Doing and Knowing the Truth
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Due to technical recording problems the audio and printed sermon will begin as recorded, immediately following the scripture verses: John 7:14-36.
14Not until halfway through the Feast did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. 15The Jews were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having studied?”
16Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me. 17If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. 18He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him. 19Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me?”
20“You are demon-possessed,” the crowd answered. “Who is trying to kill you?”
21Jesus said to them, “I did one miracle, and you are all astonished. 22Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs), you circumcise a child on the Sabbath. 23Now if a child can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing the whole man on the Sabbath? 24Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.”
25At that point some of the people of Jerusalem began to ask, “Isn’t this the man they are trying to kill? 26Here he is, speaking publicly, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities really concluded that he is the Christ[a]? 27But we know where this man is from; when the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.”
28Then Jesus, still teaching in the temple courts, cried out, “Yes, you know me, and you know where I am from. I am not here on my own, but he who sent me is true. You do not know him, 29but I know him because I am from him and he sent me.”
30At this they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his time had not yet come. 31Still, many in the crowd put their faith in him. They said, “When the Christ comes, will he do more miraculous signs than this man?”
32The Pharisees heard the crowd whispering such things about him. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees sent temple guards to arrest him.
33Jesus said, “I am with you for only a short time, and then I go to the one who sent me. 34You will look for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.”
35The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we cannot find him? Will he go where our people live scattered among the Greeks, and teach the Greeks? 36What did he mean when he said, ‘You will look for me, but you will not find me,’ and ‘Where I am, you cannot come’?”
…but there’s just a lot there. But I settled on this word called truth, and what does truth mean for a Christian? How do you know the truth, as a Christian, as you lead your life in Christ? And that is what this is. It is the idea of that actually as Steve said, “It is not just knowing it, it is doing it”, and that theme runs straight through this scripture.
So how do we know the truth? Well the first thing we have to know, it is not just about what you know; it’s who you know that counts. Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me.” Now there are two things going on in Jesus’ time if you wanted to be taken seriously as a teacher. One is you had to be educated; in other words, you had to go, in our parlance, seminary. You had to be a seminary grad. In those days if you went to seminary, it was like going to law school and you learned what everybody else said for hundreds of years about particular subjects. So you not only had to go to school but you had to be able to quote everybody, kind of like a lawyer does when they go do a case today; they want to know what the precedents are. That is how they argued back then. So Jesus has a problem. One is that he is not educated. Of course he knew more than everybody but they didn’t know that, given who he was. To them, he can’t quote everybody else. That’s why they are derogatory. “How does this guy know these things? He hasn’t even been educated.” And Jesus answers, “My teaching is not my own.” Now the word the Pharisees used was learning, which literally was grammatic, or letters: he is not a man of letters. But Jesus says, “My teaching, my doctrine is from God, Himself.” No wonder he infuriated them. He would infuriate them by these kinds of statements. And I believe the lesson for us is, knowing the truth is so much more than knowing the facts.
You know, Christianity is not some secret knowledge. There are a lot of groups out there that, in order to be a member, you have to go through ceremonies and learn secret knowledge and you are above everyone else because you know this knowledge no one else knows. It is not like that in Christianity. It is not secret but it is a relationship. It is a relationship. In other words, you have to know the Lord in order to know things. That is the beauty of it. You see, you don’t have to necessarily have a high school education to know the Lord really well. I have been a pastor a long time and have been a pastor of several of churches and I have learned along the way that there are a lot of folks out there who know the Lord really well and it has nothing to do with their education. Sometimes, as a person who is exceptionally educated, you go in with all these degrees, these letters behind your name, and you think: I know something. Not necessarily. In fact, I have met many seminary professors, people who have ozone layer brains, way above most of us, who don’t have a clue because they are missing something. It is that relationship with God. They may be experts in the Bible, may know more than most everybody in the world, but they don’t have a clue. That is not to say that education is not important; it is both/and not either/or. Education is a good thing, but it is more than that. You have to know some one in order to know some thing as a Christian.
The second thing about the truth… A very curious statement Jesus makes. You have to want to do the will of God before you can know the will of God. Look what he says. He says, “17If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” Very curious statement, but it is right in line with what happens very often, or what you see in the Bible very often— and that is almost the very opposite of what the world teaches— and that is, in order to know you have to believe first. In the world it is, “I don’t believe it until I see it.” “I won’t believe it until I know it.” Believe me, in many cases that’s O.K. But when it comes to being a Christian, knowledge only takes you so far and I want to say that if anyone here who is a searcher, God loves you. He is glad you are searching. But, knowledge only gets you so far. You have to believe in order to know. To go along with that, to some degree you have to do in order to know. You have to do the truth. How do you do that? Well, in my own life, I have shared many times that I had one of those conversion experiences. About six months before that, as I was thinking about that, as I was moving in that direction, it was the spring of my sophomore year in college. I resolved that when I went home for the summer, I was going to be a good person. I was going to stop doing all the things that I had been doing. I will not tell you what they are, you don’t want to know. But, I was going to stop it. I was going to be a good person. I was going to follow the Lord and it worked for the summer, at least most of it. But I found that I didn’t really have the power by myself to do those things. Now, I actually believe that you can’t take a step without God actually helping you. It is kind of like my little grandson out here who is trying to learn how to walk. He requires a hand. I think that is true for us, as well. But I do believe that God honors even the most halting steps toward him. I look back on that and I believe that. You have to do. That is what Jesus is saying to the crowd. He is saying, “if you are choosing to do God’s will, however haltingly, you will find out if I am right or not, if I am the truth, because God will honor it.”
The third aspect of the truth is appearance is not always reality. Jesus says, “Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.” Another personal story, when I got out of high school and I went to college up in the north I went to a school in Philadelphia from Atlanta. As a southern kid who had never really been away from home, it was an interesting experience, but when I got there I found out that if you were a southerner and white, most northerners thought you must be a racist. It was assumed that if you were southern and white you were automatically a racist. But I discovered something. I discovered that racism was in Philadelphia, as well. I have also discovered that not only is it in Philadelphia, it’s everywhere. And then, it is also between everybody. It is white towards black. It is black towards white. It’s Oriental towards other folks. It is everybody. We judge people by appearances. That is what it is, isn’t it? At least partially what racism is, is judging by an appearance. So we judge people by not only their appearance, where they are from, how much they are educated; all kinds of different things. Now please don’t hear me say that I am letting southerners off the hook. You know, southerners talk about Yankees; but it is not just Yankees, it is “darn Yankees,” except it’s another word, which I can’t use in church. Then there are those Yankees from Minnesota but we won’t talk about that… In all seriousness, it is a horrible thing, really, isn’t it? We judge people by appearances and Jesus has experienced this already in this passage, twice. One is he is not educated and he is from Nazareth. In other words, they are prejudging him by these things. In other words, “You are a hick from the northern part of the country. You don’t know anything.” That is what they were saying to him. But even more seriously, Jesus chides them. He says “You accused me of breaking the Sabbath and yet you break the Sabbath yourself because you have to follow the law.” That’s the problem with every legalist; because if you are a legalist you can’t really follow the law, the rules, absolutely all the time. And they were stuck. They were commanded to circumcise a child on the eighth day and every now and then the eighth day fell on the Sabbath, and so they had to do one or the other and they chose to break the Sabbath in order to keep the other law. But the Sabbath had to do with a kind of healing, resting, worshipping. And he said, “All I did was heal on the Sabbath, which is what the Sabbath is all about. Stop judging by appearances.”
You notice he said it is O.K. to make judgments. I really believe that “judge not that you be not judged” is one of the least understood verses in the Bible. We are called to make judgments all the time, between right and wrong, good and bad, all kinds of things. But we are called to make judgments that are right, and you begin by realizing that it is not about appearances. We may hear things, rumors that go around about different things. We may see a person and say, ”Oh, well, they don’t look right.”
My Chaplain assistant is a godly man who is a youth pastor but he has tattoos all over his body. I didn’t know that until we got together and he began showing me a couple of them and I don’t get tattoos. I’m really, I’m too old, I guess. And I have to admit when I first found out about it, I am kind of going:”What’s wrong with you?” And I still don’t get it, but I had to repent, I had to repent for him. He is a good guy. He is a deeply, deeply, committed follower of Jesus Christ. It didn’t matter about his outward appearance. I’m not that good looking either, so…
Fourth aspect of the truth is a well known phrase: Do the Math. And a lot of the crowds were actually doing the math. “31Still, many in the crowd put their faith in him. They said, ‘When the Christ and Messiah comes, will he do more miraculous signs than this man?’” The Pharisees, the leaders, just didn’t do the math. Well, dah! Who else was going to do these things, these kinds of miracles? Certainly, the devil could do some of them but not the way he did them, and yet they were blinded to it because they just didn’t do the math. You know, I really believe that if we do the math, you find a lot of truth. Not always. Not always, it is really not an absolute, nothing is in that case; but if we just count it up sometimes we see what is right and what is wrong.
You know, I know we have all been shocked at all the horror of Haiti. It is just hard to see the pictures; it is harder being in a place like that, and seeing, and the smells and the sights. It is just hard and we heard this week, some interpretations I think we really need to reject. You know, we all heard what Pat Robertson said, about two hundred years ago how they made a pact with the devil, and all that kind of thing. You know, I don’t know how Pat knows that. Even the scriptures, if you look at Luke, Chapter 13, and I say it very specifically, I would encourage you to read it; Jesus is asked the same question about people who had a tower fall over on them, and then others who Pilate had put to death in a very particular gruesome way, and he asked a question. He says, “Do you think these guys were bigger sinners than anyone else because they had these things happen to them? No, I tell you not.” He doesn’t go and give a reason for it, but he does say unless you repent, you too will be lost. As we look at Haiti, what happens if we do the math? Well we might see a hundred years of corrupt governments that took all the money and ran, thousands and hundreds of thousands of people stacked up on each other living in cardboard or concrete, and the Bible says there will be earthquakes and tragedies. Other than that, I don’t know. But I do know that God is still good. I do know that Jesus is still the answer.
You know, it is very popular in our day to say that Christianity is a bad thing, or even religion. There are even books out talking about let’s be an atheist because religion is a bad thing, Christianity is a bad thing. God is Not Great is one title. Certainly the Church has been guilty of many things in history, but no other man has had such an effect on history. No other man. And if we just do the math, and the hospitals and the helping organizations and the laws that have been past for freedom and equality under the influence of Jesus Christ, not to mention the millions upon millions of people who have had their lives changed because of him. You do the math. Abraham Lincoln once said famously that “America was the last great hope of the world” and I agree with him, partially. I think America has been an exceptional nation, but the last great hope of the world is still Jesus Christ, still Jesus Christ.
Last, but not least, don’t just sit there. Jesus says to them, “34You will look for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.” This is an incredible warning to those listening to him. In other words, I am not going to be here a long time and you will look for me but I am going away. Of course, they didn’t have a clue where he was going. He is going back to be with the Father. But look at the warning piece, “and where I am going, you cannot come.” You cannot come, unless, unless, you believe in me.
You know, there is a lot of debate about what heaven looks like. There is a lot of speculation about what is going to happen there. But you know the only thing we really know is that is where Jesus is going to be, and if we belong to him, we will be there, too. And there is a lesson for these people. He is giving a warning. “I am not going to be here that long. Put your faith in me now.” There is a lesson for any of you here who are searchers. God loves you for searching, but don’t wait forever. There is a lesson for us as we think about our friends and neighbors who may not know. They don’t have forever either. And that is part of our job as Christians, is to winsomely and as best we can to invite people to see and to hear, not perfection in ourselves; but, again as we talked about, be pointers to Jesus Christ, because he is the last best hope of this world, a world which is full of tragedy as we have seen, horrific tragedy. And what happens to those people is in God’s hands and He is a God of mercy; but it is our job to help physically and spiritually.
Let’s heed this warning for ourselves and for others, and not sit there. Let’s pray together.
Lord God, thank you for Jesus our Savior. May we be his hands and feet and mouth in this place, in this world today. Help us Lord, to help others. Help us to be witnesses as we should be, not because we are perfect and we do it very well, but that we are called to do it. We thank you for him our Savior and it is in his name we pray. Amen.