John 1:19-51 – The Gospel of John

My name's Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at the church, and uh it's great to have you with us.

Please, uh, would you uh open up John chapter one again, that passage that Sydney uh read for us?

That you get sometimes you get a short passage of just like five verses that we had two weeks ago, and this time you get about 30.

So uh you're welcome.

If you need a Bible, um either to borrow for today, or you need a Bible at home, you don't have one, uh, please feel free to grab one from the from the front.

You can do that while I'm praying uh in just a moment.

There's uh uh there's nothing wrong with that.

Uh just as long as you're able to follow along with us as we look at this passage uh together.

Why don't I pray uh for us as we come to God's word?

Thank you, Father, that in your word we hear your voice, uh, give us ears uh to hear you speak to us uh this morning.

Uh we thank you uh that we're able to gather together and we pray that we would see Jesus uh clearly and respond in our own hearts to that invitation uh to come and to see him.

We pray these things in his name.

Amen.

Uh a few years ago when I was at uh college in London, it was the uh the Christmas break.

It was also essay deadline.

Uh night before I was that sort of guy, I worked a deadline.

If you're one of those people who kind of gets in essays kind of weeks ahead of time, I don't understand you.

Uh it was the night before uh handing in essays, and I was flying home for Christmas, uh, back to back to Northern Ireland from London, and I was packing my bag, doing footnotes, getting my bibliography already, and all of those things, and getting laundry out of the uh out of the the tumble driver and heading down to my room, which is in the basement, and carrying this basket of laundry down into uh my bedroom, I missed my footing and I fell down the stairs.

And as I fell down the stairs, uh I didn't have any shoes or any socks on, and so my toe started jamming into the banistrade as you kind of went down, and I broke my middle toe the night before.

I had essays to do and I was flying home.

I wasn't going to the hospital.

What were they gonna do?

They were just gonna splint it to the next toe, and so I put some ice on it and I splinted it to the next toe, and I never went and got it looked at.

One of the things that you notice if you ever break something small like a toe or a finger, is uh how much you needed it.

It's remarkable how something so small uh can hurt so much when it goes wrong.

I mean, nobody, you don't think about your toes usually, they just work, and that's what you expect them to do until they break.

And then you realize just how important they were and just how much you needed your toes or took your toes for granted.

Our ego should be a little bit like our toes.

Our ego, our sense of self, our sense of identity, it should be a little bit like our toes.

Not really something that we think about too often.

But the reason why our ego is often hurt and we feel it's hurt, is because there's something wrong with it.

Because it's broken.

When it's drawing attention to itself or obsessing about how we're treated or perceived or how we come across or what that person thinks of us, it is an indicator that that little thing in our brain, in our consciousness, in our soul, is broken.

It's not quite working right.

Our toes don't hurt unless there's something wrong with them.

Our ego hurts because there's something wrong with it.

There's barely a day goes by when we don't, certainly I don't, analyze or assess what that person said or did.

We feel snubbed or ignored.

We criticize ourselves for feeling stupid or inadequate.

There's something wrong, isn't there?

Something wrong with our sense of self, something wrong with our identity.

It's drawing needless attention to itself like a broken toe.

It's kind of throbbing and going, There's something not right here.

Either because you're the kind of person who likes to puff yourself up, or as I suspect is probably more true for people here, is that we're putting ourselves down.

Pride is by nature uh competitive.

We're only proud because we compare ourselves to others.

We're uh comparing and contrasting with the the next person, and we see that we have more money than them, more success than them, we're more intelligent than them, we're more beautiful than them.

That's certainly my particular one.

I don't know why you're laughing.

The inversion of pride is, I think, victimhood.

Oh, I'm more of a victim than them.

They haven't been through what I've been through.

I'm more oppressed, more hard done by, more damaged than the next person.

Okay, it's another kind of symptom of that kind of self-obsessiveness.

The problem with both of those ways of living is that you're always comparing, always assessing, always seeing where you where you fit in the in the hierarchy of your friendship, your relationship groups, your uh your workplace, your office team.

If that person is better than you or worse off than you in the victim scale, then you have nothing to be proud of, you've nothing uh to tell your victimhood about, and and so your ego, like a broken toe, begins to ache again.

Christianity offers a different way.

Christianity this morning offers you a better way, a more beautiful way, I think.

It offers us gospel humility, that is humility that comes from the gospel, which we'll get into.

Humility isn't too much seen as a virtue uh these days, and that's perhaps what makes John and Andrew and Philip in this passage uh quite intriguing and remarkable because they they don't connect the events that they are involved in to themselves, they don't connect it to their greatness, they point away from themselves.

One of the marks of the gospel humble person that you will notice as you interact with them is how much they are interested in you, how much they listen to you.

You ever have that conversation with someone and you have that sense that they're not really with you, they're kind of looking kind of beyond you, they kind of got half a glance over to see who you know they might go and talk to that person over there.

The gospel humble person is is there in the in the room with you, listening to you, they're not about them themselves.

We see that in this passage.

This whole passage could be summarized in one phrase, and this is what we're going to unpack.

It could be summarized like this not me, but him.

Not me, but him.

In a sense, that's the that's one of the kind of headlines over the Christian life.

Not me, but him.

Let's look at how that plays out in this passage.

John begins in this first section between uh verses 19 and uh 28, essentially by saying to the religious leaders, not me.

Uh news had reached Jerusalem and the religious establishment in Jerusalem of uh this man out in the wilderness, uh kind of uh looking and sounding a bit strange.

He looks like an Old Testament prophet, that's John the Baptist, that's who we're talking about here, and uh and so a delegation was sent from Jerusalem to kind of check this guy out.

See, is he is he coacher?

Is he is he teaching properly or is he uh a bit of a heretic?

We're supposed to uh in this passage uh note the the contrast and the irony because we read in verse 6, if you cast your eye up to it, we read in verse 6 that John was sent by who?

Sent by God.

There was a man sent by God whose name was John.

But then in verse 19, uh the Jewish delegation, who are they sent by?

They're sent by the religious establishment.

And John again is kind of he's he's hinting at what is going to unfold throughout the gospel.

John was sent by God, and these guys were sent by the religious leaders.

John, like I said, looks like this Old Testament figure, and so they begin to quiz him and ask him, you know, are you are you Elijah?

Because Elijah was an Old Testament prophet, and it was prophesied that he would come uh before the Messiah, or are you the Messiah, the Christ?

Like, who are you?

Are you the prophet that that Moses spoke about in Deuteronomy 15?

And and all the way through, John says, No, no, that's that's not who I am.

I'm not the guy that Moses uh promised.

I'm not the Christ.

You want to know who I am?

The best description of who I am comes from the prophet Isaiah, and so he quotes it in verse 23.

He says, I'm the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.

He says, I'm the one that Isaiah spoke about who would come and say, get ready.

Because the Lord is coming.

Messiah is coming, the Christ is coming.

I'm the one who's preparing the ground, who's preparing the way and calling you to prepare your hearts.

I'm not the guy, not me.

This is why he was uh baptizing.

That baptism was a fortice, a preparation of what the Christ, God's King, would would bring in, would come to, would come to usher in.

But in terms of his own identity, it's all about, he's all pointing away, he's all saying, not me, not me.

This isn't about me.

I'm not the guy you're looking for.

But then we're told in verse 28, or sorry, 29, the next day one walks onto the stage of this gospel, who it's all about.

Not me, but him.

The next day, verse 29, we're told that John sees Jesus coming, and he immediately draws everybody's attention to him and says, Look, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Behold the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.

John again is alluding to the uh to the Old Testament.

Just by the by, we can have this kind of uh thought in our uh in our personal devotional life that the Old Testament is kind of uh you know, it doesn't really matter or it's really dense and hard to understand.

I hope that one of the things that if you've been tracking over the last three weeks that you see is actually the Old Testament is really important for helping our understanding of the New.

Don't get this, don't fall into this kind of mistaken uh thought of uh you know, oh you know, Old Testament, Old Testament God bad, New Testament God good.

No, no, the the Old Testament uh helps us to understand the new, and this is another allusion to the Old Testament.

Because what was the Lamb in the Old Testament?

Well, we could go back to the book of Exodus, where the lamb was sacrificed uh for the sins of the people, so that in Egypt the angel of death would uh would pass over those who had sacrificed the lamb, and that those people would be rescued from slavery.

And this idea of the sacrificial lamb becomes central in the in the Jewish religious system.

That a lamb becomes a substitute, a stand-in for people, that because we are justly condemned for our sin, but God has made a provision that our sins would be placed on the lamb, and the lamb would die in our place so that we could live.

Just a moment's thought about that, you kind of realize, but is a is a lamb of same worth as a as a human being?

Is that a fair substitute?

John recognizes that this Old Testament system of sacrificing the lamb was only ever meant to be a picture.

The death of a lamb, a single lamb, could never really take away our sin.

That's why it needed to be done again and again and again.

And in pointing to Jesus and calling him the Lamb of God, what John is telling us in that is that he's saying that we need a true substitute, a human being, who would die for our sin.

And that God has provided it in the person of Jesus.

That is who he is, the Lamb sent by God, who would take away not just the sins of Israel, ethnic Jews, but would take away the sin of everyone who would trust in him.

Not me, John says, but him, the Lamb.

John goes on, he readily admits in verse 30 that uh that Jesus far surpasses him, that he's far more worthy, that he is preeminent, because he was he existed before John.

That's what verse 30 says.

Uh after me comes a man who ranks before me because he was before me.

He is more worthy.

And John's witness here in this section, in verses 20 to 34, is confirmed by Jesus' baptism.

That's what we're being told in verses uh 32 to 33, that the spirit descends like a dove, almost as a as a yes, as a seal, as a amen to John's witness.

The spirit descends and goes, yes, John's got it right.

John's seeing Jesus clearly.

And so the spirit comes down and goes, Yes, that is who Jesus is.

Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Taken altogether, John in a sense gives us a kind of blueprint for what's a what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

As Christians, there should be something about us that is pointing away from ourselves.

Not me, but him.

Don't look at me.

Look at the Lamb that I point to.

We need to settle in our hearts as followers of Jesus that it's not all about me.

It's about pointing to Him with our speech, our actions, our decisions, how we conduct ourselves and work in our relationships, what we value.

And the promise there is that our egos, like our toes, would begin to ache less when we take the focus off ourselves and begin to put it on another.

Not me, but him.

The story goes on.

And we be the focus begins to turn to Andrew.

So the following day we read verse 35 that John is with two disciples, and we know that one of them is Andrew, and he sees Jesus again and again.

You kind of like a nickname.

He kind of goes, God, behold the Lamb again, behold the Lamb of God.

He's he's arrived again.

And what happens?

Those two disciples immediately leave John behind and go and follow Jesus.

They leave John and go and follow the greater.

Folks, if you are uh, this is great servant leadership.

This is a great uh illustration of what good Christian leadership looks like.

That John lets them go with gladness to follow somebody greater, to follow Jesus more closely, more fully.

That is an indication that John really gets this kind of self-forgetfulness of pointing away from himself and saying, but him.

And so Andrew and the other disciple go and follow Jesus, and we learn that Andrew is Simon Peter's brother.

Andrew responds to the invitation of Jesus to uh to come and see, and goes and spends the day with him, and then immediately the next day goes and gets his brother.

And he says to his brother, down in verse 44, 41, he says, We're find the Messiah, which means the Christ.

Uh those two words are just the same word in different languages, it means it means God's promised king.

Messiah, Christ, God's promised king.

And that's what he says to Simon, and he brings Simon to Jesus.

Jesus meets Simon and immediately changes his name, changes his name to Kifas, which is the Aramaic.

Uh, in in the Bible, uh, very often the C word that we would normally have as a soft kind of S sound is a hard K sound.

So it's Kifas, which means rock, or we've come to know it as Peter.

Like God in the Old Testament often changed people's names as an indication of the kind of person that he was going to make them into, the kind of uh character that he would have.

And here Peter is called the rock.

It's a good nickname to have, you know.

So you know, some of the Bible nicknames.

Uh you know, some of the other disciples are called, you know, Didymus, the twin.

And say, oh, can I get a better one?

Can I get the rock one?

Uh, but Peter's called the rock.

He would be the leader, the foundation.

And we know that Peter goes on.

Uh, he writes a couple of books of the Bible, he becomes the leader of the disciples.

No, he's not the finished article, uh, by any stress.

We're going to see him uh deny the Lord Jesus before his death, but there is uh there is something of a trajectory towards leadership for Peter.

And Andrew fades into the background slightly.

Do you know what?

Praise God for the Andrews.

Praise God for the Andrews.

Everybody in this room, if you are a believer and follower of the Lord Jesus, can think of somebody in your life who came to you and in essence said, Come and see.

Come and see, come and explore this with us.

Maybe it was a parent faithfully teaching you the Bible and what it meant to follow Jesus.

Maybe it was a friend, maybe it was a colleague, maybe it was somebody at university.

That person who says, Come, come and see.

Who are those Andrews who came to you not thinking of themselves, pointing away from themselves to him, not me but him.

Thank God for them.

Thank God for those Andrews.

If you're still in contact with those Andrews, maybe it was a maybe it was a parent.

Or a colleague or a friend, do you know what you should do today?

You should message them.

Say thank I thank God that you told me what it was to follow you, that you brought me to come and see.

Andrew fades into the background, but God sees them.

God bless the Andrews.

I know my Andrews.

My Andrews were a friend called Darren when we were 13 years old who invited me to a youth group.

An old man called Ronnie who was leading the Bible study at that youth group.

Another guy called Mark.

Those are the people who invested in me.

Not for them, not for their sake, but out of a heart of not me but him.

Maybe you're a Peter type personality.

It is particularly important for you to remember the Andrews.

And hey, if you're an Andrew, you're not an upfront person, you don't like the whole upfront thing, you're not very outgoing.

You're just quietly trying to follow Jesus, quietly trying to invite people to him.

God sees that, God honors that.

God will raise up Peter's because of it.

Not me, but him.

And then we get into the final section with which centers on Philip and Nathaniel.

It's there down in verse 43 and 51, and there's more uh kind of texture and complexities and interesting things here.

Jesus uh journeys again.

So the the the uh the text is really moving in the clip.

Every section begins the next day, the next day, the next day.

So we're we're moving quite quickly with Jesus, aren't we?

Jesus journeys uh to Galilee.

That's a a region on the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Gennesaret uh that has a uh a number of little kind of uh villages on the on the lake, and he's in that region, and he finds Philip, and Philip immediately responds to this call to follow him.

And we're told in verse uh 44 that Philip was from Beth Saida.

Bethsaida means fish tyne.

Um, if you're wondering, that will become important in a moment.

Beth Saida means fish tyne or the house of fish.

Uh bet is the Hebrew word for house, so Bethlhem, Betlehem is the house of bread, and Beth Saida is the house of fish.

And that's where Philip's from.

And again, uh just as Andrew before him, he finds uh somebody else.

Perhaps it is a friend this time.

We're not told what the relationship is, but it's important enough that Philip would immediately go and find this guy, Nathanael.

Look at verse 45 with me.

Philip find Nathanael and said to him, We have found him, of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

Nathanael said to him, Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

You suppose that it's supposed to be funny.

Anything good?

What?

Nazareth?

No.

Really?

It's like, can you know, can anything good come out of Awfully?

That's harsh.

Sorry, if sorry to you if you're from if you're from I should have said Carlo, really, shouldn't I, Peter?

Yeah, I should have.

Uh is that sort of really not Nazareth?

The king of the world?

Came from Nazareth, right?

Nathaniel uh isn't like Peter.

He doesn't immediately go and you know get a new name from from Jesus.

He's uh skeptical, you might say.

He says it like it is in verse 46.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

Now it may well be that he knows his Old Testament and knows that the promised Messiah was going to come from the city of David, that is Bethlehem.

And so it doesn't make any sense that the one that Moses wrote about would come from Nazareth.

And so he's skeptical.

He's not immediately won over.

Maybe you're not either.

You've got questions rattling around your head.

Do you know what?

Look at Philip's response.

Philip doesn't go toe-to-toe with Nathaniel.

Philip doesn't try to argue, well, if you look in the Bible, you know.

He just says, Do you know what?

Come and see for yourself.

Come and see.

This is another moment of not me but him.

Philip is going to say, look, I won't persuade you.

But he might.

Come and see him.

Not me.

But him.

Jesus sees uh Nathaniel down in verse 47 and says something strange.

Perhaps given Nathaniel's response to Philip, it is similarly tongue in cheek.

Verse 47, Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him and said of him, Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit.

What Jesus is saying of Nathaniel here is he's saying, here's an Israelite in whom there is no duplicity of heart.

There's no ulterior motive in Nathaniel.

He's a straightforward guy.

He calls a spade a spade.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

He just says it like it is.

He shoots from the hip.

All of those sorts of idioms.

That's who Nathaniel is.

And so if if you're that kind of straightforward, uh kind of maybe speak a little bit bluntly, again, can't identify, but um this is who Nathaniel is.

He's forthright.

Again, uh, as you'll see as the story unfolds, there's an implicit contrast here between Nathaniel and the religious leaders, because what you begin to see from the religious leaders is that there's a lot of ulterior motive and there's a lot of duplicity of heart.

That they, in a sense, are supposed to be representing Israel, and yet they operate out of a uh a heart of deceit.

And Jesus looks at Nathaniel and goes, Here's an Israelite indeed, who has no double-heartedness about him, in whom there is no deceit.

There's no hidden agenda.

The wonderful and slightly hilarious thing about this is uh is Nathaniel's response to him in verse 48.

Nathaniel said to him, How do you know me?

He accepts it.

It's a great compliment from Jesus.

Ah, here is somebody with no hidden agendas or duplicity of heart.

And Nathaniel goes, Oh, how do you know me?

Do you see?

It's okay to laugh, some of these things are tongue in cheek.

And Jesus responds, in uh verse 48.

Jesus answered him, Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.

We don't know what Nathaniel was doing under the fig tree.

We're not told.

There's lots of speculation if you read commentaries or books on this as to what was happening.

It's it's really not the point.

Nathaniel understands this as a supernatural perception.

You know, it's not a case of uh you know Jesus was kind of peering into the distance or had a kind of ancient pair of binoculars, and so oh, it's Nathaniel over there.

No, Nathaniel understands that as this supernatural divine sight.

And so he responds with this profession of faith in verse 49 Rabbi, you are the Son of God, the King of Israel.

Jesus' uh final response is uh is both lovely and striking.

You know, since he kind of teases him back, verse 50, he says, Because I said I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe?

Is that really?

You know, hard-hearted, you're you're hardened skeptic, shoot from the hip, Nathaniel.

You little bit of kind of extra sensory perception, and he's like, Oh, what must I do to be saved?

He's like, Really?

Because I said that to you, you believe?

And then he says in verse 51, truly, truly I say to you, uh, or at the end of verse uh 50, just note that he says, You will see greater things than these.

Truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

That term, Son of Man, uh, is a term that we will unpack as we go.

It's a designation of uh that Jesus is using about himself.

It comes from the Old Testament, from the book of Daniel.

We don't need to worry too much much about it.

Nah.

So what's going on here?

Remember how Jesus called him an Israelite?

Or called him Israel.

Israel was the name of a man, a man who had his name changed to Israel.

Does anybody remember what Israel's other name was?

Jacob.

His name was Jacob.

And Jacob was a trickster.

He was deceitful, he deceived his brother and stole his birthright.

And so do you see how the echoes are coming?

You when uh when Jesus would look at Nathaniel and go, here is an Israelite indeed in whom there is no deceit.

In in a sense, Jesus is saying, Here's Israel with no Jacob left in them.

Do you see?

And Jacob in the Old Testament, it took a long time for God to kind of straighten out that crooked stick.

And there's an incident in the book of Genesis where Jacob falls asleep.

He falls into a deep slumber, and and in his in his dream he has a vision, and he has a vision of a ladder stretching to the heavens and heaven open.

And the angels of God ascending and descending on this ladder.

But this is the place where access to God was granted in his vision.

And Jacob wakes up in the book of Genesis and he realizes this this must be a holy place, and so he builds an altar there and he calls the place Bethel.

Bethel.

The house of God.

El being the old Hebrew word for God.

He awakes and saying, This is Bethel.

Jesus looks at Nathaniel in verse 51 and says, There will be a day when you, Nathaniel, from the house of fish, will see heaven open and access granted to the house of God.

Saying you ain't seen nothing yet.

There are greater things than this to come.

Not by way of ladder like Jacob.

But by way of the Son of Man, Jesus Himself, would be the one who tears heaven open and grants access to the house of God.

Not me, but him.

Not me, John preparing the way, or Andrew searching for Peter, or Philip inviting Nathaniel to come and see, but him, but him, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, but him, the Messiah, God's forever king, but him, the one who brings us into the house of God.

What do all of these men around Jesus have in common?

Is it that they loathe themselves?

Is it that they have low self-esteem?

No.

It is that they have been filled up rather than puffed up.

They aren't inflated with the air of pretense like the Pharisees and the religious leaders and like so many religious people today.

Rather, they are filled up with the substance of something better.

But it's not about themselves, but about him, and that causes them to forget themselves.

And this is how not me but him heals our wounded, throbbing egos.

A truly gospel humble person is not a self-hating person, not a self or a self-loving person, but a gospel humble person.

The truly gospel humble person is self-forgetful.

A self-forgetful person whose ego is just like his toes.

It just works.

It doesn't draw attention to itself.

It is as we look at the Lamb, as we point others to the Lamb and say with every fiber of our being, not me but him.

The next time, the next time you feel hard done by, or you've been read wrongly, or somebody is maybe usually, oh, I wonder what they think of me.

Not me, but him.

Not me, but him.

It is as we look at the Lamb rather than ourselves, that our problems, our other people, that they begin to come into a kind of perspective.

It is that we begin, it is there where we begin to find life, the life that John promises in his gospel that he wants to bring to us.

Remember week one?

What's the purpose of the gospel?

Of John's gospel?

That you might know that Jesus is a Christ and that believing in him might have life in his name.

The self-forgetful person, the person who says, Not me but him, their life is enriched.

And it is as we invite others to center not on themselves, but on him who takes away the sin of the world and brings us to God.

When we do that, we hold out the offer of life, life in all of its fullness that Jesus promises us.

May we individually and as a church together go forward into this next week and into our lives as followers of Jesus.