SEVEN Series: Week 15 - God Is Moving In The Middle

Crossroads church, I am beyond grateful, I am beyond thankful, I am beyond humbled to get to be a part of this story.

To realize that your story has been the story that God has chosen to use to change history for eternity in so many lives.

And I truly believe that the best is in front of us.

I am grateful, I am thankful, and I am humbled to get to be a part of what God is doing here.

And I look forward to leading us collectively with our elders, our staff, our incredible volunteers, and all of you into God's very next for us.

It's already happened, it's happening, and it's gonna continue to happen.

Just this week coming up, we're launching our City Care Christian Counseling Center, which is gonna be unbelievable.

And here's what I can tell you that the director of our counseling center two weeks ago was already full.

His intakes tomorrow, he's already got a full caseload.

He hasn't even started.

We're already looking to hire more counselors, and we have got a vision for leadership development and ministry.

You're gonna be hearing in the next several weeks about a new school, Ministry Leadership Institute, that we are creating here as part of the life and ministry of Crossroads, but not only for Crossroads, for a regional, for a national, and even an international reach to raise up fully devoted followers of Jesus who are called, equipped, and qualified to go and do the ministry.

We are so excited.

Just this past week at the city center.

I showed up on Friday for the food and the fun and the fellowship, and eight people off of the streets came in, gave their life to Jesus, and were baptized on Friday at our city center.

God's not through with us.

This is unbelievable.

I'm so excited.

We're gonna continue doing what God has called us to do with faithfulness and fervor.

I'm excited to invite you to be a part of what God is doing.

We're gonna continue in our seventh series.

In fact, we're gonna finish it today.

But I need all of you to grab your Bibles and turn to the New Testament book of John.

Listen, if you don't have a Bible, can I invite you to raise your hand?

We've got ushers that would love to bring you a Bible this morning.

The Bible that they bring you is a gift.

It's your Bible.

We want you to take it with you when you leave today and bring it back with you when you come back next week.

And we're gonna look at John chapter 11 together today.

John 11 · chapter mention

We're gonna look at the first 45 verses as we finish a series that we started at the very beginning of this number called Seven.

The framework that we've been building and operating under is the idea that in the Gospel of John, there's a triad of sevens.

There are three different distinctive sevens.

There are seven miracles of Jesus, seven messages of Jesus, and seven character statements, or I am statements of Jesus.

We've been looking specifically at the message of Jesus and the miracles of Jesus, and we've been holding tightly to this understanding that every miracle existed to substantiate the message and the message, the good news, the Yuan Gelion changes our eternity forever.

We're gonna finish out today in John chapter 11 with an unbelievable story.

John 11 · chapter mention

I want to read just to begin with verses 38 through 44.

Though we're gonna cover the whole thing, I want to cover the back.

We're gonna start at the end, John 11, 38.

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb.

It was a cave, and a stone lay against it.

Jesus said, Take away the stone.

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, by this time there's gonna be an odor, for he's been dead four days.

And Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?

So they took away the stone.

And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me.

I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.

When you said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come out.

The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips and his face wrapped with a cloth.

Jesus said to them, Unbind him and let him go.

Father, I thank you so much for who you are in our lives.

I thank you for who you are and who you've been and who you will be in our ministry here across this church.

God, I thank you for the privilege that you've given us to reach our community for you, Christ Jesus.

Father, I thank you for the favor that you've given us over all of these years.

And I pray that you would continue to do immeasurably more than all we could ever hope for, dream up, or ask of you.

God, as we study your word today, I pray that it would come alive in us in a brand new way.

Meet us where we're at, move us where you want us to go.

As we rightly divide your word, I pray, Father, that you would captivate our minds, challenge us, change us, create in us a new heart.

And Father, I pray that you would do what only you are capable of doing this morning.

I pray now that the words of my mouth and meditation of our hearts would be received as a gift, holy and pleasing to you alone, our rock and our redeemer.

And the whole church said, You seen one of these before?

Newton's cradle.

In the 1600s, there was a French physicist and priest who was studying the laws of motion.

Sir Isaac Newton was credited with the idea of the law of motion.

In 1967, this cradle, aptly named after Isaac Newton for his work with rules and laws of motion, came to be.

They called it Newton's Cradle.

Now it's got other names, but in 1967 it became popularized and even became a toy.

As I looked at this, I began to think about how it works, the physics of it and inertia and motion and movement, and how you take one weighted sphere from one side, equally hung, equally balanced, with each sphere in the middle barely touching the next.

How when you drop the weight of one sphere, it moves from one side into the next.

What stood out to me, and what stands out to me perhaps more than anything else with Newton's Cradle and the law of motion, isn't the beginning or the end.

The motion is obvious, the outcomes are evident.

You see the beginning and you recognize the end.

What stands out to me are the spheres in the middle.

That when you begin to move from one side into the next, though there seems to be drastic shifts, there's almost no motion and seemingly very little movement in the middle.

And it begs the question: if you don't understand the law of motion, how that's possible.

How do you have such a drastic divide between when you start and when you end with almost nothing going on in the middle?

I've chosen to use Newton's Cradle as an on-ramp for our discussion today because I think that it actually does a brilliant job of capturing the idea of what we're going to study together today.

And that's God moving in the middle.

For us, we get so consumed and so caught up with where we start, and for too many of us, we can't move past that.

We see all of our flaws, we see all of our failures, we see all of our brokenness, we see all of our doubts, we see all of our missed opportunities, we live in a place of regret, and we're stuck at the start.

For others, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we're consumed by the outcome.

We want to know exactly how it's gonna end.

We've dreamed up, we've envisioned, we've drawn out our vision maps, we've put it all together, we've created goals, dreams, and desires, and our end is always in mind.

In fact, we're so consumed with what the outcome's gonna be that we miss all of the moments in the middle.

And then there are us who are somewhere in between on the journey.

God has us somewhere in the middle right now.

And maybe, like these spheres in the middle, we feel stuck.

We feel like there's no movement, we feel like there's nothing happening.

We know where we started, we know where we want to go, or perhaps we know where God started with us, and we believe we understand where God wants to take us, but we're stuck somewhere in the middle.

Maybe we feel stuck relationally, or we feel stuck financially, we feel stuck physically, we feel stuck emotionally, we feel stuck spiritually.

Somewhere, somewhere between the beginning and the end, we feel stuck in the middle.

And here's the good news this morning: God, in his sovereignty, in his sufficiency, in his divinity, is not limited to one or two or three dimensions, not to four dimensions.

God, while we see from one side into the next and can be consumed with the beginning, the end, or being stuck in the middle, God sees throughout history and time, over all humanity.

And he holds it all in his hand.

That should change the way we see everything when we understand how we should see God.

That's how we see this story today.

In John chapter 11, Jesus is now away from Jerusalem, some 20 miles.

John 11 · chapter mention

Prior to this, we've been in a series, this series, where we've been studying how Jesus, for a little more than a week, was in Jerusalem at the temple during the festival of tabernacles or the festival of booths.

And in just a little more than a week, about eight days, multiple things occur in the temple.

In a myriad of celebrations and momentous occasions.

In a town that typically has 20,000 people that's swollen to maybe as many as a million people.

Jesus is going to use all of the backdrops of society and religion and expectation, and he is going to make some unprecedented revelations and claims.

Jesus is going to say that he is the light of the world.

Jesus is going to say that he is living water.

Jesus is going to say he is bread of life.

Jesus is going to leave through a very common sheepgate, and he's going to see a man born blind, and he's going to disrupt superstition when the disciples ask, Jesus, who sinned?

Was it this man or his parents?

Jesus, then, along with this man, they're going to disrupt society as this man born blind is healed in a really unique way.

And after Jesus spits on this dirt and creates mud and puts this clay over his eyes and sends him to the pool of Siloam to be washed and healed, Jesus slips out of the crowd.

This man is going to be brought before the religious leaders, the Sanhedrin, Pharisees, and Sadducees, and five times he's going to be put on trial.

Five times he's going to have to give an account for what happened and who did what had been done to him.

In this moment, Jesus has this revelation with this man.

Do you want to know who the Son of Man is?

You're talking to him.

And immediately, immediately the man born blind falls prostrate in front of Jesus and begins to worship him as Lord and lives his life for him as Savior.

On the heels of this, and right up to what we're going to study together today, Jesus is embroiled in controversy with the religious leaders.

They're demanding answers.

And in fact, they believe that Jesus is guilty of blasphemy because he says, I and the Father are one.

They take up stones, they begin to attempt to stone Jesus.

And together with his disciples, they leave the temple, they leave Jerusalem, and they travel south and east to the other side of the Jordan River in the country of Jordan.

And I'm going to show that to you here in just a minute.

But we're going to begin now in chapter 11 and verse 1, picking up where I just gave a narrative and left us.

Now, there was a certain man who was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.

Now we know that Lazarus, Martha, and Mary are close companions and friends with Jesus.

We know that Jesus, though his hometown is Nazareth and his home base is Capernaum, he will spend a lot of time in this village, Bethany, that is just outside the temple in Jerusalem.

Bethany is a unique village.

In fact, the name says it all.

Bethany or Beth Annay literally means house of the poor.

House of the poor.

I want us to understand that names bear significance culturally.

They tell a story collectively.

When you hear the name Bethany, speaking of this context, if your name's Bethany, I'm sure this is not true of you.

It's a beautiful name today.

In relationship to the town, the village, that the hamlet that is being referred to here, there's some three to five hundred people that are living as residents in Bethany.

It's just two miles outside of the temple, but it is as house of the poor.

To give us an understanding for our context today, this would be what we would call Section 8 housing.

There are government subsidies taking place.

Maybe HUD housing.

The government has set this community aside, and we see the broken, we see the poor, and we see the outcasts going in and out through Bethany.

In fact, lepers are recorded as being from or in Bethany.

So Bethany is not a desirable suburb of Jerusalem.

And yet this man, Lazarus, who's the youngest of three siblings, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, is ill.

He's gravely ill.

We are never given the understanding of what he's sick with, but I do want to let you know in advance he eventually is going to die because of his illness.

He's going to pass away because of whatever ails his body.

In verse 2, it says, It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill.

This is a prolepis.

It means something that is going to happen that hasn't happened but is stated as a matter of fact.

In the next chapter, John 12, John is going to be at the house, or excuse me, Jesus is going to be at the house of a religious leader.

And there, preparing for his final week, Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, is going to find Jesus.

She's going to come to Jesus, and she is going to take a very expensive perfume, a nard, an oil, a fragrant offering worth a year's wages.

Respectively, nationally, the average individual income is about$42,000 a year.

She's going to take a perfume that is worth an average annual salary, break it open, and there anoint Jesus' feet, and she's going to wipe them clean with her hair.

In this prolipsis, though it hasn't happened yet, it is stated as a matter of fact, as though it is certain to happen.

And this is an explanation that is pointing to this individual and who she is.

It's really unique because there's no way that we can misunderstand which Mary this is.

There's no way we can misunderstand the relationship that exists.

It's Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill.

So it wasn't a different Mary, it wasn't a different Martha, and it wasn't a different Lazarus.

That's important because Lazarus was one of the most prominent and popular names of this era.

I love that John chooses to include these details.

Verse 3 says, So the sisters sent to him.

Lazarus is sick.

Martha and Mary sent to Jesus, saying, Lord, he whom you love is ill.

They didn't have the capabilities of communication like we had.

They didn't have the telegraph, they didn't have the phone, they didn't have the ability to text, they didn't have smoke signals, they didn't have carrier pitches, they didn't have anything.

Jesus is 20 miles away from where Mary and Martha and Lazarus are.

But this is such an important moment that they send delegates who are going to travel two days.

In fact, I've got an image I want to show you, the distance between Bethany, just outside of Jerusalem, and where Jesus is at.

We're going to learn that Jesus is just at the site of John's baptism site or John's baptistry.

In the image that you see here to your right, which would be the east and a little bit down to the south, you're going to see what is today on the other side of the Jordan River, in the country Jordan, the baptism site of Jesus and John.

Now I've been here.

I've had the privilege of baptizing many people in the Jordan River, and they can know with certainty, based on archaeology and geography and written facts, that this place is where John's baptistry would exist, and most certainly would have been a place where Jesus was baptized.

And from this space, to travel from this side of Jordan into Jerusalem, would have been a two-day trek.

Given the topography, the landscape of the land, it would have taken each day about 10 miles to get where they needed to go.

This is going to be important here in just a moment.

Mary and Martha send a delegate to let Jesus know that Lazarus, the one that he loves, who he has a close relationship with, is sick.

Verse 4 tells us when Jesus heard it, he said, The illness does not lead to death.

It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.

This is what's known as an antinomy.

An antinomy.

It's where two things that oppose each other are equally true at the same time.

Two things that are absolute truths that are juxtaposed, an antinomy.

Jesus declares this illness won't lead to death.

Now I gave you a spoiler alert about four minutes ago and told you that Lazarus, at the hand of his illness, is going to die.

Jesus declares that this illness won't lead to death, but that this has happened so that God's glory would be on full display, and not just for anyone or everyone, but specifically for the disciples.

Others will catch it, others will see it, others will respond to it.

But this moment is a moment where Jesus is going to speak directly to the hearts of the disciples.

In this antinomy, he is declaring, this illness doesn't lead to death, it's for the glory of God, so the Son of God may be glorified through it.

Verse 5.

Now Jesus loved Martha.

And Jesus loved her sister and Lazarus.

I think what's important here is we so often want to associate outcomes with affection.

If God loved me, why would he allow these things to happen to me?

If God loved me, why would these bad things happen to a good person?

And we begin to rationalize and try to understand equating God's love with our outcomes.

Is it possible that God loves us regardless of the outcomes?

That God has control regardless of the outcomes, that God has set things in motion that we can't see because we're so consumed with the start or the ending that we don't know what God is doing in the middle.

I think it's really important that John points out here in this that Jesus loved Martha and he loved Mary and he loved Lazarus.

The circumstances are unique and momentarily it looks like they're not going to change.

This illness is going to lead to a physical earthly death.

And so we equate this with if you love me, you wouldn't hurt me.

If you love me, you would honor me.

If you love me, you would do what I want you to do.

Yeah, I think so often about how I've struggled with this in my own life.

Have you ever heard that song by Garth Brooks, Unanswered Prayer?

It came out about the same year that Crossroads Church was planted.

It's an amazing song that talks about.

Now I'm not a country, and I'm not a Western fan.

I'm certainly not a country Western fan.

But the lyrics of this song are profound.

Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayer.

That the things that imagine what would have happened if God would have answered my prayers, how much different my life would look.

But God in his sovereignty, God in his omnisciency knows so much more than we do.

And in high school, in college, early on in my life, and at various times throughout my life, I have associated God's love with my circumstance.

And friends, I need to tell you this too is an antinomy.

Sometimes life is really hard and doesn't make sense, and still God loves us.

His love is unwavering and never changing, and it is unending.

He finds out that Lazarus is sick up until the point of death, and he chooses instead of to make the journey to stay two extra days.

Doesn't that seem a little odd to you?

Doesn't that seem a little strange, the timing?

Then, verse 7.

After this he said to the disciples, let's go to Judea again.

Judea is the region where Jerusalem is.

The disciples said to him, Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and you're going to go there again?

Remember, he fled Jerusalem.

He left the region of Judea, in Jerusalem in Judea, to get away from these religious leaders who were trying to stone him for what they called blasphemy, because Jesus, on the heels of demonstrating his sovereignty and divinity, makes the declaration that I and the Father are one.

So he leaves.

And now the disciples look at this very pragmatically.

They're looking at the circumstances and the facts, just the facts, ma'am.

And they're saying, Jesus, the place that you just left, you want to go back to, you're most certainly going to be stoned.

Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day?

Verse 9 If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of the world.

But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles because the light is not in him.

Guys, I've been talking about this over the last several weeks, the motifs in the Bible, and specifically the motif of darkness that is equated with death and light that is equated with life, and how Jesus has and seemingly continues to make his point.

Here again, Jesus is making his point.

This time is a little bit different than Jesus declaring that he is the light of the world.

Instead, what he's talking about here is the cultural understanding that people worked when the sun was up and they rested when the sun was down.

Jesus is declaring with his disciples, here's what he's saying in modern terms.

Hey guys, the sun is still up.

We've got work to do.

Regardless of the surroundings and the circumstances, we've got work to do.

We need to be going because I need to be about my father's business.

We've got work to do.

I wonder how many of us would change the way we live our lives day in and day out, week to week, if when we left Crossroads parking lot, we didn't see it as an end of a service, but the beginning of our service.

That we've got work to do.

While there is still day, while we still have breath in our lungs, while we still have capacities and capabilities, we've got work to do.

The service may be over, but our service to the Lord is just beginning.

We've got work to do.

This is exactly what Jesus is saying in verse 11.

After saying these things, he said to them, Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.

The disciples said to him, Lord, if he's fallen asleep, he will recover.

The word here used to describe sleep is interchangeable with rest and death, or a deep rest and a complete death.

Jesus takes all the guesswork out here in verse 13 when he when he says, now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in his sleep.

Jesus told them plainly, Lazarus has, past tense, already taken place, died.

Lazarus has died.

Verse 15.

This is a very important explanatory verse.

Highlight, circle, underline, italicize, use this as the fulcrum point where we're going to start to see the shift of the circumstances with the designed outcomes that Jesus has intended.

And for your sake, I'm glad that I was not there so that you may believe.

Let us go to him.

So Thomas called the twins, said to his fellow disciples, Let us go away.

Let's go also, let's go with him, that we may die with him.

That's how sure Thomas was of the kind of danger that Jesus and his disciples were about to step into.

Are you sure you want to go back to Judea?

You sure you want to go back toward Jerusalem?

They almost stoned you to death.

Certainly, if we go back now, you're going to be stoned.

And Jesus says there's still work to do.

The service may be ending, but the serving, we're just, we got, we got work to do.

I love Thomas's courage.

Where you go, I'll go.

And if you die, I will die with you.

He puts himself knowingly, willingly and intentionally in harm's way.

To the glory of God, for the good of others, and for the fulfillment of the gospel.

How many of us, if we know that our life and our livelihood hang in the balance for our faith and the gospel, would carry this same attitude.

Jesus, I'm coming with you, even if it means death.

Verse 17, when Jesus came, when he got to Bethany, house of the poor, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb.

Four days.

Verse 18, Bethany was near Jerusalem.

It's only two miles away.

It's just off the Mount of Olives.

You can see Jerusalem clearly in the temple from Bethany.

And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother.

Here's what you need to know: this is what's called a period of Shiva.

In context, the moment an individual is deceased, the burial proceeding begins.

There's an embalming process, including wrapping the dead or the deceased in linens from their feet up into their head with a separate burial cloth for their head.

They embalm them to try to mitigate some of the odor that is going to come from the decomposing body at the hand of death.

They are buried, listen to me, they are buried the same day they die.

There's not a mortuary, there's no removing vital organs and draining the body and then filling it full of embalming fluids and other things to uh keep the body looking in some sort of a natural state.

It's instant, it's moment, like in that moment, instantaneously, that individual is dead.

They verify the death and they then immediately begin the burial process.

The second part of this is Shiva, and Shiva is a professional or a personal mourning period.

It's a seven-day period of mourning where several things happen.

First, and maybe most prolific is people are actually paid.

There are vocational mourners, people who will cry with you, they will wail with you, they will play instruments, making sure that everybody around knows that this is death.

It's a seven-day mourning period, and there are professional mourners who are like the deceased relatives, wearing torn clothes and sackcloth and heaping ashes on their heads.

Now, for the immediate family, for seven days they go into a period of complete rest.

They do not work.

For seven days they sit either on the ground or on a low stool, showing the low stature of their hearts.

For seven days they don't groom, they don't bathe, they don't change, they wear these torn clothes, they heap ashes upon their heads.

And it is very evident to all that death has taken place.

We are past midway through the seven-day mourning period.

We are on day four of seven during this mourning period, this Shiva.

Verse 19, or excuse me, verse 20.

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she wasn't there when Jesus arrived.

Why?

Because the relatives of the deceased didn't even leave the home.

They didn't want to be in the streets, they didn't want to be interacting with the community.

They would just stay at their residence.

She hears that Jesus is there.

Jesus doesn't go to their home in Beth.

He actually stays on the outskirts.

When Martha heard, Martha the oldest, when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him.

But Mary, in her state of Shiva, her state of mourning, remained seated in the house.

Martha said to Jesus, Lord, Lord, if you had been here, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

Here's another antinomy.

Both true.

Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again.

Martha said to him, I know that he'll rise again in the resurrection on the last day.

What she's referring to is what you can find in Acts chapter 23, verse 6, 7, and 8.

Acts 23:6

This is where Paul the apostle makes the declaration about hope and the hope that he had as a Pharisee, comparing the Sadducees and the Pharisees, that the Sadducees do not believe in the spiritual things, and the Sadducees do not believe in life after death or in eternal existence or eternal life.

But the Pharisees do believe that there will come a day of atonement, a day of judgment.

And both are true.

We will see a day of judgment, every one of us.

But Jesus is going to make a radical statement in this moment, not about what is future tense, what will come eschatologically, what will be in the last days or in the end when it's all said and done.

Jesus says in this moment, when she says, I know the day of the resurrection and the last day, Jesus said in verse 25, I am the resurrection and the life.

Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.

Do you believe this?

She said to him, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into this world.

Jesus is not just talking about future things to come, he is talking about what is pay possible, available, and immediate in this moment.

As I talk to you right now, I'm even thinking about, I'm gonna see if I can find it quickly.

2 Corinthians chapter 5, speaking of the Apostle Paul.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

In 2 Corinthians chapter 5, speaking about the resurrection, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, speaking about what Jesus does, beginning in verse 11.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention 2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others.

But what we are is known to God, and I hope it's known also to our conscience.

We're not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about our outward appearance and not about what is in the heart.

For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God.

If we are in our right mind, it is for you.

Verse 14, for the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this that one who has died for all, therefore all have died.

And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

Verse 16, from now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh.

Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has already passed away.

Behold, the new has already come.

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.

Write that down and go study that on your own this week.

2 Corinthians chapter 5 tells us that where Mary believed a very common practice and understanding that was thousands of years old eschatologically, that in the end days there would be a judgment and that we would be all held accountable for our actions, and that there would be a resurrection of the dead, Jesus makes this declaration right now that in him there is resurrection, that if you are in Christ, there is now no more condemnation, and you are a new creation.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

The old is gone and the new is right here, right now.

She said, I believe.

Verse 28, when she said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, the teacher is here and he's calling for you.

Verse 29, when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him.

Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had to meet him.

When the Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there.

These are professional mourners.

This is their job.

Now, when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell to seat, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

Sound familiar?

Can I just be honest?

Sometimes I spend time with individuals who are messed up.

They're dealing with something really difficult in their lives.

And I see themselves surrounding themselves with negative people.

And negativity breeding negativity.

And I start to hear this negativity from different sides, different individuals, different angles.

You know that old adage, that axiom, you are what you eat?

There's so much truth to that, by the way.

But there's an even greater truth.

You are who you surround yourself with.

This is why Paul says also in Corinthians, bad company corrupts good morals.

You are who you surround yourself with.

You know, can I just tell you that yesterday was hard for me?

But 6 30, I'm sitting here wondering if I'm even going to preach today.

And some say, Pastor, why?

Because organ lost.

And I went to bed knowing that I was going to hear nothing but negativity from you.

I went to bed at halftime after Smith cut that brilliant ball from saying in the end zone, made it look easy, and I thought, uh, who else can preach tomorrow?

I don't want to deal with all their nonsense.

And would you believe I woke up this morning at 4 a.m.

and I looked at ESPN and the Ohio State fan of me thought, what happened?

But the organ duck in me said, Yes! We're all one in one.

You can't say a word to me.

In all seriousness, you start to pick up the language of those that you surround yourself with.

You start to pick up the attitudes of those you surround yourself with.

You start to pick up the behaviors of those you surround yourself with.

Negativity breathes negativity.

In fact, two weeks ago, Wednesday, I was leading our staff chapel in devotion time, and in the middle of our staff devotion in chapel, I stopped and I asked our staff to hold me accountable.

I said, I will not tolerate negativity from anyone, nor do I want you to allow me to be negative.

If you hear negative talk come out of my mouth, stop me immediately.

Stop me immediately.

We're not just gonna, we're not gonna just sugarcoat negativity with facts.

Well, I'm just talking about what the fact no, no, no, no, no.

You know exactly the difference between something happened and just addressing what happened versus your attitude about it.

I'm tired of being negative.

I am not inherently a negative person.

I am inherently a glass half full kind of guy.

I am inherently a guy who sees the best in everyone and the best in everything.

And I have found that over weeks and months and years that I have allowed circumstances to create a cynicism in me, and that when I choose to, I can surround myself with negative people who are gonna feed my negativity.

And here's the point in this: be careful who you surround yourself with because you're gonna start to sound like them.

Martha goes to Jesus and says, Lord, if you had been here, if you had been here, this wouldn't have happened.

Mary, Mary goes to see Jesus, the very first thing she says, Lord, where were you?

If you had been here, this wouldn't have happened, my brother wouldn't be dead right now.

It's not a coincidence that she's saying the exact same thing.

And this is going to burden Jesus.

Verse 33, when Jesus saw her weeping, when Jesus saw her, highlight that, underline that, circle that.

Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with him also weeping.

He was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.

The word greatly troubled in the original language there is the same word that uses imagery of a horse that is unbridled and angry.

A horse that puts its head down, stomps on the ground, and snorts.

It's a kind of violent anger that you don't want to be in front of.

That's the etymology of this word.

We were look at this, and the way we read it is so sweet and kind and considerate.

Oh, Jesus was greatly troubled.

No, what he's saying is Jesus was furious.

Jesus was angry, Jesus was beside himself, upset.

And what was he so upset about?

Not the circumstance, but the byproduct of the circumstance.

Sin.

Sin that leads to death.

Death that leads to destruction relationally, physically, emotionally, and even spiritually.

Jesus is looking all the way back in Genesis at the fall of humanity, and it angers him at his core, the byproduct of sin, the ramifications of our choices and how we respond.

This is what Jesus is feeling viscerally.

In his spirit, he is moved beyond an emotion.

It's a righteous indignation.

Verse 34, and he said, Where have you laid him?

They said to him, Lord, come and see.

And Jesus wept.

This is so important.

If you have a hard time memorizing scripture, try this.

John 11, 35.

Jesus wept, period.

So the Jews said, See how he loved him.

But some of them said, Could not he have opened the eyes of the blind man also and kept this man from dying?

Here it is again.

Man, I mean, some of the people are so moved by Jesus' emotion, and others are cynical, and they're taking advantage of Jesus in what seems to be a moment of weakness.

They want to exploit.

Verse 38, then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb.

It was a cave, and a stone lay against it.

Jesus said, Take away the stone.

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, by this time there will be an odor.

And King James has said, He will surely stinketh.

For he's been dead for four days.

Okay, I've mentioned four days three times now.

Let me explain to you what's going on and why Jesus chose to wait two days and why it took him two days to get there.

Okay.

The two days to get there, the travel, the topography, the map, it all makes sense.

But why wait two days?

Why why belabor the point?

Culturally, they believed, even in the extratitions of the Jews in Leviticus Rabbah, that the soul would leave a dead body and would hover.

Listen to me.

They believed that the soul would hover over that corpse or over that body for a period of three days, looking for a means, a way, or an opportunity to re-enter the body and re-engage life.

This is what they believed.

Systematically, this is how they prepared everything.

So Jesus, knowing this nonsense, Jesus knowing this mythology, Jesus knowing this superstition, that this is what they held to, Jesus knew that if he had gone the day of, if he had gone the day after, if he had gone two days later, within three days, and he had healed Lazarus, no one would assume that it was the sovereignty and the sufficiency of God.

They would have assumed that the soul had been hovering over the body until it was able to re-enter and then re-emerge to life.

But in this moment, by the fourth day, if you do the studies, and I'm gonna temper myself this morning and not tell you about the decomposition process, but let me tell you that four days decomposing is not pretty.

They believed that on the fourth day there was no way possible for a soul to re enter the body.

Jesus then, in what is irreversible and unmistakable, shows up at the tomb.

Now, do you see the power of this moment?

Do you see the purpose in Jesus waiting to go back?

He wanted to make sure that Lazarus wasn't just dead, but he liked he gone.

He gone gone.

Take away the stone.

Lord, he smells horrible.

His body's been in there four days decomposing.

Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you, this is rhetorical?

Catch this.

Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?

So they took away the stone, and Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me.

This is giving God glory in advance for what has already taken place and what's about to be experienced.

Verse 42, I knew that you always hear me.

But I said this on the account of the people standing around.

Who's standing around?

Jesus' disciples are standing around.

Martha is standing there.

Mary is standing there.

These paid public mourners are standing there.

The Jews are standing there.

The three to five hundred people from Bethany are standing there, and maybe even others who have come in from the outside because they've heard the murmurings of what's happening.

These people are all standing there.

Jesus says, Lord, I know you know that I know that we know, you know.

But they don't know, and they need to know.

So I did this.

Not for me, not for you, but for them, that they may believe that you sent me.

Verse 43.

When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come out.

It said that St.

Augustine made the statement that Jesus had to use Lazarus by name because if he had just opened the tomb and said, Come out, there would have been people coming out in droves.

Lazarus come out, verse 44.

The man who had died.

Past tense, already taken place.

He was dead, gone, buried.

Who had died, came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips and his face wrapped with a cloth.

And Jesus said to them, Unbind him and let him go.

Verse 45.

Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him.

Reminds me of John chapter 4, the Samaritan woman with the well who has this encounter with Jesus, and she says, Come and see a man who's told me everything.

John 4 · chapter mention

Could he be the Messiah?

And because of her testimony, many believed, and still they went to see Jesus.

And after Jesus was with them, teaching them and performing miracles, it says, Many more believed.

They say it.

These Samaritans said, We first believed on account of her testimony, but now that we've experienced you for ourselves, we believe.

But there are three things that I want to point out.

The first comes, I believe it's verse 32 and 33, where it says, Jesus saw them.

And here's what you need to know, church.

That God sees us in every situation.

All those moments in the middle where it doesn't add up, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't look right.

God sees us in the middle of every situation and circumstance.

God sees you in your situation right now.

Whatever you're faced with.

He is not going to leave you and he is not going to forsake you.

He is always with you.

He sees you in your situation.

The second thing that I see is when Jesus tells them to roll the stone away.

Martha and Mary say, Lord, you can't do that.

Based on our experience, and what we know the expectation is that it's going to stink if you do that.

And here's the second thing that I see in this text.

God is greater than any of our experiences or expectations.

God is greater than our experience or expectations.

We see so myopically, we see so simply.

We see so insignificantly, so many things.

We can't see one from the other.

We see just what's in front of us.

That old axiom, that that old statement, the forest for the trees, we get so convoluted and confused.

That when we look at what we're dealing with, we tell God why He can't do something based on our experience and based on our expectation.

God, you you can't do that.

Experience would say that that's impossible.

Like I expect that if you step into my life, it's going to be smelly.

I expect that if you step into my marriage, it's going to be dirty.

I expect that if you step into my finances, it's going to be hard.

I expect that if you step into my relationships, it's going to be vulnerable.

It's going to come at a cost.

And so we tell God we pray with an idea, but we pray without faith.

Lord, I'd love for you to do this.

I just don't think, based on my experience and expectations, that you could do this.

God.

God sees you.

And God is greater than your experience, and he's greater than your expectations.

He is?

And finally, God is moving in the middle.

I need you to catch that, church.

God is moving in the middle.

When all we see is maybe this place where we're starting from, with an understanding of what we hope the end looks like.

And we feel so stuck in the middle.

God, even though it doesn't look like anything's happening in the middle, God is moving in the middle.

God is moving in the middle.

God is moving right now in the middle of your life.

He's moving in the middle of your diagnosis.

He's moving in the middle of your bank statement.

He's moving in the middle of your relationship.

He's moving in the middle of your counseling.

He's moving in the middle, he's moving in the mental in the middle of your mental health.

God is on the move.

Three words I offer you.

Don't give up.

God is moving in the middle.

Don't give up.

God is moving in the middle.

God is moving in the middle.

He sees you in every situation.

He's greater than your experience and your expectation.

And God is moving in the middle.

Just believe.

Yes, Lord, I believe.

And Jesus said, I've allowed all this to happen.

I've allowed all this to happen so that others might believe.

What if what God is doing in the middle of your life right now has nothing to do with what you're dealing with right now and everything to do with the outcome and the impact that your story is going to have on others around you?

What if?

Even in the middle of your loss and your brokenness and your heartache, what if God, in his sovereignty, knows the outcome?

And he's not punishing you for any bad deed, but he knows that in the middle of the loved one that you lost, that God's going to use you to reach others in a way that you could not reach otherwise.

What if that movement in the middle right now has nothing to do with your outcome, but what others are going to see and how they're going to experience Christ because of your story.

Don't despise God in the middle because He is still moving.

Hang on.

Hope is here in Jesus' name.