Classic Christianity – Book of John Part 66 (09-02-19)
Synopsis
Bob George continues sharing from the 13th chapter of John. Here is Peter, like all of us, born spiritually dead, without the spirit of God living in him, living in darkness. But who is he listening to? He is listening to the Light of the world, the man sent from heaven, sent to explain spiritual truth to him. Can he understand what Jesus is saying? No. Neither could we without the Spirit of God living in us. Yet truth is being explained to him. What does he decide to do with the very words of Jesus?
When someone is born again, having the Spirit of God living in him, what is supposed to happen? There is supposed to be a change that takes place. You become a new creation, not an old one. Many times that does not happen overnight. Conversion experiences are all over the place. For some people, their behavior changes immediately. With others, that change in behavior takes a while. The issue is, if you are in Christ, then you will never be happy in your old life style. If you are, then something is wrong with you. When God says something is evil, it is evil. When God says something is sin, it is sin. It is not an alternate life style. It is not gay. It is perversion. We as Christians have to call things as they are. If I am a worrier then it is not a healthy concern. Worry is not of God. We have to understand these things. What do the lost do? Where do they meet with their friends? In a bar of a coffee shop? A bar! You do not belong there any more in the bars. Alcohol destroys brain cells and I have no more to lose. My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. There is a behavior associated with lost people. God says, “I want you to be over here. I want those words to come out of your mouth to be encouraging words. I want you to get out of that pride, ‘Do not tell me to wash someone’s feet. That is the servant’s job over there.’ ” That is the attitude of pride God wants me to dismiss.
Many times we learn truth little by little. We do not understand what Jesus is teaching us. Peter did not understand why Jesus would be washing his feet and even told Jesus to not wash his feet. Pride is something ingrained in man that has to be worked out. Now, Peter was at a huge disadvantage. Not until Pentecost did he even receive the Holy Spirit. So he was not born again until that day of Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit came to permanently indwell him. The Holy Spirit could not be given until sin was taken away first. At this time in history, Jesus had not yet gone to the cross, to shed his blood for the sins of all mankind.
Yet Jesus is teaching about the new way to live once the promised Holy Spirit is received. Jesus said, “You will not understand what I am doing right now. But later you will. Trust me.“ Peter is to store up these teachings of Jesus until the time faith is revealed to him, and he can walk in total trust in Jesus, having the Spirit of God lead him from within. Until that time, he is to follow Jesus. He is to develop an attitude of trust in the words of Jesus. Being in darkness and stupid in his understanding, he is often in need of correction. We all need correction. Correction is not easy for us, but it is for our good.
I do not think it is foot washing he was talking about. I shine your shoes today, and you shine others shoes tomorrow. The issue is not in what he is doing but his attitude of servanthood. This is the attitude Jesus is teaching us to have, “There is no assignment I would not do to serve and help my brother”.
Jesus asks Peter an interesting question, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” Think about such a question in your own life. Do you understand what Jesus has done for you? Why is it that you can sit and memorize scripture and not have a clue what it means. Bob recalls a time he was speaking in Atlanta, GA in an Exchanged Life conference. At the end of one of those lectures, a lady came to Bob and asked to talk to him. She showed him a date in her bible, where she had heard a message on imputed righteousness and how her life had changed. She was emotional with tears of joy for the understanding of such truth. Bob looked at her and said, “I am glad it has done something for you but it has not done anything for me yet”. Bob knew what it said and could teach what it said. At that time Bob had not understood what it meant. That happened later when he did come to understand what it meant to have Christ’s righteousness imputed to you. Jesus is asking the same question, “Do you understand what I have done for you?”
Truth must be revealed by the Holy Spirit of God. Only He can reveal truth to you. It happens at a different time for people. Someone can explain the truth of scripture to you, and you just do not get it. Someone could also just read a scripture to you, on what the word of God says, and yet the person hearing receives truth but the one sharing is the one who is still in darkness on the matter. He read the word but did not understand it himself. But the truth was heard. Who was doing the speaking? God was through the Holy Spirit.
Anyone in Jesus Christ is A New Creature
Later, under a different circumstance in life, the same truth is shared, and somehow that truth now comes alive to you. I cannot explain that. That is what I believe Jesus was explaining the Holy Spirit at work to Nicodemus, a leading Pharisee, who came to inquire of the teaching of Jesus. You hear it’s sound but you do not know whither it comes or it goes. Yet, you observe the effect of the Holy Spirit on the lives of men. Sometimes all you know is that there is something different about some person, that he has something you do not have. Then one day, the truth comes alive to you, and you realize that He has a vital living relationship with a personal God. You come to believe that God wants you to have that same life, the Holy Spirit living in you. You come to realize that it is not something you work for. Oh, a gift of love, of life in Christ Jesus, a gift to be received. God initiates His love to me. I respond in faith and simply receive the gift. I respond to the gift of life, believe and am saved unto eternal life.
God sends His messengers into the world today. Just as the Father sent him into the world, now he sends us. Did the world receive Jesus? All but one of the disciples did. But the world at large rejected him. If they rejected him, they will reject you also. Why? Because they are rejecting the message. They have no room in their heart for truth. They are full of pride. They want job security. They want their own way.
Jesus did not speak on his own, but he only spoke what the Father told him to say and how to say it. Those words are the very words of God. So if you reject the message, you are rejecting God. So if we are walking in the same Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, that is now in us, and we are sharing the message God wants us to speak, and they reject those words, whose words are they rejecting? If they are rejecting the words of God, who are they rejecting? God.
Why is pride such a pervasive problem in mankind? As immature believers, they jostle for position of influence in a church setting. They marvel at those who can speak eloquently or have an amazing singing voice. They often look down on those less naturally gifted. Is anyone better than anyone else? No. Is Paul better than Peter? How did Paul address such issues of pride?
1 Corinthians 3:4-6
4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe – as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.
Who is Peter and who is Paul? They are only servants. God causes the growth in people’s lives. One man waters and another man sews but God causes the growth. Paul never saw himself as a big deal. He never saw himself as one governing the church. He saw himself out of the eyes of Jesus.
What has God called the people of God, whom He is the head, to do? I do not know. I only know what He tells me to do. But I know what attitudes He wants all of us to have. Do we allow God to live in us and through us? Apart from Him we can doing nothing, irregardless of whatever natural gifts he has given you. At times, the natural talents we have can be an issue of pride with us, preventing God from using us as He intended for us to be used. Anything we have we have received from God. So what is our boast? In what we have? No. In who is living in us! Christ alone is our boast.
So what Jesus is illustrating to us by washing the disciples feet is an attitude of incredible love. He did not consider stooping down to the lowest of positions, certainly in the eyes of men, to serve one another in love. Jesus is saying that if you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. If you do them, then you are putting into practice what he said to do. That is where obedience comes in. It is my love of God that results in my dependence upon God that then results in my obedience to God. The attitude of my dependency comes from the love of God. I love because He first loved me. He met us where we were. He came down to the miry clay, to my condition of death, and pulled me out of that. If God says for us to do something we will be blessed when we do them.
John 13:31
Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.”33 “My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.”
Is it not wonderful that God calls us His children?
John 13:34-35
34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Transcript
When you come to Christ Jesus, there is supposed to be a change that takes place. You are to become a new creation, not an old one.
2 Corinthians 5:17
17Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
It means the old life style you used to live should be over with or in the process of being over with. Many times that does not happen overnight. Conversion experiences are all over the place. For some people, their behavior changes immediately. With others, that change in behavior takes a while. The issue is, if you are in Christ, then you will never be happy in your old life style. If you are, then something is wrong with you. When God says something is evil, it is evil. When God says something is sin, it is sin. It is not an alternate life style. It is not gay. It is perversion. We as Christians have to call things as they are. If I am a worrier then it is not a healthy concern. Worry is not of God. We have to understand these things. What do the lost do? Where do they meet with their friends? In a bar of a coffee shop? A bar! You do not belong there any more in the bars. Alcohol destroys brain cells and I have no more to lose. My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. There is a behavior associated with lost people. God says, “I want you to be over here. I want those words to come out of your mouth to be encouraging words. I want you to get out of that pride, ‘Do not tell me to wash someone’s feet. That is the servant’s job over there.’” That is the attitude of pride God wants me to dismiss.
Peter did not understand that. “Lord, that is the job of a servant.”
John 13:8
Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”
Jesus is saying, “Unless you allow me to cleanse you of all your unrighteousness, unless you allow me to take away your sins, you will have no part with me at all. You cannot come to me until you allow me to do what I came to do, to take away your sins at the cross and give life to you who are dead. You will have no part with me.” People can say, “I want Jesus resurrection but I do not want his cross”. Jesus says, “Well, that does not work that way. You have to come to me by faith in what I accomplished for you”.
John 13:9
9 “Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”
I love Peter’s reply. Peter says, “If that be the case, do not just wash my hands and feet, scrub me from top to bottom”. Peter always had his foot in his mouth. I guess you could say Jesus washed his mouth too since his foot was always there.
John 13:10
10 Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.”
Who was he talking about? Judas.
John 13:11-12
11 For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean.
12 When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?
This is what we have talked about so many times. We have to go to the meaning of the word of God. We can go to what the bible says and never know what it means. You have heard it said, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” That is nonsense. No, if God said it, that settles it, whether you believe it or not. But that is not the issue, that God said it and I believe it. The issue is, “God said it and I now know what it means“. The reason I know what it means is because I have allowed the Spirit of God who lives in me to reveal what it means. For apart from the Spirit of God revealing the meaning of the word of God, you will know what it says but you will not know what it means. A computer knows what it says.
1 Corinthians 2:9-10
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.
That is exactly why you can sit and memorize scripture and not have a clue what it means. Bob recalls a time he was speaking in Atlanta, GA in an Exchanged Life conference. At the end of one of those lectures, a lady came to Bob and asked to talk to him. She showed him a date in her bible, where she had heard a message on imputed righteousness and how her life had changed. She was emotional with tears of joy for the understanding of such truth. Bob looked at her and said, “I am glad it has done something for you but it has not done anything for me yet”. Bob knew what it said and could teach what it said. At that time Bob had not understood what it meant. That happened later when he did come to understand what it meant to have Christ’s righteousness imputed to you. Jesus is asking the same question, “Do you understand what I have done for you?”
John 13:12-15
“Do you understand what I have done for you?”, he asked them. 13 “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. 14 Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. 15 I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.”
I do not think it is foot washing he was talking about. I shine your shoes today, and you shine others shoes tomorrow. The issue is not in what he is doing but his attitude of servanthood. This is the attitude Jesus is teaching us to have, “There is no assignment I would not do to serve and help my brother”.
John 13:16
16 Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master,
This is the essence of what Jesus is sharing.
John 13:17
nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. 17 Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.
What that says to me as a teacher or minister is that if I have been sent by God to be a messenger, I am certainly no greater than you. So why do people walk around thinking they are greater.
1 Corinthians 3:4-6
4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe – as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.
Who is Peter and who is Paul? They are only servants. God causes the growth in people’s lives. One man waters and another man sews but God causes the growth. Paul never saw himself as a big deal. He never saw himself as one governing the church. He saw himself out of the eyes of Jesus.
Again, he is saying if you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. If you do them, then you are putting into practice what he said to do. That is where obedience comes in. It is my love of God that results in my dependence upon God that then results in my obedience to God. The attitude of my dependency comes from the love of God. I love because He first loved me. He met us where we were. He came down to the miry clay, to my condition of death, and pulled me out of that. If God says for us to do something we will be blessed when we do them.
Act 20:35
35 “In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ”
Do I really believe that? Then why do we not do more giving? Why do we not give more to one another? You are blessed by it. You feel good doing it. God is not saying that He will zap you if you do not do it. It is does not mean you will get ten times more when you give. It simply means you will be blessed by what you have given whether you ever get anything back from God or not. That is between you and God. You did not give to get. You give because there is a need. You give to meet that need.
John 13:18-20
18 “I am not referring to all of you; I know those I have chosen. But this is to fulfill this passage of Scripture: ‘He who shared my bread has turned against me.’”19 “I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe that I am who I am. 20 Very truly I tell you, whoever accepts anyone I send accepts me; and whoever accepts me accepts the one who sent me.”
You go out, as a child of God, to where you work or play and you tell people about this marvelous Jesus and they reject you, who are they rejecting? Him. When you reject him you are rejecting the God who sent him. You are rejecting the totality of God. When God has sent a servant here on this earth, and you reject that servant, you are rejecting God who sent him. Whether you think he is worthy or not is not the issue. The issue is if God has sent you and you are rejected they are rejecting the God who sent you. A lot of people say they have been sent by God. One of the ways to know whether they are sent by God is by what they are teaching. What sets you apart, and how God sets you apart, is not in how you dress or the way you act, or how many radio stations you own or how many radio stations you are on, but He accepts you, predicated on, how do you know truth.
Truth is what separates you from the world, not what you are doing, but truth. When a person is separated by God and listening to the voice of God, then he will be speaking truth. Is not God full of grace and truth? What else will you be teaching? Grace.
John 1:14
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Galatians 3:1-2
1 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?
Now Paul was stringent on this, when the people of Galatia were co-mingling law and grace. He was saying, “You people have lost your mind. You foolish, idiotic Galatians”. It would be like saying, “You dumb Dallas-ites. Have you gone mad? Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law or believing what you heard?” What is the answer to that? Believing in what you heard.
Galatians 3:3
3 Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?
You are set apart by what you believe and how you act upon what you believe. That is what sets you apart. “This is what I believe and this is what I am going to do”. That is what sets me apart. How do you know when a minister is set apart? By what they teach. So if I came in here and said, “we are going to have a slain in the Spirit service, to knock you over”. “I thought the bible says, ‘The Holy Spirit came to give you life”. “No, it came to knock you down”. So you know something about that guy. He is a charlatan. It does not matter how many people are listening to him and following him. That just means you have a bunch of stupid people following a charlatan. Is it popular? Sure, draws thousands of people. The people are saying, “it must be good”. No, it is false.
Someone says you must come in here to get baptized. I was dunked in a Christian church three times. I was sprinkled as a Presbyterian, later as a Baptist, and another time just to be sure. Not a one of those saved me. A guy called in a radio who believed in baptismal regeneration. (Baptismal regeneration is the name given to doctrines held by major “Christian” denominations which maintain that salvation is intimately linked to the act of baptism, and that salvation is impossible apart from it.) Bob asks, “Who died for your sins?” The mans answers, “Jesus” “Who was raised from the dead?“ “Jesus.” “Who baptized you?” “My pastor.” “Where do you find that in the bible? So then, is salvation 2/3 Jesus and 1/3 your pastor. You do not believe you are saved by baptism. You believe you are saved by baptism in your church by your pastor dunked in your water. Where are you going to find that in the scripture?” People who are teaching that are teaching a false doctrine. How do you know they are not set apart by God? By what they are teaching. For over 20 years, I have told you, do not believe what I am telling you because I could be lying through my teeth to you. You do not have to be honest to be on the radio or on television for sure. Any charlatan will do. So if I am telling you something or sharing something with you, you go into the word of God and let Him reveal that to you, for when He reveals it, you are taught. Otherwise, you are just believing what I told you. We must get into the word of God. You will not grow in Christ unless you get in the word of God. You cannot use the bible to sit on your bed to need it when you need it. It is food for the soul. How many meals do you miss a day? We need to open the scriptures, meditate and ponder over them, and ask the Lord, “What does it mean to me?” When that happens we will grow.
John 13:19
19 “I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe that I am who I am. 20 Very truly I tell you, whoever accepts anyone I send accepts me; and whoever accepts me accepts the one who sent me.”
When you go out in this world, and talk about Jesus to people, you may as well forget about running for sheriff. You will not be popular with the world. They are not rejecting you. You are just the messenger boy. They are rejecting the message.
John 13:21-22
21 After he had said this, Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, “Very truly I tell you, one of you is going to betray me.”
22 His disciples stared at one another, at a loss to know which of them he meant.
There was not too much evidence that Judas was the one who was going to betray him. No one knew. Judas must have been acting pretty good. Many of us can be good actors. We can be like a parrot, repeat the Christian langauge, yet but not knowing what any of it means.
John 13:23-24
23 One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him. 24 Simon Peter motioned to this disciple and said, “Ask him which one he means.”
Why didn’t Peter ask him? You wonder, “why did not Peter ask him?” Probably because he was afraid of what Jesus would say.
John 13:25-27
25 Leaning back against Jesus, he asked him, “Lord, who is it?”26 Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” Then, dipping the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. 27 As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him.
Can Satan enter a true believer? No. Was Judas a true believer? No. Were any of the disciples at that time, would you and I call a true believer? No. How come? Pentecost had not come yet. Pentecost was the day the Holy Spirit of God would descend upon people who would believe that they are sinners, who are dead and in need of life. On the day of Pentecost was the first day they were born again as you and I believe today.
In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit came upon believers for divine service and then left. Until Pentecost, none of them were permanently indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God. If the Spirit of God does not live in us, then we are not a part of him. So you cannot be born again of the Holy Spirit apart from the invasion of the Holy Spirit into our lives. That is why we are born again, alive. The Holy Spirit brought life to us who are dead. The cross took away the cause of death and the Spirit brought us life. Life is the only solution to death. Until the day of Pentecost, no one was born again as we are today. Only until some 2000 years are people permanently born again of the Holy Spirit with no way for the Spirit of God to depart from them. Let us call salvation what salvation is. Salvation is life. Can I lose life, spiritual life? No. Because of the cross, where he took away the cause of death. It is not even a theological issue, but a very practical issue. I am dead spiritually and the Spirit of God does not live in me. He took away the cause of death before he could give me life. If I was given life before sin was taken away, then the next time I sinned, I would die again.
The reason I know I have eternal life is because of the eternal consequences of the cross through Christ Jesus, where he took away the cause of death. So we can rest in the fact we are eternally secure in Christ Jesus. He gave us an eternal inheritance. Eternal means it lasts forever. He did not give you temporal life. He gave you eternal life. He did not give you a temporal inheritance. He gave you a permanent inheritance. It is forever. That is why there is no fear of death for a believer. For a believer, it is a promotion day. It is a day you get promoted out of this temporal body, a body not suited for heaven, and into the presence of Jesus.
2 Corinthians 5:8
8 We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
If you do not fear death, then you do not need to fear life.
John 13:27-28
So Jesus told him, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” 28 But no one at the meal understood why Jesus said this to him.
They still did not understand Judas was the culprit here. Since Judas had charge of the money, that ought to tell them something. It would be like Bob Christopher having charge of the money and nobody knew!
John 13:29-33
29 Since Judas had charge of the money, some thought Jesus was telling him to buy what was needed for the festival, or to give something to the poor. 30 As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out. And it was night.31 When he was gone, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.”
33 “My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.”
Is it not wonderful that God calls us His children?
John 13:34-35
34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
