this day. If anybody tells you that it's gonna happen like this on this day next week, don't believe them. You run away.

Don't be deceived and that's what Jesus tells us. He tells us in Matthew twenty four eleven, he says, many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. People obsess over predicting the return of Jesus even when Jesus told us not to. Don't be deceived. The truth is Jesus is returning.

He's coming soon. Remain faithful till he gets back. That's it. If it's next week, great. Your job is not to figure it out.

Your job is to be faithful, make disciples, love God, love others while you're waiting for him to come. Not being consumed with fear about what's going to happen. Don't be deceived. Another popular topic of deception that I see in the church today is the one with politics. Again, I was sitting with a guy a few weeks ago and this guy told claims he's a Christian but there was not word one word of Christ out of his mouth in two hours.

It was all about, well, this is happening over there and well, if we don't vote on this day, everything's not gonna be good. And all we talked about was politics and that our politics aren't right, then Christ's kingdom won't advance here in America or any other nation. My friend, I'm telling you this. This is what Jesus said in this passage. He says, my kingdom is not of this world.

If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders but now my kingdom is from another place. Jesus just lays it out there, but we deceive ourselves thinking that we can accomplish God's purposes just through a modern politics and modern government. Jesus said, my government, my kingdom is not a political one. Cause if it was all my disciples would be killing you and fighting back. But my kingdom's from a different place.

But I see so many Christians so many people give priority to politics and to government officials more than they give to Christ. They talk more about to me about how they need to vote and do this or that instead of actually making disciples and loving others. Don't be deceived my friends. Christ is building his kingdom in whatever in political environment we find ourselves in. If America falls one day and we're not free to worship in this way that won't affect how God's kingdom advances because when you read the scriptures, when you look at church history for two thousand years the church has been persecuted and then guess what?

Wherever the church is persecuted it grows just fine. It grows just fine. And so am I asking God that persecution would hit this nation and it would go crazy? No. But we had to give priority to the main thing and not deceive ourselves and thinking the other thing is going to fix the problem.

Don't be deceived my friends. The religious leaders deceive themselves to accomplish their own purpose and they miss the truth right in standing in front of them. We don't need to be deceived. Not only in those things, the two examples I give you, we see so many other levels of deception in the world. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon, there's many people in our culture who deceive themselves and thinking that, hey, like I was born as a male but I really feel like I'm a female.

And they deceive themselves and that is just so sad that they had believed the lies of the enemy that they really aren't made in God's image and God messed up at the beginning. That God made a mistake. God doesn't make mistakes my friends. He doesn't make mistakes. And so many of us have been deceived not only in the church but at, you know, outside of the church.

We had to look to Jesus again for truth on all topics. My friends, when truth dies, hypocrisy can creep in. When truth dies, deception can creep in. And number three, look at your neighbor and say apathy. Ketan, you can go ahead and come up and this is probably the point that that I'm having the hardest time with if I'm just open with you.

Look back at John eighteen thirty eight through 40. Jesus just gets done telling Pilate that he came to testify the truth and this is what Pilate says. He says, What is truth? Retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, I find no basis for a charge against him.

But it is your custom for me to release one of to one of you one of the prisoners at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release the king of the Jews? The crowd shouted back, no, not him. Give us Barabbas. Now Barabbas had taken part of an uprising.

So Pilate asked Jesus a question. The question was, what is truth? He asked him, what is truth? And Pilate though, as you can see, he's not asking a question. He's really just making a comment.

He doesn't give Jesus time to respond. He says, what is truth? And then he walks away. He doesn't wait for an answer. He doesn't wrestle with it.

He just leaves. And even though Pilate knows the truth because what does Pilate say? Pilate says in John eighteen thirty eight, I find no basis for a charge against him. In other words, he's innocent. He's not in the wrong but he doesn't do anything about it.

He knows the truth but doesn't act upon it. He does nothing. Then he Pilate just turns him over to the crowds and and he tries in another gospel, it says that he washes his hands of the matter and says this man's blood is not on my hands. He tries to now distance himself from what the truth is. Jesus is innocent, doesn't deserve to die.

But because he fears the Jewish religious leaders, because he fears Rome, because if he lets Jesus go scot free, he's probably gonna lose his job with Caesar. Because Jesus says that he's a king of another kingdom and there's only one king in this area and that Caesar. So if he lets him go then he's gonna probably get killed by Caesar for doing this. And if he let Jesus go if Caesar doesn't kill him first, the Jewish leaders will figure out a way to kill him probably. He knows the truth but doesn't do anything about it.

Let me say this, the greatest threat to your faith is not that you'll believe a lie, it's that you'll do nothing with the truth in your life. We know what we should do in our lives, don't we? We know the things we ought to do. We know we should serve. We know we should give.

We know we should make that phone call to somebody. We know we should share the gospel. We know we should forgive others. We know we should step in when something's wrong, but we don't. We just feel inside, yeah, that's the truth, but I'm not gonna do it.

Someone else can. We'll get to it later. Now is not the time. It's this kind of this e or attitude that many of us have. We become apathetic and we say we love god but we're really like, we'll say God is good but we're like.

Pilate knows the truth but doesn't do anything about it. If we're not careful if we reject the truth just as Pilate did we'll become apathetic, we'll become lukewarm, become slothful, we become indifferent, we become unmoved, we become unbothered. We know what's right but we just don't do it. You remember what James four seventeen says? James says, if anyone then knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is a sin for them.

It's not ignorance, my friends. It's disobedience when we don't do what we know is to be right. Doesn't that bother you? Bothers me. I look in my life, I have missed it so many times because I've just had the attitude.

I've had so many opportunities to do this, that, and the other for God, but because I'm just like, oh, well, I don't do anything. That's a problem. Because when we reject truth, when Pilate rejects truth, he kills Jesus. We kill opportunity for people to know Jesus. All because we're just have grown unloving and weak in our faith, become apathetic.

And over time, if you continue to be apathetic, if you continue to not do what you know is right, your heart gets hard. You get calloused. You become unsensitive. I remember certain moments of life where I used to be very sensitive to God's voice or God's movement in my life. But I remember a period of time I had sin in my life, and I knew I I knew what I was supposed to do, but I didn't do it.

And my heart just kinda grew hard and that conviction just waned. I didn't feel the conviction like I used to feel it. My friends, I don't wanna live that way. I don't wanna be apathetic. I wanna be on fire for God.

I wanna be obedient. I was telling the story at JC's last week. I gave a random guy a a message in tongues at the phone store the other day. That's not something I thought I was going to do that day, and it didn't make a lick of sense to the guy in the store. But I try to be obedient because I know if the lord called me that day to do that and I didn't do it, the next time he called me to do it, probably like, oh, that was, I don't know, it's not really god.

We have to be obedient and be become on we have to stop being apathetic. That's the point and so when we reject truth, apathy can settle into our lives and that's probably the biggest issue that we face in America, in the American church. We're just apathetic. We think we have time to do whatever we need to. We have no idea what tomorrow holds.

So we must be faithful with the time that we have. That's the whole message of the book of revelation. The book of revelation is not a road map and exactly how it's gonna go down in the end. The book of revelation is a message to a persecuted church, remain faithful until Jesus returns. That's the message that we're going to conquer.

Christ is coming, but we must remain faithful and persevere to the very end. It's not just saying hosanna on Palm Sunday, but it's also being able to say, no. Don't crucify him. He's the king of the glory the week later. We have to be we have to rid ourselves of this apathy.

But here's the beautiful thing about all those things in this passage. Remember, Pilate asked the question, what is truth? Right? The tragedy is he didn't stay long enough to hear the answer because truth wasn't an idea in the room. Truth was a man standing right in front of him.

And here's what I'm afraid of today. Some of us will do the exact same thing. We come to church. We hear God's word. We feel him stir our hearts, and then we never respond.

And nothing ever changes. And I had a really good pastor once tell me nothing changes until something changes. We must respond to what God is doing right here and now in the present. You don't have to crucify Jesus to reject him. You just have to ignore him and his word.

But Jesus didn't just come to speak truth. Jesus has a lot on the top. This whole this whole bible. This is all of God's word. It's full of truth.

It's full of truth. But Jesus didn't just come to speak the truth, he came to die for you so that you would know the truth. Right? Truth has a name, and his name is Jesus. So today, the question is no longer what is truth?

The question is, will you surrender to him again? Will you cry out to him again? Will you rid yourself of hypocrisy again? Will you stop yourself from believing lies and deception again? Would you rid your hearts and your minds of the apathy that has settled in there?

My friends, I I really wish I told the truth at church camp years ago. The fact that I can still remember the story shows me that I should have told the truth. That would have been the right thing to do. And so you can bow your heads and close your eyes this morning. Where are you?

Are you a hypocrite? Have you been deceived? Are you just apathetic? Wherever you are today, god can meet you there and I was as I was praying and prepping this word which is not a the most fun word I've ever