"True Followers Trust Jesus" (Salter) | John 7:1-24

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A reading from John chapter seven, verses one through twenty four.

After this, Jesus went about in Galilee.

He would not go about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him.

Now the Jews' feast of booths was at hand.

So his brothers said to him, Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing.

For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly.

If you do these things, show yourself to the world.

For not even his brothers believed in him.

Jesus said to them, My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.

The world cannot hate you, but it hates me, because I testify about it, that its works are evil.

You go up to the feast.

I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.

After saying this he remained in Galilee, but after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly, but in private.

The Jews were looking for him at the feast and saying, Where is he?

And there was much muttering about him among the people, while some said he is a good man, others said no, he is leading the people astray.

Yet for fear of the Jews no one spoke openly of him.

About the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and began teaching.

The Jews therefore marveled, saying, How is it that this man has learning when he has never studied?

So Jesus answered them, My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.

If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.

The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory, but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood.

Has not Moses given you the law?

Yet none of you keeps the law.

Why do you seek to kill me?

The crowd answered, You have a demon who is seeking to kill you?

Jesus answered them, I did one work, and you all marvel at it.

Moses gave you circumcision, not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers, and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.

If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me?

Because on the Sabbath I made a man's whole body well?

Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Please be seated.

Well, it's good to be back in the Gospel of John.

And we'll be here this fall, continuing our way through John after having summer in the Psalms.

Look forward to studying and watching our Lord Jesus throughout this gospel.

Let me pray for us as we prepare to hear God's word.

Father, these words of Jesus can be hard to understand.

But we are asking for your Holy Spirit, and we're thankful that because we have your Spirit, we know we can understand them and have them apply right to our heart right now.

And so it's with that expectancy and that hope that we pray that you, Father, by your Spirit, would attend to your word so that as it goes forth, we would be led to repentance, to deeper faith, and to greater actions and fruit for the sake of your name.

Come speak, Lord.

Your servants are listening.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, the last time we were together in this gospel, we watched a crowd walk out on Jesus.

Before the summer, back in chapter 5 of John, he healed a man on the Sabbath.

And instead of wonder, it put blood into the water, as it were.

He had broken their Sabbath regulations, and then he called God my Father.

From that day on, the leaders wanted Jesus dead.

Hold on to that, as it's the first line we read this morning in chapter 7.

The Jews were seeking to kill him.

In chapter 6 of John, the crowds swelled around a miraculous feeding, and they wanted to crown him.

And he refused.

Instead, he said, I am the bread of life.

And then he said this hard word unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.

And the crowd that had chased him for bread now drifted away.

The text in John 6 says, Many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.

The bread was easy to want, but Jesus, when you really heard him, was not.

When the teaching got hard, most of those who were following him were gone.

Only the twelve stayed.

So many have left him at the end of chapter six.

And now in chapter seven, two groups completely miss him.

Now, before we decide we would have done better, we would not have missed him, I want you to look closely this morning that the people who miss Jesus in this passage are not the obvious sinners.

They're his own family.

And they're the most religious people in the land.

That's who misses him.

So this morning I want us to watch for three things.

A true follower of Jesus, those who truly stay with him and remain with him, must learn to trust.

His timing, his teaching, his verdict.

All three of those are a way of trusting one person.

So let's start with his timing.

Trust his timing.

Verses 1 through 5 begin this section.

After this, Jesus went about in Galilee, verses 1 through 2.

He would not go about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him.

Now the Jews' feast of booths was at hand.

Very important.

This is one of the three major pilgrimage feasts.

They were remembering when they were wandering.

And God provided for them.

It's in this moment of this feast that everybody's going up to that his brothers now think that it's time for them to give him advice.

Which sounds a bit supportive on the surface, verse 3.

So his brother said to him, Leave here and go to Judea.

That your disciples also may see the works you're doing.

For no one who works in secret, if he seeks to be known openly, if you do these things, show yourself to the world.

You know what they're saying.

Jesus, go public.

It's time.

Let's go up to Judea.

Let everybody see your works.

Show yourself to the world.

It sounds like family looking out for family, but it's actually not, because listen to how John ends the sentence in verse 5.

For not even his brothers believed in him.

Their counsel is the world's counsel.

I want you to know it's the same voice that Jesus heard in the wilderness.

Turn the stones to bread.

Leap from the temple.

Take the kingdoms by a shortcut.

It's the same voice.

They're close to Jesus, but they're mired in unbelief because they make the world's applause the real God.

They want Jesus to go public for their sake.

That's our brother.

That's what you see, and they're saying, now they wanted Jesus only as useful to them.

They wanted Jesus for their reputation and for their status.

They did not yet want Jesus, the person.

So here stands Jesus and his brothers, looking at the same feast and the same crowds, streaming up to Jerusalem, the same stage, and they read the times in exactly opposite ways.

And I was reminded of that as this past Friday night we watched this great movie called Pressure.

And it's the story of when this sort of thing happened at another time as two armies faced each other on the same stretch of gray water.

Two armies seeking to read the times.

The invasion was set for June 5th, 1944, but a storm rolled into the channel.

And Eisenhower's weatherman, James Stagg, found a narrow, unlikely break over June 6.

And despite a forecast he couldn't prove, Eisenhower gave the order and said, Let's go.

Across the channel, the Germans read the skies and the times differently.

They concluded there would be a storm and no invasion was possible.

And General Rommel went home for his wife's birthday.

Both sides trying to read the times, but only one was right.

See, the brothers are reading the times.

They're reading it through the lens of fame and their own selfish interests go public.

But Jesus is reading the times they cannot see because they're his father's times.

He does not judge his own times.

So in verse 6, he says to them this, verses 6 through 8.

But your time is always here.

The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil.

You go up to the feast.

I'm not going to this feast, for my time has not yet come.

My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.

In other words, his brothers can go up whenever they please because nothing they do carries the weight of heaven's guidance.

It only has to do with their selfishness.

So they can go up at any time.

But he says that he is guided by a different time.

Jesus moves on a different schedule.

He's not going to hold back to save himself.

He is always exactly on his time because his time is his father's time.

Eventually, he's going to go up to Jerusalem.

And it's going to be public.

And he's not going to be crowned.

He's going to be crucified.

Because that was his father's timing.

Not applause and fame.

He would go when it's time to die.

And so verse 9 says, after saying this, he remained in Galilee.

But then verse 10 makes you kind of shake your head.

But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up.

What's going on here?

Key, right here.

Not publicly, but in private.

Jesus goes quietly.

He is not going to be the spectacle that his brothers want.

And listen to the crowd in verse 11 and 12.

The Jews were looking for him at the feast and saying, Where is he?

Verse 12.

There was much muttering about him among the people.

Some said he's a good man.

Others said, no, he's leading the people astray.

Some say he's a good man.

Others say he's leading people astray.

But notice the verb describes what they're doing.

They're muttering.

This is the great irony of this text.

They are celebrating the feast of booths when God provided for them in the wilderness.

Do you remember what the people of God did in the wilderness?

They muttered.

It's the exact same word.

They grumbled.

What did they grumble against?

Mana from heaven.

Now, here as they celebrate God's past provision in the wilderness, they are simply repeating the story.

They are grumbling against what?

Not manna from heaven, the bread of life who came down from heaven.

They are grumbling against the very provision himself.

They can't see.

And then some people say, well, he's a good man.

I want to tell you, if you say Jesus is a good man, that's not saving faith.

Because you can admire Jesus and you can stand near Jesus at the feast, but you will still be nothing more than the crowd.

This is way more than about being a good man.

So you see all these readings and the inability to see, and the brothers are seeing with their own eyes through their own lens of self, and Jesus is on his Father's timing.

So the first question in this passage is this Is my interest in Jesus really an interest in what he can do for me?

In just what he can, in the ways that he can be useful to me.

You see, when we are go there, guess what we impose on Jesus?

Our timing.

You got to be useful for me on my terms.

And Jesus is not that kind of one that we follow.

He is on his father's timing.

So a true follower, trust his timing.

Even when the answer is wait, even when the way up turns out to be down, we trust him.

Why?

Because we want him.

We don't just want to use him.

And that's what the preoccupation of timing through the lens of self shows us.

So the same crowd that could not read his clock cannot place his authority either.

If they stumble over when he arrives and when he goes public, now they stumble next as he teaches.

True disciples trust his teaching.

Look at verses 14 through 15.

About the middle of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple and began teaching.

See, the public spectacle that his disciples wanted was the fireworks.

Do some more of that stuff with the loaves and fish.

Do some more of those healings.

Do some more stuff where you just heal somebody by saying a word and somebody in another town gets well.

Do that.

We don't really want you to teach.

Do some stuff.

But Jesus goes up to teach.

Verse 15, the Jews therefore marveled, saying, How is it that this man has learning when he's never studied?

Halfway through the feast, Jesus stands up in the temple and teaches, and the response is not worship.

It's suspicion.

They don't trust his teaching.

They're asking, how much does this man, how does this man know so much when he never studied?

He holds no office.

He sat under no famous rabbi.

And so from a safe distance, they weigh him, they run his numbers, they run his credentials, and they won't trust him.

This reminds me of a similar bafflement in the movie, if you've seen it, Goodwill Hunting.

A professor chalks a graph theory problem on a hallway board, the kind meant to occupy graduate students all semester.

But overnight, a janitor mopping the floor stops, solves it, and walks off.

The professor assumes vandalism until he checks the math, and then he goes, I'm left with two things I can't reconcile.

The work and the solution is right.

And the man doing it's a janitor named Will?

With a police record and no degree, and none of the schooling that's supposed to guarantee this sort of math?

That's what the crowd's doing.

They can't reconcile Jesus and his authority with his teaching.

His teaching's real, but they go, he has no credentials.

I want you to know that Jesus, though, does not answer the way Will would in that movie.

Will's answer in that movie is the answer of every prodigy.

I'm brilliant.

And I don't need your schools.

That's not what Jesus says.

Look at verse 16.

So Jesus answered them, My teaching's not mine, but his who sent me.

You remember long ago God promised a prophet like Moses?

One into whose mouth God Himself would put his very words.

Here he is.

Jesus, with that statement, is saying, I'm the one you've heard about that would speak like Moses.

I'm the one who comes from my Father.

I speak with a different authority source.

Unlike Will in that movie, Jesus is not a self-taught genius with an original idea to sell.

He speaks only what the Father gives him.

And then he tells them how they can know it is true.

Look at verse 17.

If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.

Do you want to know if you can trust his teaching?

It's not enough to just think about how to weigh all the evidence.

But if your will is to do God's will, then you'll know.

That's what he says.

A will surrendered to God is a will that can finally recognize his voice.

It is not earned by obeying, but it is seen.

You can finally hear him.

Once you stop fighting him.

Think of the first time someone tried to teach you to float in the water.

Everything in a beginner's body says the same thing fight the water.

Lift up your head.

Stiffen up, thrash for the surface, and you sink.

And the instructor's word feels like a dare.

Stop fighting.

Tip your head back.

Let the water take your weight.

And you come to know that the water will hold you only at the moment you stop trying to hold yourself up.

That's when you come to know.

It holds me.

Because I stopped trying to hold myself up.

See, the knowing arrives on the far side of surrender.

That's Jesus' point.

You learn his word the way you learn the water holds you.

You cannot stay on the edge of the pool.

You must trust your life to him.

When you trust your life to him and surrender, you realize his voice is true.

His voice is real.

I can let go and rest the entirety of my life on everything he says.

And then Jesus lays bare the difference between a false teacher and a true one in verse 18.

The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory, but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood.

Do you realize that a self-made teacher cannot help but angle for applause?

Because his name is bound up with how the people receive the message.

You see, if I come to you to preach, and it's about me, then my angle will be for you to all receive it and applaud and like me.

Because who's it about?

It's about me.

But if I come to you on the authority of another who is true, I am bound to say what he told me to say from his word, whether you receive it or not, has nothing to do with me because this is about him.

You see how that distinguishes this in verse 18?

The one who seeks the glory of the God, the other who sent him tells the truth, and nothing in him is false, because he speaks for another.

And Jesus wants only his father's honor, and that's why you and I can trust him.

Here the passenger, the passage turns and looks at us, and here it is.

Listen.

Whose glory are we seeking this week in the things we say and do in Jesus' name?

A true follower trust his teaching.

Because it is not his own invention.

It's the Father's word.

His family and the religious leaders.

I want you to see something they have in common.

They are both committed to self-glory.

They're different.

Brothers and religious leaders, what's in common?

They are both committed to self-glory.

They teach as ones without authority, just for the applause of man.

The brothers say go public for their own glory.

But to remain and trust and follow him means we surrender to his truth and we live for his glory.

It's a surrendered life.

Then you see that, you know, there's one more thing this crowd can't accept.

They can almost stomach a teacher without a diploma, but they can't stomach a verdict that overturns their perceived righteousness.

This when it gets hot.

We've got to trust his verdict.

Jesus goes on the offensive.

Verse 19.

Has not Moses given you the law?

Yet none of you keeps the law.

Why do you seek to kill me?

Standing in the very crowd in the temple, all tore up about the law, are men plotting the death of an innocent man.

Do you see that?

This is about as plain as you can break the sixth commandment.

But they're up in arms over Jesus' supposed breaking of the fourth commandment.

And as he speaks these words to them, you know what he's doing?

He's exposing their false righteousness, their unrighteousness, and they cannot stand it.

You know that happens to us, right?

When I'm leaning on myself and you expose my false righteousness or my unrighteousness, I can't stand it.

The crowd answered in verse 20, You have a demon who is seeking to kill you.

And the people so certain of their law, they cannot receive his verdict that they have murder in their own hearts.

They will not trust his judgment.

And then Jesus brilliantly reaches back to the one work that started all this on the Sabbath when he healed a man who had been lame for 38 years.

Jesus said, I did one work, verse 21.

One work, and you all marvel at it.

Moses gave you circumcision.

Not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers.

And you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.

If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man's whole body well?

I want to explain the logic of Jesus' verdict because it's kind of complicated.

And you've heard it now for a second time this morning.

You may be going, I don't understand what he's saying.

That's my job.

I'm going to try to help you.

The law says this circumcise a boy on the eighth day.

And when that day, the eighth day, is a Sabbath day, do it anyway.

Because keeping the covenant command was never something the Sabbath was meant to stop.

Keeping Sabbath was never meant to stop the keeping of God's commands.

So if the eighth day lands on the Sabbath, there's a superseding reality to obey God's law.

Do you see that?

So Jesus then presses the point that if you may circumcise one part of a boy on the Sabbath, why does it enrage you that I made a whole man well on the Sabbath?

You see, he's trying to expose to them, you love the letter of the law, but you miss the heart of the law.

You prefer your righteousness to God's holiness.

Isn't that a temptation for all of us?

Love the letter of the law and miss the heart of the law?

Think about this, another illustration.

A fire engine runs a red light as a house burns at the end of the street.

Now imagine a man on the corner, indignant with his phone, dialing 911, calling the police, because the fire engine just ran a red light.

Is he technically right?

Yes, but he's completely wrong.

That red light is there to protect life.

And the engine that runs it to save life is not defying the heart of the law.

It's keeping it.

The man scolding the rule break is opposed to the very nature of the intended rescue.

That's Jesus' point.

Verse 24.

Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.

He lands the whole thing on a single command, and they cannot see beyond their precious little law and their prideful righteousness.

Do you see what it caused you to miss Jesus?

When we make up our own laws and love them like our precious little law.

And when we think we have a righteousness on our own.

Those two things, and you'll miss Jesus right before you.

The Sabbath was made for restoration.

Jesus is not breaking the law that day.

He's keeping it in the way it was always meant to be kept.

He's pointing forward to the day God, at the ultimate Sabbath rest will make his people what?

Whole.

And they miss him.

Because all they see is you ran a red light.

And they couldn't see the rescue and the restoration that he's pointing to.

Right judgment is not a technique you master, it is the sight, a heart of faith is given.

You can't judge rightly until you're born again.

And in that new birth, you realize I don't have a righteousness on my own.

I don't have a life on my own.

I don't even understand what is true.

But when he wakes you up suddenly, you trust his timing and you trust his teaching, and you're able to trust his verdict about your unrighteousness and your love of your little laws.

And you stop judging by surface and credentials and success and what's respectable.

You see, two very different crowds miss Jesus in chapter 7.

And underneath they turn out to be just the same.

His brothers wanted to use him, and the leaders wanted to get rid of him.

One group was thrilled by his miracles, the other was threatened by them.

And underneath, as I've said, underneath missing Jesus was the pursuit of their own glory.

And I want you to know that is the root of all unbelief.

I want my glory, my way in my time.

To use Jesus' to seek your own glory, to oppose Jesus is to seek your own glory, but to receive Jesus is to seek his.

Faith is not admiring him.

Faith is not fighting him, it's receiving him.

Glad at last to hand God the glory we spend our whole lives keeping for ourselves.

You see, pride is the refusal of grace, but faith is gladness in the God of grace.

And a true follower does not seek to manage Jesus.

He does not resist Jesus.

He trusts him.

He trusts his timing.

He trusts his teaching, and he trusts his verdict.

So that's the call today.

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for showing us even a hint of ourselves in this passage with the brothers and the religious leaders, and thank you for the truth of Jesus' teaching.

Help us receive your verdict about us and our unrighteousness and our false righteousness and our self-glory and our love of our timing, over the Father's timing, all those things that cause us to miss you.

Help us trust you.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.