The following is a sermon from Grace City Church in Denver, Colorado. Grace City exists to make and mature disciples of Jesus Christ. For more info, visit gracecitydenver.com. We're excited to be back in John with you all this morning in chapter seven. I'm gonna read verses one through 16. After this, Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Now the Jews' feast of booths was at hand. So his brothers said to him, leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world. For not even his brothers believed in him. Jesus said to them, my time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me, because I testify about it, that its works are evil. You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come." After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly, but in private. The Jews were looking for him at the feast and saying, where is he? And there was much muttering about him among the people. While some said, he is a good man, others said, no, he is leading the people astray. Yet for fear of the Jews, no one spoke openly of him. About the middle of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple and began teaching. The Jews therefore marveled, saying, how is it that this man has learning when he has never studied? So Jesus answered them, my teaching is not mine, but his who sent me. This is the word of the Lord. So anybody living in Colorado is probably familiar with what I'm gonna have put up on the screen here. If you get out at all in the mountains, you might know this red line that goes through kind of the Western half of the state, the Continental Divide. The idea is if you're literally standing on this line and you were to dump a giant bucket of water on that red line, Half of the water would go down the western slope, and half of the water would go down the eastern slope. Half of it would literally end up in the Pacific Ocean, and half of it would end up in the Atlantic Ocean. It's fascinating to think that here is a spot, a line, and... From this dividing line, things go this way and end up way over there, or they go this way and they end up way over there. Two entirely different destinations, though they begin at the same point. And I'm starting this way because we're seeing in this text that Jesus is this spiritual continental divide. What I mean is that every person who met him either trusted him and went on to a blessed destiny of God's grace, God's inheritance in their lives, the forgiveness of their sins, or they doubted him or rejected him for various reasons and ended up in a completely different place. But Jesus intended to force that decision on everyone. Our setting of this story, so the story begins in northern Israel, it says the region of Galilee. So you're northern Israel, this is during the reign of the Caesar Tiberius. And look at verse 1 again, we're going to kind of jump around. So keep your text open to John 7 this morning. It says, So notice it starts with after this. And if you're like, after what? Well, after chapters 5 and 6. And in chapters five and six, you may recall from the spring or you can just thumb back a page or two in your Bible and see that we recently had talked about Jesus' famous miracle of feeding the 5,000. He had walked on water when he sent the disciples out and there's the storm and he went to them. He gave this discourse called the bread of life discourse where he's saying, if anyone is hungry, come to me and I am your sustenance. But he's doing these things in a remote region of Galilee. It says he's gone to the far side of the Sea of Galilee and thousands of people followed him there. And you may be thinking, why is this popular rabbi and teacher going so far away from the population centers? And the answer is the chapter before that. In chapter five, Jesus had healed this lame man at the Pool of Bethesda. So right outside the city gates, right outside the temple gates is this Pool of Bethesda where this man lay for years. and he didn't have anyone to come and put him in the pool when the waters are troubled, and whether that's a superstition that people had about what was going on, or whether that's actually what was happening, at least phenomenologically, that's how he's describing it. And Jesus comes and says, well, if you believe in me, you're healed. And all these religious leaders come to him from the temple that were never willing to help this man, and they say, you're not allowed to do what you just did. What do you mean I can't heal someone? Well, you can't heal someone on the Sabbath day. You don't heal people on the Sabbath day. And instead of Jesus apologizing, being like, oh, my bad, I didn't realize it was the Sabbath, he doubles down and basically says, I and the Father are one. I'm working the works of my Father. I can do what I want on the Sabbath day, and I've made a man whole, and you should be happy about that. And they decide we're going to kill you. So the picture of this context is Jesus has gone back up north. He's intentionally gone to a more remote region just to let stuff cool down a little bit. It is not his time, as he says in this text, to go offer his life. And so he's back in Galilee, verse one. Now keep going, now verse two. The Jews' Feast of Booths was at hand. So his brother said to him, leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing, for no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world. For not even his brothers believed in him. Okay, so here's a spoiler alert of the rest of the chapter. Jesus initially says, I'm not going up. And what he means is I'm not going under your conditions. I'm not going in your time, in your way to go make myself known right now. It's not my time. But Jesus ultimately does go up to this feast, one of the three major feasts of the Jews. And he's greeted with mixed reviews. And that's what the rest of the chapter is going to be about. There's six ways here. I'm gonna kind of map out or overview for you six ways that people wrongly react to Jesus. And I call these ways of missing Jesus. Okay, six ways to miss Jesus. And I'm gonna give you six key words that sound similar. The first key word is using. And that's what his brothers are doing in the verses that I just read. They're using Jesus. Notice they're saying, you got to go to this big feast in Jerusalem, Jesus. They're like, this is your moment. This is your time. You go during the biggest feast of the Jews and you make a splash and then everyone knows you. You become not only a national, but an international phenomenon. Let's go. And Jesus is saying no, because what he hears in their words, and John even notes this, it's not belief. It says they don't believe in him. What's happening in their words is they're saying, Jesus, we have a plan for you. And now we're gonna project that plan onto you. Instead of us surrendering our wills to your will and saying, you're the Lord, you're the master, you lead us and we'll go. They're saying, we want to use you for personal gain. Because if you go up and you're prominent and we're your brothers, guess where that puts us in this new messianic kingdom that's coming. So that's the first way of misusing Jesus or missing Jesus altogether is simply by using him. And I want you to think for a moment how you can do that, how you can subtly and probably subconsciously shift from a not my will but yours be done to a I have an idea, I have a dream. And how even your prayers are not, Lord, I lay down my will, and I worship you, and I praise you, and I'm grateful for you, and I want your kingdom to come, and I want your will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, as Jesus taught us to pray. But it's more be kind of bringing my wish list to God and saying, could you do a solid for me? I'd like this, and I'd like this, and I'd like this, and I'd like this. And don't hear me saying that the spirit of prayer is that you don't bring those petitions. But even those petitions, you can come and say, Lord, I'm praying for this healing and I'm praying for this job or this promotion or this thing with school or the healing of a relationship, but I lay it all down before you because you're God and you're good and I trust you. I don't wanna use you, I don't wanna manipulate you to get what I want, I want to see what you want. And that's the first way here of missing Jesus is simply these brothers that are not saying Jesus lead us, teach us, but more, hey, we have an idea. do this for us. So that's using. A second way, and this dominates this particular chapter, is confusing. Confusing. Let me just overview some verses here. So jump to verse 10. But after his brothers had gone to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly, but in private. The Jews were looking for him at the feast and saying, where is he? And there was much muttering about him among the people. While some said he is a good man, others said, no, he is leading the people astray. Verse 14, about the middle of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple and began teaching. The Jews therefore marveled saying, how is it that this man has learning when he has never studied? Okay, idea of Jesus was never apprenticed to any famous rabbi. How does he know this stuff? Verse 25, some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, is not this the man whom they seek to kill? And here he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him. Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ, the Messiah, in other words? But we know where this man comes from and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from. By the way, they're wrong. But it was a superstition that the Christ, the Messiah figure, that he would suddenly spring onto the scene with these miracles and this authority and this leadership to raise an army to defeat Rome. And that, how would you know he's the Messiah? Well, in spite of, or in addition to the miracles, no one knows where this guy came from. And that's actually not what the Bible teaches, but people are confused. Jump to 35, verse 35. Jesus is saying, I'm going away, and he means I'm going to send back to the Father, and you can't come right now, but they're confused. Verse 40, when they heard these words, some of the people said, this really is the prophet, and that's the one that Moses promised. way back in Deuteronomy. Others said this is the Christ, the Messiah. But some said, is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was? So there was division among the people over them. And if you were to go back tonight or this week and reread this whole chapter, you would see this kind of confusion just dominating the chapter. They're saying, wait, wait, wait, who are you? Like, where did you come from? Where are you going? Are you good? Are you evil? Are you the solution to our problems? Are you just more problems? Are you the Christ, the Messiah? Are you the prophet that Moses spoke of? Nobody knows who this is. And here's the problem, that many of the Jews in seeking answers to the identity of Jesus, they're asking a lot of the right questions, but they're asking the wrong people. They're asking people who are ignorant of the very answers that they seek. And no one's just going to Jesus and saying, you tell us who you are. Where did you come from? Where are you going? And there's a bit of dramatic irony here. You may have learned this term in some kind of lit class. Dramatic irony is often when the reader knows more information than the people that are in the story. And so the people that are in the story are like, we don't know where Jesus came from. He came from Galilee. He came from Nazareth. So he can't be the Messiah. The Messiah would come from Bethlehem. And it's like, well, we're sitting here knowing, well, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Did anybody bother asking Jesus, do you have any roots in Bethlehem, the city of David? Well, we know that from the gospels. They didn't know that. And they'd rather continue to debate with each other and take sides. And this concludes with, and there's division, there's confusion. Nobody goes to Jesus and says, where did you learn these things that you're teaching? They're just talking amongst each other. There's no way he knows this stuff. He was never mentored by a rabbi. And so they're clinging to superstitions and half-truths and outright misunderstandings of the person of Jesus because they're confused and they don't simply talk to Jesus. I think this is still common today, where maybe even some of you have been or are confused by something that Jesus did or said. You're like, that's not my picture of God. I thought he would be more loving than that. Jesus can be very confrontational. I'm confused. Well, do you take that confusion that you sense sometimes, that you experience sometimes, do you take it to God and to the Word of God? Do you take it to trusted people who can help you unpack the meaning of something? Or I think what a lot of people do are just like, I'll just settle with this ambiguity. I'm confused, I don't know. Another kind of confusion is not confusion over what Jesus did or said, it's confusion of something going on in your life. And you're like, this trial, this pain, this injustice just doesn't square with my understanding of God. And it gives you an opportunity, instead of diving in, again, to the word of God, to the person of God, in community with people who can help you, you're just like, I'm okay just settling with this ambiguity. I guess God is just unjust or unfair or treats people this way. So you got using, you got confusing. Next you got refusing, okay? Remember this debate back in verse 12 and following, is Jesus a good man or is he deceiving the people? Is he leading them astray? Is he the Messiah or is he no one of consequence that we can just ignore? And it seems like that'd be pretty important to answer. Is this the person that we have waited for for hundreds, for thousands of years? Or should we just ignore him? Is he another fraud? Is he just another teacher? Another traveling itinerant miracle worker? You'd wanna answer that, but look at verse 13. Yet, for fear of the Jews, no one spoke openly of him. I want you to think about that. This could be the most consequential human being that ever walked the face of the earth. And he's right here. But we're not going to talk about it because the Jews have power and the Jews have control and they could ridicule you. They could cast you out of the fellowship. They could put a pox on your house, you know, and they're not going to visit your business because you started following Rabbi Jesus. You know, much of our own academic and political, and I would say especially urban culture in America, in Western culture, is a lot like this, where you may be ridiculed for believing in Jesus. You may have certain labels attached to you that you're thinking, well, but I'm not the things that you're saying about me, and that's not fair, but you don't wanna look like an idiot. And that's how a lot of these people felt. Like, I'm not going to talk about him. I'm not going to follow him. Because we fear the Jews. We fear the loss of our own reputations. And again, you can't tell me that that's not prevalent in our culture, where maybe from the extremes of both sides, you feel a pressure to not identify openly with Jesus, to talk about Jesus, to say, yeah, I love Jesus. In fact, I would love it if you came with me to church or to a Bible study so we can learn more about Jesus. You're just like, I'm just gonna shut down. I'm gonna dial it back. I'm gonna refuse to talk about him because that's not what the key people are doing right now, or that's not what the, bulk of our society is doing right now. One specific way you see this is in verses 46 through 49. What's happening here is the Pharisees, who are some of the most powerful religious leaders, they're not political leaders, they're not under Rome, but they're religious leaders, they're going to the, and don't mistake this, they're going to the temple authorities. So they're going to other Jews who have the right to arrest someone, and they're saying, you gotta go get this guy. You gotta arrest him and detain him because we wanna kill him. That's what's going on in verse 46. Now, a few verses later, you see that the temple officials, here we are a few days later, and the Pharisees are like, are you gonna arrest the guy? Like, what's going on? You haven't detained him yet. And they say this in verse 46. Why didn't we arrest him? because no one ever spoke like this man. I'll come back to that shortly. For a moment, I want you to focus on the religious leader's response, starting in verse 47. The Pharisees answered, have you been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed. Now, if you don't recognize this, that is incredibly spiritually abusive, narcissistic bullying. It's also a clinic in logical fallacies. Okay, what they're doing, what the religious leaders are doing, when the people come and they're like, well, no one ever spoke like this man. So they have the courage to say, at least we're listening. There's something going on here with this guy. And the first thing they're doing is what's called an ad hominem attack. That is an attack directly on the person. To put it in the modern vernacular, they're like, are you complete idiots? Are you morons? You're morons, you're accursed by the law is what you are. So it's a personal attack. And it's getting them to shrink back, like, oh, I guess we're morons. Because the second thing they do here is a logical fallacy known as appeal to authority. And that's when they're saying, do you see any of us educated spiritual leaders following him? And they're gonna be like, well, no. So you think you're so smart, don't you? But what you should be noticing is nobody who's in the know believes this guy is anything. In fact, we think he's such a fraud, he needs to die. They're getting people to refuse to engage with Jesus by shaming them. They're saying, it doesn't matter what you saw with your own eyes. It doesn't matter what you heard with your own ears. Shame on you. Shame on you, you pathetic people. that you would even start to follow, start to listen, start to entertain ideas that he's someone worth going after. And again, I think this is so common in our culture that so much talk about Jesus and the church community and the gospel, Christian ethics, is simply shut down by ridiculing it and labeling it. by ad hominem attacks of like, well, you're this and that and the other, and you're a bigot for believing these things, you're a sexist, you're a homophobe, you're a maggot. Like we hear these things in our culture, just attacks where you're like, no, no, no, I'm not those things. And you want to, in a way, maybe not deep down disassociate from Jesus, but you're like, I'm not like those people, I'm not like those Christians. So there's a tremendous peer pressure for you in our society to simply refuse to talk about and to identify with Jesus. To say, yeah, I'm not trying to offend anyone, but I love Jesus. I follow Jesus. Jesus has been so kind to me, so forgiving of my brokenness and my sin, but that gets shut down. And so there's this refusing. Well, the next one is accusing, verse 20. So in the midst of this back and forth with the crowds, Jesus asks, why do you seek to kill me? Why are there people that seek to kill me for being a supposed lawbreaker? And this is going back to the healing on the Sabbath. So he's like, why do you want to kill me for being a lawbreaker when you all are lawbreakers? And they're like, what are you talking about? And they're like, well, you're trying to kill me. So whether or not someone can heal on the Sabbath, that's up for debate. And Jesus settled it, said, not a problem. It's actually a good thing. Trying to kill someone is a bad thing. It's in the Ten Commandments. Don't kill people. So he's flipped this around on them and saying, you're seeking to kill me, you're accusing me of being a lawbreaker, when in fact you are lawbreakers. And their answer, verse 20, is you have a demon. Who's trying to kill you? And I don't think it's necessarily as theologically charged as it sounds. If you told someone today, well, you have a demon. But what they're saying at a minimum is you're insane, you're out of your mind. And what they're doing is they're just dismissing Jesus with an accusation so they don't have to deal with his claims. They don't have to wrestle with, well, yes, there are some of us that want you dead. All we do is just we just label you, we accuse you of something, hold you at arm's length, and we have to deal with, we don't have to wrestle with who you said you were. I mean, this is really bad, people. You're taking the sinless, spotless, holy son of God and saying, you have a demon, so we don't have to listen to you. And I think some of this still goes on today where just an accusation is launched at you, and again, what do you do internally? You kind of shut down. You're like, I need these relationships in my academic setting. I need these relationships in my work setting. And the accusation, yeah, it hurts. You're saying I'm not as tolerant as you believe I should be around X, Y, Z issues. I wonder if we can do the same thing to God, not just accusations coming at us, but do you ever find yourself accusing God? Again, where something painful or confusing in your life happens, and you're thinking, God, you're not as good as you could be. Or you're good to people like this over here, but you're not good to people like me. And I think we can start to hold things against God, maybe unspoken accusations. You may feel like, well, I know in a church setting, I'm not supposed to accuse God. But you feel those things of, God, I'm really hurt by you. I'm really disappointed by you. I thought things would be better if I surrendered my life to you. And in some ways it's gotten worse, it's gotten harder. You ever have a situation you're like, I want justice here, but it seems like God doesn't care about justice here. Like if I were God, I would have settled this a long time ago. I would have shown who the right and the wrong parties were. I would have enacted some kind of justice and God is silent. And so I guess he just doesn't care about justice the way I do. These are all ways of accusing Jesus instead of dealing with him. And then finally, abusing. Abusing. You see the reaction of the religious leaders. It's just over the top. They're abusive, they rail on Jesus with their words. They literally are sending henchmen to arrest him so that they can kill him. And we've seen before in the Gospel of John, that's what's behind that hatred, that bloodlust is envy. It's jealousy. I mean, we've seen a little window into the religious leader's soul that's just like, they are so hungry for power and control, so hungry for esteem, respect from the people, that they would do and say anything to keep a tight grip on that control. And they see Jesus and the crowds are going after this itinerant carpenter guy from Nazareth. And they're like, what are you thinking? He has to die. We're losing all this influence. We're losing control. People respect him more than they respect us, and we went to school, and then we went to grad school. And who's this clown over here that's taking all this attention? He has to die, that's abusing. Now, we can't kill Jesus today. What we kill is every last trace of the biblical historical Jesus. We kill Jesus in the sense of taking Jesus out of context, and everybody does this. we remake Jesus in our own image. We're like, see, Jesus is this hyper-conservative thing, or Jesus is a liberal, or Jesus would support this, or Jesus would support that. And we always use Jesus, like Jesus is behind my cause. It's a way of killing his influence. Because instead of just all of us coming to the Bible and saying, I don't know who or what Jesus is, what I know is he's king. What I know is my life is submitted to his life. And if he is something or he does something or he says something that rubs me the wrong way, it doesn't matter because he's king, he's God. And my life must be surrendered to his and to his word. And we're abusing Jesus. when we just make him in our image. And instead of letting him in those places rub us the wrong way so he can plane off some rough edges or something that just doesn't belong in our lives, we can be abusive in this way. And then the final way of missing Jesus is amusing. And I said, we come back to this in verse 46. So why didn't the temple authorities just arrest Jesus? They've been given a command by the religious leaders, go get him and bring him back. And their answer here, and we looked at this a moment ago, but they say, because no one ever spoke like him. What they're saying is he's interesting. He's an anomaly. He's entertaining. And I think there's an incredible danger in every generation that we would simply find Jesus interesting. It's interesting that he's really neither fully what we would say conservative nor fully liberal. It's interesting that he is the most loving person who ever lived and yet he was incredibly confrontational. It's interesting that he was humble and gracious and gentle. The word gentle associated with Jesus over and over and over again, gentle and lowly Jesus. And yet he is not gentle and lowly when he's in the temple, like throwing over tables and having a fit over the abuse of his father's house. We're like, that's interesting. that he can be like this and this and these tensions and these paradoxes and the stories that he tell and the parables and the miracles. It's just so amusing. It's interesting. And not taking a step to Jesus is not after your fascination. He's after your heart. And if we're sitting here like these leaders just like he's interesting. Well, is he king? Is he Lord? Are you going to submit your life to him? Oh, no, no, no. But for now, of all the people that come into Jerusalem and start talking at these feasts, he's a pretty interesting guy to listen to. So that's an overview of a long chapter using, confusing, refusing, accusing, abusing, amusing. And let's turn to the other side of the story just here in closing briefly. Three keys not to missing Jesus, but to receiving Jesus. Three things that Jesus presents in this text that we need to understand if we want to understand and submit our lives to the authentic, historic, biblical Jesus. The first thing is understand his mission. Understand his mission. So in Jesus' conversation with the crowds at this feast, he frequently, go through this chapter again, he frequently refers to the fact, the Father sent me. Okay, so he is a sent one. The idea of that is that his life, he's not just living, he's not just here, going through the motions. His point is, if I'm sent, then there's a purpose, there is a trajectory, there is a mission that the Father has for my life. And he hints at that mission here. So starting at verse 21, again, we're in the middle of this argumentation, this confusion, Jesus answered them, this is to the crowds, I did one deed." So he's healing the lame man by the pool of Bethesda. I did one deed and you all marvel at it. And they did. Look back at chapter five. They're amazed. They're like, we know this guy. He was there for year after year after year after year. He was really lame. This is incredible what you did. But going on, he says, Moses gave you circumcision, not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers, and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man's whole body well? And you see the line of his argument. You do whatever you want, in a sense. You do whatever you need to, in a sense, on the Sabbath day. You'll go through that rite with your little baby boys at eight days old or whatever to make sure that you're obeying the law with your children. And he's like, but here's my whole mission. I came to seek the lost and the broken, to seek sinners and to restore them to health. And what you saw in the physical life of that broken man who couldn't get to God, but I could get to him. and I healed him and I made him whole and I turned his life from a life of shame and brokenness and poverty to a life of potential flourishing, that's my mission, that's what I came to do over and over and over again. And when you see it in his body, I want you to understand that is indicative, that's an evidence of what I came to do spiritually, that you can't see like that. But I want people who can't get to God spiritually, I wanna get to them and make it so they can come. so that there's grace, there's forgiveness. And family, you will never make sense of Jesus if you think his mission was something other than he came to seek and save the lost. Like if you think his mission is that he came to advance your politics, he came to advance your ideologies, he came to advance your academic training, he came to advance just your opinions and your perspectives on things. He didn't come to advance you. He came to heal you. He came to offer you flourishing in every way. But another thing I can say is like, He didn't come, His mission is not like, let me grant you three wishes and make your wildest dreams come true. What do you want me to do for you? He came because He loves you and sees you and me in our brokenness, in our blindness. And He came to make us whole. And if you can receive the Jesus and realize this is why he came, this is what he's up to. Now, as someone who follows him, what should my mission be? And you see how his mission is now translating into your day-to-day mission, whatever your academic training, whatever your vocation, whatever neighborhood you live in, you start to understand something not only of Jesus, but of your own mission as you follow him. So understand his mission. Secondly, understand his message. So remember these crowds are coming to him and saying, how is it that you're teaching all of these things and you can read the teachings of Jesus, you're making these connections to the Old Testament, the Old Covenant, that no one ever taught us this stuff. And these parables that are pointing us to a future spiritual kingdom and not just an earthly kingdom, we've never heard teaching like this. And they're asking finally, as they're talking around him, verse 16, Jesus is going to explain this. He says, There's that mission, that sending. If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking of my own authority. The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory, but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there's no falsehood. So what Jesus is saying, I want you to understand my message. He's saying first and foremost, it came from the Father. It has a divine origin. The reason that it's hitting your hearts differently than any teaching you've ever heard is because these are the very words of God. I'm not coming just tickling your ears. I'm not just telling you what you want to hear at these various feasts of like, yes, I'll be your Messiah. Yes, I'll go into the desert and raise an army. Sure, what do you want me to do? And this is often what he's contrasting here. He's saying the antithesis of my teaching is the teaching of the religious leaders that you're used to listening to who they just constantly make stuff up. They constantly try to be clever because they want you to like, what an incredible delivery, Rabbi so-and-so. And he's like, I don't care about that. I've come with the authority and the words of God. And I'm not trying to be clever. I'm not trying to win your favor. I'm trying to tell you the truth. He says, by the way, you know why they're tickling your ears? You know why they're telling you the things that you want to hear? And I could do the same thing and stand up here every Sunday. I know what most people want to hear. He's saying it's because at the end of the day, it's all about them. They want glory from you, self-glory. They wanna feel like we're really something. We have arrived, just look at all these people that listen to us and follow us and come to our church and do our thing. And he says, I'm not even about that. I want the Father to be glorified through my teaching. And because it came from him, and because it's through me, the son of God, it's true, it's reliable, it's dependable. And again, I would say, family, if we want to know Jesus, we've got to understand not what we wish he had said, or what people are saying that he said, we need to understand his message. We need to understand the authority of it. We need to understand the meaning of it. We need to understand the conviction of it and the direction of it, that if I live this way instead of this way, what does my next step look like? So understand his mission, understand his message, finally understand his mandate. There's a few times in this text, Jesus says, you may have noticed this, verse six, verse eight, he says, my time has not yet come, or my time has not yet fully come. And then verse 30, he says, they were seeking, or John says, they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him because his hour had not yet come. And the gospel of John, Jesus' time or Jesus' hour refers to the predetermined timing and circumstances of him going and laying down his life on a cross in Jerusalem at Passover. And what Jesus wants you to understand, what he's telling the people here is, I'm not just gonna stumble into Jerusalem one day, offend the wrong people and get killed, oops. didn't see that coming. He's like, the whole point is I see it coming. That's why I came. You want to talk about my mission again. How is it that I'm going to seek and save broken people? How can I save sinners? He's saying here, what's the mandate? That there's an hour coming that the Father has mandated and I've embraced that I will go to a cross and I will take the sin of the world on myself and I will offer myself as the sacrifice, as the substitutionary payment so that there's nothing that sinners owe to God if they trust in me because I paid it. And that's what he's referring to here. He's saying, my death which is coming is not just a tragedy, it's the hour for which I came into the world in the first place. And I want you to understand, you can't understand, you won't even begin to understand Jesus until you understand this mission, this message, and this mandate. As great a teacher, as great an example and a role model as Jesus is, his mandate is not You know, let me inspire you with a TED Talk. His mandate is not, let me show you how to live. You know, there are a lot of people in this world that do not bow the knee before Jesus as King. They do not accept Him as their only Savior, as their only hope, but they're like, but He was a good teacher, and He lived an exemplary life of love, so I'll copy Him. And we should be copying Him. Don't hear me say you're not supposed to imitate Him. We're called to imitate Him. But you will never be able to imitate him, unless or until you understand his mandate is the copying me, the imitating me, the listening to my words, it's not even the main thing. You gotta understand, I came as a sacrifice and a savior. You need saved, you don't just need a good role model. You need rescued, you don't just need a better teacher is what he's saying. So the gospel is not listen to the words of Jesus and be better at obeying him than all the other people are good at obeying him, that's legalism. The gospel is you're a sinner, you're broken, you can't save yourself. Jesus came on mission from God with a message from God, with a mandate from God and he laid down his life and as we'll celebrate in just a few moments his body was broken for you and his blood was poured out in that hour for the remission, the removal of your sins so that you could have favor with God now and forever. So what each of these things, the mission of Jesus, the message of Jesus, the mandate of Jesus is demonstrating. I don't know all the answers about Jesus yet. I'm talking from the crowd's perspective, but I can see he's worthy of my trust. He's worthy of my allegiance. He's worthy of my surrender and my obedience. And one of the things that we do when we come to any scripture text is we're trying to determine, not just like, ooh, I love this verse, I love this phrase, here's how I'm gonna talk about that. What we're doing is we're saying, why did the Holy Spirit have John write this in the first place? Why is this here? As part of our exposition, why is this here? And the answer is, you know, John's writing around 90 AD, so some 50 or 60 years after the death of Jesus. And he's talking to all these Jews and Gentiles, a multi-ethnic church who's living in the dispersion all over the Roman Empire. And what he's seeing is people don't know what to make of Jesus now, a generation later. And they're confused. and they're refusing him, and they're accusing him, and they're abusing him, and they're doing all these things that the people in the text were doing. So he's like, let me tell you a story. When I was there with Jesus and I saw all those same reactions, I see it again, I see it still, I see it in every generation that there are all these, there are these six ways of missing Jesus in any generation. And he's like, I want to, by the direction of the Spirit, tell you this story so that I can put this question to you. Who do you think Jesus is? That's really what he's doing. I can tell you all the ways to miss Jesus. I can tell you how to understand him appropriately. Who do you say that he is? And how then will you react? What will you do with him if that's who you believe that he is? And that's where I think this text leaves us this morning. And I plan to return to this next week, verses 37 through 39, where Jesus says, come to me. And he talks about this fountain of living water that's going to be planted in people's souls and bubble over forever. And when I start telling you next week about, do you know what the Feast of Booths was about? Most of you don't. Do you know the symbolism in the Feast of the Booths? Do you know the daily rituals of the Feast of Booths? Jesus did. And so when he goes up to Jerusalem and he does something in Jerusalem, there are hundreds of thousands of Jews who could see what he's doing, see what he's claiming and be like, oh my word. And it's a decisive moment of either he needs to be worshiped as God or he should be dead as a blasphemer. There's not this middle road of he's a good teacher and a great example to follow. We'll come back to that, but I want you to hear that invitation. Jesus says, come to me. Don't hold me at arm's length. Don't study me like a academic subject matter. Come. Come near. Not with mild interest, but with passion to know me and be known by me. And don't worry about what other people think. You wanna miss God and the Savior of the world? Because you're worried about what other people think? Well, they won't be there for you at the end of time. When we say here in a moment in the Apostles' Creed, he's coming at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. And the only thing that will matter is what you did with Jesus. So don't hesitate in spite of your lack of perfect understanding. None of us have perfect, final, ultimate understanding of the person and work of Jesus, but we're growing. We're getting there. Accept Jesus on his terms and you'll find abundant life. You just listened to a recording of a sermon from Grace City Church in Denver, Colorado. We hope you can join us in person soon. Thanks for listening. The Lord bless you and keep you. Amen.