We'll pray for Paul and then we'll crack on.
Lord, we thank you. I'm just super aware that Paul
and Grace have poured out a lot and served us in many ways.
And we just honour, honour that. And we're so grateful for their
presence within the community. And we, we've just been thinking
about freedom and how so much of our lack of freedom is because
we don't really know the love God has for us.
And so I just blessed us this morning, the good news to really
receive fresh revelation of how deeply you love us through what
Paul brings today. Amen.
Thanks. Yeah, I think I will.
I was going to say, everyone come come forward, but I'll come
Grand. Thanks Lizzie for my third cup
of coffee wherever she's gone during lockdown.
We did. We did like one of these Airbnb
remote tours. Did anyone do those things?
No, because people couldn't. You couldn't do tourism stuff,
right? So that's everyone was doing
this kind of remote experiences. Then some of them were really
good. So we did a few.
One of them was with a Colombian coffee grower in her small
holding in Colombia. And she had this goat that a
little baby goat kept jumping up and eating the coffee cherries.
And the goat was getting more and more wired during the
session, you know, and she was talking about the coffee, but
she told us that the legendary story of the origin of coffee.
Have you you heard this one? You've heard it.
Yeah. The story is that there's an
Ethiopian goat herder and his goats are eating like coffee
cherries and are getting really wired and they're jumping around
and he thinks, wow, this might be interesting.
You know, I guess being a goat herder out in the Ethiopian
hills, you don't have a, you don't have a lot to think about,
you know, other than seeing what the goats are doing.
So if you see goats eating cherries, you know, you're going
to try some. So he did and then got the
caffeine hit and thought, wow, this is really good.
But you know, being a good Christian Ethiopian goat herder,
he took some of the coffee cherries to the local monastery
and showed them to the Abbot who tried a bit and said, oh, no,
this is this is of the devil, this is satanic and sent him
away and threw the coffee cherries into the fire.
And then, you know, went away. But of course, the coffee
cherries in the fire then began to roast.
The beans began to roast. And the monks came down for
their nighttime prayers and they could smell this lovely aroma
coming from the fire. So they collected, they
collected the, the, the roasted beans out of the fire, ground
them up, made them into a drink and then found that they were,
they were able to stay up all night and pray because they're
supposed to stay up all night and pray, right.
And the Abbott wanted his monks to, you know, keep the kind of
nightly pray vigil. And when the, when the Abbott
woke up in the morning and came and found all of his monks had
managed to stay awake and pray, none of them had fallen asleep.
And it was because they had drunk coffee.
He changed his mind and he said, oh, no, I got it wrong.
This was not of the devil. This has actually come from
Christ. And so he blessed it.
And therefore coffee is a consecrated drink officially in
the church due to this story. So there we go.
If it was in the Anglican Church, it would be a flagon of
beer or something, you know. But anyway, in here in Hope in
Hope Chapel, we drink coffee while we preach to honour the
Holy tradition of the church, Glory, John's Gospel.
So if you've got books, Bible books, I, you know, I'm not a,
I'm not a big PowerPoint person. Bill always has these very well
put together PowerPoints and things.
I don't have any of that, but I, but I do have references you can
look at in the Bible. And last time when I, we started
the, the John's Gospel series, one of the things I wanted to
avoid, partly because there's just no time is, is just kind of
being in a situation where we're going chapter by chapter.
We'll never finish it. So I'm jumping around and trying
to look at the overall themes in John's Gospel rather than trying
to work like ABC through it. So there's lots of lots of
angles, lots of places we can go.
But we looked at the prologue and if you haven't listened to
that one, I can't remember a couple of months ago, you can
get it on the podcast where we were going into what is John's
Gospel, the 1st chapter. How is it setting us up for the
whole gospel? So today I want to jump around
with a couple of points, but in particular I want to think about
as a starting thought to frame the message this morning when it
says in John one verse, one in the beginning was the word and
the word was with God. The word was God.
So the word word in the Greek is Logos.
And I want to start with a putting a question out there.
Why the logos? Why does it talk about the logos
being made flesh and dwelling among us?
Why? Why is this the focus in the
first verse of John? And what is it that the gospel
is doing when it's revealing to us who God actually is?
This is this is a big question for me all the time.
How does the Scripture reveal who God is to me?
Not just about how to live life or what we should do or how we
approach different questions or different issues.
All of that's fine. But the heart of the matter is
who is God? What is he like?
How do we know, and why does that matter?
So I think I maybe mentioned this before, but I don't
remember, and maybe you weren't here and maybe you don't
remember, but John's Gospel historically has been understood
as the the last gospel to be written, maybe even the last
book of the New Testament to be written.
It's certainly the book with, we would say it has the most
developed theology in it in the New Testament in the sense that
it's it's the most arguably, I think it's true.
This is the most theologically dense book in the New Testament.
Another reason why trying to go through line by line is going to
take us forever. But one of the data points we
have about the Gospel comes from Clement of Alexandria, who was
kind of third generation after John the Apostle and early
church father. And he said we basically have
got the major facts about Jesus life that is set down in
Matthew, Mark and Luke. They tell us the key points, you
know, the summary of of Jesus life and ministry on earth.
All of that's there. And what he says is that John
towards the end of his life was urged by his own disciples to
write a gospel. So you can kind of imagine John
at this point is in Ephesus. He's kind of the, the kind of
grand spiritual grandfather figure at the, of the church in
Ephesus and has been ministering there for many decades.
Mary, the mother of Jesus had been there with him as well.
So they, they ended up there and you can go and see the, the
memorials and graves, traditional sites, you know, in,
in and around the ethicist area as well.
If you, if you ever go and pay a visit, it's, it's cool, it's
good fun. But John had all of these
disciples, you know, in the church there and they said to
him, John, you really need to write some stuff down or at
least tell us so that we can write it down.
We need your teaching to be put out because we we're not seeing
all of the insights that you have in the gospel writings that
we have available. So they urged him and so he he
he did last time I talked a bit about how I like the idea that
the the Book of Revelation, when it talks about the small scroll,
it says the Angel says to John, you, you must write again that
the small scroll he has to write again is the Gospel of John.
So what he's getting in the revelation on Pat Moss in sort
of psychedelic apocalyptic form, he then is trying to put into a
narrative form in the Gospel of John.
But actually the message is the same.
But the the revelatory stuff happens on Patmos and then he's
kind of trying to get it into intelligible words, you know, in
in the Gospel. So, but Clement says that John
recognised that the facts had been put down in the other
gospels and that he sought to compose what Clement, Clement
called a spiritual gospel in in the Greek Pinephomaticus
Evangelion, a spiritual gospel. So he said the facts, we see
them in the others, but the the spiritual essence.
And I think that the point of what Clement's trying to say is
that the Gospel of John is highly symbolic.
Sometimes John will move things around.
So you've got Jesus cleansing the temple at the beginning of
his ministry in John's Gospel. In the other three gospels, the
cleansing of the temple happens at the end.
And so Clement's angle is, well, John moves, he'll he'll pull one
thing out, change the chronological order because he's
making a point. There's a symbolic point that
that is very carefully curated in the Gospel Origin of
Alexandria, another key church. Father also commented on the
differences between John's Gospel and the other Gospels.
And if you ever get into the apologetics space, lots of
people argue about this. You know, why?
Why do the gospels have things in a different order?
Why are the stories being told in a seeming contradictory,
contradictory fashion sometimes? And Origin says, well, because
they contradict, they're not saying they're not kind of
taking liberties. John especially is taking
liberties with the order of things because he expects you to
have an idea of the the narrative from the other
gospels. But he's now trying to make a
point by reorganising some of this stuff to give us a
spiritual revelation about who Jesus is and, and what John is
carrying as an evangelist and as an apostle.
So Origin says in all these people trying to harmonise and
make everything fit together, this is a waste of time because
it doesn't fit together. I think that's, it's interesting
to see someone, I think Origin was the 3rd century, someone so
early on making very astute observations around these
things. We think about these apologetics
arguments about the agreement of the Bible, how it all matches up
as being a very modern thing. But they already dealt with this
like 1800 years ago. And he was like, stop trying to
do that. It's not how it works.
It's not how the Scripture works.
There are spiritual truths that are being communicated in in the
scripture. This is the important stuff.
Actually the the historical facts, you know that is it 1
Angel or two at the tomb, you know, all these kind of things.
Origin was like really, can we, can we grow up?
These are not the important questions.
And I think that there's lots of people, again, as an aside, who
read the Bible and struggle with will hang on.
If this is really a book from God, why is it it seems to say
one thing in one place and another thing in another?
And this really wasn't a big deal for much of the early
church. And it is a big deal for us and
I think partly because we are approaching it in the wrong way.
That's why I say this book is about revealing the nature and
character of God to us. It's not really about trying to
give you a blow by blow historical account of absolutely
everything that happens in a certain order, which isn't to
say that this isn't stuff that happened, but the point, the
point of it is not to educate us about history.
The point of it is to reveal Christ in US and to us.
Now, John himself says that at the end of this book.
He says, I've written these things so that you may believe
and continue to believe and in believing that you may have
life. That's that's why it's written.
It's not written so that you may be educated.
It's written so that you may believe, have life, giving
faith, experiential. You're supposed to feel
something and experience something when you read this.
And the symbols and the references that are there in the
gospel are difficult to engage if you don't know the back story
because there's lots of references.
And so when you read that it might kind of be confusing.
What, why is it putting it that way?
Why is it putting it this way? But I would say just don't worry
about those bits. Read it in a way that is
engaging your heart and is read it.
Read it prayerfully in a way that you're saying, Jesus, how
are you revealing yourself to me in this gospel?
That's how it was written, perhaps more so than any of the
other books of the New Testament, although I think it's
a good way to read the whole of the Bible.
John's Gospel, the tradition of the church historically has been
this is how you read this book. It is a spiritual book.
It's supposed to reveal who Jesus, those are supposed to
reveal who you are in revealing him.
It's supposed to be experienced. It's supposed to be felt.
It's supposed to be something that you have a sense of.
Something more is going on within me than I can grasp with
my natural mind. Something is happening in my
heart, something's happening in my spirit and I need to kind of
just not resist that. I need to relax into that and
allow the Holy Spirit to do the Holy Spirit's work in teaching
me, in forming me right. So just as a longer intro, how
do we look at the book now? There's a couple of things if
you, if you're new to studying John systematically, a couple of
things to look out for that I didn't mention before.
There's lots of numerology in John, symbolic numbers.
We have 7 signs in the book of John.
The signs are called mighty works or signs.
When you read the other gospels you see Jesus doing miracles all
the time. In John's gospel there are 7
curated miracles that are chosen and there are also seven
so-called I am sayings of Jesus. There are actually more I am
sayings, but there are 7 special ones where Jesus says things
like I am the bread of life, I am the true vine, I am the Good
Shepherd. Like over and over again he says
these phrases. And as I say, there are a couple
of others which are not in the list of seven, but they are
other I am sayings. I'm going to say a little bit
more about those in a moment, but you have this, the I am
sayings and the signs also happen in a certain order and
that's there's a purpose to it. So we see for example, in in
John 2, you get Jesus changing the water into wine.
So this is on page 1064 in the Bibles, if you're looking at it,
it says we've got the story on the third day, a wedding took
place in Cana in Galilee. Jesus's mother was there and his
disciples and then they had no more wine.
And his mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells
you. And then he says nearby there
were 6 stone water jars used by the Jews for ceremonial washing.
Jesus said fill them with water and then draw it out and then
they turn into wine. You know the story, right?
And then in verse 11, it said what Jesus did here in Cana of
Galilee was the first of his signs through which he revealed
his glory. So John makes a point of saying
this is the first of the signs, the transforming of the water
into into wine. Now that's not the case in the
other gospels. You get a different order.
John is doing this deliberately. He's saying this is the first
one. And and what does it mean?
Well, it's really, it's really full of symbolism.
You, you notice that it says 6 jars and the jars are for
ceremonial washing, which means it is representative of the
whole Jewish law and the system of the law, the system of
purification that requires water for ceremonial washing.
A little bit like we're, we're more familiar with perhaps with
a Muslim prayer practises, people have to wash before they
pray in a ceremonial way. That's what these jars were used
for. And there are six of them.
And numerologically 6 is a number of incompletion.
So what you have is 6 jars and there's no wine.
So you've got ceremonial water, but there's no wine, which means
there's no life because wine is symbolic of life, the life of
God. And particularly it's symbolic
of the life of God because it brings joy when you drink it,
you, you have a good time. That's the idea, right?
So you have, they're there at this wedding, but the, the
central point of the wedding can't be reached.
They've got all this other stuff, all this party,
everything has been set out. But suddenly it's like, but
we've got no wine. We've got all of the form, but
no substance. In other words, and this is a
critique of the whole religious system.
It's saying this whole a tradition that you've inherited
gives you the form, but it gives you no substance.
It leaves you wanting. It's like the rich young ruler
who comes to Jesus and saying what must I do to receive
eternal life? And Jesus says keep all the law
and the prophets and he said I've done that, but I still know
I don't have it. Something in my heart I know
I've done all the things I'm supposed to do, but it hasn't
solved my problem. And that's the the symbol here
in this story. 6 ceremonial jars full of the holy water.
They can't do it but 6 + 1 = 7. So here's Jesus.
He's the 7th one, right? And when it's 6 + 1, suddenly
the water is transmuted into the wine of the Spirit that they say
is the best wine, which is completely counter intuitive.
So with again within the story, you see the reversal of the
natural mind. The natural mind expects the
best thing to come first and then it's kind of depreciate
over time. But the mind of the spirit says
you go from one measure of glory to another, that it's ever
increasing glory. It's the same with the story of
Moses face, which I'll also come to in a moment.
Moses covers his face after he's encountered God because the
glory was fading away. The Bible says Moses didn't want
the Israelites to see that the glory was draining away from
him. So under the Mosaic covenant,
you have this divine infusion at the beginning which just drains
away and leaks out and it gets diminished over time.
But that's not the way things work with Jesus.
With with Jesus, it goes from one measure of glory to another.
Exponential growth, exponential increase, ever increasing glory.
So you see, this is the first sign, right?
And it's the first sign because John is trying to tell us, pay
attention to this first. This is a key entry point to
understanding the ministry of Jesus throughout the whole of
the Gospel of John. It's telling us to refer back to
it when we see what he's doing. When he's arguing with the
Pharisees or they're arguing with him, he doesn't really
argue with them, He just kind of grenades them.
But when he's engaging with them, all these other things
he's doing, it's kind of a an ongoing expression of this first
sign, water into wine. Every time he turns up into a
situation, he transmutes it from an ordinary watery situation
into a very divine alcoholic situation.
It's constantly elevating people into this, this kind of altered
state of consciousness, which is actually to become conscious of
true reality. That's the image here.
But he goes straight from changing water into wine, into
cleansing the temple. And as I said in the other
gospels, he cleanses the temple at the end of his ministry and
it's part of what gets him killed, right?
So he he goes and right at the end he cleanses the temple, has
this direct confrontation with the Sadducees, and then within a
week he's crucified. But John has the cleansing of
the temple right at the beginning.
And that's once again for a purpose.
He's trying to say to us this act that Jesus performs is very,
very important to understand what the whole message in the
trajectory of this gospel is going to be.
So keep it in mind. That's why he's put it right at
the beginning. Just like with the prologue,
keep it in mind because he's put it at the beginning.
This is the logic. So you have this interesting in
the second-half of Chapter 2, again, you know the story he
you've got people selling animals in the temple.
And he says, get out of here, stop turning my father's house
into a market. His disciples remembered what it
was written. Zeal for your house will consume
me. Then the Jew said, what sign can
you show us to prove your authority to do all this?
Does this question all throughout John, what authority
does Jesus have to do and say the things that he does all the
way through? You'll notice it comes up again
and again. By whose authority do you do
this? What gives you the right to make
the kind of claims that you do? Jesus.
And his answer is remarkable. And I don't know if you've ever
stopped and really thought about this.
He says, destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three
days. That's a remarkable answer.
So John has Jesus driving people out, cleansing the temple, gets
accused. Why are you doing this?
Why do you have the right to do it?
What sign can you give to prove you have the right to, you know,
tell us what to do? And he says destroy the temple
and I will raise it again in three days.
And we know from the other gospels that everybody was
extremely confused by this statement because it comes up at
Jesus trial. He gets accused of, of being a
revolutionary. Who's going to who that he is
going to come and destroy the the Jews temple.
I think, look, he's you see, he's a, you know, he's a
radical. He's going to blow the temple up
or whatever they, you know, they would do in those days, destroy
this temple and I will raise it up.
So notice that he's telling them you destroy it.
He's not saying I'm going to destroy the temple.
He's saying you're going to destroy the temple.
You destroy it and I will raise it again in three days.
And then John sort of tries to help us.
It says the temple he had spoken of was his body.
And after he was raised from the dead, his disciples.
And John's saying me like I, I recalled what he had said.
And then they believed. So Jesus is making reference to
the temple. He's making reference to his
body. And he's saying to him, this is
the sign that is going to show you by whose authority I say and
do the things that I do. The sign is going to be this,
you destroy the temple and I'll raise it again in three days.
Super confusing. No wonder they they had no idea
what was going on. I've said many times, often
people will say the reason Jesus talked in parables was to relate
spiritual truths to ordinary people so that they can
understand them. But that's not what the Bible
says. The Bible says he spoke in
parables so that people couldn't understand them.
He did it to veil truth so that the natural mind would be
confused. Remarkable, you'd think a
teacher like today. I'm trying to make things
intelligible, right? I'm trying to put it out in a
way that is that you can follow and grasp.
But that's not how Jesus taught. He didn't teach in a in a
systematic, intelligible way. He taught in a way that when you
listen to him, you were extraordinarily confused, spun
around, dizzy, but yet in your heart you felt like this is
life. I just can't.
I can't explain it. I can't put it into any scheme
that makes sense to me. My heart is burning within me,
but I can't rationally make sense of any of this stuff.
That's how he taught over and over again.
And I think there's, I don't know who said this.
It was someone, some famous church person said, for, you
know, Jesus began his ministry by turning water into wine.
And the, the church has spent the last 2000 years trying to
turn it back into water again. So hopefully we're not going to
do that today. But this issue of destroying the
temple, what is the temple? Well, we've, we've got 2 temples
referred to here. 1 is the physical temple that they're in.
And then the second one, the more important one, he's talking
about his body, right? John tells us that his body.
In the Jewish scheme, the temple is the place where God is
supposed to live. The temple is the place where
you come and approach the divine presence, but you can't go fully
into the divine presence. The temple is there to teach us,
to form within us a sense of the sacred.
We recognise sacred presence because we've got a place that
we can look at physically and identify it as this is a sacred
presence. There are sacred protocols that
we adopt when we go to the temple.
All of that is supposed to enculturate us with the idea
that OK, there is. God is not just ordinary, right?
It's supposed to create an awareness of the sacred.
It's supposed to do something in society, in the community, that
gives us a sense of there are things we need to treat as
sacred that we we take seriously, not things that we
just take lightly. We have an intuition towards the
sacred, and the temple is supposed to do that.
The whole of the religious practise is supposed to do that.
But here's the the kicker. The purpose of building the
temple is to destroy the temple. So the Temple is part of the Old
Testament story. It's divine in origin, divine in
design, but its whole purpose is to be destroyed.
It exists so that it will be torn down.
It does not exist so that it will remain forever.
It's like the law. The Jewish law exists so that it
can be torn down, not so that it remains forever in in that form.
That's what the Apostle Paul says through the law.
I died to the law so that I could live to Christ.
The Christ in his flesh abolished the law with its
commandments and ordinances. So when we're looking at the
temple, when we're looking at the the Jewish law, when we're
looking at that religious system, which is the water in
those ceremonial jars, it promises a lot, but it delivers
little to nothing and it's diminishing returns.
The whole purpose of that is to be set up so that we'd get
knocked down. You build the temple to destroy
the temple. Like through our lives, we have
all sorts of practises and experiences that acclimatise us
to what is sacred, what is important to.
We recognise, you know, we differentiate between things
that are good, things that are not, things that are clean,
things that aren't. But the whole purpose of that in
developing our intuition towards the sacred is so that ultimately
it can get torn down completely. And in the tearing down, we
discover that the whole earth is a burning Bush alive with the
presence of God, that the whole world is the temple of the of
the Spirit of Christ. Because in John one verse one,
it is the logos who is made flesh.
What is the logos? The Logos is is the divine mind.
It is the sometimes called the wisdom of God.
The idea of Lagos is that the whole of the world emerges out
of an invisible matrix that is the mind of the God who created
it. And while we can't know the mind
of God directly, we can we can see the hallmark of the
fingerprints of the mind of God in what God has created.
So you can see something of the nature of the artist in that
artwork. You learn something of the
Craftsman in their craft. You learn something of the the
person who's designed an organisation in the way that
they organise it. We talk about having values.
We have a mission, you know, here at Hope.
We have things that we value. Ideally you would be able to
know something about the identity of this church by the
way people act and behave. But the, but the values that we
have are helping us get into alignment within those
particular things that we prioritise as a community.
So the logos is what does God prioritise?
How does God think what's going on in the mind of God that would
even mean that he would create anything.
That's John. One in the beginning was the
word, the logos. This is this divine matrix out
of which everything else is. It's the substructure, if you
like, of the whole of creation, if you like quantum mechanical
analogies, maybe you would think about it like the Higgs field,
what that, that even people call the, the, you know, the Higgs
boson, the God particle, because scientists are thinking about it
as the substrate from which all reality emerges.
You know, why do we have substance?
Why do we have matter? And they're thinking about it in
mechanical terms. But for us, we think about it as
this is the Logos, this is the divine mind which has given rise
to the creation of everything. It matters that it is the Logos
that has been made flesh, the divine mind, the way that God
thinks, the way that God processes and views everything,
that has been fully embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.
So when we see him talk about his body as the temple, well,
that actually starts to make perfect sense, because within
him, within his physical body is the fullness of the Godhead,
right? Is the fullness of God.
Everything, every thought that exists in the divine mind is
within Jesus. He is the thought of God.
He is the word of God. Hebrew says this is the word by
which God upholds the existence of all things.
He's the very fabric of reality. But we don't see the fabric of
reality. We can't.
We can't grasp it, we can't conceive of it.
And so we create all these religious structures to try and
acclimatise us to it, to try and reach for it.
These are the six jars. We're trying to hold it somehow,
but we can't hold it. We can't contain it.
Here comes Jesus containing it in its fullness and every place
he goes into he he's constantly like digging up the ground, he's
ploughing the ground, unearthing what's really going on under the
surface. When he says destroy this temple
and actually he's talking about his body, he's saying in at that
at that point you're going to see the authority that I have.
I mentioned that I am sayings. I am the bread of life.
I am the Good Shepherd. I am is an important phrase here
because this is the name of God in the Old Testament, God who
reveals himself to Moses. Moses says, who are you?
And God says, I am Yahweh, right, Jehovah.
I am. When Jesus says I am, I am.
I am over and over again he is identifying himself as Yahweh.
Sometimes people who don't understand this will say, well
Jesus never claimed to be God in the New Testament.
Oh he absolutely did. Every time he says I am, he is
directly invoking the divine name and applying it to himself.
7 specific times in John's gospel and then at least two
other times. Once when asked about Abraham
and he says before Abraham was I am and another time when in the
Garden of Gethsemane they say where is Jesus of Nazareth?
He says I am and they fall to the ground.
If you remember that part. So there's a two additional ones
at least, but there are the 77 symbolic ones and each one of
these is Jesus referring back to himself.
By what authority do you do this?
I do it because I am. I am who I am as Jehovah said to
Moses. So let me tie this together.
Jesus who is I am. What does that mean?
I am is a reference to the fact that he is the ground of all
being. All the reality emerges from the
I am. That is the log offs of God.
Everything emerges from that. In him we live and move and have
our being. The Apostle Paul says everyone
and everything has a pre established relationship with
Jesus because he is the very ground of their being moment by
moment sustaining their life and existence.
He is the ground of reality. But just to say that he's the
ground of reality doesn't tell us what reality is like.
Because if you you look around you can see all kinds of
terrible things and good things. And we might infer that God is
both good and bad if we were just to look at the natural
world. But Jesus comes to show us the
fullness of the character of God that we can't see apart from his
physical human life. So the ground of being what?
What this is telling us is how should we view the entire
universe, not just how should we view our Christian activity or a
Christian experience. It's setting us up for a
Christian cosmology. What is the nature of the
universe? What?
What is the universe's origin and what is its destination?
Well, the answer is Christ as the divine Logos.
Everything we see in Jesus, everything we see revealed in
Jesus, is informing us that this is actually how the universe
works and operates. As Richard Raw puts it, if God.
So if Jesus is the face of the Father and if God is a Trinity,
therefore we are living in a benevolent universe, which is a
remarkable statement. Now if you look around, the
universe does not appear benevolent.
Nature's does not appear benevolent.
Supernova millions of light years away do not appear
benevolent. There are many things that do
not appear benevolent in the material world as we look
around. As long as we're just looking at
those things, we will be deceived and confused as to who
God is. We can't infer who God is just
by looking at the natural world. Fact as part of the Christian
witnesses that there is something disordered about the
natural world and it's a bit of a mystery how that happened.
But when Christ comes in, he shows us in himself the pattern
of how things were designed to be and actually the pattern that
they're still held in the logos. It's other focused self giving
love. It's water into wine, it's joy,
it's life, it's light. My yoke is easy, my burden.
It's like all of these things that life does not feel like a
lot of the time. So whenever life doesn't feel
like that, the invitation is to go back to the temple, the
temple that is the broken body of Christ.
That reveals to us again who He is, what He's like.
Because if we can catch a glimpse of that, we will also
know that is what we are like. Because we are formed from Him
and out of Him and our life is held in him.
It's who we're designed to be. All the ways in which we are not
like that as individuals or a society or anything else is is
indicative of a lie that we have believed about who we are and
how the world is. We've been deceived and
disordered into being selfish, prideful, violent, greedy, often
hearted, feeling like we have to fight our own corners, be
controlling, fearful. All of these things are based on
a lie that we are something that we are not or that we are not
something that we actually are. Which is the same lie that is
there in the garden when the snake says to Eve, you know, oh,
you will be like God if you eat this fruit, even though it was
already established she was already like God.
So Jesus then last thought, we go to John 14.
It's page 1082 and 1083 if you want to take a look at it after
it's for time. I'm not going to read it, but I
just want to mention it. In the Old Testament, you have
this phrase that God actually says.
No one may see my face and live. He says that when he's talking
to Moses in Is it Mount Sinai? No one may see my face and live.
Moses asks to see God's face, and he says you can't see my
face, you can only see my back because no one can see my face
and live. So there emerges this idea that,
well, God is we can get close to God, but we can't get face to
face with God because if you get face to face with God, you're
going to spontaneously combust. That's Moses's testimony, right?
So the glory that Moses gets, he gets from the back of God, not
from the front of God. Then when he goes down the
mountain, that glory drains away.
Philip says to Jesus, show us the Father and that will be
enough for us. And Jesus says you've been with
me so long and you've not yet realised if you have seen me,
you have seen the Father. So Philip, face to face with
Jesus at the moment, at that very moment, has still not
figured out I am actually looking into the face of the
Father when I'm looking into the face of Christ.
And yet I did not spontaneously combust.
I did not dissolve away into nothing, going to some divine
holy conflagration. Actually, in being face to face
with him, I, my true nature has been rehabilitated and has been
brought forth. The apostle Peter, the first
time he meets Jesus, go away from me, Lord.
I'm a sinful man. He says not six months later,
he's arguing with the other disciples about whether or not
he would be #2 in heaven. The greatest in heaven is
extraordinary. You go from I'm too sinful to
even look at the holy preacher to six months later I might have
a shot at being the number 2 head honcho in the Kingdom of
heaven. What's happened to Peter in
those six months? He's just been hanging around
with Jesus. So what does hanging around with
Jesus do to us? How transformative is that?
The face to faceness that Peter experienced with Jesus was
liberating his true nature. So to be, to be true, there is a
fire when you look into the face of Christ, there absolutely is a
fire, but it's not a fire of destruction.
It's a fire of liberation. It's not a fire of retribution.
It's a fire of purification, of refinement.
It's a fire that that lifts us up into who we are, not a fire
that burns us up into nothing and gets rid of us.
This is the consuming fire that is in the face of Christ.
So he says to, he says to Philip and the others in that day, this
is what I'm going to finish with because I live.
You also will live on that day. You will realise that I am in my
father and you are in me and I am in you.
So he's telling them just before he goes to the cross.
You don't understand this now, but in that day and that day.
Next time I'll talk about chronological time and divine
time, but I'm not going to do that now.
But just think in that day he goes to the cross and then he
rises from the dead and he calls that a day.
Right in that day you will realise not I will be in you and
you will be in me. He says In that day you will
realise I am. Remember the divine name.
I am in You, I am in the Father and you are in me.
You're going to see it then, and this goes back to when you
destroy the temple and I raise it up again in three days.
Then you will know by whose authority I speak.
Here's his answer there in John 14 you're going to see the
authority is I speak by is my own authority as the very Logos
out of which all of creation has come into being in that day.
You will know you are in me. They were already in Him.
They couldn't recognise that yet because they're still seeing Him
in the flesh. How can I be in you, Jesus?
You're standing right there because He's the Divine Logos
who upholds your very existence and in whom you were created and
designed for a good purpose right from the very word go.
You're going to see that when you go to the cross because his
body is broken symbolically, His body being broken and his
insides being exposed, as gruesome as it is, is also
trying to tell us something that the very core of Jesus is being
is being revealed to us now. It's shining out of that broken
body. And just as the veil is torn in
the temple and ultimately the temple is done away with, the
physical temple, now what we see is the light of and life of
Christ shining out in and to and through all things,
regenerating, rehabilitating, bringing them back into their
proper designed divine order. And as we see many things that
are disordered in the world, as we recognise this and
participate with it, we also join in with reordering the
world, bringing things back into right alignment, right
relationship, sorting out the environment, whatever it is,
we're participating with Jesus in seeing those things happen.
So John is trying to, he's trying to draw us into an
encounter with this Jesus, the Jesus who is the divine Logos.
Right back in the prologue, this is what he says.
In him was light. That light was the life of men.
And then all the way through we see the same thought is being
preached from different angles, going, it's like going round in
a spiral, looking at it from all sorts of different angles until
you get this culmination in the cross and in the resurrection.
So this is John. Is that too heavy for a Sunday
morning? Let me finish and let me finish
and pray because as I said at the start, this is not, this is
actually supposed to scramble our brains.
It's not supposed to sit, you know, logically and
methodologically in a way that that feels very comfortable.
It's supposed to scramble our natural thinking to reveal what
is more true, which is underneath our natural thinking.
And that is the reality of the Spirit inside us.
Christ in you, the hope of glory.
So Father God, my prayer for us all is that you would reorient
the furniture of our natural mind, that you would unearth the
reality that is Christ in US and that is our union in him.
Thank you Jesus, you are in the Father.
The Father is in you and we are in you.
Therefore we are in the Father and the Father is in US.
And there just as the fullness of the Godhead dwells in you in
bodily form, so the fullness of the Godhead now dwells in US in
bodily form. Thank you that the natural mind
cannot apprehend that or get even define its dimensions.
So we just lean back into you, we relax into you.
Thank you, Holy Spirit, you give us permission to just say we
don't know, but we are known. Whatever situation you're facing
in your life today, I want to speak that over you.
You do not know how it's going to work out, how to solve it,
how to address it, but you are completely and fully known.
And in being known, you are completely and fully loved.
Holy Spirit, would you make that truth blaze so brightly in us as
individuals and as a community that it will be impossible for
us to miss it, and, if possible, for those of us around us to
miss it as well. And then thank you.
Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Paul.
We've got to go and collect our children now.
But I think one thing I think God's been putting on my heart,
which is that, you know, Jesus sat at the feet of Mary and
Martha was distracted by the diaconos, which was like, not
just it. People think of Martha as doing
the kitchen work. And it wasn't about being
domestic. It was about being a sitting at
the feet of Jesus as a rabbi, as a learner.
But in that story, actually, she was in ministry.
It was like leadership. It's a leadership role.
She was busy doing the things of God and she was distracted
because Mary had chosen the better part, which was to sit at
the feet of Jesus, listening to his word, looking at him.
And I think Paul talked a few times about this idea of being
face to face with God, which is we see, you see that image in
Genesis 1 and John 1. And So what I'd encourage us to
do is to prioritise that sitting at the feet of Jesus like Mary
and actually taking time to look at Jesus because we're very
capable, prolific people and can often miss him because we're
doing extraordinary and interesting things.
And I think he's calling us to Mary.
He actually said she really has chosen the better part, the good
part, which is quite a strong statement.
There's something about, I think what what Paul's bringing about
this revelation of who Jesus actually is and gazing upon him
until we really see him for who he is and therefore see
ourselves for who we are, that requires us to take time to do
so. I think I'm going to bless us
with that as we go away. It could be we do that in
community with other people. It could be on our own, but but
actually almost like an intentional action.
This isn't about a quiet time or solitude or any of those things.
It's literally about who are you?
Who are you, Jesus? I need to sit here and know who
you are because in knowing who you are, I will know who I am
and I will know who everyone else is.
Lord, I thank you that you have. You give us that gift of that
story of Mary and Martha, and You make us prolific and gifted
and active leaders in so many areas.
But actually, the better part is to sit and look at your face
because that's reality looking at your face.
And we desperately need you to help us to do that.
We pray like Paul prays in the Bible that the eyes of our
hearts are enlightened, that we may know you better.
May you literally turn the lights on so we can see you for
who you are. We can see ourselves and we can
see everyone else the way you see the world, the way the world
actually is. We just cry out to you in this
community that your kindness will lead us to a repentance.
Your kindness towards us will lead us too.
I love how Paul puts it an upgrade in our thinking, a light
bulb, just more clarity as to who you are.
If this is true, that you hold the universe together, you hold
us together, you hold everything together, which I believe is in
Hebrews and Colossians. You say that then we need to
have fresh revelation on who you are.
So we, we, we just cry out to you to give us that gift of
fresh revelation. Amen.