"True Freedom in Christ" (Nettleton) | John 8:31-38

The following resource is from lmpc.org and we're delighted to provide it freely to all.

If you feel need to give towards the ministry of the Cat Mountain Presbyterian Church, we welcome you to do so at lmpc.org.

And for a reading from John chapter 8, verses 31 through 38.

John 8:31–38

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.

And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

They answered him, We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.

How is it that you say you will become free?

Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

The slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever.

So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

I know that you are offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my words find no place in you.

I speak of what I have seen with my father, and you do what you have heard from your father.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome again to Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church.

My name is Will Nettleton.

I'm one of the pastors here.

Really glad to have you with us this morning, especially if you're visiting with us.

Welcome to you.

Glad to have you here.

If we haven't met, would love to meet you after the service this morning.

We are continuing our study in the Gospel of John.

And Jesus makes an offer this morning that really only makes sense if you know that you need it.

What he offers us is true freedom.

And that is good news if you know you're in slavery.

If you think you're already free, then that offer probably hits your ears as, oh, how nice, how pleasant.

Thanks, but no thanks.

And so the real tension at the heart of this passage is Jesus continues this conversation with some of these Jews at the Feast of Booths in Jerusalem, as they're going back and forth about who he is and what he offers.

The real tension is: do you need him?

Do you need what he offers?

Because what Jesus offers is freedom and a home.

If you find yourself this morning longing to be free, if you find yourself this morning longing for a home, then I want to direct you to the words of Jesus this morning.

And if you don't, if you're here this morning and you think, this is another one of those times where church people start talking about this, I don't know what they're talking about, then I'm going to invite you to consider what Jesus has to say as well.

Because Jesus tries to open the eyes of his congregation to their true situation, their true condition.

As he says to them, those who practice sin are slaves.

Is it possible this morning that you are in a condition that you haven't realized, that your situation is more desperate and more urgent than you feel?

That's the question I want to invite you to consider this morning.

You can see our outline there in your bulletin.

Jesus sets us free.

We have three indicators that he gives us in his word here that we know that we've been made free in him.

The first one is that we make our home in his word.

Second is that we acknowledge our past enslavement to sin.

And the third is that we embrace our place in the Father's family.

That's how we're going to try and navigate the text this morning.

So as we set out to do that, let me pause and pray, and we'll ask the Holy Spirit to bless our time in God's word together.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we pray now, as we come to your word.

Jesus said that he is our good shepherd.

And we're his sheep.

That his sheep know his voice.

And so, Lord, as we come this morning, many other voices are ringing in our head.

Many other voices are calling to us.

But we need to hear your voice this morning.

Would you help us to hear it, to know it, and to follow it?

I pray the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing to you, our rock and our redeemer.

It's in Jesus' name that I pray.

Amen.

Well, I am fresh.

I'm a few weeks back in now, but I was on sabbatical this summer.

I was out for about three months, and for half of that, we were gone to North Carolina.

So my wife, Mary's family, are all kind of dotted around the Raleigh, North Carolina area.

And so we decided for part of our sabbatical that we would spend it up there with family.

So we spent about six weeks there in Raleigh and uh rented a house this summer.

It was a great time.

Getting to be with family we don't get to see as often as we would like.

But while we were there, we we stumbled upon this problem that uh we had not anticipated, which was the dynamic for our young children around staying in a house that is not their home.

And we realized we had to be careful about what language we were using when it was time to leave whatever we were doing to go back to the rental house.

Because if we said, okay, time to go home, which is what we would often say as we were leaving something to go back to the house, it created lots of complicated feelings.

Especially for our youngest Shepherd, who at the time was two and a half.

And what we picked up on was that every time we said home, he thought we meant we were packing up and coming back here, that he was gonna have to spend nine hours in the car, that he wasn't gonna get to hang out with Nana and Papa anymore.

And so we started being a little more careful with our language.

We would say, time to go back to the house.

When we were talking about just going back to the rental.

And then when we were talking about coming home, we would try to preserve that language for, you know, at the end of the six weeks when we go back to Lookout Mountain.

What was fascinating was when we got back here after our six weeks up there, every now and then we would slip up.

We would slip up once we were here, and we say, okay, time to head back to the house.

And Shepard would get hot.

He would say, We not going back to the house.

We going home.

Even our little people know there is a difference between a house and a home.

There is a difference between a place that you visit and a place that you dwell.

There is a difference between those places that we go, even for an extended stay, and the place that we come to abide.

In our passage, Jesus, as I mentioned, is continuing his exchange at the temple at the feast of booths.

And in the verse right before our passage, verse 30, we've just heard John say, as he was saying these things, many believed in him.

And that's awesome, right?

That's what we want.

We want people to believe in Jesus.

That's what he wants.

But if you've been with us in this study in the Gospel of John, you may recall that belief has been a fickle thing for the crowds that come after Jesus.

If you go back to chapters 4 through 6, we watched as Jesus performed various signs from healing people to feeding 5,000 from just a small lunch that a boy had.

And those signs drew big crowds to Jesus.

But Jesus repeatedly warns them about being only after what he can do for them, after the material benefits that Jesus brings.

To the crowd that experienced the feeding of the 5,000, he says after the fact, you're just here for the bread.

You're here for this small thing that you think that I can do for you.

You're not here for me.

As Pastor Mark Sayers has phrased it, they wanted the kingdom, the benefits of it, without the king.

I think it's very helpful language.

They wanted the kingdom without the king.

They wanted the benefits of connection with Jesus without everything else that comes with it, without actually coming and following him, without connection to him.

And so that's been a theme throughout the Gospel of John.

They're following Jesus, but are they really with him?

Are they truly his disciples, or are they just here for something else they can get from him?

And actually, that's a tension that's going to run throughout the rest of the New Testament, throughout the rest of church history, even through our own very life as a congregation this morning.

How do you know if you're truly a disciple of Jesus?

All throughout the New Testament, we see these warnings.

John will talk about later in his epistles.

He'll talk about those who went out from us and they weren't of us, because if they were of us, they would have stayed with us.

Paul will name these people in his letters who were close with him and then betrayed him and left.

Perhaps you've experienced that in your own life.

Friends that you knew that were walking with Jesus and have walked away.

And you thought they were the type of person that that could never happen.

They grew up in the church, they were the most faithful ones.

There's no sign that this would ever be their trajectory.

How do we know?

How do we know if we're truly disciples of Jesus?

How do we know that we are people who are connected to Him, who want both the benefits of the kingdom and the King Himself?

And Jesus gives us a few indicators in our passage, and the first one begins with where we make our home.

Look back at verses 31 and 32 with me.

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Jesus says, You're truly my disciples if you abide in my word.

Now, abide is one of those older kind of Bible words that I think it can go in one ear and out the other.

And so that's why I've been using the language while we kind of change the language in your bulletin in the outline to Jesus sets us free to make our home in his word.

That's the idea behind abide.

It means to continue in a place, to remain, to put down roots, to dwell.

You can hear the similar word, your abode.

It's where you make your home.

So how do we know we're truly his disciples?

Jesus says we make our home in his word.

And notice he says that doing that has a couple of effects.

We will know the truth.

And the truth will set us free.

Okay, so that raises a question.

Well, how do we do that?

How do you make your home in Jesus' word?

Now, some of you are sitting there going, I know where he's going with this.

Make our home in his word.

I know he's about to tell me all the stuff I gotta do.

Here comes the chore chart of Christian stuff that we got to get done.

And if you are already leaning out because you fear obligation and drudgery are coming, do not miss what Jesus is saying.

Where does making our home in his word lead?

It leads to a knowledge of the truth, and that truth will set you free.

In a world of deep fakes, don't you just long to know that something is real?

To know what the truth is.

In a world where the weight of our lives can feel oppressive, don't you long to be free?

Jesus offers that to us.

He says, Come and make your home with me.

Come and make your home in my word.

So how do we do that?

What is his word?

Obviously, we have the teachings of Jesus in the gospels here.

But one of those teachings was that all of the Old Testament scriptures were about him and pointing to him.

Jesus, as you know, is God in the flesh.

He's the second person of the Trinity.

And so, inasmuch as the Bible, the scriptures are the word of God, we can say with confidence that it is his word.

And so when we talk about making our home and his word, we're talking about what he's spoken to us.

This book.

And invites us to come and make our home here.

So how do we do that?

Well, let's stretch the metaphor a little bit.

What makes your house your home?

What makes your house the place of security and rest and nourishment?

And I would argue it's it's the day-in, day-out rhythm of your life that flows through it.

So, what would it look like for us to see God's word that way?

That Jesus' word is a place of security and rest and nourishment.

Well, similar to your own house, as you seek to make it a home, it's not simply somewhere you visit every now and then.

It's where you live, it's where you dwell.

So a couple of practical thoughts of application for us.

It's really hard to make somewhere your home if you're never there.

If you've been at LMPC for any amount of time, you've heard us talk about our philosophy of ministry, how we think about growing in grace.

And we use the imagery of fire and light.

We say we want to warm our hearts together in Christ.

And we want to spread the light and warmth of Christ.

And we do that.

We warm our hearts to Jesus at three different fires.

That's the language and imagery we use: the candle, the campfire, and the bonfire.

The candle being your personal time with God or with another person one-on-one, studying his word together, praying.

We call it the candle because there's real light there.

You need that in this dark world.

But that alone is not going to keep you warm.

Which is why we also talk about the campfire.

In our lingo, the campfire is those small group gatherings throughout our community that gather for study and prayer and encouragement.

This is a big church.

You need a place where you can feel known.

You cannot walk in here on a Sunday morning and feel known in the 30 seconds of greeting time.

You need a place where you feel known on a deeper level.

That's why we push you towards small groups and the campfire.

It provides greater warmth and additional light, but the biggest and the warmest fire is the bonfire.

It's what we're doing this morning.

What we do every Lord's Day when we gather to worship him.

And if you haven't noticed, just go and look back through your bulletin and notice how much it contains God's word, not just in the sermon passage, but all throughout.

The songs that we sing, the prayers that we pray are full of God's word.

You can say it this way: every Sunday we read the word and we preach the word and we sing the word and we pray the word.

And so if you want to make your home in Jesus' word, if you want to abide there, we think those three pieces are important.

You need that candle, you need your personal time in God's word, you need the campfire, that small group studying his word together, and you need this.

You need to come Lord's Day by Lord's Day to gather, to worship, to make your home in his word.

So as we apply this, let me ask, are those priorities for you?

Well, now you may be saying, look, I'm here, okay?

Yes.

Is weekly worship a priority for you?

If you want to abide in Jesus' word, you know the truth and to be set free by that truth.

If you truly want to be his disciple, then what we're doing here this morning cannot simply be an occasional thing.

Once a quarter is not going to cut it, once a month is not going to cut it.

That is vacationing in Jesus' word.

It's not making your home there.

Now you may say, easy for you to say, going to church is your job.

Let me ask you this.

Do you like going to your job every day?

Me either.

I had a moment this summer on sabbatical, and it was the first time in a number of years where I was just a congregant.

Without uh, yeah, I just I was doing what you do.

I was getting up with my wife and my kids or making breakfast and getting the kids ready and loading up the car and yelling at each other because we're late.

We were doing the whole thing.

I had the full experience this summer.

And I remember waking up one Sunday morning and realizing that it was Sunday.

And then, of course, we had to go to church.

And before I could even stop myself in bed, I was like, and then immediately I had that shame of you're a pastor, you can't think that.

And I realized I was feeling exactly the same feeling I have sometimes about going to the gym.

I know that I need to do this.

I know that it will be good for me if I do it.

I know in the end I'll be glad that I did.

And you know there are some days if you go to the gym where the endorphins are flowing, you're proud of yourself, you're making progress, talking yourself up.

I'm like, I got this, I'm a person who exercises.

And there are other days of the gym where you are just grinding it out.

You are miserable.

And I use that illustration because there is a very real sense in which church is a gym.

It just is.

It is not always easy or fun for those of us who do this professionally.

So don't hear me as I say, come and make your home in Jesus' word.

Do not hear me saying, y'all get it together.

I'm in the same boat with you.

This is hard.

But this is where life is.

Jesus has said, Come and make your home and my word, abide here.

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Which is why we need to make it a priority.

Not simply because it's our duty, though that's true, but because it is a duty that leads to delight.

If we make our home in his word, Jesus says it leads to the knowledge of a truth that will set us free.

That raises an important question.

Free from what?

And this is sort of where I began this morning.

This sense of, do you need this?

Because in verses 33 through 35, Jesus sets us free to acknowledge our past enslavement to sin.

As we talk about freedom, you may have had that question, free from what?

And that's essentially the question the audience asked Jesus.

Look back at verse 33.

They answered him, We are offspring of Abraham.

We've never been enslaved to anyone.

How is it that you say you will become free?

So they're essentially saying, Jesus, we don't need your freedom.

We're Jews, we're offspring of Abraham, we're God's chosen people.

We've never been slaves to anyone, we're good.

Which, on the surface level, is a hilarious comment because they have almost exclusively been slaves to other people.

Couple hundred years in Egypt, there's that whole situation in Babylon, even the current situation with Rome is not exactly true freedom.

But what they're saying on a spiritual level, you can follow.

They're saying we're God's covenant people.

We belong to Him.

What are you offering us exactly that we really need?

And you may feel something like that this morning.

That what Jesus offers, you don't really feel a need for.

We talk a lot about the good news, and perhaps you're internally you're thinking, they keep saying rescue.

I'm not sure exactly what I need rescuing from.

My life is pretty solid.

I feel fine.

I'm a decent person, no worse than anybody else.

I appreciate the offer, but things are going okay.

And I can understand why you would say that.

If you don't know the bad news, the good news can sound ridiculous to you.

Would you imagine for a moment that you're at home one day, sitting on the couch, and someone kicks down your front door and says, I'm here to rescue you.

Your house is burning down, and I can get you.

Out.

What dictates how you respond to that offer?

Whether the house actually is on fire makes a big difference, does it not?

Those are two separate conversations.

If the house is on fire, you're saying thank you very much.

If the house is not on fire, we're discussing what they just did to your door hinges, right?

If you don't see fire or smell smoke or sense heat, that offer is going to strike you as ridiculous.

The only way that offer is good news that you want to respond to is if the house actually is on fire.

In a similar way, we talk about Jesus offering you freedom in life, and you may be thinking, yeah, but I don't smell any smoke.

Hear what Jesus has to say to the crowd in verse 34.

Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

They want to know how Jesus can say they need freedom.

And his response is to tell them that they're sinners.

And everyone who practices sin is a slave to it.

Sin is everything we do that God does not want us to do.

And it's any time, as we said this morning during our confession of sin from the Book of Common Prayer, I love that language.

It's all the things that we have left undone as well.

Sin is the things we've done that we shouldn't have done.

But it's also the things that we failed to do that were right and good.

It's the good things that we left undone.

Have you ever thought, said, or done something that God did not want you to do?

Have you ever failed to think, say, or do something that God wanted you to do?

The scriptures teach us that every single one of those things was sin.

And the wages of sin is death.

That sin, even as small as you may think it was, that it was an agent of chaos in God's world.

That it brought death and destruction, however small you thought it might have been.

And Jesus says to practice it is to be enslaved to it.

And the problem with being a slave is you don't really get to decide when you're going free.

It's not your call.

You belong to someone else.

Either they have to set you free, or you need someone to come from the outside and declare an emancipation proclamation.

Which is exactly what Jesus is doing.

It's what Jesus comes to offer.

Jesus comes and offers his life for our life.

He offers to buy us out of slavery.

You've been bought at a price.

Remember, Paul says that?

You're not your own.

Jesus comes to bring us out of slavery, but not to continue in slavery, but to be sons and daughters of the king.

The question this morning for us have you ever had the moment where you realize the house really is on fire?

That your situation is more desperate than you want to admit, that you need rescuing, that your best efforts at moral conformity, at following the rules, at trying to get to God, have only led you further down the track away from Him.

Have you realized you can't do this on your own?

Because until you do, you cannot embrace the offer that Jesus is making.

This is one of the fundamental truths about Christianity that is so hard for us to get.

The thing you need is need.

That's the thing you need.

If you don't have that, we can't go anywhere.

As long as you're insistent that you can do this, you can't come in.

But if you will come with open hands, empty hands, nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.

Naked come to thee for dress.

That is the heart of what we have to have.

We have to be able to say, Jesus, on my own, I'm enslaved to sin.

If it's left up to me, I've got nowhere to go.

I'm staying in this house.

Jesus is ready to rescue you.

Have you embraced the offer that Jesus is making?

Because look at it again in verse 36.

If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

Do you want to be free?

Jesus offers it to you this morning.

But we have to be able to say, apart from him, we are slaves in our sin.

But once we can name that, he brings us out.

Now we're the kind of people who aren't living in slavery anymore.

We can come make our home in his word.

We can come be in his family.

And that's where Jesus finishes in verses 36 through 38.

Jesus sets us free to embrace our place in the Father's family.

This freedom that Jesus offers us is not just freeing us from slavery, it's inviting us into his family.

Throughout the passage, there's been this duality: those who are really Jesus' disciples and those who are not.

The status of the son versus the status of the slave.

And finally, he talks about his father and the father of those who are arguing with him.

Look back at verses 37 and 38.

He says, I know that you're the offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you.

I speak of what I have seen with my father.

You do what you have heard from your father.

Okay, so we know who Jesus' father is.

Who's their father?

He says, You do what you've heard from your father.

Who's he talking about?

And it's going to become clear in the verses ahead, and we're going to look at this next week.

He's saying the devil.

The devil is your father.

They are enslaved to sin.

They live in his house, they bear his family resemblance.

And without the freedom that Jesus offers, we are in the same boat.

We're slaves living in the wrong house.

But Jesus offers us a place in his house with his father as our father.

The one whom the sun sets free is free indeed.

His father can be your father.

I'll finish with this.

I was thinking about there are certain movies that you see in your childhood that kind of stick with you as a child of the 90s.

Angels in the Outfield is one of those movies for me.

And if you've not seen it, the story centers on a little boy named Roger, who's part of the foster care system.

His dad's in and out of his life, but early in the movie, they're having a conversation, and Roger asks his dad a piercing question What will it take for us to be a family again?

And his dad, sort of off-handedly not thinking about the fact that he's talking to a child, says, Ah, it would take the angels to win the pennant.

Which he thinks can never happen.

And so Roger starts praying for that.

Beware the prayers of children.

They're very powerful.

Because that's what he does.

He prays, Will the angels win the penitent?

And of course, actual angels, if you know the movie, begin to show up, they start winning games.

But of course, it doesn't work out as Roger hopes.

His father ends up signing away his custody rights, although the team is winning.

Roger's whole reason for praying that they would win becomes impossible to attain.

He can't get back to this family.

But over the course of the movie, Roger and his friend PJ, who's also in the foster home, have developed a relationship with the angel's manager, Coach Knox.

And at the end of the movie, after his birth father has signed away custody rights and left him in the foster home, Coach Knox comes and makes him an offer.

Come and live in my house.

Let me adopt you.

Let us be a family.

And Roger says, Well, I can't leave PJ.

And Coach Knox says, He's coming to.

And they say, We're gonna have a daddy.

And they go home.

They leave a house that is not theirs.

They leave behind a father who would not love them to find a true home.

A real father.

It's the offer that Jesus is making every single one of us to leave slavery and to embrace our place in the Father's family, to make our home in his word and to find truth and life forevermore.

Have you embraced it?

Will you this morning?

Let me close us in prayer.

Father, I pray this morning for those of us who long to know if we're truly one of Jesus', would you remind us again that the one whom the Son sets free is free indeed?

Would you help us to come again and to make our home in your word?

Would you help us to embrace our place in your family?

And I pray for those perhaps who have not yet done that, who are still in a different house.

I pray you would help them to see their bondage, the bondage that all of us were in apart from Christ.

And would you help them to hear the offer of freedom this morning and to embrace it?

Pray all these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.