What You Need to Know to Be a Witness
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There is a story of a young man who had been born blind but a new procedure offered the possibility of sight for him. As his parents waited for the doctor to remove the patches which had covered his eyes since surgery, they were uncertain about what his response would be; but as they did that, he blinked his eyes and adjusted his sights to the colors and the light around him. The boy suddenly began to take it all in and, full of excitement, he said to his parents, “Why didn’t you tell me it was so beautiful?!”
This morning we continue our series on John and we have arrived to Chapter 8 in John where Jesus gives one of the great “I am” statements. He says, “I am the light of the world.” John is organized in sevens, often some of the Bible is, and he has seven “I am” statements and this is one of them. What he is doing is, when he says this, he is referring back to Exodus, Chapter 3. Most of you have probably seen The Ten Commandments and you remember when Moses goes up to the burning bush and he is in a conversation with God and God says “Go to Israel.” Moses says, “Tell me your name, so I can tell them.” And you remember the great statement where God says, “I AM WHO I AM, Moses.” In other words, he gives him his name of Yahweh, which is a form of the verb “to be.” So when Jesus says “I am the light” “I am the resurrection” “I am the shepherd” “I am the door”, he is pointing right back to that and is saying, “Guess who has come to dinner?” “Guess who has come to be with you?” Not only that but he combines this with the light and in the Bible, light is identified with God. “You are my light and my salvation, O Lord.”
So that is where we are. Jesus is identifying himself as the Messiah. He is God come to earth. He is having this discussion, as we have seen, with the leaders, the Pharisees. Of course, they are not taking it in and you will see that in the passage. This passage, I think, has a lot to say to us about who Jesus is but also how we share him, because it is bracketed by “I am the light” and “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
Let’s read it. Follow along; notice what happens in the passage.
12When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
13The Pharisees challenged him, “Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid.”
14Jesus answered, “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going. 15You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one. 16But if I do judge, my decisions are right, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me. 17In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two men is valid. 18I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.”
19Then they asked him, “Where is your father?”
“You do not know me or my Father,” Jesus replied. “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” 20He spoke these words while teaching in the temple area near the place where the offerings were put. Yet no one seized him, because his time had not yet come.
21Once more Jesus said to them, “I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come.”
22This made the Jews ask, “Will he kill himself? Is that why he says, ‘Where I go, you cannot come’?”
23But he continued, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. 24I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins.”
25“Who are you?” they asked.
“Just what I have been claiming all along,” Jesus replied. 26“I have much to say in judgment of you. But he who sent me is reliable, and what I have heard from him I tell the world.”
27They did not understand that he was telling them about his Father. 28So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am the one I claim to be and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. 29The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” 30Even as he spoke, many put their faith in him.
31To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Let’s pray together.
O Lord, be with us today your Spirit hovering over our minds and our hearts. May this word touch our hearts, may it be light in our souls, may it be truth in our minds, and we may know you better today that we may share you and give you away to others. I pray that in his name. Amen.
I believe that the Bible teaches that being a witness for Jesus Christ is why we are here. It is one of the main purposes of the church. It is one of the main purposes in our lives, and yet, in many ways, we don’t do it very well. We don’t do it as much as we should. So today I want to talk to you a little bit about being a witness and what you need to know to be a better one. We all need to hear this. There are many things I could say but I am limited in time. I always say “there is so much more to say” and there is, but first, let’s think about these things.
I think first you need to know the person you are telling about. You know in the art of selling the maxim is you cannot be a good salesman until you know the product you are selling. Well in many ways, the same is true with our faith, except, we are not selling a product. We are selling or, if you will, introducing a person. That is key. We are introducing a person to someone else.
You know, I have been amazed at how popular the dating services are on the internet:
eHarmony. Match.com. What are these services about? Well they start by giving information about people. You know I have never used one; I hope I don’t have too; but apparently, that is how they work. You start knowing a little bit about the other person through some information; maybe a picture is exchanged; but that is not what the end is. Sometimes as Christians we think witnessing is just telling information about Jesus Christ, and it starts there. But the end result, the object, is to introduce a person to another person. In many ways, that is what we are trying to do with Jesus Christ. And, if you will, Jesus is our valentine.
You know, I thought about that. If we were trying to tell someone about our spouse, what would we say? Well if you are a husband, you ought to say, you ought to tell that person how beautiful she is to you and what she has meant to you and all the things in your life that would not be there without that person. Well in a sense, it is that way with Jesus except we are trying to get that person to have Jesus as their valentine also. You want that person to fall in love with Jesus. So the question for all of us is how well do we know him ourselves? There are some good questions in that area or, on a scale from one to ten, what is your relationship like with Jesus Christ? Now, it is true that in different parts of life it can be lower or higher, but where is it for you right now? And after you have identified where your relationship is, just ask yourself, do you want it to be better? Most of us do, but the kicker is, what are you willing to do to make it better? What are you willing to do to make that relationship of Christ better, so that you can give it away? That is the purpose. It isn’t just to keep it yourself. It is to give it away.
The second one is that we need to know the message we are trying to communicate, the message that we are trying to give away. Jesus says, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” And then he says later, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” You know, I have shared with you my own story many times, but back in those days when I didn’t know the Lord, I had a series of events that brought me to him. As I shared with you I was a college football player. It just so happened in the first game I ever started, my ligaments were torn in my knee and I wound up in the hospital. They took me to surgery the next day, and during the very hour I was in surgery, a fire started in my bedroom where I was staying—that very hour. They didn’t cut me open, they just put a cast on it and sent me back and there all the fire trucks were. Well, I got the hint. And the light began to go off in the brain and I walked around for a couple weeks saying “God saved my life. God saved my life.” “Are you crazy, you got your knee hurt?” “God saved my life.” Now, it was true that the light was going off but Jesus was not yet the light. He was not yet my life. That happened a few weeks later when he did become my life and my light and my truth and everything else in between. But what was the truth to set me free? What was the truth, what is the truth that sets people free? Well for me, and I think it applies to everyone, I realized just how badly my life was going. Something was missing and I couldn’t fill it. Every time I tried it got worse and worse. I finally just gave up. That is what it was. It was a surrender to the Lord. That is the truth that people have to come to. Listen to what Paul says about the Pharisees. He was one himself; he describes them accurately in Romans, Chapter 10.
“Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation.
For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.”
Here is the problem: people have a problem and they try to fix it themselves. That is what most religions are about, trying to fix yourself by doing this or doing that. Christianity says the message is ‘you can’t fix yourself. You have no power to fix yourself. There is a broken relationship.’ We are made to have a relationship with God. We were born for that, but it is broken. It is called sin, and we can only fix it by going to him. That’s the message. That is what we are trying to say to people. We try to help them understand they can’t fix it.
Now, of course, sometimes when we think about that that is kind of hard, isn’t it? “You mean I have to go tell my friends they are sinners, and they need to repent.” “Well, yah.” But you don’t really have to do it that way. You see witnessing is more about a relationship and you can tell them what God did for you. What did God do for you? Well I could tell what God did for me. God picked me up when I knew I was messed up. When I decided I can’t; God could. You see, yes, it’s true when we start talking about people being sinners, we turn them off sometimes. You don’t really have to do that. I think most people deep down inside already know. But when you hear a person whose life is hurting, you can say, “you know my life is hurting too and God helped me and here is what I did.” You take the message and you combine it with your life and about this restoring of the relationship and that is how it works. I learned about sin later. I got all that vocabulary later. But we can talk about being broken, we can talk about hurting, we can talk about messing things up because we know what that means.
Third, we need to know how short the time is, how short the time is. Jesus says something very hard to them. Listen to what he says to the Pharisees, now, the Pharisees were the best people. They kept the rules. They were considered the most moral, the most zealous; they were the good church folks. Look what Jesus says: “I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be (in other words, you don’t put your faith in me), you will indeed die in your sins.” Do we believe that? I think we have a hard time believing that people are going to be lost forever, that every human being has a terminal disease and it is not just physical death. It is spiritual, eternal death. The staff, your staff, went over to help with Feed My Starving Children this past week. It was a great experience. We got to put together the food packets and that kind of thing and then, of course, we went out to eat…but that’s another story. It was a lot of fun. You know, we will go to any length to help people. We will go to any length to help the folks in Haiti. We will take our time to help Feed My Starving Children. We will get involved in all kinds of ways to deal with cancer and all that kind of stuff, and all that is great. But what do we do for people who are dying all around us? It is kind of out of sight, out of mind, I think, to some degree. Why don’t we do that? I think deep down inside a lot of us believe, my God is not that mean, he doesn’t send people to hell, or wherever he sends them. You know, it is not a question about being mean. It is a question of justice. God is a God of love, isn’t he? Yes, he is, but God is also holy and righteous and just. If you don’t know it yet that is what the cross is all about. The Bible says “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” God is holy. The cross comes together, God’s love and God’s justice—justice condemns us because we are all sinners, we are all condemned and “God in his love so loved the world he gave his one and only Son, that whoever should believe in him should not perish.” So not only do we sometimes not believe that God is that mean, at least in our view, it is not fair; it really isn’t fair.
I like object lessons. I came up with this sort of thing. You know, an old illustration, you may have heard it before; suppose you and I only sinned three times a day. Now remember sin is not only what you do, it is what you think, and what you fail to do, among many things. So we do a lot of this kind of stuff, especially in our brain. Suppose it is only three, though. Now for me, it would be a lot more than that, but suppose it is only three. (He is now holding a small hand-held adding machine.) Well let’s see, three, plus three, plus three, plus three, plus three, for a year. What’s that? A thousand? What’s it in a lifetime? Some of you are chronologically blessed. But if it is only seventy years, that’s what –seventy, eighty thousand sins? Now suppose you broke the law, just the human law, say eighty thousand times, what jail are they going to lock you in forever? It is just an illustration. Fair? I don’t want fair. I don’t know about you; I think in the end sometimes it is just that we don’t love enough to those people outside. We say, “Oh, they can come to us if they want to.” The Church’s purpose is to go out, all of us, not simply organizationally, but individually, and love the person out there. It doesn’t mean knocking them over the head. It doesn’t mean that, but being available to share the word.
You need to know that you are going to face opposition. We already know that, but you know, if Jesus got crucified and got all kinds of things happen to him, what’s going to happen to us? Well, we are going to face opposition. In this passage it is very interesting. Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and they insult him in every way possible, in every way possible. First they question his truthfulness, binging up the law. “Well, you are your own witness, therefore your witness is not valid.” In Jewish law you needed two witnesses for anything to be true. Jesus says, “Well, I’ve got me and I’ve got my Father but you don’t know him.” Then they insult him by asking who his Father is. It is kind of like the modern, “Who’s your daddy?” “Well, who is your Father?” They probably heard that Jesus had dubious distinctions of not knowing his human father, in other words, he is illegitimate. In the end they asked him, “Well who are you?” and they had already made us their mind, “Well, you are a nobody. You are illegitimate in every way.” Yes, there will be opposition. There are all kinds of ways people oppose you and some people won’t and some people will. Peter tells us, “Always be willing and ready to say why you have the hope you have.” Then he says, “But do so in gentleness and respect, no matter how people treat you,” he talks about that a little later. It is not about us knocking people over the head but it is about giving a consistent witness no matter what happens. Because, you know what in the end, you know what in the end, it is so powerful in people’s lives if you just realize it that it doesn’t matter what other people think about you, it only matters what God thinks. It only matters what God thinks; because in the end, that is what counts. Now, of course, we don’t ignore what other people think of us, I don’t think we are built that way. I don’t think we can. But in the end, it only matters what God thinks. That is a powerful thing in anyone’s life.
Last but not least we all need to know how to please the Lord. Notice what Jesus says, he says “The one who sent me (my Father) is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases Him.” I always do what pleases him. Well today is Valentine’s day and, you know, it is amazing the advertisements out there. There is one person telling you “you need to go buy flowers.” Another person says “Oh, flowers aren’t very good; you need a massage, or a teddy bear, or dinner, or this or that.” They are all good things. It brings up the question of motivation. I think admittedly many guys, particularly, rush out and get a gift because they want to stay out of the dog house. Now we don’t want to talk about that, but that is probably right; but our motivation obviously shouldn’t be that. It’s because we are trying to please that person that we love. We have all heard of WWJD, What Would Jesus Do? and that is not a bad thing; but it is kind of impersonal. I think it ought to be WWPML, What Would Please My Lord? How do you please the Lord? WWJD is fine but if you want to know a powerful thing in your life, a powerful tool, is just ask the question: Is this going to please my Lord, the one I love? Is this going to please him who died for me, who loves me so much? What are our motivations? It is one of the questions we really should ask ourselves. Why do we do the things we do? Why do we go to church? Why do we go to Feed My Starving Children? Is it because it gives us a warm feeling—it makes us feel good? Is it because we feel guilty? Is it because of what I get out of it? If we were all to examine ourselves I would say that is number one—what’s in it for number one? They are not all bad, but we need to move toward another motivation more and more and that is what pleases our Lord. Like Jesus, what pleases the Father who sent His Son? That is a powerful thing.
A good place to start is to ask ourselves just a couple of questions and I will leave you with them. Ask yourself, if what I am doing, am I doing it because I love Jesus? Or, have I or will I stop doing something because I love Jesus? Ask yourself these things. Use them as tools. Let them change your heart. Let them change your motivations so that God will make you a great witness for him, because it really is all about relationships. To be a powerful witness means we need to be in relationship with God so that we can tell others about a relationship they can have. So as you think about it today, ask yourself what kind of a relationship you have with the Lord and ask him to make it better, not in a guilty sort of way, but in a way in which he can powerfully enter your life and you can speak for him and he can speak through you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Would you pray with me?
Lord God, none of us do this very well. But we pray that you would help us be better that, we may further your kingdom; but even more just rescue the perishing, bring healing to people who need it in their hearts and minds and that they may be with us all in the end, forever and ever. I do pray it in Jesus’ name. Amen.