Classic Christianity – Book of John Part 42 (07-08-19)
Bob George shares the meaning of God’s word as truth has been revealed to him by the Spirit of God. Jesus spoke truth to men, the meaning of God’s word, but the religious did not understand. There was no room in their heart for truth. The religious Jews studied the scriptures, knew what the word of God said, and even memorized much of the Old Testament, but rejected truth when they heard it from Jesus. Why were they looking for a way to kill Jesus? No room for his word. These are religious people. There are people who know the word of God from beginning to end, and in many cases, had most of the Old Testament memorized. Jesus said to them , “You have no room for my word in your heart.”
When a person leans on their own understanding, then they do not listen to whatever anyone else says that is contrary to what they have been taught from their traditions and practices since their youth. If they have been taught by men, then what they have heard could very well be serious error, even to the eternal destruction of their soul! How would anyone know if what anyone says is true? We have God’s word that is one hundred percent true. It would by wise to trust the meaning of God’s word over the teachings of men. But the Holy Spirit must reveal the meaning to you. But are you willing to let go of your own understanding and leave room for the Spirit of God to reveal truth to you? The religious Jews in Jesus day were unwilling. So too do many people today reject truth and have no room in their heart for God’s word. They trust their leaders, their religious affiliation, and their traditions or philosophies and do not check out truth for themselves by reading God’s word and asking Him to explain things to them.
Is there a difference between what Jesus is saying and what the Old Testament was saying? Was not all of that the word of God? What were the religious Jews saying, who even memorized the majority of the Old Testament, yet not understanding what Jesus was telling them? What is the difference? Jesus was teaching what the word of God means? Do you put your faith in what the bible says or in what the bible means? In what it means. If you do not know what it means, you do not know what it says. A computer knows what the bible says but a computer does not know what the bible means. Neither do you and I unless Jesus reveals it to us.
1 Corinthians 2:14
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
That is why a person can be in a bible study, who will hear what it says, but will not know what it means. You can teach the meaning to someone who is lost as clear as a bell, and as logical as you can get, and he does not understand anything. The lost says, “I do not understand that”. He is dumb as dirt. He does not understand anything. Why? He does not have the Spirit of God in him. If you do not have the Holy Spirit of God living in you, then you do not understand what the bible means. You may be able to quote it all day long just like an actor as to what it says, but if you do not know what it means, then you do not have anything to put your faith in. So Jesus says to them, “Even though you know what the bible says, you have no room for the word I am giving you, which is what it means”. You have no room in your heart for that.
Why do you have no room in your heart for truth? Because you have already determined what it means by leaning on your own understanding. You have no room in your heart for true understanding. All you have room for is your man-made understanding. People today have grown up with unbelievable type of false teaching. When you tell a person the truth about that, there is no room in their heart for that. They reply, “This is what I believe. This is my tradition. I have been taught this. So do not tell me these other things for I do not believe them. There is no room in my heart for truth.”
1 Corinthians 2:9-11
9 However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” — the things God has prepared for those who love him — 10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
Earlier, in John 7, Jesus was teaching to have this attitude so that you may recognize truth when you hear it.
John 7:16-17
16 Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. 17 Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.
Now, he continues to speak to the hard of heart and gave them a strong rebuke.
Proverbs 1:23
Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings.
He is appealing to all men, who are all hard of heart, dead in sin, blind to the things of God, until truth is revealed to us, and that day, when we unswerving, hold onto that truth, we come alive in Him!
Christ Jesus did not come to die for good people. He only came to die for dead people. So whenever you have the idea you are are better than someone else, then you will hear the words of Jesus say, “Who are you, trying to take the spec out of your neighbor’s eye when you have a log in your own?” There is not a single person who can walk into the presence of God in their own righteousness. If you think you can you are deceived. God’s righteousness is not predicated on how well you are next to another man, but how you are doing next to Jesus, the man. When we stop to understand the truth to, we discover that there is no one righteous, no not one. How are you doing up next to Jesus, not up to somebody else?
Romans 3:23
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Romans 3:10
As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one
Yet people deceive themselves into thinking they are okay, and say someone else is not okay. So the system of justice determines how you live your life and even determines where you will spend eternity. You cannot talk out of both sides of the mouth, to talk out of one side as if grace does not occur. You cannot mix law and grace. The apostle Paul had much to say about this. The co-mingling of law and grace is what Paul confronted the Galatians about.
Galatians 3:1-6
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. 2 I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? 3 Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? 4 Have you experienced so much in vain — if it really was in vain? 5 So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? 6 So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
If we live a life of dependency on Christ Jesus, thank God for that, but do not look at others as if they are not or try to gauge who is and who is not. You cannot live your life in that way and call yourself a born again believer. If you do not have mercy in your heart then do not call yourself a born again believer because you are saved by the God of mercy. If you cannot forgive someone else then do not call yourself a born again believer because Jesus hung on a cross and said, ‘Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing”.
Luke 23:34
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
We must understand these things. These are all attitudes of the heart that God wants to change in us. Praise Jesus for that. So many people grew up in a Christian foundation and principles and saved from all kinds of things. Praise God for that when that truth was revealed to you, just as it was revealed to those who were saved from drug addiction or pornography. When God saved you from all these things in the world, drug addiction, pornography, the same God delivered you from being critical or non-forgiving. You cannot say one thing is worse than another. Sin caused death in all cases.
If you have been saved from those things, praise God for that. If you lived a life, and certainly would not write a newspaper article about that life, praise God he saved you. It is all God’s grace. Whatever condition you are in, praise God for that. If you have not paid attention to Him and had to recognize God has forgiven you and loved you, then praise Him. Everything we have is God’s grace to us and so praise Him. Thank God for his mercy that kept you from those things, and if you were trapped in all kinds of promiscuity or addiction, then praise God also for his mercy and forgiveness.
John 8:28
So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me.
How many of you have difficulty with a critical spirit? How many of you are liars? Do we not have a tendency to be critical of others? Self righteousness is the root of that. What are you going to do with that kind of thing? What we are doing is leaning on our understanding. Do we have a tendency to lean on our own understanding? Yet we have Jesus saying he does not do anything unless the Father tells him to and does not say anything on his own buy what the Father tells him to say and how to say it. How many times do we fail to do that, to depend totally on the Spirit of God?
Bob tells the story of his wife Amy getting up early in the morning, hearing quite an irritating noise of birds squalling. You hear pesky birds squawking at 6:30 in the morning. Now Bob never heard what Amy said. But, do we wake up and say, “Praise God for that?” We have no righteousness of our own. We are indwelt with His righteousness. When we are counting on our righteousness, we do not have any.
1 Corinthians 1:30
It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God — that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.
Jesus is saying “I do not speak anything unless the Father tells me to say it.”
John 8:29-30
29 The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.”
30 Even as he spoke, many believed in him.
Many put their faith in him even as he spoke. Jesus came to his own and proclaimed his message of grace. For a Jew to believe what Jesus was saying is a miracle. They were steeped in self-righteousness. They had rules and regulations and tried not to violate any one of them. They tried but failed. Here is a message of pure grace into the hearts of the population. There were those whose hearts were opened and believed the message.
John 8:31-32
31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Jesus is saying, “I do not want you to just grab a hold only to let go of it. Jesus came and took away the sins of the world and yet there are Jews who, after hearing truth, are going back to the day of atonement. Recall this in the book of Hebrews.
Hebrews 6:4-6
4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age 6 and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.
Hebrews 10:26-29
26 If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, 27 but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. 28 Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. 29 How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?
The Jews referred to in Hebrews went back to their traditions, to their day of atonement. If you heard truth, and sin against the knowledge of the truth, then you never changed your mind and you never repented in the first place. Do not be persuaded to turn back to the law, to get back under the law. There are those who are led to be my disciples but there are those who really are my disciples, those that held onto the truth, held onto his teachings, the grace of God that has been given to us in Christ Jesus. Have you believed in vain?
1 Corinthians 15:1-4
1 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. 3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures
There are all kinds of opposition to this message of grace. People do not want to hear about grace. Why? You cannot make yourself look good. There are people who reject grace because they cannot make themselves look good. How many of you think you can make yourself look good under grace? Grace has nothing to do with you but everything to do with Him. How many of you think you can make yourself look good under law? Under law you can brag about what you are doing and get praise from men, but not from God. Under law you can make yourself look good for you say, “look at me and at all the law I am obeying”. There is no boasting of self under grace. It is all of Him and none of us. Under law you can make yourself look good to others but not to God. If you hold onto the teaching of Christ Jesus and not be swayed then the truth will set you free.
John 8:32-34
32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
What do you need to be set free from? Resentment? Have any of you been resentful? What happens if you hold onto it? It destroys you. It does not destroy the person you are resentful to. Nine times out of ten, he does not even know who you are.
There are people that have resentment to their church. Resentment says, “I was in church all my life, why did they not teach me this?” If you had a bible, you could have learned it, if you had enough sense to study it. Bob said this once to God, “Why did you wait 36 years to save me?” God may have said something like, “Well, did you pick up my word and study it and ask me to teach you”. Have you ever said, “How come that dumb church did not teach me right?” So we build resentment in our hearts. That resentment can destroy you and me if we let it fester. That is committing suicide.
How many of you have ever been insulted, injured, or rejected? How many of you have insulted, injured or rejected someone else?
John 16:33
These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but fear not [or be of good cheer] ; I have overcome the world.
In this world you will have tribulation. What is that tribulation. Getting insulted, injured or rejected by someone else.
We have options. You can choose to hang on to that rejection or let go of it. Are you going to release it into the hands of God? Jesus hung on a cross and said, “Father forgive them. They do not know what they are doing”. Was it bad? Yes. Was it evil? Yes. Can God take it and turn it around for good? Yes. How?
Luke 23:34
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Romans 8:28
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
By the God of comfort, who comforts us in all of our problems, we too can comfort others with the same comfort we have received from God.
Why does God allow us to experience trials and tribulations? It is because he gave free will to man. So if God allows free will, then that choice of evil is possible? Why do we go through these things? To give us comfort. If we never had a trial or tribulation, how will we understand grace?
Is there forgiveness in your heart for others? How many of you have someone in your heart you have not truly forgiven? Not only do you punish yourself, but you also punish the other as well. We need to be able to say, “I forgive you”. Those words are the greatest words you will ever hear, “I forgive you.” Allow that to be true in your life. I know there are things you and I have done so far out of God’s will, we do not even need to talk about it. Jesus Christ came to suffer on a cross to forgive. Yet our prideful hearts will hold on because if I forgive him, he will do it again. What is that called? Speculation and fantasy. You do not know what will happen. Ninety percent of the time, the things we worry about never happen.
John 8:32-34
32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Colossians 3:13
Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
Those demons that grab a hold of your soul and your mind, keeps you in bondage. No one will be set free apart from Jesus. There is no other way to be free from the error that binds us. The error that binds us is all through the world we live in today. The only truth that we can go to, to find out what is real, is to go to the word of God. It is the only book, that when you pick it up you, you are going to read one hundred percent truth. That truth will set you free from the error that occupies your mind.
John 17:17
Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.
2 Peter 1:21
For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
John 8:33
33 They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”
They did not understand who he was talking about. These people were in bondage to rules and regulations, and saying, “What do you mean I am a slave? I have never been a slave to anyone.”
John 8:34
34 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.
How many of you can say today, you are a slave to sin? How many of you have sinned? How many of you have sinned today? What does he say you are? You are a slave to sin.
John 8:35
35 Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
If you are a slave to sin, you have to be set free from that. So what does it mean to be set free? Does that mean you will never sin again? No. There are those who teach that. Bob once asked a man who believed that to put his wife on the phone. She was not on the phone for long.
When you are talking about being free, then you are saved from the consequences of it. What is the consequence of sin? Death.
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death
If you think that if you are born again that you will never sin again, then is that practical? Anyone going along with that? When was the last time you got upset when somebody cut in front of you on the freeway? Was that after you were born again?
Romans 14:23
everything that does not come from faith is sin.
So have you ever been worried about tomorrow? About being unemployed in a layoff that was announced? Is not your fear and worry an expression of your lack of faith in God who said he would provide for all of your needs? So you sinned then after you were born again?
Philippians 4:19
And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.
So the truth is we all sin, though less and less (2 Corinthians 3:18), as our minds are being renewed (2 Corinthians 4:16), and at other times, and we sin even when we know better when we give into the desires of our flesh that is in conflict with the Spirit within us (Galatians 5:17). We are no longer under the law of sin and death, but under grace (Romans 8:2), and have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ (1 John 2:1), who defends us against Satan, who accuses us day and night (Revelation 12:10). Jesus says to Satan, “His sins have been paid in full and there is now no condemnation for him. I am at work within him to will and to act according to my good purposes.” (John 19:30, 2 Corinthians 5:21, Romans 8:1, Philippians 2:13).
John 8:36
So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
We have been set free from being a slave to sin, from the consequences of sin, which is death, by the gift of God, which is life. And if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. How long will you be free? Forever.
John 8:37
37 I know that you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are looking for a way to kill me, because you have no room for my word.
Why then are they trying to kill Jesus? No room for his word. These are religious people. There are people who know the word of God from beginning to end, and in many cases, had most of the Old Testament memorized. Jesus said to them , “You have no room for my word in your heart.”
Is there a difference between what Jesus is saying and what the Old Testament was saying? Was not all of that the word of God? What are people saying? What is the difference? Jesus was teaching what the word of God means? Do you put your faith in what the bible says or in what the bible means? In what it means. If you do not know what it means, you do not know what it says. A computer knows what the bible says but a computer does not know what the bible means. Neither do you and I unless Jesus reveals it to us.
1 Corinthians 2:9-11
9 However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” — the things God has prepared for those who love him — 10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
Earlier, in John 7, Jesus was teaching to have this attitude so that you may recognize truth when you hear it.
John 7:16-17
16 Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. 17 Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.
Now, he continues to speak to the hard of heart and gave them a strong rebuke.
Proverbs 1:23
Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings.
1 Corinthians 2:14
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
That is why a person can be in a bible study, who will hear what it says, but will not know what it means. You can teach the meaning to someone who is lost as clear as a bell, and as logical as you can get, and he does not understand anything. The lost says, “I do not understand that”. He is dumb as dirt. He does not understand anything. Why? He does not have the Spirit of God in him. If you do not have the Holy Spirit of God living in you, then you do not understand what the bible means. You may be able to quote it all day long just like an actor as to what it says, but if you do not know what it means, then you do not have anything to put your faith in. So Jesus says to them, “Even though you know what the bible says, you have no room for the word I am giving you, which is what it means”. You have no room in your heart for that.
1 Corinthians 2:14
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness
Why do you have no room in your heart for truth? Because you have already determined what it means by leaning on your own understanding. You have no room in your heart for true understanding. All you have room for is your man-made understanding. People today have grown up with unbelievable type of false teaching. When you tell a person the truth about that, there is no room in their heart for that. They reply, “This is what I believe. This is my tradition. I have been taught this. So do not tell me these other things for I do not believe them. There is no room in my heart for truth.”
