Introducing Jesus

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I don’t know about you, but when I’m trying to say something Christian in a conversation, I find it easiest to talk about church, harder to talk about God, and hardest to talk about Jesus. Because when I mention church, I know the other person can cope by thinking, ‘That’s his hobby’. And when I mention God, I know the other person, deep down, knows who I’m talking about. But when I mention Jesus (as I did to a new barber the other day) my problem is: I don’t know what’s in the other person’s mind. So maybe when I say ‘Jesus’, they think of just a man, a long-dead person in the past. So if I talk about having a relationship with him, I sound very weird indeed. Or maybe when I say ‘Jesus’, their defences go straight up because they see Christianity as divisive, and live by the rule, ‘Never talk religion or politics’.

Or maybe when I say ‘Jesus’, they just think I’m on about a bunch of rules which no-one can keep and which only bring failure and condemnation and guilt – bad news, not good news. So how do you introduce Jesus when people have those kinds of things in their minds (and more)? Well that was the Apostle John’s question, as he wrote the introduction to his Gospel (which we’re starting a new series on today). But before we turn to the beginning, would you turn to the end, which is on page 907 of the church Bibles. That’ll land you in John 20, which is John’s eye-witness account of Jesus’ resurrection appearances after his death by crucifixion that first Easter. And look at John 20.26:

Eight days later [counting Easter Sunday as day 1 (so this is the first Sunday after Easter) today], [Jesus’] disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them [having missed Jesus’ resurrection appearance the previous Sunday]. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

And it was Jesus’ resurrection that finally brought his first followers (like John, like Thomas) to believe he was the Son of God come as a human being, because who has indestructible life in himself apart from God? So as he began his Gospel, John didn’t just take the story back to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry like Mark, or to his birth in Bethlehem like Luke, or to his Old Testament family history like Matthew. He took the story back to before the creation of the universe. So would you turn back to page 886 and John 1. And the first thing John says to introduce Jesus is this:

1. Jesus is infinitely more than just a man

Look down to John 1.1-2:

In the beginning [in other words, before the creation of the universe] was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

Now John could have said “In the beginning was God’s Son, and the Son was with God his Father, and the Son was fully God”, but instead, John gave Jesus a codename; the Word. So just like James Bond is 007, Jesus the Son of God is the Word because that gets across how Jesus is the ultimate way God has spoken to us – his ultimate Word to the world. So if I introduce Jesus into the conversation it’s good to say as soon as I can “And by the way, I believe he was and is God become human”. Not just a man, not just a person in the past. So John starts, (John 1.1):

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

Now John originally wrote for his fellow-Jews who didn’t yet believe in Jesus so his Gospel was (and is) primarily an evangelistic book. And like a good evangelist, John thought “what misunderstandings and objections might be in their minds?” And one big objection for Jewish people was Jesus’ claim to be God, because they believed in one God. So when Jesus spoke and acted as if he was God, they thought it blasphemous. They thought he was being a rival to God. And Muslims today also have the same objection – which is why John’s Gospel may be especially helpful to them.

So John begins by saying “I believe there’s only one God, as well, but you need to realise God is more complex than you think. He’s not just a solitary being.He’s more than one person in relationship: God and his Word – or, God the Father and God the Son”. And later in the Gospel you find there’s a third person, as well – God the Spirit. And that’s why John says the Word was with God because that’s like us saying “Have you heard that Jill’s with Bill?” It’s a way of describing a relationship. Now we struggle with this truth that God is one God but three persons in relationship, but two things are worth saying. One iswe shouldn’t expect to understand God fully when often we hardly understand ourselves or people close to us? And the other is, it makes sense of the way we are. Because we are profoundly relational, loving and being loved is more important than anything for us. And that makes perfect sense if we were made in the image of a God who’s profoundly relational. Where as it makes little sense if you believe in a solitary God like Allah in Islam. And it makes no sense if you believe we’re simply here through chance and evolution. Well look on to John 1.3:

All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

So like a son working alongside his father in a family business, that’s saying God the Son worked alongside his Father in creation. And John 1.4 then mentions us in relation to him:

In him was life, and the life was the light of men [ie, mankind, men and women].

Now ask a biologist, “When have you got life?” and they’ll say, “Well, you need to be moving, respiring, sensing, growing, reproducing, excreting and feeding”. (Not necessarily all at once.) And we certainly owe our physical life, moment by moment, to Jesus. But John uses the word life to mean more than just physical life. After all, you can be moving, respiring, and all those other things, but still saying to yourself “This isn’t much of a life. Is this really what it’s meant to be?” Maybe that’s you right now. And John uses life to mean life as it was meant to be, life lived in the light of knowing God, and what he says we’re here for, and what he says is good and not good for us. And John says that light is to be found in Jesus. But then comes John’s first reminder that the world is not as it should be (John 1.5):

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

And darkness is John’s metaphor for sin – for how we all say to God, “I don’t want to live by your light, by you telling me what I’m here for and what’s good and not good for me. I’ll live by my own light, thank you”. But John 1.5 says:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

So the world can ignore God, but it can’t dethrone him or derail his plans to bring more and more people back into relationship with him through Jesus. So that’s the first thing John says to introduce Jesus: Jesus is infinitely more than just a man. Then the second thing he says is:

2. Jesus divides people – against him and for him

And there’s no getting around that as we introduce Jesus to people which is why their defences may go straight up, and why talking about Jesus can be unpredictable and uncomfortable. So look on to John 1.6-8:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

So verses 1 to 8 are John’s summary of the whole Bible up to Jesus’ coming. So he’s just saved you 800 pages of reading. And the last main event before Jesus was the ministry of this man John the Baptist, and he was the last in a line of prophets who said: God had a plan to save us from how we’ve turned away from him (and that it would hinge on the coming of his Christ) which means ‘Saviour-King’. And John the Baptist’s job was to say “I’m the end of the line of prophets”, so next up is the Saviour-King himself. So John 1.9-11:

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. [And here’s the shocker:] He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. [In other words, didn’t recognise its Maker]. He came to his own [in other words, his own people the Jews – who’d had all those prophets, and the whole Old Testament, and should have been expecting him] and his own people did not receive him.

I said John originally wrote for fellow-Jews, and another big objection for Jewish people was the fact that their leaders (some of the brightest and best in Israel) had rejected Jesus. Far from believing Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God, their leaders thought it blasphemous and got him crucified for it. So what were they to make of that? And what are we to make of the fact that so many people around us (including some of the brightest and best) reject Jesus? Well, there are two possible explanations. One is that the evidence for Jesus being the Son of God is so full of holes that we shouldn’t believe it. The other is that the evidence is fine – but people don’t want to believe it. And that’s John’s explanation because he’d say, remember the darkness of verse 5. Remember that, since the fall, human beings have, by nature, been turned away from God. So that when the Son of God actually came into the world to re-establish relationship, people didn’t want it – and still don’t.

So I remember helping out one time with the Newcastle CU mission, and I was going around the Student Union, inviting people to that day’s talk. And I said to one guy, “Why don’t you come along?” and he said, “I can’t really be bothered”, so I said, “Have you ever given Christianity a look?” and he said, ‘”No”, so I said, “Why not take an hour to give it a chance?” And he said, “I guess because I’ve decided to live as if God isn’t there, and I don’t want to be confused with evidence that says otherwise”, which was certainly honest. But verses 10 and 11 are not the whole story, look on to John 1.12:

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he [Jesus] gave the right to become children of God

So from the word ‘Go’, against the background of the world rejecting Jesus, people down the ages have believed in him – including many of us. And as a result we’ve gone from being people saying “No” to relationship with God and deserving his judgement, to people he accepts and loves as his own children. And if that’s true of you this morning, just look at what John 1.13 says. It says that’s only true because you:

were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

In other words, just like you didn’t give birth to yourself physically (but your mother gave birth to you) the same goes for your coming to trust in Jesus. You didn’t cross that line by yourself. God had to do something in you, to overcome your resistance and draw you to himself.

Some of you remember John Chapman, the Aussie evangelist who spoke here on two mission weeks. Back in Sydney he took RE lessons in a local school, and he had one really tough class who spent the year picking holes in everything he said. And they were studying John’s Gospel and read John 1.13 and one of the lads said “What does that mean?” And John said “It means you can’t become a Christian whenever you want. You can only become a Christian when God wants”, and this lad said “Rubbish – I could become a Christian any time”. And John said “Say that again”, and he said “I could become any time”. So John said “OK. All year you’ve been trying to make me look a fool. Here’s your golden opportunity to prove me wrong. Go on. Do it”. And this lad said “Do what?”, and John said “become a Christian”. And he said “I don’t want to”, and John said “Well, want to want to”, and he said “I don’t”. And John said “And nor will you unless God does something in you first”.

So if you do believe in Jesus this morning, don’t just thank God for sending him into the world for you but thank God for bringing you to trust in him, as well – which you’d never have done under your own steam. And if you don’t yet believe in Jesus, but want to (at least part-want to) then as well as looking at Jesus more in the Bible, pray and ask God to help you believe in him. So that’s the second thing John says to introduce Jesus: Jesus divides people – against him and for him. Talking about him can bring to the surface people’s natural rejection of him, but he can also overcome that, and bring people to trust in him in a way we can’t. And the last thing John says in his introduction is that:

3. Jesus reveals a God who loves us to death

Just look back to John 1.1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And now look down to John 1.14:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us

Which means the Son of God became fully human in the person of Jesus, and he didn’t lose any of his God-ness (if I can call it that) in the process. He remained fully God and took on humanity as well – ‘Veiled in flesh the godhead see,’ as that great line of Hark the Herald angels puts it. So John 1.14 again:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we [that’s John and his fellow-apostles, the eye-witnesses who were actually there with Jesus – we] have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Now glory is a Bible word that means ‘God’s nature made visible’. But we mustn’t run away with the idea that Jesus went around Galilee and Judea with God-ness somehow shining out of him. You see those old paintings, don’t you, where Jesus has a bit of a glow around him, and a dinner plate behind his head, but it wasn’t like that. John does says they saw glimpses of God’s glory in Jesus’ miracles – like his feeding of the 5,000, his healing miracles, his walking on water, his bringing Lazarus back from death. But if you read right through John’s Gospel, Jesus keeps talking about the hour when people will see his glory most clearly. And it turns out he’s talking about his death on the cross, to pay for our forgiveness. Because, according to John and the whole Bible, the cross is where you see the glory of God more clearly than anywhere. In the Father giving up his Son out of love for us, and in the Son willingly giving himself, out of love for us. And that’s why John 1.14 says the ultimate thing about God that you see in Jesus’ coming is grace – which means his totally undeserved, all-forgiving love. And John 1.16-17 says:

And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace [other translations say ‘grace in place of grace’]. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Do you see what John’s saying there? He’s saying; the law given through Moses (the Ten Commandments which we looked at before Easter, and all the rest), that was grace of a kind because it was given by God for his peoples’ good. But they couldn’t keep it, any more than we could, and part of the good of the law was to show them they couldn’t, and to point them forward to a new kind of grace (a ‘grace in place of grace’) where the forgiveness of sins would be paid for once and for all on a cross, and where we could not only be forgiven but also be changed by knowing we’re loved by God in Jesus more than we can possibly get our heads around. So it is a travesty when we introduce Jesus into the conversation and the other person just thinks we’re on about a bunch of rules which no-one can keep and which only bring failure and condemnation and guilt. But that’s how a lot of people think, and we need to learn to talk about Jesus so that people realise he’s not the cause of failure and condemnation and guilt, but the cure. So look at John 1.18 to end with:

No one has ever seen God; the only God [other translations say ‘the only Son’], who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

You’ve probably heard the story of the little girl doing a painting and Mum asks “What’s it a picture of?”, and she replies “God”. And Mum says “But no-one knows what God looks like”, and she replies “They will do when I’ve finished”. And as John wrote his introduction, and then put down all his eye-witness evidence about Jesus, maybe he said to himself “No-one knows what God looks like. But they will do when I’ve finished”.

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