Category Archives: Gospel of John

When You Least Expect It

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You know how worthless you feel when you are really sick?  A prominent leader lay on his sickbed in that condition.  He was so afflicted, word got out he might die.  Various people came to visit, even though they weren’t real friends.  They said nice sounding things but when they left they bad mouthed him in public.  Even one of his best friends, someone who he regularly had over for lunch turned on him.  Can you imagine how low he must have felt, how worthless?  In his despair, he wrote down his complaints in a kind of poem.  The man was King David and the poem is now known as Psalm 41.

My enemies say of me in malice,
“When will he die and his name perish?”
When one of them comes to see me,
he speaks falsely, while his heart gathers slander;
then he goes out and spreads it around.
All my enemies whisper together against me;
they imagine the worst for me, saying,
“A vile disease has afflicted him;
he will never get up from the place where he lies.”
Even my close friend,
someone I trusted,
one who shared my bread,
has turned against me.  (Psalms 41:5-9)

Fast forward 1000 years or so.  Jesus is about to be crucified.  He spends a private farewell with his closest friends, washing their feet and sharing a final meal.  And, as He passes out the bread, He tells them one of them will betray Him.  He quotes a line from that sick man’s poem:

“I am not referring to all of you; I know those I have chosen. But this is to fulfill this passage of Scripture: ‘He who shared my bread has turned against me.’  (John 13:18-19)

Words, scrawled by a man too sick to get out of bed, became Scripture and were fulfilled in the life of God’s Son!  Whodathunkit?  Next time you are feeling too sick, too discouraged, too insignificant, too misunderstood, too abandoned, too unskilled or too weak to be used by God, remember that man’s sickbed poem.  Don’t write yourself off.  God uses people for His purposes even (and perhaps especially) in their weakest moments.   He can use you, too.

When you least expect it.

Good Eats

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“Open your mouth and close your eyes and I’ll give you something to make you wise.”  Ever hear that as a kid?  Did you do it?  If so, what did they put in your mouth?  It could have been anything from a chocolate chip cookie to a worm.  Unless this was your first time out at this game, you’d only open your mouth and close your eyes if you really trusted the person who gave you the challenge.  I can remember the names and faces of lots of childhood chums with whom I would never play that game.

That kids’ game illustrates the answer to a puzzling question.  Look at these two quotes from Jesus, taken from the same passage:

Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life.  (John 6:47)

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”  (John 6:51a)

The first question most people ask is “What does Jesus mean by eats this bread, especially since He identified Himself as that Living Bread?”   He wasn’t suggesting an act of cannibalism.  But what?  The first and second quote are talking about the same thing: what it takes to gain eternal life.  The second one says you have to “eat this bread;” the first says you have to “believe.”  Apparently, Jesus was using eating as a metaphor for believing.

But does such an analogy work?  It actually is perfect.  Eating is an act of believing, an act of faith.  When you eat, you take something external to yourself and ingest it, making it a part of who you are (Remember: You are what you eat?).  You only chew and swallow because you believe eating that thing will make you better in some way.  If you don’t believe, you don’t eat, right?  This is why most kids won’t eat Lima beans.  To believe in Jesus is to willingly receive Him into your innermost being, allowing Him to become the Source of your new life.  To believe in Him is to “swallow Him, hook, line and sinker.”

Jesus comes to each of us and presents an invitation:  He says, “Open your mouth and close your eyes and I’ll give you something to make you truly alive.”

It’s no game.  What’s your response?

 

Junkyard Beauty

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Next time you are at a craft fair, take a close and thoughtful look at the paintings done on old saw blades and other rusty pieces of junk.  The artist took something shabby and transformed it.  Reminds me of what Jesus did for the blind guy :

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.  (John 9:1-3)

God used the canvas of that man’s disability to display His power and grace. As Jesus healed him, in his transformation, he glorified God.  That word, glorified, sounds a bit churchy but simply means demonstrating or calling attention to how wonderful someone else is.  A spotlight operator, shining his light on the star of the show, draws our eyes to that person and glorifies them.  When someone comes to faith in Jesus, the changes produced are evidence of God’s glory.  God uses those changes to attract others to Himself.

He doesn’t limit Himself to people with physical disabilities.  The town drunk becomes known for a complete 180 and becomes known for his works of charity.  The greedy miser becomes generous.  Even your seemingly ordinary circumstances and generally good reputation are a suitable canvases upon which God can paint beautiful images of His grace.  A simple change that allows one to live with joy and hope in the midst of all the sniping and complaining – it shows.  People notice.  They see glimpses of God, reflected on you.  That’s why Peter encouraged his fellow believers to:

Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.  (1 Peter 2:12)

What God did for the man who was physically blind, He does in an more significant and powerful way for those who are spiritually blind.  Like John Newton, whose song you know:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.

In Line

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A friend of mine signs autographs and sells sketches at Comic Conventions because he used to be an animator for Disney.  People line up to meet him (which continues to baffle him…).  I wonder if there will be lines in Heaven to meet various Bible celebrities.  Some of those lines would be pretty long, with all the people wanting to meet John, Peter and the rest of the boys.  Don’t even think about how long the line would be at Jesus’ booth.  Good thing we’ll have eternal life if we’ll be waiting in all those lines.

I’m not sure how that will work out, but if there are lines like that, don’t be surprised if you see Peter standing in your line.  How could that be?  Let’s ask him.  He wrote this greeting:

Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ:  (2 Peter 1:1)

Peter got to be one of the original apostles of Jesus and yet considered every believer to be of equal standing.  How can that be possible?  Because, as a follower of Jesus, your standing is obtained “by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”   God’s righteousness is perfect.  How much of that righteousness will He impart through Jesus to you?

Paul wrote:

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.   (Philippians 1:6)

 

And John:

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.  (1 John 3:2)

I don’t know about lines to meet Bible rock stars in heaven.  But know this: as hard as it is to imagine, if you follow Jesus by faith, you are already in line to obtain perfection. The next time you pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” remember that promise is part of the deal.

The Opportunity in Failure

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If God knew His plan couldn’t work, why did He bother?  He chose Israel as a demonstration of how wonderful it is when people live in close fellowship with God, enjoying His protection, provision and guidance.  He gave them every advantage – a land “flowing with milk and honey,” success in battle, and a written book of instructions.  All they had to do was stay faithful to Him as their God.  But even with all of God’s special protection and instruction the people of Israel couldn’t pull it off.  They ignorned repeated warnings, ruined everything and were hauled off into exile.  And God knew it in advance.  Before they were even settled in the Promised Land,

The Lord said to Moses, “Behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers; and this people will arise and play the harlot with the strange gods of the land, into the midst of which they are going, and will forsake Me and break My covenant which I have made with them.  (Deuteronomy 31:16)
So why do it if He knew it would fail?  God knew humans would never accept His help until they had utterly failed so often they were ready to give up on trying to help themselves.  

People have not changed.  Perhaps, no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to find satisfaction.  There’s always something that “ain’t right.”  There’s a restless emptiness inside.  If so,  it’s time to quit trying.  Facing  your failure brings a perfect opportunity to surrender and receive what really does work – God’s perfect plan.  There’s a reason they call it “salvation.”  God’s plan succeeds because He installs His Holy Spirit in our souls, to comfort us, guide us and empower us.  His Spirit is what has been missing.  

Those who stop trying, who humbly accept Jesus’ offer of help, receive His Spirit and cross over into a new and satisfying kind of full life.  Jesus described the difference as a spring of cool, fresh water.  He said,

“… whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  (John 4:14)

How to Abide

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Maybe this teaching of Jesus has frightened you:

6 If you do not remain [some translations read, abide] in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.  (John 15:6)

Jesus told His followers to abide or remain in Him or else.  Yikes!  If that is the case, we had better understand how we can abide in Him.  What do we have to do?

Let me ask a question:  When you were growing up, what did you have to do to make sure you lived in your home?  Nothing?  What gave you the right to simply walk in without knocking, go up to your room and flop down on the bed?  That right came with the fact that you were in the family.  You lived in that home because, as a child of your parents, it was your home.  They gave you the right.  If you continually questioned whether you lived there they would have taken you for a professional check up.

Same thing with Jesus.  When we receive Him by faith, He gives us the right to be born into God’s family.  The Spirit of God is born into our souls and we become children of God.  As members of His family, we live, or abide, or remain in Him.  Forever.  In His teaching on this, Jesus said,

1 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  (John 15:1)

In his classic work, Abide in Christ,  Andrew Murray points out that it is up to the gardener to keep a grafted branch secure in the vine.  God is the One who draws us to Jesus and secures us in Him.

So why does Jesus tell us to abide in Him?  It’s a matter of recognizing and remembering where our home is as we go through life.  In a criminology class in college, I  once visited a maximum security prison.  It was a grim and sometimes frightening experience.  From time to time I deliberately reminded myself, “I don’t live here; I get to leave in a couple hours.”  In the same way, we who have come to abide in Christ, are taught we don’t live here.  We are strangers sent as ambassadors of Jesus.  Sojourners.  As we hang on to that reality, it transforms our attitudes and actions.

There’s No App for That

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Did you know there is an app that checks if a watermelon is ripe? And one that checks if you are brushing your teeth long enough?  I have an app that tunes my guitar and one that checks if my RV is level.  You may have apps to time your eggs and keep track of your exercise or just about anything else you can think of.  But there is one thing for which there is no app: abiding or remaining in Jesus.  Jesus said,

4 Remain in me [some translations say abide], as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.  (John 15:4)

Apps are temporary temporary tasks.  But to abide, or to remain, means to make your home permanently in a place – in this case in Jesus.  Abiding is not an app; it’s an operating system.  The operating system in your smartphone is always on when the power is on.  It under-girds and controls everything the phone does, including the apps.  Abiding or remaining in Jesus is like that.

Jesus told us,  “remain in Me, as I also remain in you.”  How does He abide in us?  He promised He would never leave us or forsake us.  He doesn’t come and go for a visit or for a service call.  He lives in us.  He instructs us to make our home in Him like that, as a steady and permanent condition that controls everything else we do.  When we pray, “Jesus, come help me bear fruit in this situation,” we are treating Him as an app instead of an operating system.  Better yet to adopt Paul’s attitude, he expressed like this:

20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.  (Galatians 2:20-21)

Spreading Light

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There is an emerging radical shift in medicine.  Instead of killing diseased and dysfunctional cells, medical scientists are experimenting with transforming damaged cells into fully functional, healthy cells.  The process is amazing: A single cell is injected in the body and begins to gradually transform the non-functioning cells.  If you’ve been to a candle lighting service, imagine a cell with a candle flame, connecting with a dark cell and lighting it’s candle.  Exponentially the light spreads.  The body becomes healthy.  (There’s a cool TED talk I’ll link below.)

John began his Gospel by declaring Jesus to be God, manifested as a human being.  But, unlike every other human, Jesus was a complete, fully functional human because,

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.  (John 1:4)

Jesus had the Holy Spirit we were designed to have, the Spirit lost to humanity at the Fall.  He came to bring this Spirit as light to our darkness.  He couldn’t merely flip a switch, however.

The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.  (John 1:5)

Spreading the light had to happen one soul at a time, because our darkness and lack of understanding was a personal, internal problem.  It was necessary for each of us to allow the light to come in and change us.  To accept the transformation from spiritual death to life, from spiritual darkness to light.  What did we need to do?

He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him.  But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name,  who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. ( John 1:11-13)

 

When a stranger knocks at your door, you either let him in or not depending upon whether or not you trust him.  Allowing him in is an act of faith.  When Adam stopped trusting God, he lost the Spirit.  When Jesus came, it was to restore the Spirit to anyone who would receive Him by trust, by faith.  And when anyone does receive Him by faith, Jesus causes the Spirit to be born in his or her soul.  He lights their candle, so to speak, bringing them to full, spiritual life and spreading His light.

Here’s the promised LINK

Life and Light

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Remember how they began “Raiders of the Lost Ark”?  The huge ball?  Bam!  Hold on to your seats, folks, this isn’t “The Sound of Music.”  John opened his book about Jesus like that.  Bam!  He said, “Jesus is God and always has been, even back at the beginning of everything.”  Before you can recover from that, he says, “Jesus created everything that exists.”  And then, having loosened us up with those wild declarations, this:

In him was life,..  (John 1:4a)

Maybe you are thinking, “Well, duh, I’m alive, too and just about everybody else I know.”  But John didn’t say Jesus was alive but that He had life in Him.  A different kind of life, but one we all were designed to have.  So, what kind of life and light is John talking about?

Jesus said:

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.   (John 6:6a)

In Him was Spiritual Life, the life of God’s Spirit.  God warned Adam, In the Garden of Eden, not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  He said, “…for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”  (Genesis 2:17b)  But when Adam and Eve ate from that tree, their bodies and minds (or souls) did not die.  What died was their intimate connection with God, the connection that is made possible through His Spirit.  Without that Spirit, mankind was spiritually dead, disconnected from God and living in darkness.

But when Jesus came, He had the Spirit; “…in Him was life…”  Which would be of no importance to us, except for what John wrote next:

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.  (John 1:4)

Jesus came with the Spirit, to bring us life and light.  Without the Spirit of God, we live in darkness, a kind of spiritual blindness.

The light shines in the darkness…  (John 1:5a)

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.  (John 1:9)

Something is missing from our human existence and experience.  We sense that lack, that emptiness.  What’s missing is God’s Spirit, from Whom comes true, full life and light.  Jesus came to give us this Spirit.  But, how can we get it; how can we receive this life and light?

More on that next time.

 

The One Who Knows

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John called Jesus “The Word,”  which meant he knew Jesus fully embodied the mindset or logos of God. [For more on that, read the  previous post.] In other words, Jesus knows what God knows and understands reality as God does.  And then John added:

All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.  (John 1:3)

In one of the most astonishing assertions in Scripture,  John said his Friend, Jesus, the One Who came from just up the road in Nazareth –  that man created everything!!!   Now, John was a fisherman, a regular guy.  I’m pretty sure he knew how outlandish this sounded.  But Jesus must have fully convinced him about His role in Creation.  Perhaps He told John, “Back in Genesis, when God said, ‘Let us make man in our image…’ (Genesis 1:26), He was speaking to Me.”  We don’t know for sure.  But we do know this astonishing truth is repeated in Scripture.

… yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.   (1 Corinthians 8:6)

…For by him [Jesus] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.   (Colossians 1:16)

Therefore, if Jesus made everything, He undoubtedly understands how it all works more fully that we do.  When I try to fix a problem with my computer, lots of times I make it worse because I don’t fully understand how it works.  But the engineer who designed and built it would know perfectly what each part does and why.  His “logos” with respect to computers, would be more accurate than mine, and would more easily be able to fix what was wrong.

If you follow that, see how it fits with this teaching of Jesus:

“…  If you abide [if you live your life] in my word [in my logos =  if you fully adopt My way of understanding how all reality works], … you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”   (John 8:31b -32 excerpts with my added explanation of terms)

When you can’t fix something because you don’t understand it, you get all knotted up with frustration, doubt and anger.  But if someone shows you what to do, it feels as though you have become released from all that tension.  You relax.  That’s why Jesus also said:

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. … learn from me,… and you will find rest for your souls.”   (Matthew 11:28-29 excerpts)

It’s good to get to know the One Who really knows…