John 16:25-33

 John 16:25-33

Jesus’ teaching on Earth comes to an end. The next chapter is Jesus's Priestly prayer, then it's to the Garden, the trials, and the cross. In this passage Jesus gets to the core of our struggle in faith. "...for the Father Himself loves you..."   There is more difficulty with these words than we care to admit, imagine, or accept.   The love of God towards us is the fundamental point of our faith.  “For God so loved the world...” But there is a change in this passage. In John 3:16 Jesus used the word Agape for love. Agape is the self-sacrificing love for the well being of the other. God loves the pedophile, and the pimp, God loves the lust-filled adulteress, and the drug lord He loves the liar and a thief. He loves them so much that He gives His Son as a sacrifice for them and for us. But the word love here is different. The word here is Philia.  It is the word for the love of a friend. Being a friend of God is different from being the object of His salvation sacrificial love.

God wants to be with us, He likes us, our company and doing stuff with us, we are delightful to Him. This frankly is hard for us to wrap our minds around. We have no trouble seeing God as the holy judge who punishes sin. We have very little trouble seeing God as one who saves us by the cross motivated by Agape.   But God as a friend who wants to be rolling through life with us that's harder for us to comprehend. Especially when we struggle with hardships, frustrations, failures, and questions, and we wonder why God doesn't come riding in on a charger and save the day. Perhaps that is the wrong image, the wrong way for us to think about God.

Like all analogies this one will break down if pressed too hard. But hear me out. There is a redneck saying that goes, “A good friend will come and bail you out of jail in the middle of the night.  A great friend will be sitting beside you saying, ‘Man wasn't that great’”. We tend to think of God as a friend who will come and post the bail and sign us out of jail. But He wants to be the one who is in jail with us. Now only a fool would propose that we should engage in riotous behavior that lands us in jail. But the best times of life are the times of high-risk shared with friends. Close companionship plus difficulty or suffering equals a bond closer than all others. I have read numerous accounts of men who have fought wars together.  They report a bond that is closer than the bond of family.  Sports teams that survive the trials that are the hardest have friendships that last the longest.

Perhaps the struggle with being a friend of God is because we play it too safe. We risk too little so that we will never struggle. Maybe what we need is not more cushions on our pews, or better climate control in our sanctuary, or nicer music in our ears.  Maybe what we need is more blood on our knuckles, sweat in our armpits and more adrenaline in our blood.  In our grasping for security at home, at church, and in life we have removed the very thing that will help us understand God as a friend.  Jesus concluded his teaching on Earth by saying, “In this world you will have tribulation but take courage I have overcome the world.”  We work really hard at trying to avoid tribulation.  So our friendship with God is bland and insipid.  Maybe we should engage those Kingdom things where we may get bloodied but we will walk away saying, “Man was that great or what?”

“Lord, grant me a great heart to risk great things with You. AMEN”

John 16:12 - 24

 John 16:12 - 24 

Everyone who has unanswered prayers looks at verse 24 with a questioning or a dubious eye. We read, “Ask and you will receive”, and we wonder why we don't get the answers to our prayers. The marriage doesn't recover, the child is never conceived, the cancer wins, we never get that date we asked for or the pony we wanted when we were six years old. My friend Rob died.  I never knew one person who was such a combination of Christian Grace and love and warmth. From when he told me he had pancreatic cancer till he died was about one year, a painful year of chemo and decline. In those last 365 days of my praying for Rob, me and perhaps 1,000 other people, he was not healed at all. Some of those people praying were holy saints that had dramatic prayers answered with startling frequency. By the way I, for one, don't want to hear “he got his healing in heaven”. That is not what we asked for. Our prayer was that stage 4 pancreatic cancer would go away and Rob, with a healthy cancer-free body, would live out many years of helping us know Jesus better and love Him more. 

Jesus tells the disciples that before the cross there were things they could not understand. After the Spirit comes He would guide them. This is not a promise of new revelation, rather the Spirit would guide them in application of what Jesus had revealed. At this time the disciples were still thinking of the Kingdom as a political-military  Earthly affair. Even after the resurrection they were looking for an Earthly Kingdom. It is only after Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit that they begin to understand that the kingdom of Christ is something entirely different. And this, by the way, was only one of their confusions. The Holy Spirit comes to our lives to give us the application of truth that leads us to holiness and righteous living. 

The Holiness of the disciple is superior to that of the self-righteousness person because the Spirit guides it. On the outside they may look very much the same. The self-righteous person may tithe and be so conscientious about it that to the point that they count their seeds. The Spirit guided disciple may be equally conscientious but it is supremely different because of the motivation, the Holy Spirit guides them. The disciple will never live immorally and claim that God's will.  His behavior is righteous and seen but he is empowered by the Spirit, which is unseen. Which brings us back to Jesus's promise of answered prayer. When we want to know what is righteous, what is Holy, what is the right thing to do; Jesus guides us by the Spirit. That does not violate our free will, because we want to be righteous.  It may be that we may not want to know God’s will or obey Him. But when we seek righteousness Jesus always answers and gives us what we asked. This passage is more about getting what we want when what we want is righteous living. It isn’t about getting the things or earthy pleasure or selfish ambition.

So my friend died in spite of all the prayers of a lot of godly people.  Perhaps we didn’t get what we wanted because it wasn’t what God wanted.

“Lord, help me want what You want more than anything else.  AMEN”

John 16:1-11

 John 16:1-11

How often do we develop a fantasy of Messianic bliss? How often do we portray discipleship in terms of “Happy ever after”?  With a misunderstanding and misapplication of ‘abundant life’ we set up those we teach and ourselves for disappointment.  Jesus tells His disciples that as a result of their loyalty to Him they will suffer dramatically.  He tells them not so they can avoid suffering but so that they will not be tripped up by it.  

I fear that “positive mental attitude”, ‘possibility thinking’, ‘prosperity gospel’ and such has infected Christianity to the point we are unaware, unwilling or afraid to address the high cost of being a disciple.  In the absence of presenting the cost of discipleship we set people up for a stumble.  Either when confronted by the cost of following they decided to walk away from Christ, or they modify orthodox Christianity into something less painful and decidedly more heretical.  

The costly discipleship, marked by suffering as it is, has the advantage of the Holy Spirit coming as our helper.  The Holy Spirit comes and He convicts the world.  To help understand this we can use the phrase “expose the world”.  He exposes that THE sin is unbelief in Jesus as God’s Son and Christ.  All the sins (works of darkness or acts of evil) are merely a product of or expression of the rejection of God’s Son.  He exposes the world’s standing in ‘righteousness’ or Divine justice because Jesus is shown by the Spirit to stand in God’s presence where Holy judgment and justice find their origin.  The Holy Spirit exposes the world’s failure in its commitment to the dark lord of this age, because the resurrection proves that Satan is defeated.  

The message that makes the disciple so much a subject of persecution is a message confirmed by the Holy Spirit, a message of Faith in Jesus as God’s Son.  It is the message that Satan and his system is void.  The source of our hardship works out to actually be our advantage. 

“Lord, help me to see hardship from an eternal perspective, the sign of victory it is.  AMEN”