In Jesus, In Peace, In the World

Amen.

Sacred Mission.

Jesus has overcome the world, hasn't he?

My name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here at Sacred Mission.

If you don't know me, it's my joy and privilege to be able to bring God's Word to you this morning.

Before we dive into the text, let's just take a moment to pray and ready our hearts and minds to receive the word this morning.

Holy Spirit, you are with us.

You are present in our midst.

For those who have been made alive by your power and baptized into Christ, you dwell within us, you fill us.

And so we pray this morning, Spirit, that we would know and feel and realize your working and your power.

We pray, Lord, that you would gift us this morning to function as the body of Christ, to be stirred in our faith and to stir one another's faith into the maturity to see and behold the beauty of the fullness of Christ.

You promised, Spirit, that you would testify of Him and His finished work.

And so this morning, may Christ be magnified in our hearts and our minds.

May they bring joy to our souls.

His finished work may we relish in this morning.

It's in his mighty name that we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, we're finishing up this discourse in John.

And what we see is Jesus is in the upper room with his disciples, and he's giving them his final instructions before he is taken away to this trial, betrayed by close friends, crucified publicly before Jerusalem.

And so he's we're we're able, because of John's gospel, we're able to be brought into this really intimate situation where, if you could imagine, Jesus is here with his disciples.

These are the last things he wants them to hear and know and understand.

And so we want to open our ears to see what was Jesus trying to say in his last moments.

If you could put yourself in a situation where you're on your deathbed and you're got your loved ones and family and children and spouse near you, like what are you gonna say to them, right?

This is the intimate moment we get brought into here in John 16.

Because what's gonna happen next is John 17, Jesus is gonna be lifting up his high priestly prayer where he prays for the disciples, but he prays for us who would be in him also.

And then immediately he's going into the Garden of Gethsemane where he will be betrayed by Judas.

He'll be seized and taken before trial, and we get to walk out this crucifixion, this betrayal, this abandonment.

And so here we see, we witness Jesus' final teaching.

And in his final words, he's assuring his disciples this one thing: clarity is going to dispel all confusion that you might be contending against right now.

We kind of see this anthem play out through the gospels where it's like the disciples almost get it.

They're almost there, and then you realize, like, yeah, they still don't have it.

They still don't understand, they still don't get it, they still don't see him for who he really is, they still are characterizing him in the way that they think the Messiah should be and how he should function and what he should be about.

Jesus says in verse 25, I have said these things to you in figures of speech, but the hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the Father.

This is something that we see throughout the scriptures.

Jesus comes to testify and make known the Father.

The Spirit comes to testify and make known the finished work of Christ, that in him we might know the Father.

And so we see this progressive revelation taking place within Scripture.

And just as when Jesus said that the hour of his death has come, so the hour of clear revelation about the Father is coming for those who are his.

Verse 26 In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf.

When that day comes, when that hour arrives, those who are in Christ, this this is this language, this two words in Jesus, in Christ, in him, is going to be something that reverberates through the passage.

And we need to see that, and we need to try to understand what it means for us because that's gonna be the bedrock of what Jesus is trying to help them understand, that there's something distinct, supernatural, unique about being in him.

All those who are in him will be able to approach the Father directly.

This is the promise that he gives to them.

That in that day, when it comes, you'll be able to go directly to the Father.

They'll not need to go through Jesus to get to the Father because they will be in Jesus, intimately near to the Father.

You see, we who have been saved by his grace, we have the privilege to pray directly to the Father in the name of Jesus because we ourselves are in Christ, raised up with him and seated with him in the heavenly places according to Ephesians 2, 6.

Jesus wants his disciples to understand this confusion that you have right now, you have bold access to clarity in me.

He wants them to understand that this phrase in my name does not mean that they're distanced from the Father, that somehow they have to make their request known to Jesus, and then he has to go and take it to the Father on their behalf, and then they kind of wait for this response.

Like you've probably been in a in a working situation like that, right?

Where it's like you can't just go directly to the source, you gotta go up, you gotta talk to this person, this person.

Then I kind of get my answer finally, right?

Jesus is saying, No, I'm not gonna have to go to the Father on your behalf.

You get the boldness to approach his throne of grace in me to pray directly to the Father.

That's a privilege we have in Jesus.

And Jesus says, Here's why.

Because the Father loves you.

The father genuinely loves you.

This is the assurance that Jesus actually gives to his disciples.

They are loved by the Father, for the Father Himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

You see, after all, it was the Father's love for us that sent the Son in the first place.

This is what John's been trying to help us understand throughout his entire gospel.

Is that God loves us, the Father loves us, and if we need any evidence of that, if we need proof that that's true, look at Jesus.

He sent his son because he loves us.

Right?

This is John 3, 16 through 17.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

You see, John wants us to understand.

So that we might believe in him and in believing have eternal life.

He even says here in the text, Jesus kind of restates the whole purpose and scope of his mission.

Verse 28.

I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I'm leaving the world and going to the Father.

Right?

This is this is the reality of the gospel.

That Jesus came from the Father.

We read that in John 3, 16.

That Jesus came into the world, John 1, 10 through 11.

Jesus, he was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

And now Jesus is returning to the Father.

And this has been the underlying theme of this entire discourse in chapters 14 through 16.

Look, disciples, guys, I need you to grasp something here.

I'm not going to be with you.

I'm going to go to the Father.

What do you mean you're going to the Father?

Well, let me walk this out with you.

Like, let me try to speak plainly here so that you get it.

Time is running out.

Jesus needs his disciples to understand that what is coming next is imperative for them to grasp and understand.

And what it's going to mean for them as his followers.

And his disciples finally, in this text, right, seem to have clarity, right?

They seem to understand exactly what Jesus is speaking about because finally, to them, he's speaking plainly.

They marvel at the extent of his knowledge, right?

And the credibility of his testimony.

Oh, we know now that you know all things.

And no one has to question you, no one has to put you on trial for what comes out of your mouth.

Like we have this confidence in us.

That you have come from God.

And I believe here in this moment, Jesus responds with something that we could rightfully read as just holy sarcasm.

Right?

Holy sarcasm.

As he seems to point out the very irony of the situation.

Do you now believe?

Like after like after all this, right?

After uh the miracles you've seen me perform, uh raising Lazarus from the dead, feeding the 5,000, walking on water, uh hearing my teaching.

Do you now believe?

And immediately Jesus doesn't allow them to revel in this false confidence.

He tells them that at the hour of his death, they'll be scattered, abandoning him and cowering in the cover of their own homes.

Like, think about the exchange that's happening right here for a moment.

Jesus, we don't know what you're talking about.

Okay, let me try to say it as plain as I can.

Oh, now we get it.

Oh, do you get it?

Because here's what's gonna happen next.

You're gonna abandon me.

You're gonna scatter, you're gonna leave.

You don't get it.

You don't get it.

Jesus is recalling the prophecy of the striked shepherd from Zechariah 13.

It says this, Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me, declares the Lord of hosts, strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.

I will turn my hand against the little ones.

But see, Jesus' assurance, Jesus' comfort isn't in his disciples, because he knows that they're gonna abandon him.

His comfort, his assurance is that the Father will be with him every step of the way.

He climbs that mount to be crucified.

And then right before Jesus offers up his high priestly prayer, he brings us into the ultimate purpose of this discourse, of this final instruction for his disciples.

Verse 33.

I have said these things.

So we can chapters 14 through 16.

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.

In the world, you will have tribulation.

But take heart, be bold, be courageous.

I have overcome the world.

You see, in the midst of the final hours of Jesus' life, in the face of denial, betrayal, and abandonment, underneath the shadow of the cross, Jesus desired to give his disciples a gift.

Peace.

This is why I'm telling you all these things.

This is why I'm here in this upper room in this moment, letting you know what's happening, what to expect, what it means for you.

I want to do this so that you might have peace in me.

You see, there is peace in Jesus.

There is peace in Jesus.

Many of us think of peace wrongly.

We think of peace in the sense of the absence of conflict, right?

When a war is over, we think of peace has been accomplished.

Biblical peace, the shalom that it speaks of in the text, is not just the absence of conflict.

A handful of years ago, I got to go to Kosovo.

And there was this NATO deal, right, that happened with inside of the country of Kosovo to be able to end this genocide that was happening.

And there was artillery and bombs and fighting amongst one another.

And I we got to go to the border there at the northern border of Kosovo, and this is what I saw.

I saw buildings in rubble, I saw brick and stone laying everywhere.

I saw the remnant presence of tanks and troops.

There was the absence of conflict.

No one was firing on one another, no one was launching bombshells onto one another, but guess what was not there?

There was not wholeness, there was not completeness, there was still this reality that things were wrong.

That what was was now missing.

And there was this artifact of conflict all around me.

You see, biblically, peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but it is the presence of something better.

It's the presence of wholeness.

It's actually the state of being unbroken, of being restored, reconciled, made complete.

This is the peace that Jesus comes to bring into a world that has been broken and fractured by our sin.

This is what we look forward to in Revelation.

When we are crying holy, when we see his glory and majesty, what are we declaring?

That he has made all things new.

He hasn't just stopped the conflict of our sin.

He just hasn't defeated our enemy by casting that serpent into the lake of fire.

No, he has restored all things to an even better state of which they were.

He's making things new.

That's the shalom of Christ, which we are looking forward to.

And he says, you can have some of that now.

Now in him.

Because in him, in his very body itself, is where our peace is realized.

This is what the Apostle Paul was working to have us see in his letter to the church in Rome.

In chapter 4, 24 through chapter 5, 1, it says, It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who is delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Look how Paul roots the peace that we have in Jesus' death and resurrection.

It's in him that we have this peace.

This is what Jesus is laboring to get his disciples to see with clarity that in me you may have peace.

In the finished work of his glorious death and resurrection, by grace through faith, we have peace.

To be in Jesus is to believe that he has come from the Father to make whole all that was broken down by our hands through the wickedness of our heart and to have those broken hearts be restored to love Him and to obey His righteous commands.

This is the plain speech Paul uses to address the church in Galatia.

In chapter 5, verses 25 through 26, he says, But now that faith has come, now that this gift has been given to us, we are no longer under a guardian talking about the law, our performance, right?

For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith.

How are we children of God?

How are we loved by the Father?

Because we're in Christ by faith.

And so to be in him, Jesus desires for us to believe in him.

That he has come from the Father to bring wholeness to our brokenness through his death and resurrection, so that in him we will have true and everlasting peace.

You see, peace is only truly found in Jesus because only Jesus himself was truly broken and raised to new life that we might have that wholeness, that completeness in him.

But many of us we seek to try and find that peace that our broken hearts long for in other things.

Right?

If we're honest with ourselves, we look for peace in other things.

One of the greatest frustrations and disappointments, I think, that we experience as human beings is we try to discover wholeness in broken things.

Think about that for a moment.

Think about all the ways humanity tries to find identity, wholeness, completeness, and we're constantly trying to find it in the artifacts and remnants of war.

Broken things that have been fractured by our very hands.

How are we going to ever find wholeness in something that's broken?

We strive to find someone or something that will complete what we feel to be missing within us, that will bring peace to the hostility, both around us in culture, but but and also internally within ourselves.

Some of us, we look for peace in this world.

We look for peace in this world.

So Jesus actually makes two promises at the end of John 16.

In me, you will have peace.

In this world, you will have tribulation.

As good, as yes and amen as every promise that comes from the mouth of God is, that we will have tribulation in this world is equal to that.

Right?

That's the yes and amen of God.

You will have tribulation, you will have anguish, you will have sorrow, you will have affliction in the brokenness of this world.

Stop trying to find that peace that you know you need in it.

Because it will not satisfy, it will not be able to do what you need for it to do.

You see, in this world we will not be able to find the peace that we long for because the brokenness of the world is ultimately only able to produce affliction and anguish.

This is the actual essence of John's use of the word the world throughout his entire gospel.

He's speaking of something.

That is covered in darkness, that is riddled with strife, that has a heart of resistance, that is filled with corruption.

This is the world that John is talking about when he says that God so loved the world.

Not a place that we can have peace or discover wholeness, but a place of darkness and strife and rebellion.

God loved that.

And he sent his son Jesus to redeem it all.

You see, we still persuade our hearts though.

This is the madness of man.

We work so hard to persuade ourselves to believe that we'll be able to find the wholeness that we're looking for within it.

It is a perpetually failed life mission.

This is why Jesus was sent on mission to deliver us from this world.

John 17 14, Jesus says, I have given them your word, and the world, the darkness, the corruption, the rebellion, has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

Colossians 1 13, Paul says, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.

You see, to be in the world is to fundamentally be without peace.

That's what the scriptures help us understand.

To be in the world, our identity in it, our hope in it, right?

But we still go on looking for it in the things of this world.

We so desperately want to find wholeness.

But the dilemma is that we seek to find that wholeness in broken things.

So we live frustrated and disappointed, running to the next empty hope, foolishly persuaded that we might find it there.

A broken world and all that it offers is unable to produce the whole peace that our hearts truly need.

But others of us, we look for peace in our performance.

We look for peace in our performance.

It is critical that we pay attention to Jesus' interaction with his disciples.

Right?

When they say, Oh, now we know you're speaking plainly.

Now we get it.

Now we understand.

We know that you have come from God.

We believe this.

Jesus says, Do you now believe?

Because here's what's getting ready to happen.

Like, don't boast in that, disciples.

Don't try to have some false self-confidence in this epiphany that you think you just had in this upper room, because here's what's really going to happen.

When they come and they strike the shepherd, you're going to scatter.

You see, they had been wrestling to understand and find clarity in his teachings.

And when they finally get there and they proclaim, Now we believe, Jesus responds with the reality that they will fail and succumb to their fear and desert him.

It is from that exchange, he then looks into the heart and soul of his disciples and says, But in me, you have peace.

Think about the power of what Jesus is saying.

You're gonna run, you're gonna scatter, you're you you don't get it still, you're going to fail me.

But your peace, your identity, your wholeness, it's not in your performance.

He looks them square in the eye and says, It's in me.

In me you have peace.

It's as if Jesus is wanting to restrain them from putting any confidence in their own understanding, from trusting that their accomplishments and performance will be their source of hope.

You see, we are often like the disciples, believing that our performance in this life, how good we are, how right we think, we'll be able to complete the missing pieces of our lives that we experience.

That we will do right.

And when we do right, we will somehow mend all that has gone wrong, right?

This is the heart of religion.

The heart of religion is that your performance, you recognize the fabric of this world has become unraveled.

And religion says through your work, through your performance, you're going to mend that fabric back together, taking something that's broken and making it whole.

Only the gospel, out of every other world religion that exists, only the gospel says, You know.

You're gonna run and hide, you're gonna scatter, you're gonna fail, you're gonna sin, you're gonna fall short, you're the reason this thing's torn apart.

Jesus is gonna put it together.

Jesus is the one who's gonna mend it.

You see, this reality isn't meant to shame us, it's not meant to make us feel hopeless.

It's given to us as a gift of grace that we would turn our hope away from ourselves and place it upon Christ, the only good and faithful one.

You see, we won't find peace in our performance because our sinfulness will always re break what we have worked so hard to mend together.

If we will ever truly obtain wholeness, it will never be in a broken world, it will never be in our broken performance, it will only be able to be obtained in Jesus, who was broken for us.

But he rose again to everlasting life, triumphing over the world.

You see, Jesus overcame the world to give us peace.

Jesus overcame the world to give us peace.

If we look back to the passage from last Sunday, we see Jesus saying this in verse 20.

Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world is going to rejoice.

You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy.

You see, the world rejoiced because they believed that they had broken him.

But they failed to understand that he willfully became broken, that he would be able to bring wholeness to all who would believe in him, to all who would be in him.

You see, there is peace only in Jesus because only in him all of our brokenness was imparted, that in him all of our wholeness would be received.

Ephesians 2.14, Paul says, For he himself, he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.

Jesus didn't simply come to eliminate the hostility, to bring an end to this conflict of our sin and rebellion.

No, he came to make us whole, not to leave us with the devastation in the aftermath of a war-stricken world.

But he makes complete, he makes whole everything that our hostility and rebellion work to tear down.

This is why Revelation ends with a new city.

Because the rubble of our sin has not just been left there, though there's no hostility anymore, it has been rebuilt into something new, something better than what we had in the first place.

We start in a garden, we end in a glorious city.

You see, his triumph over the world encompasses the making of a new one.

Where no artifact of what once was broken is ever to be seen or felt again.

We have peace because Jesus has overcome the world.

This world's tribulation has no hold on us who are in Christ.

His triumph over it gives us emboldened hearts to go into the world to share his peace with those around us.

And so my hope for us, Sacred Mission, is that we would be live in Jesus in peace in the world.

We would live in Jesus in peace in the world.

In Jesus' high priestly prayer, he states that we who are his are not of this world any longer, though we still find our physical presence in it.

He has truly transferred us out of the darkness and dominion of this world into his kingdom of light.

We are not of this world, but we find our physical presence still in it.

And because we are in Jesus and not in the world in this way, we have peace.

Peace even in the midst of living in a broken world.

And the people around us, the people around us, their life is spent searching for hope among the rubble.

If you can imagine a bomb-stricken land, and you don't know where your loved one is, you don't know where your neighbor resides anymore, and you're hoping that over this next brick you lift up and toss aside, you'll see some sign of life.

This is what we are like in our sin.

This is what the culture is like in their sin.

They're hoping that underneath this next stone removed, that there's going to be light that bursts through and hope will be discovered there.

We must be a people, us, the church, who work to show them that real peace is not found in rummaging through the rubble, but it's found in Christ alone.

Let our lives point to the one who has overcome this world, the one who is making all things new from the throne of his triumph.

Jesus has us in the world, but not of it.

So that we would be a people who share the gospel of his true and everlasting peace to hearts that are desperately searching for it in broken things.

He has revealed to us the glory of his cross and the triumph of his resurrection, that we would declare his victory to the ends of the earth.

So, church, can we raise the banner?

Christ has overcome the world.

And in him we have peace.

Peace, perfect peace, is the gift of Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Amen.