The Jesus You Expect and the Jesus You Need

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Let's go to God and let's thank Him for that this morning.

Lord, thank you that who you are defines who we are.

Thank you that being a God of truth, a God of grace, makes us a people of truth and a people of grace that don't just receive truth and grace, but a people that give truth and grace.

Lord, we want who you are to define not just who we are on the inside, but what we do on the outside, God.

We pray that you would just work through our entire being.

We want to walk away this morning, Lord, with more than words.

We want to walk away with some actions.

So, Lord, my prayer for all of us now, Lord, is that your word would open up to us and you would speak so that we can know the truth that sets us free.

Lord, give us this truth.

We need this truth.

We need it just like we need water.

We need it just like we need bread.

We want to feed on it and drink from it.

So, Lord, we trust you now to give it in Jesus' name.

And all God's people said, Amen.

You can be seated.

If you came in a little bit later, uh good morning.

My name is Clyde.

Uh good afternoon, actually.

My name is Clyde.

It's uh daylight savings time, by the way.

So I know why most of you are here in this service.

My wife told me on Friday, I said, What?

Uh well, we're glad you're here.

My name is Clyde, and uh I'm one of the pastors here, and we're gonna be back in our series on John.

We've been working through the Gospel of John, and so today, if you have a Bible, I want to ask you to open it up to John chapter 5.

John 5 · chapter mention

And if you don't have a Bible, there's one at the end of your row.

I'm gonna be on page 890, and uh I want to ask you today to read from a Bible.

I know we we have Bible apps on our phones, and those can be really useful.

Um, but there's something better, uh something uh more helpful, especially if you're uh young in the faith, to have a Bible that you can write in, that you can hold, that you can take with you.

Uh we tend to read it more when it's written in this uh this medium.

And I want you to turn to John chapter 5, and I want to tell you the title of the sermon today while you're turning there.

John 5 · chapter mention

It's the Jesus You Expect and the Jesus You Need.

Those are two different Jesuses, by the way.

There's the Jesus you expect, but there's also the Jesus that you need.

Now, if you were to go out on the street and ask somebody, well, what's the Jesus you expect?

What do you expect Jesus to be?

Who do you expect him to be?

What do you expect him to do?

Uh people would probably give you the standard answers.

You know, Jesus is the Savior, uh, it's Jesus' job to forgive people.

Uh Jesus was a good teacher, right?

I mean, even Muslims, if you if you ask somebody from uh Islam who is Jesus, they'll say, Well, Jesus was a prophet.

Jesus was a great teacher, he had good things to teach us.

Um, in recent years, there's been the pursuit of what's called a historical Jesus, which is the Jesus they found through archaeological digs and it goes against the Jesus we see in the Bible.

Things like Jesus had a wife, silly stuff like that.

They say that there's a historical Jesus that wasn't the one you see in the Bible because that was written by men with agendas that want us to have their version of Jesus.

And then for us, even today, some of us may be here with our own theological system, our own way of thinking about the Christian faith, and Jesus fits in to your theological system, right?

The Jesus you expect is the Jesus that lines up with the Bible the way you read it, right?

That's why we have different denominations, right, that say different things about what Jesus said.

Today, though, I want us to talk about the Jesus we need.

The Jesus we need.

That's the Jesus of the Bible.

That's the Jesus that John says, you have one responsibility to this Jesus, to believe in him, to believe in him as Savior and Lord.

And that's the whole point of John, right?

John chapter 20, verse 31, it summarizes the whole book in just a few sentences.

John 20:31

It says, These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you have life in his name.

And I think that speaks to two groups of people that might be in the room today.

You might be sitting here and you've never believed in Jesus Christ as your Savior.

And hey, if that's you, we're glad you're here.

That's great.

Uh I want you to know that John wrote this entire book just for you.

He wrote it for the purpose of you believing.

But for the rest of you that you have believed, it doesn't just stop with belief.

The belief leads to something else.

The belief leads to this truth, that you would have life, and that you would have life in his name.

And so what I want us to find today out of John 5 is a something for us to believe, but also that belief to lead to life.

So let's read here in John chapter 5, starting in verse 30.

John 5 · chapter mention

Jesus is talking to some religious leaders in the Jewish community, and this is what he says to him I can do nothing on my own.

As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me.

Now if I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true.

There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true.

You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth.

Not that the testimony I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved.

He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a little while in his light.

But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John.

For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me.

And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me.

His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent.

You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me.

Yet you refuse to come to me, that you may have life.

I do not receive glory from people, but I know that you do not have the love of God within you.

I have come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me.

If another comes in his own name, you will receive him.

How can you believe when you receive glory from one another, and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

Don't think that I will accuse you to the Father.

There is one who accuses you, Moses, on whom you have set your hope.

For if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.

But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

The word of the Lord.

Now before we jump into the text, I want to just back up a little bit and give us a little context for what's going on here, because this is one of those things you start reading, you're like, okay, what in the world is Jesus talking about?

He uses the word witness a lot.

And he's intentional using that because he's kind of been put on trial by the Pharisees.

It all started back in the early part of chapter 5.

This is what Wade Collier preached on a few weeks ago.

In their mind, Jesus had committed a crime.

And when you commit a crime, you get put on trial.

And the crime that Jesus committed was he healed a man on the Sabbath.

And so that was against their rules.

You can't break our rules.

So we're going to put you on trial.

But then they discovered, as they started questioning him, the intent behind his crime.

And this is what Jesus says in verse 17 in chapter 5, My Father is working until now, and I am working.

And what Jesus is saying is, I'm healing on the Sabbath because I'm doing what my father's telling me to do.

And in verse 18, this is where they take him to trial.

They say, We're going to go for the death penalty on this one.

Because they said, This is why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, he was calling God his own father, making himself equal with God.

And so Jesus, he plays along with our game.

He brings his defense.

That's what verses 19 through 29, that's what Neil talked about two weeks ago, about being a man under authority, so you can say things of authority.

And then he gets to this point, which is our text today, and Jesus calls his witnesses.

And I don't, we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about his witnesses in his trial, as much as I just want us to kind of see what's going on, because God has something for us out of this passage today.

And so these are the witnesses he lists.

Jesus says, Jesus himself, that's a witness.

But verse 31, he says, I know you don't accept the word of one witness, so you know, I know that's not enough for you.

And then he talks about God the Father is a witness.

The one who sent me, is the other way he phrases this.

And then John the Baptist is a witness.

The works of Jesus, the things that he's doing.

Jesus has healed a man.

That testifies to who he is.

That says, Can you heal a man?

I don't care if it's on the Sabbath or not on the Sabbath.

When was the last few time you touched somebody and they were healed?

That's what I thought.

And then the Old Testament.

Jesus points out that the Old Testament points to him.

We'll get a little bit more to that in a little bit.

And then Moses being a part of the Old Testament.

All of these things are there to tell us who Jesus is.

All of these things are there to point us in one direction.

And it's Jesus.

It's the Jesus we need, but not necessarily the Jesus we were expecting.

And so today, I think this passage, before we get to our first point, I just want us to see kind of it's being written for a few reasons.

It's being written in the context of this trial.

It's being written because it happened, you know, it was it was going, but for Jesus, it's kind of just like a mock trial.

But for the people that were reading it, this was not a joke to them.

This wasn't, this was something real because John wrote this to Christians that were being put on trial for their faith, right?

He wrote this 2,000 years ago to people that might be put on trial for their life because they had believed in Jesus.

But it was written for them, it's also written for us.

God has something out of this passage for us today, and I think it's so that we can understand the Jesus that we need, not just the Jesus we expect.

Because those are two different things.

So let's look at the first point here from the text.

And I the first point is when you depend on God, you hear from God.

When you depend on God, you hear from God.

And we get that from verse 30.

The first thing Jesus says to them in talking about all this is he says, I can do nothing on my own.

As I hear, I judge.

And I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me.

Jesus was totally secure and totally good with who he was and what he had been sent to do.

He wasn't waiting on somebody else to define that for him.

He wasn't looking outside of himself to another man or another agency to send him and give him his mission.

Jesus knew who he was because he was the Son of God.

And he knew what God had sent him to do.

Jesus was dependent on God.

Jesus was unwilling to do anything other than what the Father had given him to do.

And we just need to stop right here and realize that of those six witnesses I put up earlier, this is the only one that matters for Jesus.

This relationship he has with the Father is enough for him.

Is it enough for you?

Because everything that we have from Jesus comes from his relationship with his father.

Jesus is saying to us this morning, the Father's enough for me.

The Father's enough to define who I am and what I do.

And I want to ask you, is the Father enough to define who you are and what you do?

Or do you need to find that in something else?

Because we're going to see a group of men today, they need to define it in something else.

There's a danger the longer we uh we we live to kind of find our identity in the opinions of others, whether it's another person or ourself or events that happen, uh, and and to just kind of get deaf to what the Father is saying to us.

You know, one of the things, probably two of uh the most profound words that I read in the Bible are well done.

Well done.

When God says, Well done, my good and faithful servant.

And I just want to ask you this morning, have you ever heard God say that?

Well done, my good and faithful son, well done, my good and faithful daughter.

God is saying those things through Jesus Christ.

Have you ever heard him say those things?

Because when you depend on him, you can hear God say that.

We see a group of people here that they have no interest in hearing that through Jesus.

But he's there to convince them otherwise.

And so, you know, we see here in the text that even though that's all Jesus needs, and that's all we need, is just the Father testifying to who we are.

It's not enough for the people that are listening to him.

And so he goes on in verse 33 and points out another witness.

You see, you sent to John, and he's borne witness to the truth.

Verse 35, he was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light.

Now, the the religious leadership of the time, they we kind of think of them as being against John and all this, but Jesus points out they loved them some John.

John was hip, John was current, John was relevant to what they were talking about and thinking about.

He was kind of the uh, I'd say the uh ancient equivalent of a hipster.

He wore funny clothes, he ate funny food, and he lived in funny places.

Uh and so John created this sense of excitement for them because there was for the the Jews at the time a sense of anticipation, right?

They were waiting for a Messiah.

They were waiting for someone to come and save them.

And what is John saying?

He's coming.

We read the beginning of Mark, the beginning of Matthew, make way for the Lord.

Make a path straight through the wilderness because the Lord is coming.

And they enjoyed this message that John had.

The problem was you can enjoy something and never embrace it.

You can you can enjoy something but never really embrace the truth of what it means for you.

And I was reminded of this.

You ever go to an ice cream shop and they give you one of those miserable, depressing size little spoons to try samples on?

Okay, I'm not the only one.

Good to know.

Yeah.

And so they give you a sample of cookies and cream, they give you a sample of the cake batter, you know, the tootie fruity, whatever your flavors are, and then they stop you at five, I found out.

Which was probably good.

So, but and then you look on the top of the counter, and they've got a bowl of all those little collected spoons, you know, and I'm like, y'all don't wash those and reuse them, do you?

But I I look at the bowl of collected spoons and I think of the Pharisees with John.

They were willing to try it, they were willing to rejoice for a while and try it.

They were like people that had gone in and they just got scoop after scoop after scoop on these little tiny spoons, but they never bought a bowl of ice cream.

Yeah.

I think the Pharisees are the same way.

They they enjoyed it.

They were excited by what John had to say, but they never embraced the truth of what he was saying.

But then Jesus goes on, he says this in verse 34.

Not that the testimony I receive is from man.

He says in verse 36, the testimony I have is greater than that of John, which goes back to Jesus loved John.

I mean, John had a purpose, but Jesus did not rely on what John had to say about him for his mission.

Jesus isn't interested in John's testimony.

Jesus is interested in what the Father has said about him, what the Father has given him to do, what he hears the Father telling him to do.

And so I just the first point I want to ask you this morning, is that what you desire?

Do you desire to hear from God?

Because Jesus is pointing out in this passage this morning, this is how you hear from God.

This is how you hear from God, and you hear from God through me.

Because all that God had for Jesus, He has for you through your relationship with Him.

And here's the thing: if you don't hear from God, if you don't hear from God because you depend on God, because you have a relationship with Jesus, the alternative is you're gonna be deaf to God.

You're not gonna be able to hear God.

You're gonna only be able to hear men who are gonna die just like you.

And so I don't want to depress you with that as much as I want you to just know that God's given us a way to hear Him.

God's given us a way to know.

That's why every Sunday you gather in this church, we read from God's Word.

And we usually don't just do it in this context of preaching a sermon.

We believe God's word is so effective, it's so powerful, that saying it out loud, just reading the word, is a necessary part of the Christian faith.

Singing's great.

Obviously, I'm your worship pastor.

I want us to sing and obey the biblical commandment to sing.

But you hear God speak through his word.

Okay?

But this then this is the second point this morning.

You can read his word and miss it.

You can hear his word and you can miss it.

So read with me here.

Um starting in verse 37, kind of the second part, this is what Jesus turns to the Pharisees and he says, His voice you have never heard, his form you've never seen, you do not have his word abiding you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent.

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but it is they that bear witness about me.

The whole Old Testament is all about Jesus.

The entire Bible is all about Jesus, but right here, they didn't have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, those were all being written.

So their Bible at that time was everything that you see Genesis, Exodus, the early part, the Psalms, the prophets, that was their Bible.

And even though you don't see the name, Jesus, showing up there, and this Jesus we're talking about, it was all pointing to him.

It was all pointing to them, and they failed to see it.

These religious leaders, Jesus says, you've never heard from God, you've never seen God, and you don't have your word, his word in your hearts.

And you don't have it because you didn't read the Bible correctly.

You missed it.

You're like people that have gone around your whole life picking up acorns, but you've never seen an oak tree.

They did not see Jesus, the Son of God, as the fulfillment of everything in the Old Testament.

Now, what do we mean when we say this?

Because for some of us, you're like, I didn't know Jesus was in the Old Testament.

It really starts in Genesis 3.

You don't have to turn there, we'll put this up on the screen.

But in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve have committed sin, and as a result, everything is cursed because of sin.

And God's giving these curses specifically to the people involved, to Satan, who's represented by a snake, and to Adam and to Eve.

And in the midst of all this curse, God gives a promise.

In Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, God's talking to the serpent, and this is what he says to him I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.

Genesis 3:15

He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.

And right in the midst of all this evil, all this curse, God gives the greatest promise of the Bible right here in the very beginning.

You didn't have to wait through Matthew, you didn't have to wait until Luke and John.

It's right here.

And he says three things, really, that we need to know about something that's gonna happen.

God's gonna send a man, it's gonna be a man born of a woman, the offspring, and this man is gonna bruise the head of the serpent.

And he's gonna get his heel bruised in the process.

It's gonna be a man, he's gonna conquer evil.

He's gonna conquer the serpent, but he's also gonna suffer in the process.

He's gonna get his heel bruised.

And so if you're a person living in the old test in the times of the old testament, when you would read the Bible, you know, when we when we read the Bible, a lot of us we're we we want, we have questions we want God to answer, right, through the Bible.

We we ask questions like, what is God like?

Right?

So we read the Bible to answer the question, what is God like?

Here I can read it and I can kind of see what God's like.

But here's the thing: the more you read the Bible, the the more you start asking a different question.

And that question you would ask is, okay, yeah, I see this and this and this about God.

It keeps talking about the Savior.

Genesis 3.15, this this offspring of the woman who's gonna get his heel bruised and he's gonna he's gonna crush the head of the serpent.

And you would start with what is God like, and you would start asking this question.

What is his savior gonna be like?

This word starts showing up, the Messiah.

What is the Messiah gonna be like?

And we start to see that the Old Testament was all about a Messiah, a man who's gonna be raised up.

Moses talked about him.

Moses is the man that we associate with hearing from God, right?

Moses heard from God and he spoke for him.

And in Deuteronomy 18, 15, Moses says, the Lord's gonna raise up a prophet like me from among you down the road.

He was looking forward to Jesus.

We see in the story of Jacob.

Jacob is a man who wrestled with God.

He saw God's form.

We see it in the Psalms.

The Psalms remind us that we are to take God's word.

Psalm 119, verse 11 says, I have hid your word in my heart that I may not sin against you.

Psalms 119:11

All these things, hearing, seeing, having God's word, all of them depend on Jesus.

All of them depend on reading the Bible in such a way that you see Jesus.

You see the eye.

You may not know it's the person, Jesus Christ, but they knew that there was this Savior that was going to come.

He was going to be a man, he was going to suffer, but he was going to conquer.

You see it in the story of uh Simeon, right?

In the early part of Luke, Simeon was a man who had been waiting his whole life, and God had made a promise to him you're not gonna die until you see the Messiah.

And there's a scene in Luke where Jesus holds, or Jesus.

Is held by Simeon, and God gives him that promise.

Simeon was one of those people that understood this Messiah, the idea of waiting for this Jesus that we need.

The Pharisees, though, weren't.

That's why Jesus said about them, You have not heard.

You have not seen, and you do not have God's word in your heart.

This was how they read the scriptures were wrong, right?

How they were going about reading the Old Testament was wrong.

But the how, what's worse than the how is the why.

Jesus moves on and he says in verse 39, it's not just how they were reading the scripture was bad, it's why they were reading the scripture was even worse.

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life.

And it is they that bear witness about me.

They thought that religious reading activity was going to save them.

They thought that Bible drill would save your soul.

And this is a really basic doctrine that gets talked a lot about in the Christian faith.

It's the whole idea of justification.

On what basis can I stand before God?

And you know what?

We like to fill in that blank with a lot of different things.

If I just work hard enough, if I believe hard enough, if I go to church hard enough, if I, you know, read enough, life will be okay.

And when we do that, we're like sponges that just sit on the edge of the sink, but they never get in the sink.

They never get in the water and soak up the truth of what God's talking about.

That's why in Proverbs it says, there's a way that seems right to a man, but its way leads to death.

We don't want to just be people that partake in religious activity and miss Jesus.

So, second point here, find Jesus in the whole Bible.

Don't make the Bible an idol in the process to where you just see what you want to see, but you never embrace the truth of what you really see.

That's why it's so important to read the Bible and not just get it in your head, but get it in your heart.

The Bible wasn't meant to just be stored in our head so we can spout off how much we know about the Bible.

We don't like people like that.

We like to walk away from people like that.

Amen?

Yeah.

I want to be around somebody who's hidden God's word in their heart because they say things that I need to hear.

I want to be around people that have heard from God.

And I think I'm not the only one.

That's why we want to hear from God.

We want to depend on Him.

And we want to be around people that have hid it in their hearts, not in their heads.

Because when you hide the Word of God in your head, you can still die.

You can still read the Bible in such a way that you go to hell.

And that leads us to a third thing this morning.

That's the title of the sermon.

The Jesus you need is better than the Jesus you expect.

The Jesus we need is better than the Jesus we expect.

You know, the Jesus they wanted, he arose out of an expectation that they had of what the Messiah should be like.

Has anybody ever seen the TV show, The Man in the High Castle?

Alright, good.

So none of you are going to get this.

Good to know.

Alright.

Now, I can explain it.

Man in the High Castle is a book, and they turned it into a TV show, and it's built on the premise that what if the U.S.

had lost World War II?

And what if instead of everything that happened in history happened?

What if Hitler had lived and Germany took over the eastern half of the U.S.

and Japan had taken over the western half of the U.S.?

And uh it's a fascinating show.

I watched it, and this is the whole point I'm telling you.

Uh I watched it, and I just had a feeling of how wrong it was as an American.

Just the idea of imagining of another nation being in charge of my nation where I'm a citizen, it feels wrong.

And I, you know, you would probably agree if you could just imagine some country coming in and taking over the U.S., just the thought of it feels very wrong for a lot of reasons.

And I look, and I was reading this passage this week, and I thought about the religious leadership, the, but not just them, all the Jews, all the people that lived in Israel.

That was them.

They had been living this way for hundreds of years.

Because of what?

Rome, right?

The Roman Empire had taken over all of the area where they live, called Palestine.

And so, you, if you're a Jew and you're reading your Bible, right, you know that God's in charge.

But where's this Messiah he keeps talking about?

Where's this Messiah that is supposed to save us?

And I think for them, one of the things that this would naturally happen for me, and I think we have evidence here in the text that it happened for them, is they wanted a Messiah that was going to conquer.

The seed of the woman, right?

The offspring.

He was supposed to conquer.

He's going to crush the head of the serpent.

And the head of the serpent for them was anybody that comes and takes us over, whether it was Rome or Assyria or anybody else.

They were thinking about the Messiah and how he was going to meet their expectations.

And then the actual Messiah shows up.

And he's not there to meet just their expectations.

He's there to meet their needs.

He's not there just to fight battles, to kill emperors, to fight armies.

He's not there to just fight the physical battles.

Jesus is here to fight a battle that goes on right here.

That goes on in every single one of us, and it's the battle with sin.

Before the battle with sin is fought and won, no other battle matters.

And that's why they missed the point.

They had this idea of a Jesus, of a Messiah that was going to be like them.

A Messiah that loved the glory of people.

Verse 41, Jesus says, I do not receive glory from people, but I know that you do not have the love of God within you.

I've come in my Father's name, you don't receive me.

If another comes in his own name, you'll receive him.

And they had.

They'd received lots of guys like that.

And they'd rise up, they would try to lead a rebellion.

Rome would just take them down.

But Jesus takes this opportunity to just point out something about them, and he goes a little bit deeper.

He says, How can you believe when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from God?

It's easy to just make fun of the Pharisees and think, yeah, they got it wrong.

They missed who Jesus was.

I wouldn't miss that.

Would you?

I mean, I don't want to be so arrogant to assume that I would have gotten it.

I think God's gracious and he reveals himself to who he reveals himself to.

But I don't want to be arrogant and think just because they missed it that I wouldn't miss it too.

We need to understand this is part of our doctrine of the idea of being depraved as people.

The same evil, the same sin that resides in all of us, resides in everyone else who sinned.

If you can't see the mistakes that lead people to become Nazi prison camp concentration camp guards, you think they started off their life thinking, man, I want to end my life being a guard at a prison camp.

No one starts off thinking I'm going to go down a trajectory of sin.

Sin is subtle.

Sin creeps in and slowly changes our identity.

And one of the ways it does it is because we receive glory from man.

We get caught up in what we see everybody else doing and we forget what God's telling us that we need to be doing.

We forget what God's created us to do.

And if you want to know if you receive glory from people, just like Jesus says in verse 41, I do not receive glory from people, if you want to know if that's you, just look at your social media feed.

Check your Instagram profile.

Get on Facebook.

Do you get upset when that little globe at the top doesn't have a little red number on it and nobody's liked your post?

It's subtle, isn't it?

We are wired to receive affirmation, to receive glory, to receive recognition.

And that's not wrong.

That started in the garden.

God wired us to receive all the goodness He has for us, all the things God says are true about us.

The Father wants us to know those things.

But sin entered the world, and now we find ourselves here where we should be receiving that goodness and affirmation that God has for us, and we start finding it from everybody else.

And that's why I say today the Jesus you need is better than the Jesus you expect.

Build your view of Jesus on the Bible, on the Jesus of the Bible.

Because that gives us something worth hoping for.

And that leads us to our fourth and final point today.

Just to examine your hopes.

Just examine your hopes.

It's interesting what Jesus does here is, you know, they they started off, they put him on trial for what he had done.

And Jesus flips it around and he says, I'm not really on trial, you are.

And he says, verse 45, do not think I will accuse you to the Father.

There is one who accuses you, Moses, on whom you have set your hope.

Jesus is not here to accuse us.

Jesus is here that we might be saved.

That's what he says to them.

What's actually going to accuse them on the final day is Moses.

Not the person of Moses, but their idea of Moses.

Their idea of keeping the law.

Their idea of using the law as a bunch of rules and commandments to give life to their light, to their life.

And what they've really done is they've made an idol of the law.

And idols, it says in Psalm 115, here's what an idol does.

An idol has eyes but it can't see.

An idol has ears but it can't hear.

An idol has a mouth but it can't speak.

And those who worship them become like them.

The effect of idols is that you become spiritually, just like the idol.

You become spiritually deaf, you become spiritually dumb, you become spiritually blind.

And that's how the way these religious leaders reading the Old Testament, that's what it had done for them.

It had made them blind.

It had made them deaf.

And that's what's interesting to me about this is that in spite of all the conflict, in spite of all the fighting they did with Jesus, he was never there to accuse them.

He was there to save them.

Jesus had hard things to say to them.

It says later in John, this is a hard saying.

Who can accept it?

But you know, sometimes the people that love you the most say the hardest things for you to hear.

I think I'm awesome, and more people should talk about how awesome I am.

But the people that really love me, they tell me how not awesome I am.

They tell me what I need to hear because you know what?

They love me.

And they want to see me become the Clyde that God created me to be.

And that's true for you as well.

Think about that.

Think about how the people that really get on your nerves because they say things about you that are true and you need to hear.

So we end with this: just examine your hope.

Is your hope on being able to stand before God and look at how well I worshiped the law?

Look at how well I kept up with my theological system.

Look at how well I read the Bible.

That's setting your hope on Moses.

That's setting your hope on filling the blank.

That's setting your hope on anything but Jesus.

And the Bible's just really clear today.

Set your hope on Jesus.

Set your hope on Jesus.

Set your hope on the biblical Jesus, the Jesus that speaks, the Jesus that wants all your baggage.

Carl Barth told this story about people that lived in the wilderness and they had built a canal because they lived in a dry and desolate place.

And they built this canal and it cost a lot of money, it cost a lot of lives, a lot of people died because bringing all this water and this canal over through the mountains and through the desert was very expensive and it was hard, and it took years to complete.

And time goes and the canal was great.

It brought water, it brought life to the area.

But years and years and years go by, hundreds of years go by.

And the canal dries up.

But the funny thing was, even though the canal has dried up, the people are still making a big deal about the canal.

They still talk about how great the canal is.

They named their kids after the people that built the canal.

And they've forgotten the whole purpose of the canal in the first place.

It was there to bring life.

And if they were wise, they would have followed the water from the canal back to where it led, to the source.

But they didn't do that.

They were stuck around with just a dead, empty canal.

And I think that we all have a canal.

You may have more than one canal.

You may have this thing that you're setting your hope on.

Not just your hope of salvation, but all your little hopes as well.

I think parents do this with their kids.

You hope that they're really a Christian.

You hope that they've really made a decision to follow Jesus.

And what do you build that hope on?

A decision that they made 30 years ago when they walked down an aisle and got baptized.

But 30 years have passed and you don't see the fruit of Christianity in them.

You don't see the fruit of the Spirit in them.

You don't see a life that's committed to Jesus.

Other canals for us may just be the hope that we can modify our behavior enough.

I'm going to stop sinning.

I'm going to start doing this.

That's just an empty canal.

Go back to the source.

Go back to Jesus.

This Jesus is the Jesus that leads us back to our Father.

And that's what Jesus has been about this whole passage.

Remember what I said at the beginning.

When you depend on God, when you depend on the Father, you're going to hear from the Father.

And Jesus has given us a way to do that.

We don't want to miss that this morning.

I want to close with this quote from J.I.

Packer.

He talked about the importance of just understanding what you have through what Jesus gave you having a father.

He says this.

You sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's holy father.

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his father.

If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

And so I'll close with this just to if you're the person I was talking to earlier that has never believed Jesus Christ as your Savior.

That's why John wrote this book, that you would believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

If you haven't believed in him, I want you to think about this.

What are you setting your hope on?

For these people, they had been setting their hope on Moses.

Their idol was just the idea of, you know, keeping rules in such a way that we give them life.

What are you setting your hope on?

If you're ready to set your hope on Jesus, he's ready.

He's waiting.

But for the rest of us, for those of us that have believed, you've probably got some dry, empty canals in your life.

Some religious activity that you used to do or that you've been doing for a long time.

But does it have, does that canal have water in it?

Do you have, like John said, I write these things that you may believe so that you have life in his name?

Are the things you're doing, is your church attendance, is your Bible reading, is your singing, is your listening to sermons, are you getting any life from it?

Have you internalized it?

Are you just got a little tiny spoon taste of it?

Or have you actually bought it and tasted and ingested it?

Have you hidden God's word in your heart?

Are you just being religious?

Do you want life in his name again?

Let's think about these things together.

Let's pray.

Lord, we just want to take some time and let your Holy Spirit do the work of helping us understand and receive your word.

We want to absorb what we've heard today.

We want to understand what we've heard today.

And we want to be changed by what we've heard today.

So, Lord, I pray for people this morning that that they just showed up because somebody drugged them to church today.

Lord, you have them here for a reason.

You have them here for a purpose.

So I pray that you would just show them that they can believe there's something worth believing in, and you're ready.

Lord, for those here this morning that they've just got caught up in a pattern of empty, dead religion, of reading the Bible but not seeing Jesus in it, of finding more value from the words of men than from the word of the Father.

Let's take a few moments and as Lindsay just plays, and let's think about this together.

Lord, of all your works that you spoke of, the one you spoke of most was getting people to believe in the one that God had sent.

And Lord, we want to be a people of belief, not just that throw the word belief around because we talk of it like a duty, but we want to be people that think of belief as a privilege.

As something as the man that he finds a pearl in a field, and he sells, he finds a treasure in a field, and he sells everything he can to buy that field because he knows that it's worth it.

And so, Lord, we found something today that's worth it.

Something that's worth more than anything the world has to offer.

And we're still tempted by the world.

We're still tempted by the words of others.

We're still tempted by our own hidden secret sins.

So, Lord, we pray that you would tear down the strongholds that are that are in us.

And that you would take us back to the treasure, take us back to the living water, and take us back to you.

Pray all this in Jesus' name.

And God's people said, Amen.

Well, I want to thank you for being here today.

If there's anything that's been said today that you have questions about or that stirred up something in you, I want you to know we always have our pastors and elders uh down here at the front of the stage to talk about that with.

So if you have anything that stirred up with you from uh the singing today or the sermon, uh we would love to process that with you.

Also, uh, if this is your first, second, third time, you've been coming to our church, uh, we would love for you to come down and just introduce yourself to one of us.

We want to know uh that you're here so we can just get to know you.

Because you, like I said earlier, you matter to Jesus, you matter to us.

So thank you.

Um let me invite you to stand together and hold your hands out like this.

The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.

May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

And may you know that the Jesus that you've always been looking for and that you've always been expected is far outweighed by the Jesus you need.

He came to save you.

So believe him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Bless you, you're dismissed.