Let me draw your attention to these familiar words that were read in your hearing in John's Gospel chapter 7 and verse 46. No one ever spoke the way this man does. No one ever spoke the way this man does. John 7 and verse 46. Now, we know that our Lord Jesus, he had a flesh and blood existence. We know where he was born. We know something of his biography. And we know that he made a great impact on people who were with him. He made a great impact by his life and by his presence and his works. But most of all, he made an impact by his words. And this text reminds us that no one ever spoke the way this man spoke. And I want this morning then just to consider the implications of that and why people said that, why country yokels like these two policemen sent to arrest him, why they came away empty-handed, transfixed by what they had heard Jesus say and the way he had spoken it. What was it in the actual verbal presentation of his message that impacted men and women like this. And the first answer I want to give to you is because of the authority with which Jesus spoke. We find that quite often, don't we, people say, oh, he speaks with authority, not like the scribes. There was a certain imperiousness. about our Lord's words and in that authority there were a number of strands that built up together that made an overwhelming impact on people so they heard him, they heard him gladly. First there was his originality that he wasn't copying other people. There was an impressive independence of thought. The scribes in their pulpits every Sabbath day in their synagogues they would quote what one school of rabbinic tradition said and another school said. And they would quote the great historic rabbis and their teaching. And even the prophets in the Old Testament, you know that they said much the same. When they made a prophecy, they would say to the people, thus saith the Lord. This is the message I've had from God. I'm not original. I didn't invent this myself. I'm bringing to you the words that God has given me to say. But Jesus Christ, he never quoted human authorities. He never sheltered his opinions behind the opinions of great people in the past. He never even said, thus saith the Lord. He says instead, I say to you." And he is content to set up his own opinions over against the hallowed traditions that people in his generation believed. He is content to speak not in God's name, but to speak majestarily in his own name, by his own authority, verily, verily, I say to you. And he legislates on the basis of his own status, of his own insights. He tells us on that basis he is Lord of the Sabbath. He tells us that he has authority to forgive sins. He pronounces on oaths He pronounces on divorce, he pronounces on scripture itself and he does so constantly and simply in his own name. He sets up a great eye over against all the rabbinical assertions and the traditions that the Pharisees laid upon the simple people. And he corrects those traditions simply on the basis of his authority. And so he had an independence of thought. He had an originality in his teaching. And secondly, he had a tremendous cogency, a persuasiveness, a beauty. in his speaking, in the way he mixed parables in with moral declarations and got under the skins of people and spoke to their hearts and reflected then on common things. There was something very compelling about him. So we are told, the common people heard him gladly. The teaching was often singularly profound. It was constantly provocative and controversial, but there was something about him. that made them go back again and again and listen to what he had to say. We find in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, that passage we call the Sermon on the Mount, one of the most wonderful passages in all of the Bible, that cogent and tremendously logical discussion that people in the end went away not so much with the content of what was said as the fact that he was able to speak like that for an hour and grip them and bring more and more mighty, vital truths to bear upon their lives. They found that very, very impressive. We know that even the devils then, even they found the authority behind the teaching of our Lord Jesus. They found that overwhelming. And that's one of the great antidotes that we have then to doubt and uncertainty in our hearts. To sit under biblical ministry, to come and hear the Bible taught and the Bible explained. and to read the Bible for ourselves, to find a little routine of a place that we sit by a French window overlooking the garden or in a corner of our bedroom and to sit rather than lie down and read because then we get sleepy. when we've had just some splash some water on our face or have a routine in the morning and then we go and we read from the Word of God. We expose ourselves to the great teachings of Jesus Christ as you find them in the Bible and we do so in large and consecutive doses. I mean, go back to Mark's Gospel and read the cogency of what Mark writes and the narrative in its liveliness and immediately and immediately and it moves us on and on as we go from teaching to debate and miracle and let it make its own impression on our souls. I could say to you, well we've got pieces of manuscript of the New Testament that go back to about 120. That would be the very oldest piece in the library in Manchester University, the codex there. It's a piece from John's Gospel. But when you consider that the oldest manuscripts for the Gallic Wars written by Julius Caesar are a thousand years after he wrote it. They go to about 900 A.D., a thousand years, and that's considered very accurate and a powerful source. Here's a manuscript, a piece of a manuscript that goes back then to within 90 years of the life and the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ and I could use arguments like that and to look at the facts that Luke brings before us in his well-researched Gospel and the Book of Acts and I could say here are arguments that show us the historicity then of the Gospels But in the last analysis, the real magnetic power of the Bible. the cogency lies in this person that you come to that builds us up and then he's announced and then four gospels tell us about him and letting his teaching fall into our hearts and listen to his words and expose ourselves to the personality of this one person. I lived in Machen Hall in Westminster Cemetery for three years and it was named after the founder, J. Gresham Machen. And Machen was the great champion of biblical Christianity in the 20th century. And when he was a young man, before the First World War, he went to study in Germany and he studied under the leading German skeptics of the day, people that were held in awe by all the denominational leaders in Wales and all the theological teachers. They were all bought by them. And he went and studied there. He went into the lion's den. And he discovered that these men then were not the dry academic men, but they had constructed their own image of Jesus, what they found Jesus to be, a sort of mystic, political, prayerful man. And they spoke about him. And when they lectured, their faces glowed and their eyes twinkled. And they presented their Jesus to these people. The Jesus of social concern. And Machen would go home reeling from what he had heard. So different a Jesus from the Jesus his mother and father had taught him. And the Sunday school teachers and the preaching he had heard in his church in Baltimore, in Maryland. What did he do? He'd go back to his room and he'd sit there in a tumult and he would open his testament, he would open Mark's Gospel and he would read it through. He would read it through in the Greek because he had that sort of mind and he would let the self-attesting testimony of Jesus himself fall into his mind and into his troubled heart, the uninventable Christ, he would have a confrontation with this Jesus once again. Our Lord's words in their independence, our Lord's words coming from the beauty of his personality and they would bring peace to him and he would discover there the real Jesus, the real Jesus is the Jesus of Matthew and Mark and Luke and John and Paul and Peter and James and so on. And then thirdly, the authority of Jesus was due to the confidence he had in the relevance of what he had to say to my life and your life. The durability of his teaching, that it would last. That it would last certainly 2,000 years. And that there would be people today, there would be aborigines in Australia and former headhunters in Papua, in New Guinea. and there would be people in Argentina and in the central states of America and there would be rice farmers in China. and there would be Indian peasants and scientists and there would be people today in Siberia and they would be gathering together and they would be meeting in the name of Jesus Christ and they would be living their lives by what he had to say. Remember how he says this now? At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the climax is a parable. It's about two men who are building houses. And one man builds his house on a rock. He takes time to build it. His neighbour has finished his house and is smoking his pipe and sitting on the veranda watching him as he still isn't up to the window level of the house yet. But after some months they've both finished and a storm comes. and the winds howl, and the rivers break their banks, and waves come, like we see now on the news of flooding in different parts of the world, how powerful a flood can be, the tons of water. His house stands. His neighbor's house is washed away in a moment, and all that he invested in it is destroyed. And our Lord was speaking about the 20th and the 21st centuries. And he was speaking about the storms and the waves that historical research, and persecution, and philosophical speculation, and scientific pretension, and all these waves, how they would come and the winds would howl, and they would beat upon a family, and a congregation and an individual whose life was tied to Jesus Christ and was trusting in Jesus Christ. And Jesus was absolutely confident that every human being then that had as its foundation the teaching of Christ, his life would stand. He would survive the storms. And he was convinced of that. So not only then his originality, and not only the compellingness of his personality, but his confidence that what he had to say would speak to people from all the world over, and would be enormously helpful to them, and that their lives would be invulnerable to assault and research and guilt and despair. Whatever men would say about the Word of God and would attack the Word if we trusted it and we said, well, no, this is what Jesus is telling me today and this is what I've got to do. This is the sermon that comes to me today and I must trust I must put my faith in this Jesus Christ. I want us to face this morning the reality of the authority of Jesus Christ. That we would pause before these words that two men blurted out. No man ever spoke like this man. That nowhere in the whole of human literature or world religions will you find anything that can compare to the teaching of Jesus Christ? The Bible itself, the Gospels, they are themselves miracles. When I hold this book in my hand, I'm holding in my hand then a miracle. I'm holding something that is quite unique. I have something that's miraculous in its independent thinking and its tone and its confidence. It's got something to say to me if I read it with an inquiring and obedient mind. And sometimes in moments of doubt I have to say, I've got the Bible. I've got this intrusion from another world. A book that comes to me from God, that God has breathed out, that he's born holy men, prophets and apostles, so that they have been helped by the Spirit of God. When they were going to write something that he didn't want to write, he says to them, don't write that. And John on Patmos doesn't write it. And other things then, he gives them insight. And he gives them help in penning exactly what he wants them to pen. And if you ask, well, to what degree did he inspire them? Jesus says, to the jots and to the tittles, he inspired them. I've seen much human literature. When I was a boy, I read the Carnegie Library in Merthyr Tydfil dry. It was only 100 yards from our front door, and I went back with my books day after day, frustrated at times because I couldn't find something new. And when I got to 11 years of age and 12 years of age, I had to make my break from children's books to adults' books and wondered where I should begin then in that expansive world. I've read. It's been my delight in a way that my children then in the age of television and so on, they never read like I read. But when I come to this book, it's discontinuous with all other books. Here is something splendid. Here is something absolutely unique because this is a book that knows me. This is the book that describes me. This is a book that tells me what's wrong with me and what's wrong with the world and why the world is in the state that it is in. It searches me. It finds me. It gives me help. It doesn't just rebuke me, but it lifts me. And it opens my eyes and it gives me encouragement. It speaks to me. Here are concepts that are quite unsurpassable in their grandeur and uninventable in their sheer originality. And there are times I say, well, if there were no God, I'd worship the God who wrote the Bible. Because no one ever spoke like Jesus Christ. That's why I follow him. That's why he's my lord and my teacher. He can say nothing wrong. And secondly, they said no man ever spoke like this man because of the claims that he made. Extraordinary claims he made about himself. For example, he claimed he was going to be the one who judged the world. He would judge the world. He's going to judge us. It's appointed unto man once to die and after that man faces a judgment, an evaluation. I gave you much, I entrusted you with so much. I blessed you and helped you and was so kind to you all through your life. Well, what did you do? Did you love your neighbor as yourself? Did you see your sin because You weren't loving your neighbor as yourself. Did you run to Jesus and find salvation and forgiveness? Did you find the strength of the Holy Spirit to help you? Did you do these things? We're going to receive our eternal destinies. from his lips, the one who met with Matthew and John and Andrew and Peter and Barnabas and Jude and the other disciples famous and not so famous. He met with them, didn't he? And he spoke to them and he taught them and he exhorted them and he searched them. Do you love me, Peter? Do you really love me more than these? It matters to him how we've lived our lives. It matters to him how we care. On the cross he's concerned about his mother and he's concerned about John whom he loved and he brings them together and he gives them a future ministry to one another. It matters to him how you're going to live in your homes this week, how family life is going to be, how it will be between you and your children and you and your parents. It matters. and we're going to give an account to him. And there he stood before them in all his vulnerability. He needed to wash and he needed to eat and defecate and all the things that ordinary men did and they knew something about his history. They knew his father was a carpenter and his mother was a pious woman and he had half-brothers and sisters. They thought they were his full brothers and sisters and we know better than that. He was found in fashion as a man. He looked only human, he didn't have a white sparkling robe, and he didn't have a halo around his head when he walked around. And he said to them, one day I'm going to judge the world. Well, there's nothing ordinary about a man who says that. If men say it, and they can say it, and you would say, poor Dob, you'd say. Oh, what a shame. The man's crazy. He thinks he's going to judge the world. I talked to some men this week and just the week before They'd met a man who told them that in November is going to be the end of the world, that Jesus is going to return. Oh dear, who has he been listening to? Who's been dabbling with him that's given him such confusion? Because if you believe that, then you stop working and you just go around in a wild way telling people that Jesus is going to come again in November. And it brings discredit because nobody knows. that information God has kept to himself. And if anyone claims it, they're crazy or they have been ill-informed. But here is the Lord Jesus Christ and he says, we're going to meet him. that we must all appear before him, the king of the world, and he will decide our destinies. And the standard by which he will judge us is how we relate to him, whether we've been ashamed of him. or whether we've made our boast in Him, whether we've loved Him and done His will, and that's to be our chief concern. In the great humanitarian parable, remember, of the sheep and the goats, and the sheep are divided from the goats, and the sheep are welcomed, and the goats are turned away by the great farmer, and God is the great farmer, isn't He, in that parable? The means that he knows the difference between the sheep and the goat and we don't always know, but he always knows. And it is that I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty, you gave me to drink. I was in prison and you came and visited me. I was sick and you helped me. I was lonely and you came and sought me out and you did it to the least of these my brethren, Jesus says. And you did it to me. Come, he says, and welcome because you loved me and you loved everything to do with me, my day and my book and my people and my life and you sought by grace to follow me and be like me. He's the judge, and the standard for judging us is, how is it between you and Jesus Christ, the Son of God? And then he made another claim. He claimed pre-existence. He said, before Abram was, I am. And there he stands in the middle of time, and you know, they know him. in his early thirties but he's aging visibly, he's looking older. But there he is and they know when he first appeared as a man straight from the carpenter shop, strong and agile and how he was baptized and they followed him and here he was and he tells them that he goes back. but he goes back right before Abram. And he doesn't say, before Abram was, I was, but before Abram was, I am. This simple Jesus, this historical Jesus, he says, before Abram was, I am. And he quotes then, in that statement, the great words of Exodus. God appearing to Moses at 80 years of age to recommission him and use him now to deliver his people from Egypt. And he says, I am has sent you. the self-existent God, the God from eternity to eternity. He goes back, he says, to another world. So he says he's the judge. He says that he exists eternally. He says he and God are one. I and my Father are one. It doesn't matter where you probe. the New Testament, if you look through the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, if you read John's Gospel, if you read letters about him, or the story of the early church, or the book of Revelation, the Christ that you will meet in all those books makes the most astonishing and tingle-creating repercussions in your life. The claim that he is one with God, that Jehovah and Jesus are one, that he is Jehovah Jesus, that he claims utter deity. You know how God has so inspired John, that when he begins his gospel, it begins, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And it ends with Thomas falling before him and saying to him, my Lord and my God. And we are confronted this morning with this tremendous assertion that Jesus Christ is God. That the child in the manger, the infant of Mary, in all his frailty, in his humanness and ordinariness, who is he in yonder stall at whose feet the shepherds fall? Tis the Lord, the King of glory, the one who made the universe, the one who upholds it, who will consummate it. He made you. He is your God. He is your Lord. And I'm not confronting you this morning with some emotional challenge. I'm not working on your feelings this morning. But I'm confronting you with thoughtfulness, with an intellectual challenge, with a veracity of the claims of Jesus Christ. I don't know how you feel this morning. You may feel as cold as ice. But it doesn't matter. what you feel, you're being confronted with these, this man, and what this man said, and how this man lived, and what he claimed. The issue is, is what Jesus Christ said true? That's the great issue. And that's quite independent of how you may feel this morning. You may feel no fear, you may feel no warmth, you may feel he is God. But the question is, is it true? Is this truth? Because if it's truth, it has the most momentous consequences for my life. If it's true and I believe in him and follow him, I go to heaven. If it's true and I don't want to change my life, even for Jesus, then I go to hell. I'm standing, you see, in the middle of the New Testament. All the streams are flowing around me. Matthew, Mark and Luke and John is flowing around me and Paul and Peter. They're all flowing around me. And wherever I look, wherever I dip my cup in the water of these streams, I find a colossal Christ. I find a divine Christ. I find what men will say is a megalomaniac Christ. if he's just crazy but from the rest of his life I find the norm for sanity I find the definition of what an archetypal human being should be how he should respond how he should love and care and turn the other cheek and pray for his enemies and that's marvelously attractive in Jesus Christ as an example to me of how I should live. I'm asking you, have you reflected this morning then on the claims of Christ? Have you thought of the possibility that what he says is true? The possibility that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, that the God who spoke through the prophets and Moses, and Samuel, and David, and Elijah, and Isaiah. But now God has come very, very close to us in a unique way. He's clothed himself in flesh and blood. He's added to himself our human nature, and he's come, and he's, Jesus says, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. And you simply can't ignore that without some thought. You can't simply say, well, that's religion. And then never think about it anymore because it's religion. That's one thing you can't do with Jesus Christ. Some people said, follow him. Some people said, he's a blasphemer. He's a crook. He speaks by Beelzebub. Crucify him. Silence him. You can't sit on the fence. You can't do that on the one hand. On the other hand, you can't do that because of his claims. And I'm saying to you, I think it's worth pondering about the claims of Christ, the great I ams. I'm the true vine. I'm the way and the truth and the life. I'm the resurrection and the life. And I'm saying if those claims are true, you must bow before him. You must submit to him. You must give him your life. And from now on, life is following the one who said, I am the life. He's the door to life. He's come that we might have abundant life. You say, well, but I don't feel anything. But it's not about your feelings. I'm not here to work on your feelings and work through a microphone and tell tear-jerking stories and bring pressure to bear on you like that. I'm here to say that this is Jesus Christ. And this is the beauty and the cogency of his personality. This is the authority with which he spoke. These are the claims he made. Is he an evil man? Is he a crazy man? or is all that he said real and true? I'm saying on the basis of that you bow before him. And that's the great reason. I'm always telling you the great reason for you being Christians is that it's true. He died for our sins. He made peace with God through his shed blood and it's true. He rose the third day from the dead and it's true for 40 days he talked and spoke to his disciples and transformed them and it's true he poured out the Holy Spirit on the church first on the day of Pentecost and ever since and 2,000 years later he's pouring out his spirit and we meet in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit it's true and the change in me that makes me a servant of God and you His servants. It's because of God's love for us. And it's true. You know, there are some days I feel like a man. I don't often feel like a man. There are some days I feel like a minister. I rarely feel like it. I don't know what a minister feels like. I don't often feel like a minister or like a man. Jesus Christ is not like that. I run away from my feelings. I make a bonfire of my feelings. I am what I am by the grace of Jesus Christ, by who he is and what he's done for me. The case for Christianity doesn't fluctuate by my feelings. It stands on this unchangeable Jesus of the Bible. The same yesterday and today and forever. And then briefly, the third point I want to make to you is that when people said, no one ever spoke like this man, they said that because of the promises that he made. Many great promises. You know, in my father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again, take you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also. He tells us if we look to him and we trust in him we'll have life. God loved the world and gave his only begotten son that whoever believed in him should not perish but have everlasting life. You know that these are the things that that Jesus promised, but just this one promise, come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest. Now there's nothing in John's Gospel that's as wonderful as that statement. that if we go just as we are, to him just as he is, in the attractiveness and holiness of his character, in the power of his life, if we go and we give ourselves to him, he does a wonderful thing. He takes us, he receives us, he doesn't shun us. When we knock on the door, he doesn't open the door, crack and look through the door and say, what do you want? He opens the door. And we have fellowship with Him. And He settles our fears. He soothes our sorrows. He heals our wounds. And He casts away our fears. That's what Jesus does. He gives us rest. And you know all the responsibilities that are facing you just now. and your uncertainties about your health, and about finance, and about the futures of your family, and about illness, and about death, that great unavoidability. And Jesus says, I'll give you rest. I'll take your tensions, and I'll take your fears. and I'll replace them with my rest." Isn't that wonderful? Could there be anything more wonderful in all the world than that you go and you listen to a man speak and tells you about Jesus Christ and he tells you the words of Jesus Christ and that this one great word he reminds you of again this morning that if we go And if we put our trust in Him, if we give Him our hearts and our lives and our futures, He'll take them. And He'll give us His rest. An easy yoke, a light burden. That's what He promises to give us. There's nothing that anyone in all the world, the richest people who can pay for the greatest teachers and philosophers to come, and speak to them. I was reading some words of Paul Johnson, how he would meet a famous philosopher called A. J. Ayer and he would meet him and he would say to him, well now, what true things can you say to help me today? And A. J. Ayer would be frustrated. That's not a rational question to ask. There's no answer to that question because he had no answer to it. because there was no such thing as something that was there, beautiful, constant, strong, enduring, relevant. But the gospel is full of these things, isn't it? Because it's full of Jesus Christ. You come to me, coming to Jesus means experiencing the rest of Jesus Christ. So coming is being touched by the Word of God, the Holy Spirit taking the Word of God and touching your mind and your affections and beginning to draw you with cords of love, drawing you, drawing you so that you can't stay away from Him and you must know more about Him and you must have this rest, the reality of it. the enduring reality of the rest of Jesus Christ. That's what the Gospel has offered you again this morning. Think of it. Our Heavenly Father, bless this word to us then. Thank you that we have such teaching in Jesus Christ, such a teacher, such loveliness, such cogency and authority and beauty and relevance, such wonderful promises. Oh Lord, keep us from Satan's suggestions now that these are the devices of men and all too good to be true. Help us to see that they come from the pit. And help us then to cast ourselves on this lovely, altogether lovely One, even our Saviour Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.