Too Familiar | The Gospel of John & Rooted [Part 1 of 8] | Nathan Lawson

Headphones, I'm a professional. And man, I can search with the best of them, like Indiana Jones.

I mean, I'm looking in jeans pockets. I'm looking at counters.

I'm going in rooms that we don't even use just in case, like it's migrated in there.

And it's not successful. So I call, you know, the unquestionable source of authority

for such things, my wife.

And like, she comes in the kitchen and looks at the counter and says, you mean those keys?

And I'm looking down and there they are. Like same keys, same counter, same reality.

But different perspective. You see, it's not that the keys were hidden and nobody moved them.

It's not even that I was being careless. It's that I was convinced.

I was convinced I'd already looked on that counter, probably.

And I was convinced I already knew what they look like. I was so convinced that

I couldn't see something right in front of me.

Now, between now and Easter, we're going to be walking through the Gospel of John.

And for a lot of us, this is pretty familiar territory, the gospel of John.

When you see like John 3.16 on the face of an athlete or somewhere out on a

poster somewhere, you don't have to look it up.

You already know what that means. For God so loved the world, he sent his only son.

And now we love it when we see on the face of a younger person or a new Christian

that wonder and excitement of hearing a story for the first time,

that look on their face that things have changed and kind of embracing that story.

But for a lot of us, when we hear the gospel story, it's not our first time,

and it doesn't feel with wonder. It feels safe.

We kind of already know how this story goes. We're pretty sure that,

you know, we already know the gospel, and so we may not be tempted to read and follow along,

which is why when I was preparing for this message and going into John's gospel

chapter one, I came across something that startled me. It says this in verse 11.

It says, He came to that which was his own, but his own didn't receive him.

If you take a step back, that's a pretty surprising sentiment.

The verse right before it makes total sense, right?

Even though the world was made through him, the world didn't recognize him.

And we're like, well, obviously.

I mean, come on. It's the world. It's broken. They're confused.

They're running on all kinds of distractions. You know what they're like.

Of course they didn't know him.

But he came to that which was his own, and they didn't receive him.

These are people who knew the scriptures.

They knew God's promises. They were waiting and watching for the Messiah,

but why didn't they see him?

I mean, these aren't pagans. These aren't like skeptics who are not so sure.

These are people who are convinced.

They have worship songs anticipating this. They had expectations of how God

was going to move, and maybe that's part of the problem.

You see, when we have really clear expectations, when we're convinced that we

know how God is already going to move, then it's easy for us to miss when God actually does move.

You see, we don't always see it that God is doing something that perhaps didn't

conform to our expectations.

You see, the danger for the church as we read this story is that I think what

John wants us to do is he's turning that camera around and he's not telling

us a story about those people, about Rome, about that culture.

He's talking about us.

The danger in our churches for most of us is not that we don't believe in Jesus.

It's that we're convinced that we already know this story so well. We know Jesus fully.

We've settled on a version of Jesus that fits our expectations.

And when we come across things that maybe don't fit in that,

we just kind of disregard if it doesn't fit our framework, our political agenda,

our paradigm, and things that would disrupt or seem to confuse.

We kind of footnote those out of the story.

We are not really ready or looking for things that would challenge our assumption.

You see, if we're not careful as we start this story of the gospel,

we end up not trying to follow Jesus, but hijacking him and trying to get him to follow us.

And in doing so, we run the risk of not just because we don't believe him,

but because we think we already know.

It's one of the reasons that I'm excited that a lot of you have signed up to do a rooted group.

Not because you're more spiritual than other people, but because you needed to create some space.

Now, for some of you, this is brand new. This is a new experience.

You're going to get to feel what it's like to kind of be in a group of people

who are kind of dropping all kinds of pretense.

And they're just going to bring real struggles and they're going to be honest

and drop that performance.

They're going to allow the truth of Scripture to be things that we wrestle with

in conversation with our real lives.

But for lots of us, this isn't our first experience.

There's a lot of things you would recognize that you already know,

but there's also going to be some things that you knew once,

but perhaps need to be reminded of.

My wife and I, when we go on trips as a family, us and my bazillion children,

we're loading up in a literal commercial-sized vehicle, and it's chaos, as you can imagine.

And we'll look at each other at some point, and one of us will say,

now, are we forgetting anything?

Which on the surface is the dumbest question. If we knew what we were forgetting,

that would not be forgotten. Like, how can you know what you're forgetting?

But somehow the question still works. You know, you just kind of walk around

the kitchen saying, wait a minute, what are we forgetting? and you're saying,

I don't know what I'm looking for. I just know something is missing.

And one of us will say, I'll know it when I see it.

And you do. Out of the corner of the eye, you say, wait a minute,

we needed that charger or don't forget the motion sick pills or whatever it

is. You're gonna know it when you see it.

You see the good news for all of us, even if you're not in a group,

is that as we walk through the gospel of John, there's gonna be all kinds of

things that we can discover or learn in this gospel story. there is going to

be some truths that we perhaps needed to be reminded of.

John is going to tell us an amazing account, his rendition of this story of

how Jesus changes the world.

Now, when he starts his gospel story here in John chapter 1,

John 1 · chapter mention

he is not going to begin in Bethlehem.

There's no angels, there's no shepherd, no Herod. He says, no,

no, no, you got to go back before that.

He's going to say, you got to go further back than even prophets like Isaiah,

who 700 years before kind of looked forward to a suffering servant who would

take punishment that would lead to our own peace and restoration.

He says, no, no, no, no, no. You got to go further back than that.

Even before God is directed by Moses to lead his people from slavery in Egypt

out into the freedom toward the promised land. And he says, no,

no, no. We got to start the story way before that.

Even before Abraham, there on Mount Moriah, where God provides a substitute

for a sacrificed son. And John says, no, no, no, you don't understand.

We have to go way before that.

If you want to understand the story I'm telling, John says, you got to go back

to the beginning, the very beginning.

The part of the Bible that says in the beginning, God created the heavens and

the earth, the very beginning.

That's what John wants us to do in that first verse. In the beginning was the

word and the word was with God and the word was God.

He was with God in the beginning and all things were made through him.

What a way to start. Write that back in Genesis when God speaks and there's light.

Now, in my group this week, we got to walk back through that first chapter of

Genesis and pick up on all kinds of nuances we hadn't seen in years about how

God is interacting with creation.

And God calls out to the ground and says, make trees. And the ground's like,

okay, I'm going to make trees.

And it's interacting. There's this unfolding where God is going from chaos to order.

He's bringing about an environment where life can thrive. And he looks at creation

and he says, it is very good.

You see, the first thing that John wants us to tell us is that the gospel story

can't fit into the neat mold we sometimes want to squeeze it into.

That sometimes when we tell the gospel story, we want to act like it's God showing

up into the house of our lives. And he goes back into that back closet we don't

want to talk about where things are dirty and shameful.

And he wants to clean it out so you can find forgiveness and not live in shame. And that's true.

It's just only a part of the story. God doesn't want to stop there.

You see, when Genesis tells the story of creation, he talks about the fallenness

of humanity, how Adam and Eve sin, and when they bring sin into the world,

it breaks, everything is fractured.

But it also means that that story is not just about the fact that sin breaks

our relationship with God.

It's about how sin breaks all of creation, and now all of creation is longing

to be restored for the revealing of God's people.

You see, as we're starting the story that John that wants to tell us about Jesus

in the beginning was the word.

That if creation was very good, then salvation isn't about escaping it.

This is going to be a story about how God is going to reclaim it. All of it.

That a lot of us, when we first come to church or join a group,

we come to God and say, God, I have this problem.

I want you to fix this thing that's just not working. It's broken.

And God says, I don't want to just fix that one thing.

I want to fix all of it. I want to fix all of you.

When you look at the things that we talk about in Rudin and discipleship,

they're really the same principles that have been a part of discipleship at

Northside for, well, this church has been around a hundred years,

but it goes back to the very beginning, what it's always meant to follow God's people.

It is about our whole lives finding a new rhythm.

Because that's really what we're talking about, transforming not just a piece

of you, but your desires and your love and loves and your relationships,

your vocation and your dreams and hopes for the future.

Yes, even the garden in your backyard is going to be affected by a gospel story.

In the beginning, he says, was the word.

John tells us this story of creation, this story where God is going to invite

us to be part of the renewal of all things, where he starts by redeeming our

lives in our lostness, but then bringing us on his mission to restore the world.

But as we read through this chapter in John, if you get down to verse six,

it will say things that says, you know, the kind of gospel story we're telling

is that light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

Make no mistake, there is a reality that John points to that we see throughout the Bible.

It doesn't shy away from human brokenness, the selfishness and violence that

leads to people being abused and systems where money is of higher value than human life.

It's going to describe the consequences of when we make choices that just harm

people around us, that that selfishness and that brokenness is described as darkness.

But the wonderful part of the gospel story is God doesn't sit back and just

say, well, You're getting what you deserve.

No, it says the gospel is a story where God initiates. That just like in Genesis,

when it says God spoke and there was light, this is going to be a story where

God sends light to shine light in the darkness, that God sent his son in the world.

God is going to initiate. The story never starts with us, always with God taking that first move.

Jesus shows up and very often does not conform to our expectations.

You're going to see a Jesus in John's gospel, that from the very earliest chapters,

he's going to cleanse out the temple, confrontation with religious leaders and

family, and yes, even our own expectations.

You're just going to have times where the people in this story are thinking,

well, I thought God was going to do this, or why was this man born blind?

And Jesus is going to be like, I'm going to change how you think about what

it means to honor Sabbath rest, what it means that God, how God interacts with

suffering in the world, and on and on the list goes, disrupting perhaps our

own agendas that we might want to bring to God.

That as we start this story, you may come in with your own assumptions and you're

saying, God, here's my plans. I want you to bless them.

God, here's my things that I want you to fix and do. But instead, God shows up to disrupt.

I came to church today knowing who the enemies are and what you should probably

do about it. I just wanted to make sure I brought it to your attention.

And God disrupts the whole framework of how we're thinking about those others in the world.

He reframes and redefines our place within it, our own brokenness and culpability,

even as we have contributed to the own problems in society, not just those people.

Jesus disrupts everything. What you're going to see is that discipleship is

going to be that voice that stops asking, like when it was early in rooted or

other things like that, I've said what you've probably said before,

which is, I don't know how I'm going to fit this into my schedule.

I mean, this is a, we got to do this questions every day. And then I've got

to find a night of the week that's free. And how am I going to fit God into my life?

But as you go through it, what you're going to find is the opposite is eventually

going to become the case. Real transformation is going to happen.

Not when we try to say, how do I fit God into my life? When I start saying,

God, how do I fit my life into what you are already doing in the world?

And my hope is you're reading through, whether it's rooted or reading through

the gospel of John, that you'll find some answers to some questions that you

may have had or been wrestling with about faith and about life.

But even more than that, I hope that some of the questions that you find rising

out of the text, that the Bible is actually asking you some questions that you didn't even expect.

They just caught you. They're blindsiding you. Wait a minute.

If that's true, then what does that mean for me? What does that mean I should

be doing? we're going to allow this text to not just answer our questions, but ask some in return.

The last thing I want to look at in this gospel story is going to be down in verse 14.

Remember in verse 1, John wants to root the story of the gospel in all of creation

and the renewal of all things, that the same one who formed the entire universe,

the same one that made the individual forms of life as we know it and gave purpose to all things.

In verse 14, it says that same word became flesh and made his dwelling among

us, that we have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only son who came

from the father, full of grace and truth.

I like the way that Peterson, Eugene Peterson's The Message translation puts it.

It says, the word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.

That the word, that cosmic force that put all things into being took up particular

space right near us to what we could see and taste and touch.

What an incredible story. But it also says that it comes full of grace and truth, full of both.

You see, if truth had just showed up, that truth that this is the way the world

was, that God's divine presence, this is the way things ought to be,

he could have given us a list saying, this is what human beings were expected to do.

And he gave us a bullet point list on how we are falling short.

And it would be accurate, but it would be crushing.

And again, God could show up and he could just have suffered grace and just

said, hey, I just want you to know that I am a God who offers forgiveness and

let's not worry about justice.

But then that would be ignoring violence and real broken things that need to be put back right.

Some of the relationships that you're living in right now, if I told you just

to not worry about it, to overlook it, there is hurt there that needs to not

just be forgiven, but healed and put back right.

That you need grace, but you also need truth to put it back in its place.

And what we see that when Jesus shows up and John's explaining it,

he's saying, look, it's not even 50% grace and 50% truth.

It's not even that moderation in all things. It's a ridiculous amount of both.

It's 100% full of grace and 100% full of truth.

You see, truth, if we study, and maybe you've been in churches yourself,

have you gone through the Bible?

Truth is that voice that is kind of echoing as you're reading through it saying,

you've got to get it together. You know, you should have been doing a lot better by now, honestly.

I mean, are we really having these same struggles? I mean, come on.

Like, you should be doing more. I just want you to know I am disappointed in

you. And the problem with truth is it's right. We should be further along.

It is crushing and debilitating.

And if we're just reading the Bible, looking for that grace and that healing

and that puts its arms around us and says, you know what, don't change anything.

You're just good the way you are, but we keep being hurt and hurting others.

And full of grace and truth says both things.

It has to take on flesh because it has to show up alongside of us and says,

Jesus is going to say in this gospel that I love you more than you could possibly

imagine before you have done anything to deserve it.

I already love you more than you can comprehend.

But so much so that we're not going to stay here because we're going to walk

together toward the life that you were created to live.

100% grace and 100% truth.

You see, that's what the word that we call discipleship is meant to be,

where both can function at the same time.

Where we create these spaces where truth can reveal distortions and lies and

things that we've been doing to contribute to brokenness that were based on

delusion and hurting others, and that truth can come out and not just lead us toward shame.

We can let it expose some things that need to be said, some ways that we thought

because we got it from movies in the world that are just wrong,

but it can expose that, but without shame and guilt.

Because right there is also going to be 100% grace. Grace that can heal,

but not just the kind of healing that comes from denial or minimizing or saying it wasn't a big deal.

Truth can say it was terrible, some of the things I did.

But grace is also saying, but it doesn't have to stay that way.

Things can be put back right you see

when both of those are working together it is that life those slow small steps

that we're making not just one day not just one week but a steady obedience

in the same direction it is when instead of fitting gods into my life i begin

to wrap my life into what he is already doing.

Now, I'm going to be honest with you that we were not expecting when we wrote

this series to be at home during a winter storm. This was not on the forecast.

We were sitting there even on Tuesday wondering if this was even going to be the case.

This was, to put it mildly, outside of our expectations.

But what a perfect way to begin the Gospels. That God is going to show up in

living rooms, streamed, not because you had planned it and had it on your schedule,

but because God often doesn't conform to the places we thought.

And maybe you didn't think you'd be here on Wednesday nights six months ago.

You wouldn't have imagined yourself in a circle of people talking about things

that you just would never have been comfortable talking about.

And yet here you are breaking your own expectations and allowing God to change yours.

I can promise, even if you're reading through the Gospels or working through

Rooted, that God is going to reveal some things in your life that are truly life-changing.

That God's going to bring about some changes that are going to make all the

difference, where redemption is going to be possible. I can promise you it is going to happen.

I can't tell you though, what specific verse it's going to be.

And I can't tell you which particular Sunday it's going to happen.

And I don't know which night or which morning of homework.

I don't know when it's going to be perhaps not even the homework,

but when you're sitting in a circle in your group, like I was hearing in many

others who had their first meetings already, who didn't write it down,

but they heard somebody else say something.

And they said, I'd forgotten about that.

That's true for me too that's exactly how I felt when I started following God

I don't know when it's going to happen but I can tell you it will happen and

you'll know it when you see it.

Now, at this time, if you have the resources at your home and maybe you're gathered

there with a few other people, you could take something that could bread somewhere

that would represent that God wanted us to know,

that the truth of the gospel wasn't just meant to stay up here as ideas,

but it was meant to land in the kind of places that you could taste and you

could see and you could touch.

So you're going to take that bread and remember that God's own brokenness was

there to remind you that you were not designed to live in sin and shame and

isolation, that no mistake puts you outside of the reach of a gospel arm,

which the arm of the Lord is never too short to save.

And you are going to discover not just the idea, but the experience that God's

forgiveness comes close. It moves into the neighborhood.

And you're going to take a cup and you're going to remember that his blood was

poured out for you. And it's called the blood of a new covenant.

Covenant is that word in the Bible that we sometimes use when we describe a marriage or a family.

That we don't just think about God's brokenness and the forgiveness he gives,

but also this new covenant promise that God wanted you to be part of his people.

He wanted your sense of humor and your talents and your gifts to be used to

say, I want you as a part of my family.

You're going to take that bread and that cup, and you're going to hold them

together and say, in the beginning was the Word, but the Word this morning in

my living room has come close,

moved into the neighborhood, and we're going to experience the glory of the

Father through the glory of the one and only Son who comes from the Father,

full of grace and truth. Would you pray with me?

Dear God, for all those who are gathered, both around the peninsula and around the world.

God, we are humbled to get to follow, not to always the places that we predetermined,

to the agendas that we've already written, but God, we choose to follow wherever you would lead us.

So God, whether it is beginning of a rooted study, a first time being in a group,

or one of many Bible studies, whether this is the first time reading through

the gospel of John or one of many, God, may you give us fresh eyes to see.

God, may that which is familiar not blind us to the amazing work that you are

doing both now and God in the weeks ahead.

Help us as a people prepare our hearts for Easter. In the name of your son,

we pray, amen. Thanks for listening.