I invite you to turn to John 18 today. John 18, we've been looking at these very, very dark hours in these various stages of Jesus' trial. Remember, first he was taken to the Jews, then he's taken before the Romans, specifically before Pilate, who would be serving as the governor of Judea, the Roman governor of Judea. And we saw last week that the Jews needed the Romans to convict Pilate, to find him guilty, because only the Romans could put Jesus to death. The Jews, under Roman rule and occupation, did not have the authority to put someone to death. And they wanted Jesus dead, so they had to take Jesus to Pilate so that Pilate might render a verdict of guilty and put Jesus to death. So they bring him to Pilate, and again, we saw this last week, they're using every trick in the book to get Pilate to think that Jesus is a threat to Rome and worthy of death. And the biggest tool they have in their arsenal against Jesus is to tell Pilate, look at him, he claims to be a king. because of course with that claim of kingship would be a threat to the Roman Empire. And this is where we now pick up in verse 37. And I'm only gonna read two verses today. We're gonna zero in on this kind of narrow interaction at this particular point that Jesus and Pilate have with one another. So John 18, verses 37 and 38. Hear now the word of our God. Then Pilate said to him, so you're a king. And Jesus answered, you say that I am a king for this purpose I was born and for this purpose I've come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. Pilate said to him, what is truth? After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, I find no guilt in him. And thus far, the reading of God's word. Now, our focus this morning is going to be on Pilate's question in verse 38, what is truth? And I do believe that a proper reading of this question understands Pilate to be asking it cynically, not seriously, but with tremendous amount of skepticism behind it. Clearly, Pilate does not want to know the answer to this question because as soon as he asks the question, he leaves the room not waiting for Jesus to respond. And what we have here is a picture of a man confronted with the truth And the truth that he's confronted with is not just a cold, detached, intellectual truth. He's confronted with truth incarnate, with the author of truth, with Jesus, who is the one from whom all truth flows. And here Pilate is, staring truth in the face, and he wants nothing to do with it. We can presume, we can presume why. because the truth of Christ will intrude upon and dismantle the carefully constructed facade of truth that he's erected for himself in which to live his own life. So when Jesus tells Pilate that everyone who is of the truth listens to him, there's a sense in which Jesus is giving to Pilate an invitation to acknowledge that Jesus truly is the King. Jesus is inviting Pilate there into a life of radical discipleship. Pilate, everyone who is of the truth listens to me. And Pilate hears that, basically, and he understands Jesus is threatening to upset everything that Pilate had previously embraced in life. What he's living for. And Jesus is asking Pilate to reorient his life around his reign, his kingship, his truth, the truth, the only truth. And Pilate doesn't want to give up anything at all. Pilate's committed to living for himself, so he replies cynically to Jesus, what is truth? What is truth? Now, I want to focus on this question that Pilate asks because Pilate's cynical question reflects almost perfectly the situation that we find ourselves in today as so many people in our world reject the notion of truth altogether. Just like Pilate who threw up his hands and said, what is truth? So that he didn't have to be inconvenienced by the truth. So that he could simply go on living however he wanted to live. That very same thing is happening on a massive scale today. So much so that the denial of objective truth is, it's really one of the hallmarks of this society in which we live, isn't it? And I'll give you some examples. I don't need to give too many, I don't think, because you understand this and we see it all the time, to the point where the rejection of truth, which we may have at one point thought absolutely absurd, is widely accepted as normal today. You hear the phrase, we heard it in Sunday school this morning, not because it was being taught, but because the same analogy was being given. You hear the phrase, what's true for me isn't necessarily true for you, or vice versa, what's true for you isn't necessarily true for me. You hear that phrase, don't you? Your friends say it, your coworkers say it, and the underlying assumption is that truth is whatever you want to make of it. It's your own reality, your own construction. An old high school friend of mine once told me, you worship God, that's great, good for you. He was glad for me, legitimately glad for me. And he said, my God is nature, I worship nature. as if there was no potential conflict between these two claims of truth. He saw no conflict whatsoever. What's true for you is not true for me. He was content to simply affirm two conflicting truths. And by the way, that friend, Jason, I won't tell you his last name, one of the smartest guys I know. Brilliant, brilliant. but unable to recognize truth, staring him in the face. Another example, abortion, which champions choice over truth. Look at our political atmosphere. And boy, was I tempted to give about a bazillion examples from our political atmosphere. I'll just give a broad generality. Our political atmosphere champions appearance, personality, showmanship, all kinds of things over truth. So you can be president if your personality is big enough. Truthfulness of our politicians, their moral character, the quality of their policies means almost nothing because truth itself means almost nothing. Another example, an obvious one but still a tragic one, is this. In our world today, you are now free to choose your own gender. If you're a boy, you can say you're a girl. And the state will affirm that and concur with it and require everyone else to realign their reality around your own construct of reality. Employers must concur, school districts must concur, judges must concur. in spite of the plain truth. It's our society's way of saying, along with Pilate, what is truth? What is truth? Earlier this year, I played a video in Sunday school, and I may have spoken about it in my sermons, I can't remember, but I played it in Sunday school, and it was a video of a short white man visiting a college campus, interviewing people, asking questions, and these questions dealt really with the nature of gender, the nature of truth, and he would say to people that he's interviewing, if I told you that I was a six foot five Chinese woman, remember, he's just a short guy, What would you say to that? And time and time again, people said to him, good for you. We affirm that. Some of them might hesitate a little bit. Well, it's a little bit weird, but if you can define who you want to be, And again, what we're finding is the same question that Pilot asked, what is truth? You are, you can be whatever you wanna make of yourself regardless of what the truth is of who you really are. Today, we're told that claims to exclusive truth are, what that really is is just an illegitimate grab of power So those who have the power in the world are those who establish truth. They make up truth for themselves. And those who claim to have truth are the ones who are seeking to grab power out of the hands of other people. And of course, we hear that when someone says, who are you to tell me what I can or can't do with my body? who I can or can't claim to be, what I can or can't claim as truth, who are you to define truth for me? It's a power grab and it's offensive in our world today. So the greatest sin in our world today, one of the greatest sins is to deny someone their version of the truth, isn't it? Now here's the thing, even as Christians we're not exempt from this temptation. Don't think that you're exempt from it because it is a real temptation. It's a temptation that goes all the way back to the fall in the Garden of Eden when Satan tempted Adam and Eve by questioning the truth of what God said. Did God really say that? What is truth? And we feel that temptation every time we're tempted to sin. And sometimes we read our Bibles like this, with this temptation ever before us. Well, that verse, that verse right there, it might be true for them. but it doesn't necessarily have to be true for me. So don't think that we're exempt as Christians. Sometimes we are just as skilled at defining our own truth as our non-Christian friends. Now, I could go on and on with examples. You could probably recite many examples, personal examples from your own lives. The point is this. It's not just Pilate in an isolated incident asking, what is truth? Just about everyone is asking that same cynical question today. And Pilate does it because he likes the status quo of his life. He likes his position of power. He doesn't want to be bothered with ever even pondering. He's not even going to take seriously for a second this trial that he's engaged with with Jesus. His goal is not at all to get to the bottom of the matter or to get at the truth of who Jesus is. He doesn't even want to think about it. And Pilate's chosen to define his own truth, his own reality, so that he can live however he wants to live. So that's a key connection there. It's not that Pilate is taking just kind of a cold, analytical view of the truth. He has reasons, he has reasons, personal reasons to say what is truth. and the exact same thing happens today. And really, this doesn't come out of the blue. There is a very strong philosophical foundation that's been laid over the last number of generations to dismantle truth in our world. And I'll just look at one example. kind of pop philosopher maybe we could call him. He's serious. And we think of Aldous Huxley. And Huxley, when constructing his own philosophy in regard to the world, he functioned on the assumption that the world had no meaning, that there's no truth, and that in affirming this, what he's gonna say, there's no truth, no meaning, but this is not something that he discovered for himself, he would say. After digging for truth, he discovered there was none. This is something he would say he decided for himself. And he writes this, he said, I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning. consequently assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. Now what is the great reason he decided on his own that there is no meaning or reality or truth or morality? He writes, we objected to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. So there's what lay behind his rejection of truth. As Huxley thinks about the role of the philosopher, he says, a philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics. He's also concerned to prove that there's no valid reason why he personally should not do whatever he wants. You hear what he's saying? Philosopher pursuing the philosophy of meaninglessness, rejecting truth, one of his aims is always going to be justifying a life in pursuit of doing whatever you want to do, living however you want to live. That's Aldous Huxley, that's Pilate, that's our contemporary world, and sometimes it's you and me too. Sometimes it's you and me. So Pilate asks this question of which he does not want to hear the answer. What is truth? He doesn't care about the answer. It's a cynical question. It's not sincere. It's not serious. But unwittingly, Pilate has actually asked an extraordinarily important question, hasn't he? And he's asked it of the only one who can really give an answer, the Lord Jesus Christ. So what we wanna do this morning as we're looking at this is we wanna take Pilate's cynical question and make it a sincere question and let's ask Jesus, what is truth? Tell us, Jesus, what is truth? And I'll tell you what, I wanna know the answer to this question because if there is no truth, then everything is lost. I'm out of here, you should be out of here too. Live however you want to live. But if there is truth, then there can be nothing more important than to embrace the truth, and to love the truth, and to live in conformity with the truth. So what is truth? What is truth? What exactly was Pilate rejecting when he said, what is truth, and dismissed Jesus? What do we reject when we dismiss the truth? What do we lose? What is truth? And to answer that question, let's just look at what Jesus says to Pilate in verse 37, because as Jesus speaks to Pilate, before Pilate even asks a question, Jesus is already anticipating and answering Pilate's question. And the first thing Jesus wants Pilate to understand about truth is this, truth and the kingship of Christ go hand in hand, they're inseparable. This is evident in how closely Jesus connects his kingship to the truth in verse 37. Then Pilate said to him, so you're a king. Remember, that's the big question. Are we gonna kill Jesus because he claims to be a king? And Jesus answers, you say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born, and for this purpose I've come into the world. And now Jesus is going to reveal his kingly purpose to bear witness to the truth. So for Jesus being king and bearing witness to the truth, go hand in hand. Jesus' kingdom is the kingdom of truth. And this means that when Pilate rejects the truth, or when he rejects truth generally, one of the central things he's rejecting is the kingship of Christ. There can be no question about this. It's very simple to say I will not embrace the truth is to say I will not have Jesus as my king. And let me just say that again, to say I will not embrace the truth is to say, I will not have Jesus as my king. And that's what Pilate was doing. This is what anyone does who rejects or denies or cynically dismisses the notion of truth. Alice Huxley freely admits this. He very proudly says, for myself no doubt, quoting him, for myself no doubt, as for most of my contemporaries, The philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. So Huxley rejected truth because he wanted to be liberated. He would not live under the reign of another and the reign he would have to live under if he embraced truth is always and only the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this, of course, is why it's so very hard for fallen, sinful human beings like Pilate and like us, at times like us, apart from Christ, to embrace something as simple and as self-evident as truth, because to embrace the truth that's woven into the very fabric of creation is to necessarily embrace the king who established that truth, who authored that truth, who, in fact, is the truth. So if I were to say to you today that I'm actually a 6'5 Chinese woman, and if you were to say to me, good for you, you go ahead and define your own truth for yourself, what you're really doing is saying, and what I would really be doing is saying, look, I don't want anyone to be king over me than me. What is truth? Jesus makes it clear in verse 37, truth and the kingship of Christ go hand in hand. There's a second thing that Jesus teaches us about truth, and that's this, that truth and the word of Christ go hand in hand. We could also say that truth and the word of God go hand in hand. Again, verse 37, Jesus says, I've come to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. So truth and the word of Christ, his testimony, his witness, his voice, these things go together. And one of the hallmarks of the contemporary movement to reject truth is an assumption that truth can't be known. So one of the reasons people give, okay, you know, you can't make a truth claim because how in the world can we possibly ever know truth? There's no fixed point on which everyone can agree that that's the truth. And as I said earlier, and as we heard in Sunday school already this morning, if you claim to possess the truth, you are either arrogant, or you're power hungry, or you're both, maybe. So we're told, you know, you can't make a truth claim, a truth statement today. And isn't it interesting that the possession and pursuit of truth would have once been considered a virtue, but now it is a vice. So, there are few things more offensive to our modern world than to say that the Bible, the Word of God, the Word of Christ, His testimony is true. This is exactly what Jesus is saying here. He's saying, I bear witness to the truth. His words are true. His word, the Bible, the whole of it is true. Everything Jesus says, everything the prophets have said, everything that our Lord has recorded for us in this word, all of it, all of it is true. Nothing is false here. And so those who would reject truth. necessarily reject God's word, and they reject the testimony of Christ. This kind of mindset is captured almost perfectly in the book of Job, as Job is recounting the mindset of the wicked. Job says, 21, 14, Job 21, 14, of the wicked, they say to God, depart from us, we do not desire the knowledge of your ways. That's the stance of the wicked. We don't want your word. We don't want to know it. Get it away from us. And again, this is exactly what Pilate is doing. Suppressing, rejecting the truth. Jesus, on the other hand, says that those who listen to his word are of the truth. because the truth and the word of Christ go inseparably together. And this leads us then to a third thing that I believe we're meant to see about truth here, and it's inferred in verse 37, but it's openly testified in other parts of John, and it is the truth that Jesus and the truth go hand in hand inseparably. Jesus' kingdom is the kingdom of truth, Jesus' words are the word of truth, because Jesus is himself the truth. John 14, six, Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And here, dear friends, we come now to our central idea. What is truth? Jesus is the truth. Not only is he the author of truth, not only does he speak truth, not only does he reign in truth, he is truth, he emanates truth, he defines truth, all truth is measured by him, all truth leads to him, all truth serves him. And this, incidentally, is why Jesus makes such a bold statement at the end of verse 37 when he says that everyone who is of the truth listens to his voice, because to be of the truth is to be a disciple and follower and servant of Jesus, and to reject the truth is to reject Jesus. Now, here is the single big idea that I hope we can all see and embrace in this passage, and it's this. Truth is not made up of a bare reporting of facts. I think the news networks want to convince you of this when they say, we're fact-checking the presidential debate that happened. We're fact-checking, fact-checking. Well, that's fine, but fact-checking does not come close to penetrating the overarching truth that defines the reality of this world in which we live. So truth, here we are, I'm getting to this big idea. Truth is not made up of the bare reporting of facts. Truth is not uncovered by mere, cold, distant analysis. Nor is truth unknowable and elusive, as some would say. Rather, what we find here in the Gospel of John is that truth is deeply personal and eminently knowable because truth is found in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the truth. So think about this, when people do violence to the truth by dismissing it or rejecting it or distorting it as Pilate does here, what they're really doing is violence to Christ, which of course Pilate ultimately does. The rejection of truth is always personal because Jesus is the truth. Maybe to put it in a little different way, the rejection of truth always involves our affections, what we love, what we hate. It exposes these things because truth is ultimately found not in some kind of cold, hard fact or idea, but in a person. And this, of course, is what makes Pilate's dismissal of the truth so chilling, I think, because it's clear he's not merely dismissing an idea, he's dismissing the very person of Jesus Christ. Pilate isn't merely saying that truth is unknowable, he's saying, if this Jesus is truth, I don't want any part of him. Now, with these things in mind, and there's so much we could do with this and go from here, we could really spend an eternity contemplating the implications of this. I just want to bring two points of application in closing as we think about this. And the first is this, it is that as we look out at the prevailing skepticism and rejection of truth in our world today, we should understand that this unbelief we see is primarily a matter of the heart, not a matter of the intellect. Sometimes we think, if only I could bring the right arguments to this person to convince them of the truth, then they would see and believe. And we can, and indeed we should, bring every intellectual argument we have to bear on the truthfulness of the Christian faith. It is true. We have the intellectual advantage. There's no question about it. But ultimately, what needs to happen for our dear friends who reject the truth is not so much a change of mind as it is a change of heart. Because what we want them to embrace is not so much an empty idea, but a person, Jesus Himself. And John is very clear earlier in his gospel to show us that the rejection of Christ is not a matter of intellect, but of affection. In John 3, 19, remember what he said there, he says, the light has come into the world, that is Christ has come into the world. And he says, but people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. Such an important word that he uses there. They loved the darkness. They rejected Jesus because they loved something else. Augustine, one of the church fathers, one of the great church fathers, speaks of his own unbelief prior to his conversion in this same kind of way. It had to do with his affections. as a matter, not of the intellect, but what he loved. So before he became a Christian, he describes the lie that he once believed in those days. He says that this lie was the huge fable which I loved instead of you, God. He says it was the long drawn lie which our minds were always itching to hear. Here's Augustine, one of the great intellects of the Christian faith, of the world, of history. And embracing Christ, for him, was a matter of his affection, what he loved. And he loved the fable, he loved the lie, before he became a Christian. The Christian apologist, Os Guinness, puts it this way, and I'll just read a paragraph. of what he says here is he's contemplating the same kind of idea. He says, we should therefore never view unbelief as flatly theoretical, loftily neutral, or merely as a worldview that people just happen to have. However suave and cool its attitudes and however rational its arguments may sometimes appear to be, unbelief is different in its heart. Deep down, the unbelieving heart is active, willful, deliberate, egotistic, devious, scheming, and unrelenting in its open refusal, its deliberate rebellion, and its total resistance to God and the full truth of his reality. And Guinness says, it can never be countered by purely intellectual arguments that ignore the power of the dark secret of this heart. Now all of this means that if we hope to bear witness in this world to those who are lost and blinded to the truth, to those who love the darkness instead of the truth, like Pilate, We need to labor very hard in prayer, of course, because only God can change a person's heart. And although we can't change anyone's heart ourselves, we nonetheless need to remember that our Christian witness to others must engage their hearts as well. We engage their hearts by showing them the goodness and the beauty and the wonder and the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. You wanna talk about truth? Let's look together at Jesus, who He is, what He claims to be, what He claims to say. If we're talking to someone about truth, whether it can be known, what it is, our conversation has to go ultimately to Jesus because He is truth. And yes, he can be known, and yes, he ought to be loved. So, I'll say it one more time, the Christian faith is not a matter of mere, cold, bare belief. Remember the demons, they believed Jesus is Lord, no problem with that, they embraced that wholeheartedly. I know plenty of people, I know plenty of people who would affirm all day long that Jesus is the Son of God, that He's the Lord. They believe it, they know it, they do not question it for a second, but they don't love it. They don't love the truth. and they don't love Christ, and they don't commit their hearts into the hands of Christ. And although they affirm this truth, they are not Christians because they have zero interest in the very truth that they affirm. What is truth? They ultimately say. So the first point of application is this, in our witness, in our testimony to our world, to our friends, we want to pray for them and we want to engage their hearts as much as possible. And the second application is this, and it's more directly for us I suppose. There's so many things we could say, but we'll leave it at this. If Jesus reigns in truth, And if his word is truth, and if he himself is truth, and if you love Jesus as the embodiment and author of truth, then you never, never, never be afraid to take a firm stand upon the truth. Whatever that truth may be. It could be the truth of the gospel. It could be the truth that touches upon human sexuality. It could be the truth that addresses the morality of the world in which we live. It could be the truth that addresses the worldview, how we think of reality around us. And this, of course, is what Pilate could not do. He could not take a stand upon the truth because it would have been too costly for him. It would have devastated that facade that he had built for himself. He couldn't stand on the truth because he loved the darkness and he did not love the truth. But we who profess Christ above all people should be ready to stand gladly upon the truth. So think about this. When you go to work next week and your boss says, hey that short white guy that sits beside you, well he's no longer a short white guy because you've got to call him a six foot five Chinese woman. Now, tremendous amount of compassion for the situation, for the person, because of the blindness and darkness and the lies which Satan tells us. And your boss says, so you've got to affirm that. It's something you can't do. You cannot do it. Because you love the truth. You love the truth. And you love the Lord Jesus who stands behind that truth. It's not a small thing. It's not a small thing. Because to deny the plain truth, in fact to deny any truth, strikes at the reality of the kingship of Christ, of the word of Christ, and of Christ himself who is the truth. When the world demands that you keep your faith to yourself, you can't do it because you love the truth that is a public truth that defines every aspect of reality. And when the world suppresses the truth and distorts it, we respond by embracing it and loving it and living by it. not merely because we love the truth as a concept or an idea, but because we love the one who stands behind the truth, our Lord Jesus Christ. And we may suffer, Pilate would have suffered here. But what we find in truth, what we find in Christ is ultimately true freedom and joy. Isn't this ironic? The very thing Aldous Huxley wanted, liberation, freedom. is found only in the very one whom he rejected, the Lord Jesus Christ, the author of truth. Jesus said earlier in John, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth, and you know how it goes, and the truth will set you free. The very thing Pilate wanted, freedom to be his own man. Well, I shouldn't say, I shouldn't add to be his own man. Freedom, human freedom, flourishing joy, found only in the very person he rejected. And this means for us that it is, as Christians, we would say that it is never a burden, but always a joy to embrace and live by the truth because we love the one who is the truth and he set us free by his truth. Let's pray as we come to the Lord's table. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the truth of your word and We thank you that we have tasted the freedom that comes by abiding by this truth and abiding in your word and abiding in you. And it is such a joy. We long so much for our friends and loved ones to know this truth and to be liberated from their bondage and their love of the darkness. And we pray, Lord, that your truth would be made known in this world we live in that so often rejects it. And we pray this in Christ's name, amen. It was after Pilate rejected the truth and cynically told Jesus what is truth and went out then to the Jews that he rendered his judicial verdict, his formal judicial verdict, which he alone had the power to render as the Roman governor And it was this, John 18, 38, after he said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, I find no guilt in him, no guilt in Jesus. And dear friends, that is such an important happening in this chapter about Jesus' trial because there we see the affirmation from the civil court, not that Jesus depended on the civil court, but here we see the public affirmation that Jesus is not guilty. And we're reminded that not only is Jesus the truth, he's also the sacrificial lamb. And here, Pilate himself tells us, he is a lamb without blemish. The judicial Verdict is rendered, Jesus is righteous. And He alone then, He alone is the only one who can save us because He is the God-man and because He has lived as a man perfectly. And on the cross, of course, we affirm that He became sin. Our sin was credited to Him so that His perfect righteousness might be credited to us and that we might be saved. Isn't this incredible? So here's Jesus claiming truth. Here's Jesus claiming to be a king. Everything the world hates about truth, a power grab and an exclusive claim. And here Jesus, as he then goes to the cross, shows us what the truth of who he is looks like. He's a lamb, he's a king, he's the kind of king that dies for his people. So what a good truth this is we affirm when we affirm Jesus is king and when we commit our lives to him and we come to this table to commune with him because he alone saves. And the Apostle Paul in instructing us as we come to this table issues a warning in view of the significance of it, in view of the glory and goodness and weight of this. He reminds us that whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. And he says, let a person examine himself then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. Dear friends, if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and if you entrust your salvation into his hands, and if you are a member in good standing of an evangelical church that proclaims the gospel, because remember, our communion is not only with the Lord, it is with one another as his people, then come and feast on Christ today. But if you don't know Christ, if you are separated from the fellowship of His church, we want to ask you to call on Him this very day. I'll be happy to talk to you. Anyone will be happy to talk to you here about what it means to have Jesus as your Savior. Let's pray as we come to this table. Our Lord and God, thank you for this meal. Thank you for Christ. on whom we feast spiritually, and we thank you that you bless us with communion with him. We come here not only to affirm the truth of the gospel, but to affirm the uniquely personal nature of this truth as we commune with Jesus. Bless us with a close fellowship with Him and a deepening love for Him. In His name we pray, Amen.