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Well, today we're going to be
looking at a topic that ought to grab most of us. The topic
is freedom. That's the title for the message
today. Certainly those of you who had the privilege, and I've
had that privilege in times past, to go to Washington, D.C. on
the history tour, have a large chunk of history suddenly laid
out in front of you. And unfortunately, as Mr. Kanachi
so movingly let us know, Much of that history, and particularly
the aspect which reveals the deep Christian influence on the
founding of this nation, much of that history simply is not
taught anymore. And that is to our great loss.
Well, today we're going to be looking at freedom and seeing
what Jesus has to say about it. We're going to look at John chapter
8, verses 31 to 38. I would encourage you to turn
there. And I'm just going to read the text as we begin reflecting
upon Jesus and his words about freedom. So Jesus said to the
Jews who had believed in him, 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 commits 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
word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with
my father, and you do. what you have heard from your
Father." The passage that we're looking
at poses, particularly for us evangelical type Christians,
a number of questions. Because of the way we will now
hear Jesus begin to talk to people who say they believe in Him. The questions that rightly come
to mind is, what does it mean to say
somebody believes? There's a second question that
really comes up out of this passage, and that is, what is freedom?
And under what conditions is freedom experienced or realized?
Another intimately related question is, what is the relationship
between truth and freedom? And then a fourth question which
I think is found here is, what is the relationship between sin
and slavery, truth and freedom? Well, if you're reflective at
all, you know that I'm not going to cover all of this because
that's impossible. Those questions are some of the
most profound questions with which human beings wrestle in
trying to understand the nature of human experience and how it
is we are going to structure our societies and our personal
lives both in order to realize our freedoms. But we'll try and understand
a little bit of what Jesus has said to those who said they believe
in him. So the first thing I want us
to do is to take a moment and just think about the word belief
or believes. When a person says they believe,
what do we understand them to mean? Well, when looking for
the meaning of a word, a good place to begin is the dictionary.
And so I went to our dictionary, and these are the definitions
that I found for the word belief. It's to take as true or real. It is to have confidence in a
statement or a promise. I believe what you have to say
to me. Third meaning is to suppose or
to expect. I believe that it will be a nice
day tomorrow as it is today, that sort of thing. And then,
another meaning is to have trust or confidence in someone. So,
I believe when so and so says he'll do something, it's going
to happen. So, we use the word believe that
way. And then we also use the word in relationship to religious
faith. I believe in God. I believe in
Jesus. We're familiar with that. And
then lastly, it's to hold opinions. Well, I believe shopping at Rayleigh's
is better than shopping at... Well, it's just a matter of opinion.
So if you reflect upon that a moment, if you look over the spectrum
of meanings that just covers the common way that Americans
use the word believe, you will very quickly realize that to
say someone believes something is not clear at all. And sometimes it's not even clear
when we say we believe something. Because we don't know at what
level that word is reflecting our lives. Well, you'll notice,
of course, that at one point, though obviously we're not surprised
by this, that the word belief and the word faith touch each
other. And so I thought it might be good if we just took a moment
and said, well, how is the word faith commonly used amongst Americans? And so faith, as defined in the
dictionary, is unquestioning belief. Or more specifically, as you
and I would anticipate, unquestioning belief in God or in religion,
something of that sort. It can be, of course, a system
of beliefs that constitutes a faith. And so we know that there is
the Christian faith, But we know that there was the Islamic faith,
Hindu faith, and actually most of us understand today that secularism
is a faith, a whole set of things that they believe to be true,
a system woven together. Faith can refer to anything that's
believed. And so, you know, there are some
people who are so strongly committed to their kind of car that they
have faith in Oldsmobiles. They wouldn't dream of buying
a Buick. So we use the word, we put faith
in a whole variety of things, which obviously reflects a wide
variety of what I call dispositions of the soul. Some down the last
is complete trust or confidence. And I think that oftentimes we
think this way when we use the word faith as the way a child
usually has faith in his or her parent. I think, as I say, that
the last of those is probably most meaningful, particularly
when we're in this kind of setting. It was after all Jesus who said
that unless you have faith as a little child, You cannot enter
the kingdom of heaven. Now, if we turn our attention
back, and I hope you have your scriptures open and looking at
John chapter 8, verses 31 to 38, the first thing
to put in place, if we are going to rightly understand this passage,
is that the Jews who claim belief in Jesus are not little children. They do not have a child's faith. John has given us a fairly extensive
introduction to our exposure to these Jews, as John generally
means when using the term scribes and Pharisees. Some of them were
utterly despicable people. You might recall the episode
at the beginning of John 8 where a group of these men found a
woman in adultery and hauled her in front of Jesus and said,
what should we do? Heartless men. But not all of them. Some of
them were probably not despicable at all. You might remember Nicodemus,
the man who came to Jesus in the night. And we realize in
that conversation he was an honest seeker trying to understand the
truth about God. Understandably, we tend to oversimplify
what we read in the Bible. We do so, we oversimplify in
order to find certainty and understanding when we read a passage. When
we read that someone believes, we want to be able to import
to that word, to bring into the word they believe, all that we
know about believing. And that way the belief becomes
rich and strong and reinforces our own understanding. We tend
to do the same thing in conversation. In a casual conversation, we'll
say, is so-and-so a believer? Oh, yes, yes, yes, that person
is a believer. They made a profession of faith
when they were young, maybe at a weekend retreat, and they were
active in youth group during the year, and they attended church
services. Now, into this little conversation,
someone may add a distinction. They will say, well, do you think
that so-and-so has saving faith? That sort of thing normally makes
us uncomfortable. Surely the Bible says, believe
in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. Well, surely the Bible
does say that. But by now we know that to say
the word believe in reference to anybody is not clear. Why introduce confusing distinctions
and qualifications? After all, inevitably in that
conversation, this is what's going to happen. After all, who
are you to judge? Ever run into that? Yeah. So put down. And this is how it goes. Having
started with relatively pleasant certainties, he believes, I believe,
we all believe. What a happy believing place
we are. Now we're teetering on the edge
of an unpleasant confusion with conflicting opinions
about so-and-so's life. And so what oftentimes happens,
don't you agree, is that rather than debate the matter, we turn
the conversation to the weather or to sports or to shopping. And so we duck the whole question
of what does it mean to say so-and-so believes. Now, of course, it's
the question that we're wrestling with relative to these Jews,
right? You see, the 31st verse says to us, so Jesus said to
the Jews who had believed in him, and, you know, we all say,
oh, a bunch of Jews that are already just becoming Christians.
And then he proceeds to call them the sons of the devil. Did you notice that? You see, we practice avoidance, but avoidance is not wise. The difficulties with following
through on the question of so-and-so's belief are diverse. Why do we avoid them? My observation,
both of my own heart and of others, is that we fear becoming entangled
in the life of the other person. If we look too closely, we may
discover things are amiss, that there are things lacking. And
suddenly we may realize that as we have looked closely, maybe
there's something that we need to do. And we would rather not
look that closely. We fear that not only may we
have to do something, but we realize it's going to put pressure
on our time. Indeed, it might put pressure
on our wallets. It might interrupt our plans.
That's our fear of entanglement, but there is also a different
kind of fear of pursuing these kinds of conversations. And that
is the fear that we may, in fact, become convicted and realize
that as we push in and examine the faith life, what goes behind the statement
he or she believes, and we begin to examine the Word of God to
see what it is they're supposed to believe, We may fall under
personal conviction recognizing that our own lives fall terribly
short. We would just as soon not go down that road. There are reasons why it is easier
to live in a world of surfaces and appearances only. Unfortunately for such an attitude,
the world is not simple. The world is sinful. And sin
is nothing if not massively complicating. This is what we see with the
Jews who believe in Jesus. If we're going to understand
Jesus' words with them, we need to recognize that He is intending
to catch them out. He intends to expose them. Because he knows that until that
happens, they will remain stuck inside the illusions and self-deception
by which they are living. After all, this is what it means
to say that when we come to know the truth, the truth will set
us free. Free, that is, from living in
a world of pretense. Now, one way or another, a group
of scribes and Pharisees have made known that they believe
in Jesus. We're not told what it is they
believe. That's been my point up to now
to say to you all, right, join me in recognizing that that statement
in verse 31 is utterly empty of any content other than some
way, at some level, these people have a positive attitude toward
Jesus. And may I simply say that I think
there are many people today who when you hear them say, I believe
in Jesus, that's all they mean. Well, what is it that they probably
believe? We can surmise what they believed
based upon other things that have been said to us. And I think
it would be completely safe to say that they recognize that
Jesus is, in fact, commissioned by God. And he has what you and
I would call an anointing of the Holy Spirit. And I think
that they would also agree that they believe that he is empowered
by God. After all, this is what Nicodemus
had said already, that the Pharisees knew this was true about Jesus.
Commissioned by God, empowered by God to do these remarkable
miracles, his wonderful works that he had done. And I suspect
that they believed that he has a message from God. But that is not all that they
would believe. There are some additional things
that I think we can be pretty sure they believed. Being smart
people who have learned to survive in the world, I think that they
probably believed that God has more favor, excuse me, that Jesus
has more favor with God than the leaders of the current religious
establishment. Because, of course, they're not
fools and they know that to say, I believe in Jesus, is to draw
a line and to begin to separate themselves from the official
establishment running the church in Israel. They probably also believe that
it's Jesus who's becoming increasingly popular with the multitude and
beginning perhaps to overshadow the popularity of the religious leadership. Now, see, these are scribes and
Pharisees. Their lives were closely associated
with the people at large. They were, in fact, the religious
leaders of the popular culture. We can be pretty sure that they
were anxious to ensure the continuance of their place in Israel. They probably believed
that Jesus, in fact, was the wave of the future. And that
is why, you see, they would be willing to take the risk of identifying
with a controversial figure Under the supposition that by doing
so, they were identifying with something good, possibly even
God-sent, and they were therefore prepared to stand either with
Jesus or have Jesus stand with them as long as this will continue the necessary continuance of
their place in taking care of others. Now,
what I have just sort of stretched out in front of you is not conversion,
it's calculation. It's calculation. It is not a sudden conviction
brought on by the power of the Holy Spirit penetrating the heart,
bringing conviction of personal corruption, standing before a
holy God and a desperate need for a Savior, and a recognition
that this particular individual has been sent by God in order
to lay down his sinless life, in order that my sins could be
atoned for before this holy God who demands that kind of sacrifice
for sin. That is not what these people
believe. They believe that there are a
set of potential advantages to identifying with Jesus. Now, to expose, right, I said
that's what Jesus wants to do, to expose the true condition
of their belief and their souls, Jesus could have said to them,
listen, if you believe in me, this is what you must do. You
must die. That, after all, is what he says
in Matthew chapter 16, verses 24 to 26. Jesus told his disciples, if
anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up
his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life
will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find
it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and
forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return
for his life. Now Jesus doesn't say that here.
He said that in Matthew. So we'll go back and look at,
well, what did Jesus say? And so we're coming down to the
32nd verse of John chapter 8. He says, if you abide in my word,
you are truly my disciples. Now, you and I, once again, this
is the case of saying discipleship. Whoa, I know what that's all
about. Well, so do they. And indeed, they knew more about
it than we do. Discipling was at the core of most of ancient
cultures. What did it mean to be a disciple?
Well, to be a disciple, You are the person who patterned your
life in all of its aspects after the Master so that your life
would reflect theirs. You were, in fact, to become
so much like them, you were to be the same. To know the one
would be to know the other. This is what Jesus meant when
He said that the disciple is not greater than
the master. And when he also said, you know,
if they persecute me, they will persecute y'all. So you have
to understand that close identification, that was assumed. So when Jesus
said, okay, if you are going to be truly my disciples, they
all would have said, So we go to the next phrase and
see, is there something that Jesus says thereafter which might
have sparked the following conversation? You will know the truth and the
truth will set you free, is how that phrase continues. Well,
even here, of the two clauses, the first would have caused no
stir for it was part of the general truth in the ancient world, that
truth was grounded in and learned through personal experience. Abstract or theoretical learning
is really a product of modernity. In traditional cultures, predominantly,
they understood that education was the fruit of an apprenticeship
relationship, as you drew close to and followed after a master. Most often it was the father,
by the way, who apprenticed and passed on the wisdom to his sons. And the mother did the same for
the daughter. So the notion then of truth coming
out of discipleship was absolutely, they would have said, but of
course. And so we come down finally to
the last concept and that is freedom. You see it's to the word freedom
that they respond. Scribes and Pharisees got this
at once, but their response may strike us as a bit off point. What they say is, hey, we are
the sons of Abraham. We have never been slaves. You think to yourself, that's
just not an American thing to do. So what are they doing? How can they possibly say they've
never been enslaved? At this very moment, they are
an occupied country under the power of the Romans. They have come from slavery in
Egypt. That's the beginning of their
nation. They have been enslaved by the
Babylonians. They have been enslaved by the
Assyrians. And when you read some of the
other works like Ezra and Nehemiah, you realize that many of these
slaves, many Israelites were captured by their neighbors and
enslaved by their neighbors. Because Nehemiah was trying to
buy them back. So, what are these men saying? According to the Mosaic Covenant,
Jews could have slaves, but they could not be slaves. So what they're doing is they're
saying, hey, we are members of the covenant people of God. And
we, being in the covenant people of God, stand in a relationship
of freedom with God and amongst each other as God's people. Now
that is a good response. It's not true, but it's good. Jesus, of course, hears them,
having had Himself something to do with the covenant they're
talking about. He assures them He knows they are the children
of Abraham. But look now at verse 34. Jesus answered them, Truly, truly,
I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. What does Jesus do in his answer? Let me put my finger on the moral
condition of your heart. Let me shift this conversation
from the externalities of covenant to the internalities, the insideness
of your real condition and how you make choices and what your
life reveals. It's not political, civil, or
economic relations. It is the spiritual and moral
condition of the heart and the mind. Truly, truly, he says in verse
34, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. Now, you and I can listen to
that, and we simply say, oh, what Jesus is so right on. And do you know why we can do
that? Because we do not believe it. We do not believe what Jesus
has just said. We deny it. We say, oh, well,
of course, you need to understand that Jesus is speaking hyperbolically. He's making a big statement in
order to capture our attention. But of course, he doesn't actually
mean what he said. I sin, in a technical sense,
now and then, in small ways. I fall short, it's true, but
I'm not a slave to sin! I mean, I'm the pastor of the
church! Come on! See, we don't believe what Jesus
says. You know, I'm okay. I'm in charge of my life. I've
got things under control. I'm free to come and go. I do
good and sometimes not quite so good. And that's how most
of us reason. What we don't come to grips with
is what it means to not sin. A sinner is not a righteous person
who occasionally slips. A sinner is a person who sins
because sinning is the natural orientation of their soul. So that to not sin is something
extraordinary. See, we have it all the other
way around, don't we? We look over our lives and we say, well,
occasionally I do the wrong thing. And then we give ourselves a
pat on the back for being fundamentally, basically good folk. But if we let the Word of God
speak to us, and if we recognize that sin is something that arises
out from the deepest part of what we are, we realize that when I do not
sin, when I manage to act in true, uncluttered, unburdened,
uncompromised faith in God, something extraordinary has happened.
The course of Scripture tells us what that extraordinary thing
is. It's when we have our hearts
and minds focused upon Jesus Christ and we sense the power
of the Holy Spirit within us, clearing away that which is unworthy
and drawing us to that which is reflective of God. The Apostle Paul gives the same
teaching in slightly expanded form, and I would encourage you
to turn to Romans chapter 6, verses 15 to 19. I'm going to start reading right
away because I'm late on the clock. Paul says this to those
Romans. What then? Are we to sin because
we are not under law but under grace? By no means. Do you not
know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves,
you are slaves of the one whom you obey? Either of sin, which
leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness.
But thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have
become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to
which you were committed. And having been set free from
sin, you have become slaves of righteousness. I'm speaking in
human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you
once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness,
leading to more lawlessness, so now present... Did you notice
the tense? It's time to do this. You are members as slaves to
righteousness leading to sanctification. Paul's teaching here, you see,
clarifies the matter as an ongoing reality of Christian living.
He is speaking about what it means to abide in Christ. How? Most two ways. The first
is to present yourself as a slave to Jesus Christ. Last week, we saw that it is
essential for faith that we move from knowing about Jesus to knowing
Him personally. Now, what we recognize is that
to know Jesus personally, I need to be a slave. Because that's what Jesus says. Jesus wants to be and He needs
to be both our Master and our Friend. You and I do not define the relationship
that we will have with Him. He says, I will be your friend
and your master, or you are a disobedient slave. By the way, you're not
a non-slave. You're a bad slave. And the second thing, of course, as our master and our friend,
he has given to us a standard of teaching or living to which our lives are to conform. Now, in the Christian walk, there
are two equally disastrous errors. The first is to try and live
by the standard without being a slave of Jesus. That's a disaster
because it leads to legalism. We will necessarily reshape the
standard to fit our abilities. Remember, what does it take to
not sin? It takes the presence and the
power of the Holy Spirit for one who, according to Hebrews
12, is keeping their eyes fixed on Jesus. The other error is to try and
live with just Jesus alone. And the problem with this is
that if I try to live with Jesus and ignore the standard, I am
ignoring the standard that Jesus has given to me. And so what I must do in order
to do that is I must suppress the knowledge of the truth in
a lack of faith or in unrighteousness. It's inescapable. There's nothing
you can do about this. The motto, just give me Jesus,
does not work. We begin here to see the centrality
of the truth of Jesus' resurrection. It is not just in reference to
His death and resurrection for our sins. As it says in Hebrews,
so that we understand and appreciate that He ever lives to make intercession
for us at the Father's throne. Here's the fact. Every time any
one of us chooses to sin, we are in grave peril of returning
to the slavery to sin which held us before we were saved by grace. I am not saying you lose your
salvation, but I am saying you fall out of favor with God. You
come under His wrath and His anger because you are violating
His standards and you are saying no to His Son. And you are giving
yourself over to the service of that which is unworthy and
corrupting and defiling. That is why the promise that
we have in a place like 1 John 1 verse 9 is so critical. If
we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sin and
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Beloved, If you understand what
Jesus is saying to these Jews and what the Word of God is saying
to us about the realities of sin and slavery, truth and freedom,
that verse should make your heart leap for joy. We have looked today at a little
bit of what Jesus had to say Certainly not covered all that
he has to say. But let me close by the close
of verse 34. Jesus says, The slave does not
remain in the house forever. The son remains forever. He says,
If the son sets you free, you're really free. Beloved, Our freedom from sin's
power is entirely dependent upon the fact that our freedom is
a gift from the eternal Son of God. I urge you, stop playing
around. Recognize what sin really is
about and what it takes to be a child of God and to glorify
Him. Please pray with me. Gracious
Heavenly Father, the world would have us live no more than skin
deep. And oh, so often we are willing
to do so. We are not used to the deeper
things, not of Your Word so much as of our own lives. Forgive
us. Teach us to trust more fully,
both in Your grace and the presence of Your Spirit in the hearts
and minds of fellow believers, so that we can encourage and
nurture one another. And so we then can, as Your servants,
bear witness to the world around us on the amazing, liberating
truth of God. It is in His name that we pray,
Father. Amen.
Freedom
Series Letters of John
The house of freedom is built on the foundation of faith with the building blocks of truth.
| Sermon ID | 131192229466762 |
| Duration | 42:22 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Language | English |
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