John 5:16-47

Alright, well we pick right back up in John chapter 5 where we were at before Christmas.

John 5 · chapter mention

And so Jesus is back in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem's a city at this point, now it's about a 5,000-year-old city.

At this point, it was about a 3,000-year-old city.

And this was a city that had been controlled by many different people groups, many different religions, lots of wars, lots of battles.

And at this point, we have the Jewish center is in Jerusalem.

The temple's in Jerusalem, the chief priests are in Jerusalem, the Pharisees are in Jerusalem.

And what we see is we begin to see this division occurring, and Jesus to some extent setting himself apart from the Jewish authorities and the Jewish authorities reacting to him and wanting to kind of snuff out any resistance.

And this is what was going on repeatedly, not just with Jesus, but any resistance, any rebellion to the Jewish authority and the Jewish law.

And the Pharisees were this group within the leadership, and they were very keen and very into the law and controlling the law, deciphering the law, dictating the law, and then keeping people account to the law.

And then Jesus is coming along and he's saying, Well, I'm the fulfillment of that law, and things are going to be a little bit different now.

I'm actually looking to revolutionize how you think about spirituality.

This is not going over well.

So Jesus comes into Jerusalem.

If we remember the last sermon before Christmas, and he heals a man at the pool of Bethesda.

So this was in the city, and he heals this man, and this man goes and he goes to declare himself clean to the priest so he can kind of re-enter society.

And so the priests right away they say, Well, today's the Sabbath.

You know, you shouldn't have been healed, and that'd be a tough thing to say to somebody who's been sick for decades that he shouldn't have been healed.

And he probably doesn't care if it's the Sabbath because he just got healed, but they care about this, and so now they're upset with who healed you, and eventually it comes back around.

Well, Jesus healed them.

And so this division is occurring, this animosity is building within this leadership of the Jewish authorities and these Pharisees.

And really this idea of the Sabbath, this goes back to Exodus 20.

I mean, these the Pharisees and Jewish people, they weren't overreacting in terms of a belief of keeping the Sabbath holy.

I mean, this is Exodus 20, the fourth commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, to keep it separate.

Then what the Jews knew is the Jews knew it took great intentionality to not work.

Right?

I mean, I think we all know that.

It takes unbelievable intentionality to not work.

And then they took this fourth commandment very seriously.

And so they said, all right, well, if it takes great intentionality not to work and to give a day out of respect to God, well, let's set some boundaries.

And so the rules began.

And then the rules just kept going.

That list kept getting longer and longer and longer.

And then this is what happens.

This is legalism.

You know, anytime you turn your eyes away from God Himself and Jesus into, well, let's create a bunch of rules to define how we will behave out of his ways, and let's create our own rules that we can hold people to.

Then the list keeps growing and growing and growing and growing.

I can remember back to when I went to Israel and my friend Jim, this is probably four or five years ago, and we're going into Tiberias, and he says, you know, by the way, this city will look very different tomorrow because it was the Sabbath, it was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

We get in the city, the city's dead, there's nothing going on.

And we even get in the hotel, and he said, I, you know, he explained it to us about how the elevators were going to work and how the lights in the room were going to work.

And you walk in, there's a there's a Shabbat elevator, you know, and then there's like the Gentile elevator for the non-Jews.

And if you go into the elevator for the Jews, um, it's programmed to stop at every floor.

It's pre-programmed because to operate machinery is a is a break in one of the rules about the Sabbath, right?

I mean, they they took it very seriously, great intentionality.

And so um, you know, use the machinery, you just can't operate it, and so it stops at every single floor.

You can't turn lights on and off, and so the lights come on with motion detectors.

I mean, this is the seriousness that they took it, they still take it today.

This is because they believed upholding the laws the way that they are maintaining their standing with God.

So for them, this is incredibly important.

And then Jesus comes in and and and he comes into one of their rules about no healing on the Sabbath, and he just kind of he just kind of puts his finger in it.

I mean, he just kind of, I mean, he heals on the Sabbath very purposefully.

He breaks the rules.

And he does this not to just say, I'm, you know, I'm doing away with the law.

He does it to say, I am the fulfillment of the law.

I am the says in Luke chapter 6.

Luke 6 · chapter mention

He says, I am the Sabbath.

I'm the Lord of the Sabbath.

And what he's doing, he's revealing a much deeper and a better way of life.

Maybe, maybe you're here.

Maybe you're here, you're coming out of holiday season, and it's just like, you just feel crazy.

I mean, you've been crazy busy, you feel exhausted, you're just thinking, when will there be some rest?

Like at what point?

When can I get to some rest?

And our house with three little kids running around, and you know, the laundry's never done, the dishes are never done, the toys are never picked up.

That's our house right now at this phase of life.

And we'll just look at each other, and our line, we always say is we say, You want to go to Costa Rica?

We'll just look at each other in the midst of all of that.

That's what we say.

We just look at you want to go to Costa Rica, and we're like, Yeah.

Um, we also have an imaginative housekeeper that we use her name a lot and say, When's she coming?

And she never comes, but that's our other.

But we're just kind of wondering, when like when is rest coming?

I I can think back to when we first got married, you know, almost 10 years ago, and I was I was out of seminary, but I wasn't working in ministry, I was working for my father, I was working in the business world, nine to five job, doing the commute each way.

And I was I was I was bored to death.

We'd have children.

I I had I had plenty of margin.

I had all the margin, I had so much margin, I was I just wanted somebody to come in and take away some of the margin.

I was bored.

And and yet, in both those situations, so easy to not be rested.

See, it's possible you're here and you're bored, and even then you're you're not at rest.

And that's because rest is not about even productivity, it's not even really necessarily about busyness of activity.

It's a heart issue at the core.

It comes out of the heart.

Jesus comes into this idea of Sabbath and he heals on the Sabbath.

He declares himself Lord of the Sabbath, and it creates this conflict, and the Pharisees start talking, they're starting to organize, they're gonna snuff this out.

They're gonna snuff this resistance out, and so um that they're beginning to plot to kill them, get rid of them.

And so he's speaking in John chapter 5 to the Pharisees.

John 5 · chapter mention

Very easily it comes into our lives, and we're gonna jump into the end of the chapter.

We'll mention some of the beginning of the chapter later in the sermon.

John chapter 5, verses 39 and 40, speaking right to the Pharisees.

John 5:39

You study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life.

These are the very scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

This is fascinating, this is scary because the Pharisees they loved the scriptures.

They loved the law.

These are good things.

But all of these things they point to Christ.

And this is what he's saying in the Pharisees.

He's saying, You love the scriptures, you love the law, but don't you see that all of that points to me?

I mean, this is exactly why religion is so dangerous.

It's because you can become all about something that's supposed to point to Christ and just stay at that other thing, and you become all about, you know, just like just church attendance or like a discipline or studying or even knowing the scriptures, but never know him.

And all of it is pointing to him.

Several years ago, my family from Seattle uh they went to Jackson Hole, and us in Atlanta went to Jackson Hole, my family in Virginia.

We all ended up in Jackson Hole, and we had been talking about going there for years, and so finally it kind of fleshed its way out.

And so we all got together at a big house, Jackson Hole, and Grand Teton National Park, is about ten minutes north of Jackson Hole.

I've been I've been very, y'all at this point know I'm like kind of like obsessive like researcher, you know, for going somewhere.

I'm gonna research all about it.

You know, what mountains are there, what heights can we do, what's the range, you know, and so I've I've been researching, I've been learning, I've been looking it all up.

And so we get there, we get in the house, and we actually get sick the first couple days, and we kind of get through the sickness, and so finally we got we have a good day.

We're feeling better, beautiful day out.

We are going to Grand Teton National Park.

We're going to see the Teton Mountains.

And so we drive up out of Jackson Hole about 10 minutes, and we pull off that highway that cuts to that big wide valley, and the visitor center, the Grand Teton National Park Visitor Center, is right there.

We pull in the parking lot, we go in the visitor center, and you know, you kind of national park visitor, you go in there and I always buy a patch.

I'm dorky like that, I collect patches, and so you know, and then you look at the topographical map, and here we are, and okay, and you know, you look at all that, and they have the history up on the walls.

You know, this is how the land evolved over time.

This is how the formation of the park happened.

They have the kind of the film strip video room over on the side.

We didn't go over there, but we're learning all about it.

I'm I'm so excited, I'm so jacked up.

I've been looking forward to this so much that I am in the Grand Teton National Park Visitor Center.

I can't believe this is happening.

I'm so excited.

We're just soaking it in.

Loving this.

So, I mean, we spent 45 minutes there.

It was so we got back in the car, just went back to the house.

Went straight back to the house.

I mean, can you believe, can you believe we got to go to the Grand Teton National Park Visitor Center?

That was so fantastic.

That was that was amazing.

Did you see those pictures?

Did you see that map?

That was awesome.

No, that's not what we did.

We got back in the car.

Visitor center was great, it was okay, it wasn't even that great.

I wasn't even jacked up to be there that much.

And got back in the car.

We drove another five minutes up and we parked by Lake Ginny.

We got on a ferry and crossed Lake Ginny's the foot of the mountains and then hiked up into the mountains.

The visitor center exists to point us to the Tetons.

The Pharisees stopped at the visitor center.

We're all about the visitor center, and missed what the law and the scriptures were pointing to.

The law, the standard of holiness, the scriptures, these are good things.

And what they do is they help us understand him more.

They point us to him.

Like I said, this is scary because it means we can know about him, we can know about God and never know him.

We can know a standard of holiness, we can know disciplines, we can know kind of maybe even behavior, but never know him, his character, who he is, what he did for us in history, and to shift our faith from us and what we do, which we can get that completely in, that standard of holiness, we can do that, but to shift it into him and what he did for us.

So we can be all about law and all about what we do or what we prove or how we perform, which requires no death of us.

I mean, still still faith in us, or we can be all in him, which requires a death of ourselves, a death of our pride.

And this is last week Jim Moon came and preached, and many of us were not here, but he talked about that the gospel's offensive.

This is why it's offensive.

Because it says you can't do it.

You can't pull your bootstraps up.

You're not enough.

And you know the only way to freedom here is the vulnerability to have what I would call naked honesty, just brutal naked honesty about who you are, what you're capable of, what you're incapable of, your fears, your anxieties, just honesty about all of it, because then what you realize is I'm not who I should be.

Thank you for the grace of God, which I need.

And there's a shift of faith outside of yourself into him.

So Jesus comes into this culture of the Pharisees, of the law, of the visitor center.

And he comes in, he says, I'm I'm the Sabbath.

This day is so important to you.

And Jesus gets that.

I mean, he's God Himself, He's the one who created the law.

He gets that, but what he's saying is there's a deeper meaning here.

And what the deeper meaning here is, is not the day, but it's me.

I actually am your rest.

This is what Hebrews chapter 3 and 4 are about.

Hebrews 3 · chapter mention

Read it later.

It's all about Jesus is our Sabbath.

So what does he rest from?

This passage tells us, verse 41, I do not, this is Jesus talking, I do not accept glory from human beings, but I know you.

I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts.

I've come in my Father's name, and you do not accept me.

But if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him.

How can you believe since you accept glory from one another, but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

See, we're all we're we're all seeking glory somewhere, meaning.

We're gonna try to pull it from other people.

You know, like what's their opinion of me?

Am I approved?

So I achieve or I react to that and kind of rebel from it, act like I don't care.

I do.

Either I'm gonna get glory from people, or glory from him, meaning from from God, and receive it and not earn it.

And so the two things I see in this passage that we receive rest from, that he's speaking straight to the Pharisees, and it bridges over our lives.

The first is what I would call rest from the glory train.

Theologically, people might call it the theology of glory, meaning theology of just making yourself much.

The glory train is uh is about people pleasing and needing approval that you will achieve unto death no matter what it costs, and this will be your glory.

And that train does not lead to freedom.

The train that leads to freedom is not glory from friends or family, or performance, or career, or neighbors, or newspapers.

The glory train does not end in freedom.

The train that leads in freedom requires a death.

And it's dying to those the needs of those things.

It's a dying of the self to receive arrest from outside of yourself.

The most wearying thing in our lives is not busyness of our schedules, it's it's a busy heart that's just constantly looking for something else.

That's what's that's that's the weariness.

And when a heart begins to be relieved of this constant toil of looking for something else, needing something else, finding love, earning love.

And when we we see that, oh, he is our Sabbath, this is rest to us.

So the first is rest from the glory train, the second is rest from the law and its judgment.

Verses 45 through 47.

But do not think I will accuse you before the Father.

Jesus came earlier in John, we saw Jesus said, I'm I'm not the one who condemns, I'm actually the one who loves you out of condemnation.

Again, he's kind of saying that, but do not think I will accuse you before the Father.

Your accuser, and mind you, he's saying this to Jewish people who love the law, your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set.

This is not a big deal to us because a lot of us aren't Jewish.

Maybe a couple of you have Jewish background.

To a Jewish person, Moses was everything.

I mean, he he gave them the Ten Commandments.

I mean, he went up on the mountain, he came down.

I mean, he was he was the the he gave them the law.

And Jesus comes and he says, Your accuser is Moses.

This is a little bit why I've always said, um, I would be very hesitant, and maybe you should be hesitant to hang the Ten Commandments in your house.

If all you hang is the Ten Commandments in your house, you have you have hung a statement of accusation over your life.

Now I'm all for if you hang the Ten Commandments and right next to it you hang a verse about the gospel.

Now we have a very fair overall picture of the story.

But if you just have the commandments and you just have Moses, what you have is you have an accusation.

And that's what it was for: to accuse us, to point us that we need God Himself to come and to be incarnate, love for us, and die for us, and to give to us what we cannot earn.

And so your accuser is Moses.

He's saying this to Jewish people, and they've got to be so offended at this point.

But he says this if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.

And this is what we see in the Old Testament.

We see picture after picture, a foreshadowing, a pointing.

Somebody else is coming.

That's what all these laws are.

You're not enough.

Somebody else is coming to do what you can't do.

But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?

If we live by performance, we will live accused and condemned.

This this is the Pharisee's life.

And in their in their humanity they loved it because it was control.

It was control.

It was pride.

And this for us is huge because what what this means as Christians, um, this thought of like, am I good enough?

Am I passionate enough?

Am I serious enough?

Am I giving enough?

Am I obedient enough?

Am I whatever enough?

All these questions that to some extent can be fine, but when they become the driving force that we wake up to to feel validated before God, to feel like, okay, I can get on with my life today.

The thing that helps us get on with our lives today is not, am I passionate enough, am I serious enough, am I obedient?

The thing that helps us get on with our lives today with a measure of peace and security and rest is Jesus.

It's Him.

I mean, the law and the Scriptures, they inform us how we should behave, and when we fall short of that, we are sorrowful for it because we want to live that way.

But then it helps us, it just reminds us, man, I really need some help from outside of myself.

And this is the difference between what I would call a performance-driven faith or a provision-driven faith.

I mean, these are our options.

Provision-driven that's been provided for you.

Your righteousness is given to you in the grace of God through Jesus.

Provision-driven or performance-driven.

This is where the Pharisees are.

This is where we often return.

The book of Galatians is all about a community that's returned back to the law and performance.

This is the human nature.

The human nature is to go, oh, provision driven, I become a Christian, receive the grace of God, I'm forgiven.

I receive that, I take that in, and then you just sort of, just a little, just over time, you just kind of, you know, you go, well, I'm I'm I'm pretty good at this.

I'm I'm doing okay.

You know, the grace of God forgave me of my sins, all that stuff I did back then.

Now I will prove my Christianity by what I do.

And so then slowly these questions, am I passionate enough?

Am I serious enough?

Have I prayed enough today?

Have I done have I given enough?

Have I whatever enough?

This line of thinking is a line of thinking of law.

And you've turned your eyes away from the grace of God, the provision, the provision that God has given to us in Jesus.

The brilliance of this is that when when we when we are all in over here in the provision, when we are all in Him, all the obedience and the passion and the prayer and the things that we could drive ourselves nuts over, am I doing it enough?

All these things become an outflowing of being in Him.

So rest from the law, rest from the glory train, rest from the law, but also rest from judgment.

The front half of John chapter 5 is Jesus declaring that he is equal with God.

John 5 · chapter mention

The Pharisees would have hated this maybe even more.

I mean, this is why they want to tell you, this is blasphemy.

Jesus is declaring that he is God.

He's declaring he's dependent upon God, but he is equal with God.

And Jesus, in the first half of that, John chapter 5, is declaring the rescuing truth to us.

John 5 · chapter mention

He is sovereign.

He woos us, he overcomes our unbelief.

And all of this, this is the very reason we can have rest.

We can be at peace.

We are secured.

We're not even secured by our commitment to him.

We are secured that his grace has drawn us and holds us and sustains us.

And that even when we don't have faith, and even when we have a little bit of doubt, and we're working through that, he is faithful to us.

Our worry and our fear.

How am I doing?

How am I doing?

Will I make it?

Am I in?

If I die, what's my standing?

All of that.

Does he love me?

Does he not love me?

I screwed up.

Am I okay now?

When am I going to be okay?

All of that, all of that.

It is reconciled in Jesus.

And so we rest in him.

We turn our eyes to him.

We live in him.

So like I said, over the break we were in Orlando with Christie's family.

And so it was a busy season leading up.

In the past, the church I used to work at before starting this church, I would stop work about December 12th and not come back to work again to like January 2nd or 3rd.

It was amazing.

I mean, I look back on it, I was like, that was amazing.

Because I was just like one of up team pastors, right?

And so you just kind of collected all your days and you took them all off.

It was amazing.

Well, it's not like that.

I'm looking around, there's, you know, I got Brad and Brian, they help and different people help.

But it's kind of like, all right, well, we got Christmas Eve, right?

Christmas Eve's coming up.

There's nobody to pass that off to.

I can't just show up.

And so busy leading up to Christmas, Christmas Eve, very tired Christmas Day.

That's fun.

That's tiring.

Lots of cleaning up to do, unwrapping, which produces lots of cleaning up to do.

You know, meal, cleanup for the meal.

The 26th, we went to a party with a bunch of friends out in Gwinnett.

And so we go to that.

And so come back.

We think about, oh, this is we're gonna take Christmas down.

That doesn't happen.

Maybe for some of y'all it still hadn't happened.

And so then 27th, we go to Orlando.

Drive to Orlando, horrible drive, as everybody was driving, took forever, million stops, like 10 and a half hours to get to Orlando.

It didn't take 10 and a half hours to get to Orlando, it took us 10 and a half hours to get to Orlando.

Get there the next day, we're having a good time.

I'm still not rested.

Y'all know what I'm talking about.

It's just like it's just activity, activity, activity.

And so that second morning I went for a walk by myself, and so I put on some worship music and I go out and just get some space.

And so I start walking, and this was for me the first time having rest for a while.

And it was me just breathing in the grace of God, reminding myself as I walked, I don't have to control everything.

The future of this church, not all up to me.

I can let go of that.

I don't have to be fearful over the future of my daughters, I can let go of that.

I don't have to maintain my standing before God, I can let go of that.

And every time you remind yourself of something like that, you just feel more and more rest.

And then you know, walking along, it's a nice neighborhood, so I walk by the I walk by this house and it has a uh one of those Porsche, the four-door Porsche.

I forget what it's called.

Do you all anybody?

Y'all gonna act like you don't know?

That might be the name of it, I don't know.

So there's four-door Porsche and then there's a Tesla.

I I like these cars, and I I'm kind of walking by looking at them, and and I'm going, um man.

Those are those are really nice cars.

I don't have to own those cars.

I it's okay if I never own those cars.

It's okay.

A measure of rest coming in.

I I w I walk by um um uh Chris Kirkpatrick's house, the in-sync guy.

His house is a little bit bigger than everybody else's.

Um, you know.

It's okay if I if I if I don't have uh if I never have that house, it's it's okay.

Just kind of let and every every time you kind of let go of some, maybe maybe people will never know my name like they know Chris Kirkpatrick's, but it might be a good thing.

Um but every time you let go, just more and more rest.

Jesus is where I find my righteousness.

Jesus is where I find my identity.

He is my rest.

And so we we dive into him.

When we dive into scriptures, we dive into the law, we dive into all of that to know him more.

Matthew 11, 28 through 30, another time Jesus is teaching.

This is from the Message Bible.

Phrasing is very good for us.

Are you tired, worn out, burned out on religion?

Come to me.

Get away with me, and you'll recover your life.

I'll show you how to take a real rest.

Walk with me and work with me.

Watch how I do it.

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.

Keep company with me, and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.

Let's pray together.

Father, we confess we're not good at resting.

Even even when we're not doing anything, we're not good at resting.

Would you help us to shift our faith from the glory train, from the law, to into you.

And that we would find great rest of our hearts.

And that this would produce great glory for you.

Amen.