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

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Please stand for a reading from John chapter 7, verses 1 through 24.

John 7:1–24

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 Boose 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 is much more 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, Jews Jesus went up to 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 any 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 was 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.

Please be seated.

Well, good morning.

My name's Chad Middlebrooks.

I add my uh welcome to Aaron's.

And uh we, as you noticed in this passage, it's been a couple of months since we left John's gospel and we took a detour in the Psalms for the summer.

And honestly, I think John probably understands that because after all, six months of time passes between John chapter 6, where we left off back in May, and John chapter 7, where we're picking up this morning, while Jesus just stays in Galilee with no explanation.

John 6 · chapter mention John 7 · chapter mention

And so if John can take a six-month intermission without any so much as a footnote, I think we're okay to take a break and jump back in this morning.

So that's what we're doing.

So as we come back to John 7 that we just heard read, let's pray and we'll ask the Lord's blessing on our time this morning in his word.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we do come to you this morning as we are.

Tired, many of us, distracted, carrying more than we've even said out loud to others around us.

And so, Lord, we ask in this time as we come before your word that you would quiet our hearts, that you would clear our minds, that you would help us to set aside and even bring into this place all those things, so that you might speak into them by the power of your word.

So would you give us ears to listen and to hear and speak to us by your spirit in the way that only you can do.

And so, Lord, we know we are at your mercy, and we ask that you would come in power and make good on your promises.

And so do that now for the good of your people gathered.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

Most of us have a list somewhere.

Maybe it's mental, maybe it's literal.

And that is of things that we're still waiting for God to do.

A prayer that He is yet to answer, or door that has not opened for us yet, or a promise that just feels like it's kind of stalled.

And our passage opens with Jesus facing that exact pressure, being told by the people closest to him to stop waiting and to make something happen.

And Jesus' answer to his family members, it's worth our study and it's our attention this morning.

And so, as I mentioned, six months have passed since Jesus has healed a man at the pool of Bethesda back in John chapter 5, and that set in motion the people and the authorities in Jerusalem to try to seek out and find Jesus to put him to death for what he did.

John 5 · chapter mention

And Jesus stayed away from Judea ever since.

And now, more recently, if you'll remember two months ago when we were in John chapter 6, Jesus said that he's the bread of life, and he told them something that was kind of peculiar, and yet they struggled to wrestle with it and understand it.

John 6 · chapter mention

He said, You, in order to abide in me, you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood.

And many of those followers, when he said that, turned away from walking with him any longer.

This was a hard teaching.

And now the Feast of Tabernacles is approaching, where the week where Jerusalem remembers and they celebrate, in a sense, what God had done in providing for Israel in the wilderness.

And so Jesus' own brothers, they come to him with this plan.

And everything that happens in these 24 verses actually turns on a single question that they have to wrestle with and that we have to wrestle with this morning.

And that is, do you trust Jesus Christ?

As detailed in our outline, we're going to see that true followers of Jesus Christ are called to trust three things that are laid out in this passage.

True followers are called to trust his timing, his teaching, and his verdict.

So let's look at the first 13 verses here.

True followers trust Jesus' timing.

So his brothers boldly tell him to go up to Jerusalem for the feast and to stop operating in the shadows any longer.

Look at what they say.

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

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

John tells us why they say that to Jesus.

He says, not even his brothers believed in him.

Now that's not a passing comment.

And John's not describing a single bit of collapse in confidence by his brothers.

This was very settled unbelief.

But Jesus' response to his brothers doesn't defend himself.

He actually shifts the question entirely.

Look at what he says.

Meaning that because you are of the world, the world accepts you.

And so because you think like the world.

And Jesus is drawing a very stark line between the timetable set by human calculation and the timetable that is set by his father.

But his brother's plan, it's not unreasonable on the surface when you think about it.

They're basically saying, if you can do these things, Jesus, why don't you just go show everybody?

Make it known to everybody that you are who you say you are.

Seems like good advice.

But what it assumes is that Jesus owes the world a demonstration on their schedule.

And Jesus is not going to let anyone, not even his own family members, dictate the terms of his ministry.

And so Jesus stays behind and he sends his brothers on ahead.

But then he does decide to go on up, but he does it quietly and he does it on his own terms, arriving in a way that serves his father's purpose, not his brother's agenda.

John Calvin, commenting on this passage, he says that Christ teaches every believer here to wait on God's hour rather than trying to force it and manufacture it.

And Christ is showing his brothers and he's showing us that it's the Father's timing that governs the unfolding of his father's plans, not human strategy.

Most of us know the name Vincent Van Gogh, the famous artist, but did you know that he only sold one painting in his lifetime?

And before he took up painting full time, he actually failed as an art dealer, as a missionary, and as a school teacher.

He was actually dismissed from the mission field because they said he was too intense and too unpolished.

He didn't take up painting in full time until he was 27 years old, but in a 10-year span, he painted over 800 works of art.

And nearly none of them sold.

His father had actually hoped that he would take up another vocation, something that was more stable.

And his brother Theo actually supported him financially, not so much because he thought he had great talent, because he thought he couldn't make it without him supporting him.

Van Gogh died at 37 years old, convinced that the world would never see his giftedness and what he brought to the table through his art.

And he was exactly right about his lifetime.

But he was dead wrong about everything after it.

Because in the decades that followed, some of his work became some of the most valuable art in human history.

Now, his family members, they weren't cruel to him, they didn't hate him.

They simply weren't ready yet.

They judged what they saw, and the real thing took decades to actually recognize.

That's Jesus' brothers here.

And that's Jesus' response and his answer.

His brothers were not villains, they didn't hate their older brother.

They just weren't ready yet.

They were urging him to prove himself on their timetable because they couldn't see who was actually standing before them.

He didn't fit into their box.

And Jesus' refusal to be rushed, it wasn't stubbornness on his part, it was actually obedience to his father.

See, what's real doesn't always reveal itself on the schedule that someone else has set for it.

And throughout John's gospel, as we have seen and will continue to see, Jesus keeps pointing forward to my hour has not yet come.

We saw it back at the wedding of Cana in John chapter 2.

John 2 · chapter mention

His hour has not come yet here in John chapter 7.

John 7 · chapter mention

But then when we get to John chapter 12, he then says, the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

John 12 · chapter mention

The hour that he's referring to and refuses to be rushed towards the whole way through the gospel is the cross.

His brothers wanted this public unveiling on their timetable.

But what the Father's timetable was actually building towards was the laying down of the Son's life as a sacrifice.

And so the timing that we're asked to trust in this passage is the same timing that a few months later would nail Jesus to the cross for the redemption of sinners like you and me.

So where might this idea of the Lord's timing land for you this week?

Maybe it's a diagnosis that you received and you don't know what to do with it.

Maybe it's a job search that has not moved forward in the way that you had hoped.

Maybe it's a prodigal child that you've been praying for years, maybe even decades, to come back to the faith and they've yet to do so.

Or maybe it's a marriage that you've been waiting for God to fix in a timetable that you have set in your mind and God hasn't done it.

As a church, maybe it's an area of ministry that hasn't taken off like we'd hoped, and we're getting impatient for God to work and show up.

Where are we demanding that God moves on our timetable and we're quietly withholding trust from him until he actually does?

What would it look like practically this week to trust him, to obey him?

Even in those places where it seems like he is quiet and he's late.

Because if we look back through redemptive history, we see that God has never been late once.

He may not be early, but he's never been late.

We can trust his timing because it's perfect.

Now look at the second section in verses 14 through 18.

True followers are also called to trust not only his timing, but his teaching.

So about the midpoint of the feast, Jesus stops hiding and he teaches openly in the temple courts.

And the crowd's reaction to him is not so much about the content of what he's saying, but who is actually saying it.

Verse 15.

How is it that this man has learning when he's never studied?

That word behind learning there refers to the normal training that a recognized rabbi would receive from a recognized teacher who had all the credentials and all the experience and wisdom.

Nobody's disputing that Jesus is saying something of great substance here, but what unsettles them is that in their minds he doesn't have the right, he doesn't have the credentials to say what he's saying.

But Jesus' response, again, he doesn't defend his credentials.

He shifts the question just like he did with his brothers.

Verse 16, 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'm speaking on my own authority.

In other words, Jesus says the real test is not pedigree, it's not the credentials that you have behind your name, it's willingness.

It is a readiness to actually obey what you find to be true and not just evaluate it as information.

And that's not a small claim.

Because it means that the reason that many people miss the truth that is right in front of them, it's rarely about not having enough information.

And D.A.

Carson, he notes that John keeps drawing the same conclusion here: speech that originates from a person, and then speech that actually points beyond itself to another.

It's the same test God gave centuries earlier about a true prophet in Deuteronomy 18, when he said, I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

Jesus' obedience and his dependence upon the Father was not only seen in the words that he brought and proclaimed, but also in his actions, laying down his life in obedience to the Father.

Apostle Paul says it this way in Philippians 2.

Christ humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Now, every one of us in this room, none of us, can do God's will perfectly.

And we know that.

But Jesus did.

All the way to death.

And his perfect obedience is credited to everyone who trusts in him, and exactly where our unwillingness falls short.

There's a scene near the beginning of a well-known movie where a professor at a prestigious university puts a graph theory problem on the board outside of his classroom, just kind of as bait to see what his students, kind of their intellect and who can solve it.

And it typically takes the whole semester for someone to finally figure it out and solve the problem.

But that night, the janitor who works at night mopping the floors in the halls there, writes the answer on the board.

So the next morning the professor gets there and he thinks it's been vandalism until he looks at the problem and he looks at the work and realizes that the answer's correct.

And so he puts an even harder problem on the board to try to catch whoever it was because they didn't leave their name.

And so that night, Will, who's sitting there sweeping and mopping the floors, he sees the problem, he begins to work out the problem, and he's caught mid-equation by the professor.

And he demands to know who he is.

But what unsettles the professor is not that Will is actually right in his answer.

It's nothing about him should make him right.

He has no degree, no pedigree, he has a police record, and his job is mopping floors at night in the very place where people spend years earning what Will apparently doesn't need.

And so the professor is left holding two facts that he can't reconcile together.

The work is real, but yet the man who's doing the work doesn't have the education that's supposed to guarantee that it's real.

And that's exactly the tension inside of verse 15.

The crowd's not wrong that Jesus never studied under a recognized rabbi.

That's true.

But where they're wrong is to think that that actually proves something.

One New Testament professor explains it this way: he said the Jews challenge the ability of Jesus to teach, but Jesus challenges their ability to hear.

But how often are we not guilty of doing the very same thing that the crowd was doing?

Maybe not with credentials, though we can do that for sure, but with our obedience to truth.

See, verse 17, I think, puts the harder question to us directly.

Because when we say that we need more evidence before we believe something, are we actually short on evidence?

Or are we just unwilling to do what the evidence requires of us if we receive it?

Think about it when we think about things in Scripture that are very easy for us to affirm, but yet they're really hard to put into practice in daily life.

So, for example, it's one thing to agree that forgiveness is commanded and it is right.

But isn't another to forgive the person that's harmed you the most?

It's one thing to believe that Scripture calls us to sexual purity and to humility and to generosity.

But it's another thing to say no to the thing that you really desire.

To open your hand and be generous and sacrifice for the benefit of someone else and to lay down our pride.

What truth are you stalling on this morning?

Not because you don't believe it's true, but because obeying it might cost you something that you're not ready to give up.

Trust his teaching because it's good and it's right, and it's what's best.

Last section, beginning in verse 19, we learn that true followers not only trust Jesus' teaching and his timing, but also his verdict.

Jesus turns the confrontation directly on his accusers here.

He says in verse 19, has not Moses given you the law?

Yet none of you keeps the law.

Why do you seek to kill me?

He's reaching back to chapter 5 and that Sabbath healing, they put into action this plot to kill him.

And the crowd's response is not to examine the charge that Jesus is speaking of, it's to dismiss it.

Look at what they say.

You have a demon.

No one's trying to kill you.

Are you crazy?

Instead of investigating the plot, they treat the one who's raising the alarm like he's the actual problem.

But we know from chapter 5 that Jesus was right.

There was a plot against his life.

But the truth is the crowd wasn't lying when they dismissed his claim.

They were just wrong and at the same time completely sure about themselves.

But then Jesus makes his case using their own logic against them.

He says if a boy can be circumcised having one part of his body part cut off on the Sabbath, and that upholds the law, then why are you mad at me?

Because I healed a man's entire body on the Sabbath.

And he's even careful to note that circumcision actually came from the patriarchs, not from Moses.

And this is a small, but it's a telling mark of how precisely Jesus handles the very law that they claim to be upholding and defending.

He doesn't attack their standard, he holds them to it.

And then in verse 24, we have the thesis of the entire passage that Jesus puts before very plainly do not judge according to appearance.

But judge with right judgment.

Jesus isn't telling the crowd how to judge him, he's showing them, by example, what right judgment actually looks like.

Which is the same principle that we see God doing with Samuel back in the Old Testament when he was choosing the next king for Israel.

Remember, he goes to Jesse's house, and this oldest impressive son of Jesse's standing there.

And what does God tell Samuel?

Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.

One commentator points out this whole chapter has the makings of a trial.

Jesus effectively on the stand before the crowd and before the authorities, and verse 24 can function almost as the counter charge in the trial.

Judges are ruling on appearance, they're ruling on credentials, on the manner in which how Jesus came, as opposed to the substance and the truth of his words and his actions.

There's a well-known scene from an old movie that some of you might remember: twelve angry men, twelve jurors.

They walk into a room to decide the fate of an 18-year-old boy from a poor neighborhood and whether or not he killed his father.

And 11 vote guilty right off the bat without seeing a shred of evidence in the case.

They just want to be done with it because they see what this young boy looks like and they just know that he's guilty.

But there's one juror that votes, I'm not sure yet.

And that enrages the other eleven because they just want to be done with it.

And over the next hour, that one juror begins to make all the eleven look at the actual evidence of the case.

The knife that the prosecution called, a one-of-a-kind knife.

He shows the one that he bought two blocks from where the murder scene was, disproving that fact.

And piece by piece, the airtight case turns out to be built less on evidence than on what the room had already assumed about a boy like that.

Nobody in the room hated that 18-year-old boy.

They didn't know him.

But guilty just felt like the right decision to make based on appearance.

That's the room that Jesus is standing in.

He names the actual threat against his life, and the crowd's response is not to check whether he's right or not, it's to write him off as unstable.

In verse 24, Jesus is doing exactly what that one juror did.

He's not going to let the room snap judgment, stand in for the actual verdict.

He goes back to the evidence, the healing itself, the law's internal logic.

And he insists that the case be judged on what is true, not on what it looks like from a distance.

And this scene in the temple courts is only a preview.

Because a few months later, Jesus is going to stand in an actual courtroom before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate.

And the room's not just talking about killing Jesus, they vote to do just that.

And a judge who privately admits that he finds no guilt in Jesus is going to hand him over anyway.

Brothers and sisters, here's the gospel.

The true judge submitted to being judged unjustly.

The one man who never deserved a guilty verdict received one.

So that everyone who deserves the guilty verdict could receive the innocent one instead.

Paul says it this way: Who is to condemn?

Christ Jesus is the one who died.

The courtroom that Jesus stands in here throughout John chapter 7, it's foreshadowing the same courtroom that he'll stand in at the end of the gospel, except there, he's not going to defend his case.

John 7 · chapter mention

He'll just let an unjust verdict fall on him so that the right verdict could actually fall on undeserving sinners like us.

Where might this hit closest to home for you?

If you're here this morning and you're not a believer and you're skeptical about the claims of Christ, have you written off Jesus and his gospel because of someone else's bad experience within the church and their church hurt?

Or for a second-hand version of the gospel that you've never actually tested against the scriptures themselves?

Or for the rest of us who are believers here, if someone asks you to defend your faith of Jesus Christ right now, not your feelings, not your impression of Jesus, but your verdict of him, could you say what evidence your faith rests on?

And so even as we evaluate our hearts, we have to recognize that ultimately none of this is within our own reach.

Trusting Jesus' timing, his teaching, and his verdict is not a matter of gathering enough evidence or putting forth enough willpower to believe it.

Scripture's honest why the natural human judgments they keep failing here.

Paul says the natural person doesn't accept the things that are of the Spirit of God, their folly to him.

Because they have to be discerned spiritually.

And that's exactly what Jesus said to Nicodemus, did he not?

Unless you are born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God.

Not eventually with more effort, you can see it, but not at all in the natural human condition.

The brothers, the crowd, the authorities, they're not just missing more information.

They're spiritually blind, and no amount of evidence placed in front of their blind eyes could produce sight.

And so if right judgment about Jesus depended on our sharpness and on our goodwill, then every one of us would end this passage in the same place that the unbelieving crowd does.

But thanks be to God that He doesn't lead the verdict to our hearts that cannot see.

He opens the eyes of those that were once shut.

He gives a will to obey where there was once resistance and rebellion to God.

And this is the Spirit's work of regeneration.

So that a person who was once hostile to Jesus' timing, deaf to his teaching, and quick to dismiss his verdict, is actually made new and given a new heart so that we can receive all of these things as truth.

And so if you're here this morning and you've trusted Jesus' timing in your life, and his teaching rings true to you, and you've landed on the verdict that Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, know that it's not because you were smarter than Jesus' brothers.

And it's not because you were more careful with the information than the crowd was.

It's because the Spirit did in you and me what he had not done in them.

And so that should produce in us a tremendous amount of gratitude for the grace of the gospel extended to undeserving sinners.

And it should move us to worship this God who opened our eyes.

And then, furthermore, it should move us out with intention with the gospel to hold it in front of those whose eyes are blind so that the Spirit might open their eyes and they might taste what we've experienced in Christ.

See, right judgment is costly.

It costs Van Gogh a lifetime of being misjudged before anyone judged him rightly.

It may cost you a settled opinion that you've been comfortable holding for years.

But there's a judgment that costs way more than any of that.

An entire city judged the Son of God by his appearance.

Because he didn't reveal himself in the way that they thought the Messiah should have come.

He didn't have the education or the credentials that they thought he should have had.

And he didn't keep the law in the way that they had kept the law, bent to serve their own comforts and have their own control rather than actually the way that God intended it.

And all these judgments, rendered in seed form here in John chapter 7, were carried out in full months, a few months later, on a Roman cross.

John 7 · chapter mention

That's not just history.

That's the offer that is in front of you right now, this morning.

Every illustration used this morning puts someone else in the seat of judgment.

The professor, the brothers, the crowd, the jurors.

But there's one more verdict left to render, and that's yours.

Jesus stands in front of you in the same way that he stood in front of that city, not by appearance, but by what is actually true of who he is.

Will you trust him?

Will you trust him to have access to every part of your life?

To know that his timing is perfect, that his teaching is true and best for your life, to experience the flourishing that he's created you to experience, and to know that he's the Son of God, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.

Let's pray.

Father, we have spent this morning in the courtroom of John chapter 7, watching a city get its verdict on Jesus wrong.

John 7 · chapter mention

Father, don't let us walk out of here and do the same thing.

Lord, for those of us who have already trusted Christ by faith, would you renew that trust this morning, even making it stronger?

And Lord, for anyone who's still deciding, who's skeptical of your claims, would you give them eyes to see what is actually true and give them the courage to receive it by faith and to experience the freedom that the gospel brings to undeserving sinners.

Lord, thank you that Jesus took the guilty verdict that we deserved so that we could receive the innocent one that he earned for us.

Lord, may we rest in this glorious truth afresh this morning.

We ask it in the matchless name of Jesus Christ, a great Savior, for sinners like us.

Amen.