Sermons – Grace Evangelical Free Church // Wyoming, MN

Exodus 2:1-25 Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. 2 The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. 3 When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. 4 And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. 5 Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. 6 When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” 7 Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” 8 And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. 9 And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. 10 When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”

11 One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. 12 He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together. And he said to the man in the wrong, “Why do you strike your companion?” 14 He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” 15 When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.

16 Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. 17 The shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses stood up and saved them, and watered their flock. 18 When they came home to their father Reuel, he said, “How is it that you have come home so soon today?” 19 They said, “An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds and even drew water for us and watered the flock.” 20 He said to his daughters, “Then where is he? Why have you left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread.” 21 And Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah. 22 She gave birth to a son, and he called his name Gershom, for he said, “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.”

23 During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. 24 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. 25 God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.

This morning we return to the book of Exodus, where we will see God quietly and patiently working for the good of his people. In June, I preached through the first chapter; this morning, we will look at the second. In the first chapter of Exodus we saw the people of Israel enslaved and oppressed in Egypt. They had arrived there during Joseph’s power and influence and were saved from the famine ravaging the world at the time. Yet when the Pharaoh died, a new Pharaoh arose who “did not know Joseph”. (Ex. 1:8) This Pharaoh feared the Hebrews who had “multiplied and grew exceedingly strong.” (Ex. 1:7) Rather than seeking to understand the cause of their flourishing, he enslaved them and sought to destroy the male children.

The Hebrew midwives disobeyed Pharaoh’s demand to kill the baby boys. It seems only the midwives were living by faith. God blessed the Hebrew midwives who “feared God” and so he “gave them families”—the very thing that Pharaoh had sought to destroy. (Ex. 1:21) The very last verse in the chapter is chilling: “Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, ‘Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.” (Ex. 1:22)

This was the situation when “a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman.” (Ex. 2:1) I know some of you got married during the many and varied COVID restrictions and had to deal with a great deal of uncertainty not only in how to plan a wedding when churches, restaurants, and all manner of public spaces were closed or had incredibly restrictive policies on how many people could fit into their spaces. But imagine being in your prime childrearing years at a time when the threat of death hung over the birth of every baby boy in an entire nation! This was the prospect that Moses’ father and mother faced. It was a time of crisis for the people of God.

One of the main things I want you to consider this morning is the many choices presented to the characters we encounter in this chapter. Who are the heroes in this chapter and why? What is heroic about them? Which character is most like you in this chapter? And don’t flatter yourself—be honest. Let God’s Word have its full effect on you.

This second chapter shows God quietly and patiently working to prepare a servant fit for the service of Yahweh. By the end of the chapter, after Pharaoh died, “the people of Israel…cried out for help,” and we see that God has been preparing his servant Moses the entire time to liberate His people from bondage in Egypt. In this, we are to see that God is always at work, anticipating our needs, even before we speak them.

There are three main sections to the chapter. First, in verses 1-10 we see the birth and salvation of Moses. In verses 11-22 we see Moses flee Egypt to Midian. And finally, in verses 23-25 we see that God has remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The structure of the chapter is laid out such that the three main sections foreshadow Israel’s future story. Moses is saved from Pharaoh after passing through the Nile River, as Israel will later be saved when they pass through the Red Sea1. Moses wanders in the wilderness for forty years (Acts 7:23), marries, and has a child there. Israel, too, will wander in the wilderness for forty years, marry, and have children there before going into the promised land. And in the final section, we see that God has always been and will always be near, watching his people, listening to them, and eager to fulfill his covenant promises. As we work through this chapter we’ll see more of how and why God does this.

Moses was born during societal upheaval, ethnic fear, and animosity. Pharaoh had “commanded all his people” to cast “Every son that is born to the Hebrews…into the Nile.” Moses was the youngest of three children. His parents’ names are not mentioned in this chapter, we learn them in Exodus 6:20. His father was Amram, and his mother, Jochebed. Aaron was three years older than Moses (Ex. 7:7). Miriam, presumably the sister mentioned in verse 4, would have been the oldest, though her age, or how much older she was, is not mentioned. They were presumably born before Pharaoh’s murderous edict.

It is interesting that rather than being given the names of Moses’s parents—we are instead told that they were both of the house of Levi. Levi is the tribe that will later become the priestly tribe serving God at the Tabernacle. This genealogical detail will be important later when Moses and his brother Aaron begin the Levitical priesthood.

When the Levite woman bears a son—we know from the previous chapter that the Egyptians had been commanded by the king of Egypt to throw him into the Nile River to die. The writer of Hebrews comments upon and commends the actions of Moses’s parents in Hebrews 11:23. He writes, “By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.” By the time he is three months old, his mother can no longer hide him. What should she do? How could she protect his life against those who desired to take it?

Oddly enough, his mother seems to have prepared a plan. “When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank.” (Ex. 2:3) This seems like a very strange plan. What did she expect to happen? How would putting him into a basket in the river affect salvation for her son? Note that she placed the basket “among the reeds by the river bank.” This means the basket is close enough to shore to easily retrieve it while the reeds shelter and camouflage it—they also keep the basket from floating downriver.

The ESV obscures what I believe to be the primary clue the text offers us as to why she did this. Most of the older translations translated basket in the ESV as ark. I believe we are meant to see the connection back to Noah’s ark. For Moses’s mother, who we know from Hebrews, hid Moses by faith, and intentionally chose to place her son, whose life was threatened by the water, into an ark and back into the water. Moses’s mother entrusted the life of her son to the LORD by re-enacting the story of Noah. She knew God had brought “eight persons…safely through the water” (1 Pet. 3:20) and asked God to do it again with her son. She couldn’t alter the threat posed by the water, but she could entrust him into a vessel God had used before to protect his beloved through the water.

God did in fact spare her son—in a remarkable way. His sister, who we will later learn to be Miriam, “stood at a distance to know what would be done to him.” When the daughter of Pharoah “came down to bathe at the river,” we would expect her to obey her father’s command to drown Moses in the river. But instead—she rescues him. While seemingly one of the greatest threats to Moses’ life, she is, in fact, ideally suited to spare his life. For who else could get away with disobeying the Pharoah than his own daughter?

The daughter of Pharoah “saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, ‘This is one of the Hebrews children.'” Pharaoh’s daughter surprisingly shows pity—something her father, the king, would not do. We know little else of her motivation, but thank God for her pity!

Moses’s sister, who had stayed nearby, sprang into action to offer a nurse for her brother. Moses’s salvation is now all but accomplished. The water of the Nile River, which Pharaoh intended to kill him, was used as the means of his salvation! Peter talks this way of Noah’s ark in 1 Peter 3:20, where he compares how Noah and his family were “safely brought through water” in the ark to baptism. Paul uses similar language in 1 Corinthians 10, regarding Israel’s passing “through the sea”—referring to the miraculous parting of the Red Sea—where Israel passed safely through it, but the same waters were the death of the Egyptians in pursuit. This is no coincidence. God was instructing Israel that he would also save them, like he had saved Moses, through the very waters Pharaoh meant to entrap and kill them.

Even more than Moses’s salvation from death—he was brought into the household of Pharaoh. His mother received wages from the household of Pharoah for nursing her own child, while he was raised as the son of an Egyptian princess.

Have you noticed how prominent a role women played in saving Moses?2 There are three women—Moses’s mother, sister, and adoptive mother who act to save his life. Again, this is interesting in a couple of ways. First, as we saw in the first chapter, the male ruler of Egypt felt threatened by the male children of the Hebrews, but it was the women who resisted him and spared the sons. This happens again in chapter two, this time with Moses’s own family—and Pharaoh’s own daughter that spare this son that becomes the Pharaoh’s real threat. The text doesn’t tell us this explicitly, but one cannot help but wonder if the Hebrew midwives’ brave defiance of Pharaoh emboldened Moses’s parents to disobey.

Women take note of this. Women are often found to be the ones protecting children from being murdered by tyrants in the Bible. Women, not just mothers, are shown protecting innocent human life. Consider also Johesheba, who saved King Joash from being murdered by his grandmother, Athaliah, in 2 Kings 10. She, his aunt, risked her life to spare him and protected the lineage of King David and, ultimately, Jesus. Do not lightly dismiss your opportunities to influence the lives of children. We do not know the roles God has assigned to little children—but our influence is profound. Seize the opportunity to nourish and protect life—this is one of the most powerful gifts that God has entrusted to women.

The daughter of Pharaoh exercised her authority as the adoptive mother and named him Moses, “‘Because’, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.'” But interestingly, that is not what the name means in Hebrew. The NET Bible has a helpful note about the name “Moses.” It states, speaking to Pharoah’s daughter,

“The implication for the Israelites is something to this effect: “You called him ‘born one’ in your language and after your custom, but in our language that name means ‘drawing out’—which is what was to become of him. You drew him out of the water, but he would draw us out of Egypt through the water.” So the circumstances of the story show Moses to be a man of destiny, and this naming episode summarizes how divine providence was at work in Israel. To the Israelites the name forever commemorated the portent of this event in the early life of the great deliverer (see Isa 63:11).”3

This section ends with rich irony. Moses was saved out of the waters meant to destroy him by Pharaoh’s own daughter and has now infiltrated the household of Pharaoh; he has been given a name pointing toward his future deliverance of the Hebrews—the very thing Pharaoh had feared when he had commanded all Hebrew boys to be cast into the Nile. This name, given by Pharaoh’s daughter—which she thought made him her son, had a Hebrew meaning that showed that he, in fact, belonged to God—as His deliverer. As Psalm 2 says, “He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord holds them in derision.” (Ps. 2:4)

The next section—Moses’s desert wandering, begins when Moses is forty years old. We learn his age from Acts 7:23. He is now a mature man—a prince and ruler of the royal house of Pharaoh. Yet the text tells us that he did not identify with Egypt and the house of Pharaoh—but his people were the Hebrews, enslaved by the Egyptians. Hebrews 11 tells us more: “By faith, Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.” (Heb. 11:24-27)

There is more in Acts 7 about Moses’s visitation of his people. Acts 7:23-29 read:

“[23] “When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel. [24] And seeing one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian. [25] He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand. [26] And on the following day he appeared to them as they were quarreling and tried to reconcile them, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers. Why do you wrong each other?’ [27] But the man who was wronging his neighbor thrust him aside, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? [28] Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ [29] At this retort Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian, where he became the father of two sons.”

This comes from Stephen’s sermon before the Pharisees, who are about to stone him to death. He concludes his sermon:

[51] “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. [52] Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, [53] you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.”

Stephen’s sermon against the Pharisees in Acts 7, along with the passage in Hebrews 11 makes it very clear that Moses was acting, by faith, the part of a deliverer to the Israelites. But like the Pharisees of Stephen’s day, the Israelites preferred to be ruled by the Egyptians rather than Moses—just as the Pharisees preferred to be ruled by the Romans rather than Jesus. The Pharisees could not abide hearing that truth spoken, and they murdered Stephen.

Moses, as a type of Christ, “looked on” the burdens of “his people” and sought to deliver them. The same Hebrew word is used for the Egyptian “beating” the Hebrew, as Moses, who “struck down” the Egyptian. This appears to be the kind of “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” justice that is commended later in Exodus 21:24. As Stephen says of Moses in Acts 7:24, “he defended the oppressed man and avenged him. He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand…”

Yet some commentators will here condemn Moses’s action, arguing that “Moses was trying to save God’s people by his own works rather than letting God save them by his grace.”4 This does seem a plausible explanation, but without a condemnation in the Bible, I’m not convinced this is the right way to understand this event. I prefer withholding judgment against Moses, as Scripture seems to, and placing the weight of judgment upon the Israelites, whose hearts were hardened against God’s appointed savior.

The outcome of this event, I believe, further cements this interpretation. The next day, when he went out, he tried to intervene between two Hebrews “struggling together,” and he intervened on behalf of the one being wronged. He asked “the man in the wrong, ‘Why do you strike your companion?'” This man understood the situation clearly and asks Moses, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?” Moses was acting on behalf of his people, and this bitter Hebrew understood it clearly and rejected his authority. He, like all Israel was not yet ready to submit to God’s savior, Moses. It is, as Stephen said of the Israelites in Acts 7:51, “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.”

God had prepared a deliverer for Israel, but they were hard of heart and had not yet become willing to turn to God in their affliction. They would need to wait another forty years—a new generation would have to arise to call out to Yahweh, just as that generation would later wander in the desert for forty years because of their unbelief, and it would be their children that would enter the land.

There is much for us to consider here. For which of us is not stubborn-hearted? How long do we endure God’s discipline before we turn to Him to be relieved? This passage is meant for our instruction—and we are to see ourselves in these hard-hearted and unbelieving Israelites. They were suffering under the hand of God’s judgment yet were unwilling to turn to Him to be healed and saved.

Is this not the very situation we find ourselves in today? Look around you—God-haters rule us. Children, by the millions, are slaughtered in so-called doctors’ offices around the nation. Many of those children that survive the abortionists find themselves willingly going to so-called doctors’ offices to be mutilated and sterilized in the name of “gender-affirming care”. Those who survive all of this find themselves shackled to the debts of their fathers and grandfathers. Yet we do not cry out to God for deliverance. Like the Israelites of old, we prefer the heavy burden of Pharaoh and the fleeting pleasures of sin rather than the easy yoke and light burden of Christ—having confessed and repented of our sin.

So Moses now goes into exile—much like his great-grandfather, Jacob. In Genesis 29, Jacob flees the threat of death and goes to his family in the East. There, he meets Rachel at a well, marries her, becomes a shepherd of his father-in-law’s flock, and has children. Toward the end of his exile, “the LORD said to Jacob, ‘Return to the land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I will be with you.'” (Gen. 31:3)

So, too, will Moses flee the threat of death and go to family in the east—for the Midianites were sons of Abraham and his second wife, Keturah, after Sarah had died. While in Midian, Moses meets Zipporah at a well, marries her, becomes a shepherd of his father-in-law’s flock (Ex. 3:1), and has children in exile. We will see in the next two chapters that God will tell Moses to return to his people in Egypt and promises, “I will be with you…” (Ex. 3:12)

When Jacob arrived at the well, he met other shepherds awaiting more flocks. When Rachel comes with her sheep, Jacob “rolled the stone from the well’s mouth and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother.” However the events in Exodus are slightly different, showing Moses as a savior. Moses finds Zipporah and her six sisters already at the well, about to water their flock. But other shepherds then “came and drove them away.” Moses acted the part of the savior—”stood up and saved them, and watered their flock.” Moses is still God’s appointed savior—ready to save God’s people.

Notice, too, that Reuel is mystified why his daughters didn’t bring their savior home to him. When they come without him, he asks them, “…where is he? Why have you left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread.” Reuel then allies himself with Moses, God’s savior, gives him his daughter Zipporah as wife, and she gives birth to a son. This contrasts with the Hebrews in Egypt, who rejected God’s savior, Moses. It is, instead, Abraham’s uncovenanted line of children that respond rightly to Yahweh’s savior. Remember, this is the pattern we saw in Acts 7, where Stephen condemns the Pharisees for rejecting their Savior, and in the book of Acts, the gospel finds greater fruit among the Gentiles than the Jews. (Acts 18:6)

Moses will spend the next forty years living as a shepherd—a vocation that will serve him well, for he will shepherd Israel for the last forty years of his life—bringing them out of Egypt and then into the wilderness, where they will wander until a new generation of Israelites is prepared to go in and conquer the land. It was naturally quite a change from the palaces of Egypt, which Moses had been accustomed to, but Moses “considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.” (Heb. 11:26)

These parallels are no accident—the Bible is full of these patterns for a reason. These patterns build our faith—for through them, God’s people can see where they are in God’s story—what kind of character they are; they can trust that God will work as He has in the past and look forward to the fulfillment of His word. God wants us to see that as the saints of old lived lives of faith, guided by God’s Word, that we too ought too, and can, by the power of His Spirit.

God was preparing a new nation with Jacob, whom he would rename Israel. With Moses, God is preparing a savior for his people, Israel, whom he is preparing as a nation, to give them a land of their own. The emphasis in Exodus is that God will save his people, Israel, but we see that the Gentiles will not be forgotten. The time will come for them to be folded in—which is one of the primary emphases in Acts and throughout the New Testament. We, ourselves, are part of that covenant fulfillment, that through Abraham, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:3)

This brings us to the third and final section of the chapter, where God remembered His covenant. Exodus doesn’t tell us this—but we are told in Joshua 24:14 and Ezekiel 23:19 that the people of Israel had fallen into idolatry during their sojourn in Egypt. They hadn’t simply fallen out of favor with the new Pharaoh who began persecuting them but were suffering the judgment of God because of their false worship. That is the background to the book that is otherwise implied by their suffering at the hands of Pharaoh.

Through most of the first two chapters of Exodus, we find few godly Hebrews—only the two midwives and Moses’s family. But despite all their suffering and hardship, not only do the people not call out to Yahweh for deliverance, but they reject his appointed deliverer. Only after another generation of enslavement do the Israelites cry out for help.

In verse 23, Moses makes a point of connecting the death of “the king of Egypt” and the people of Israel groaning and crying out to God. This is an interesting connection. In the beginning of Exodus, it is the death of one king that leads to “a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph,” that enslaved Israel. The final plague in Exodus 12, the death of the firstborn sons, is connected with the exodus from Egypt. (Ex. 12:29-32). The death of the Egyptians in the Nile, in chapter 14, is connected with God saving Israel. (Ex. 14:30) Similar death and liberation themes will then continue throughout the first five books of the Bible—the sacrificial system itself will be built around the death of animals to symbolically liberate the people from their sin. The death of the high priest will liberate the manslayer from cities of refuge. At the end of Deuteronomy, it is only after the death of Aaron the High Priest and the death of Moses that the people can then enter into the promised land.

There seems to be at least a symbolic connection between the death of the king of Egypt and the people of Israel crying to God for help. At last, the people seem to be ready for a savior. God has, of course, been near them the whole time. He has, in fact, already prepared his savior for them. For the entirety of their enslavement, God has been patiently working to preserve a godly seed through the labors of five women: two faithful midwives, Shiphrah and Puah; Moses’s mother—Jochebed, sister Miriam; and even the daughter of Pharaoh.

God began his redemptive work long before the people cried out to Him. This is how God has always worked. When man fell into sin, God immediately promised a Savior would come. God made a covenant with Abraham that he would raise up offspring after him, which would be a blessing to all the families of the earth. God kept these promises despite the many failures of those within the covenant family—even through the faithlessness of the people of Israel in Egypt.

“God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.” What a beautiful and encouraging word! God knows us better than we know ourselves. What an expression of sympathy! As it says in Hebrews 4:15, we have a high priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses, who has been tempted as we are, and yet is without sin.

This is the God whom we serve. “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” (Ps. 34:18) “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them. The LORD preserves all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy.” (Ps. 145:19-20)

As we have seen, this whole chapter shows how God was at work to fulfill his covenant promises to the people of God long before they had cried out for deliverance. God had been working even in the years leading up to Moses’s birth that, like Christ, Moses would have a king seeking to kill him as a threat to his rule. His mother, through an act of faith, appealed to God to save her son through the very waters meant to kill him. When he reached maturity, Moses forsook the “fleeting pleasures of sin”, and chose “to be mistreated with the people of God”.

Moses then fled, like his great-grandfather Jacob, to family far in the east, where he re-enacted Jacob’s exile from the land—just as the nation of Israel will forty years after Moses.

And finally, at the end of the chapter, Israel cries out to the LORD, and he hears them, and knows their affliction. This kind of process will happen throughout the Bible—it is the way God acts. “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8)

God’s Word is meant to “make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is…profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness., that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Tim. 3:15-16) How will you be instructed, reproved, trained, and equipped? Which character are you like in this chapter?

Are you like Pharaoh—who felt threatened and sought to exert power to preserve his status? Are you willing to use violence, anger, and retribution to enforce your will? Are you quick-tempered and eager to protect what you believe to be yours?

Are you like Moses’s parents, Amram and Jochebed? They felt overwhelmed by their circumstances, but they lived by faith in a time of crisis. Rather than fearing ungodly commands, they feared God and were willing to pay the price. They entrusted their son to God, and God honored their faith.

Are you like Miriam? Do you have the faith of a child? Are you watching out and protecting the weak and vulnerable? Are you eager to serve those whom you love?

Are you like the “man in the wrong” who was beating his fellow slave? This was a hard man who saw the harshness of the world he was born into and sought to keep himself at the top of his social strata. He was willing to use violence against his own people to make the best of his circumstances. He saw submission to the ungodly authorities over him as a way of ‘keeping his head down’ and enduring something he couldn’t change. He saw Moses with envy, as an upstart Hebrew who had gotten a taste of the good life but who was no better than him. He wasn’t going to have any part of whatever Moses was going to do.

Are you like Reuel, the priest of Midian? Are you quick to recognize the blessings of God and to receive them in faith? Have you, like him, allied yourself with the God of Heaven? Have you intertwined your life with His? Do you want this for your children—even if it means giving your daughter to a cause that may lead her far away, where she may be threatened with death? Will you do so because you have the eyes of faith, knowing that God will bless those who follow Him?

Are you like Moses? Are you willing to “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus?” (Philippians 3:8) Are you willing to lay down wealth, power, and comfort? Are you willing to hate your father or mother and walk away from all they’ve ever taught and given you, as Moses did with his adoptive mother? (Luke 14:26) Are you willing to bear the reproach of Christ when all your friends and family think you’ve lost your mind? Is the reproach of Christ greater in your mind than the wealth and pleasures of America? Are you willing to leave everything behind to obey God’s call upon your life? Are you willing to die to self to gain an eternal reward? Are you willing to give the prime of your life to menial labor without knowing how God will use it for his kingdom?

These are the kinds of questions we must ask of ourselves when we read a passage like Exodus 2. I suspect you may resonate with parts of or all these characters. But who do you want to be? Who will you choose to be? The choices you make today, tomorrow, and each new day make you into the kind of person you will one day be. Our character is made one small choice at a time. We mustn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that today we can choose like Pharaoh, or the violent, cynical Hebrew, and one day think we’ll have become like Moses. No, we must die to self with each new choice.

But you might be thinking, this sounds like a pretty dreary, unsatisfying life. It sounds like I can’t have any fun, enjoy the fruits of my labor, or enjoy the things of earth. But that is not at all what I mean, nor is that what the Bible demands of us.

Moses enjoyed the best that the world had to offer him for forty years. He was a prince in the house of one of the most powerful men in the world. Yet he was willing to throw it all away in a moment when he felt the pull of God upon his life. He saw God’s people, his own people, afflicted and he chose to be “mistreated” with them rather than continue one more day as “the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.” Do you think he regretted that decision? I suppose there were some days during those forty years in Midian that he did, but God vindicated his choice. He rewarded Moses for his obedience.

Forty or so years later, all the wealth of Egypt was either destroyed through the Ten Plagues or given away to the Israelites before they left Egypt. God was going to judge Egypt and was going to separate the wheat from the chaff. Rich, powerful Egypt was about to be overturned, and the lowly, impoverished, and enslaved Israelites would become exalted and enriched. God’s favor was upon them, and in the end, it was better to be an Israelite than an Egyptian.

It is the same for us today. This world, as we know it is passing away, and is being remade into the new heavens and earth. God has already achieved victory over his enemies by His Son, through His suffering, death, and resurrection. In principle, God has already won, and we only have to choose which side we’ll take. God is quietly and patiently working out the fullness of his victory today. He has already met our greatest need in Christ. He has freely offered the forgiveness of our sins, we must only look to Jesus in faith, and trust that He will fulfill His Word.

God’s kingdom is advancing here, in this world. Like Moses then, we must choose sides. Do you prefer the fleeting, passing pleasures of this world, or are you looking to your eternal reward? Do you live like this?

Let God’s Word mold and challenge you. Be reproved by it when you are in sin. Be corrected by it when you wander. Be trained by it in righteousness. “Choose this day whom you will serve”—will it be the triune God of Heaven, or will it be an idol? Let us, in the words of Joshua, say, “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15)

1 A House for My Name, Peter Leithart, Canon Press 2000, p. 77
2 Douglas K. Stuart The New American Commentary: Exodus, B&H Publish Group, 2006, p. 85
3 NET Bible 2nd Edition, Note 36, for Exodus 2:10, Accessed in Olive Tree Bible Study App
4 Leland Ryken, Preaching the Word: Exodus, Saved for God’s Glory, Crossway, 2015, p.57

John 11:55-12:8 Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and many went up from the country to Jerusalem before the Passover to purify themselves. 56 They were looking for Jesus and saying to one another as they stood in the temple, “What do you think? That he will not come to the feast at all?” 57 Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where he was, he should let them know, so that they might arrest him.

121 Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. 3 Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, 5 “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” 6 He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. 7 Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. 8 For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

What does it look like to be genuinely overcome with gratitude and love for someone in a manner pleasing to the LORD? Have you ever thought about that? If someone did something for you that was extraordinarily kind, generous, or helpful, what might you do that would truly honor them and God?

It’s astounding how thoroughly ungodly nearly every example we’re given in books, TV, and movies is today. Recklessness, selfishness, isolation, and sexual immorality are the typical marks of deep love according to the world around us. So where do we look to find a healthy example? We can look to these few verses for sure.

In this passage we find a remarkable example of God’s funneling all things to a particular time, place, and person for His divine purposes. And within that, we find an example of one of the more spectacular expressions of godly gratitude, love, and devotion anywhere in the Bible.

With that, there are two main aspects of this passage and sermon. The first is the convergence of God’s providence toward this city, this Passover, this time, and this Man. EVERYTHING was coming together to bring the Son of God to His appointed hour. The second main aspect of this passage is the extravagant act of worship we see in 12:3 and its significance for Jesus’ imminent sacrifice. Mary’s anointing of Jesus is an example of what happens when we truly have eyes to see Jesus for who He is. It is a counter-cultural, holy response to the Son of God and His marvelous work.

The two big ideas of this passage are that God’s sovereign purposes were funneling all things to the cross and that getting even a small glimpse of that amazing grace leads to extravagant, holy praise. And the main takeaways are to trust in God through every circumstance and praise Him first and most.

The setting of this passage is exceptionally important. After raising Lazarus from the dead, the Pharisees began issuing murderous threats regarding Jesus. For that reason, Jesus made his way to the calmer northern countryside, to a town called Ephraim. That area was around 12 miles from Jerusalem and 10 miles from Bethany, Lazarus, Mary, and Martha’s hometown.

11:55 tells us that as Passover drew near, “many went up from the country to Jerusalem”. That is, people from around the nation of Israel began to make their way towards Jerusalem—at that time, upwards of 150,000 people each year. The aim of many of them was to arrive in time to “purify themselves” of any “ceremonial defilement” (Carson, PLNT, 424) they’d incurred in obedience to God’s command (found in Numbers 9 and 2 Chronicles 30).

“The ceremonial cleansing for which many came early to Jerusalem was…required of lay people at Passover because the men had to enter the court of priests to bring their lambs to be sacrificed. Those requiring ritual cleansing needed to undergo this seven days before Passover” (Cruise, TNTC, 256).

With word having spread concerning Lazarus, many of the Jews who’d arrived early “56 were looking for Jesus and saying to one another as they stood in the temple, ‘What do you think? That he will not come to the feast at all?’”

Certainly, some were wondering because they were amazed by the stories and wanted to see (and maybe believe) for themselves. Likewise, there were certainly others who simply loved a controversy and wanted to see what their leaders would do in light of the fact that “57 the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where he was, he should let them know, so that they might arrest him.”

Either way, the fact of the matter is that there was a great buzz in Jerusalem as people arrived early for purification and were waiting to find out if Jesus would come and what would happen to Him if He did.

Well, 12:1 tells us that Jesus was among the masses who were descending on Jerusalem, most certainly as a part of a larger group. It also tells us that Jesus arrived at Bethany six days before the Passover. That would have been a Friday (with the Passover being the following Thursday). As we saw in 11:18, Bethany was around two miles from Jerusalem. That is not a great distance, but it is more than a Sabbath day’s journey. For that reason, most of the people traveling with Jesus would have continued on to Jerusalem because if they didn’t, they would have had to stay there until Sunday.

The fact that Jesus didn’t continue on meant two important things. First, it meant, as we just saw, that Jesus would have to stay in Bethany on Saturday and not arrive in Jerusalem until Sunday. Second, it meant that those who had been traveling with Him would have arrived two days before Jesus and told everyone that Jesus was coming indeed. That’s largely what accounts for the fever pitch that had developed by the time Jesus arrived, fueling the Triumphal Entry on Sunday.

The main takeaway for us here is to see and trust in the awesome providence of God.

Michael Zvonar is an administrative wiz. Frequently, over the past many months I’ve watched him juggle tens of things at once. He’s able to take our ideas and make them happen by directing all kinds of people, food, copies, rooms, resources, etc. to a common end. It really is impressive. It often makes my head spin.

And yet, what Michael does well for a single event at a single place among a relatively small number of people, God is always doing for all things in perfect goodness. All things…always…perfect goodness. It’s impossible to overstate the wisdom and power required to even comprehend such a thing (I can barely get my mind around how Michael does it). How much more to accomplish it?! The more you think on it, the more staggering it really is.

This passage helps us to see that what’s always true in all things is particularly true of these events in Jesus’ life and ministry. God designed an entire covenant people group with a cosmic funnel, directing all of them to one place, at one time, to fulfill promises He’d made over millennia, in one man. Can you even begin to fathom what it would take to accomplish that?! Can you even begin to grasp the glory this is?!

What’s more, that which is generally true at all times and places, and is true for this particular passage in crystal clear ways, is also true for you and me. Grace, God really is working all things together for good for all who love Him (Romans 8:28).

Your trials are not in vain. They are not arbitrary. They are never wasted. If God could use something as tragic as the Son of God being hunted and executed for greatest good and glory, He can use your struggling relationship, your past sin, your present loneliness, your busted plans, your sickness, your demotion at work, your failed assignment, your school bully, and every other challenge in your life to give you a greater glimpse into His infinite glory.

In helping me process some of the hard things we’ve been through together over the past decade, Kyle reminded me of very specific ways that we are now significantly stronger and healthier in the Lord on the other side of the trials than we were before.

Similarly, your joys and victories and answered prayers are the working of the Lord for good and glory as well. In some ways it’s easier to see that God is working in those areas, and in some ways it’s harder, but God is working in and through them all regardless of our level of consciousness.

And, Grace Church, God is working all things for greatest good and glory in the mundane as well. Most days for most of us are spent folding laundry, watching a show, performing menial tasks, whipping noses, grocery shopping, working an ordinary job, changing the oil, getting the house ready for winter, doing homework, or some other ordinary thing. Most moments for most of us are spent apart from any real thought about anything other than that which is right in front of us.

A right understanding of one of the implications of this passage, however, compels us to think differently. Grace, God has just as much goodness and glory in each of those unconscious moments as He does during the highest highs and lowest lows. Our perception of God’s working is often a poor indicator of the actual reality—He is always perfectly orchestrating all things for the greatest good of all His people.

Constantly and consciously trust in Jesus, Grace Church, at all times and in all things, for He is working for your good at all times and in all things. Look to God’s remarkable orchestration of the events of this passage and remember that He’s working in the exact same way in your every high, low, and ordinary experience. And as you do, you’ll find a kind of freedom and peace and courage and rest that you’ve never known.

That leads us to the second main thrust of this passage—the extravagant praise of Mary. The divinely orchestrated, cosmic funnel has let Jesus to a reunion with Lazarus and his sisters. With this glimpse back into the life of this family, we find out that they are still filled to overflowing with love and gratitude for Jesus’ miraculous work in their lives.

12 1 Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 So they gave a dinner for him there.

I love the beginning of verse two. Is it the most disproportionate earthly response ever? As I invited you in the beginning, I invite you again to think about this. What does it look like to honor God and a person who blessed you? It seems obvious that whatever the answer, the response must be at least somewhat proportional to the gift, right?

Thanks for the stick of gum yesterday, here’s a Jolly Rancher. That seems about right, right?

As the gift gets bigger, generally, the expression of gratitude gets somewhat proportionately bigger along with it.

Thanks for helping me move out of the dorm, here’s a gift certificate for Chipotle. That makes sense.

Thanks for pulling my son out of the burning car. We could never repay you, but my husband is a woodworker and he made you this one-of-a-kind, hand carved, coffee table out of an exotic wood. Something like that, right?

When we come to this passage, however, things don’t quite follow that pattern. Hey, remember when you raised my brother from the dead after four days of being all-dead? Yeah? Well, we thought we’d have you over for some burgers to say thanks. It’ll get a bit better by v.3, but how do you actually thank someone proportionately for a resurrection? Of course, you can’t. That’s the heart of the gospel and that’s why we need God’s Word to know how to respond to God’s amazing mercy and grace.

John continues by describing what each of the three siblings were doing. Martha, consistent with her now-millennia-old reputation, was hard at work (“Martha served’). And Lazarus was just hanging out with Jesus (“Lazarus was one of those reclining with Him at table”). But Mary had something else in mind.

Look at v.3.

3 Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

Mary poured an entire pound of “ointment” on Jesus’ feet. A pound is a shockingly large amount of perfume. But it was not merely the amount that made her act border on absurd. It was also the quality and cost. That it was made from “pure nard” meant that it was extracted from a plan that had to be imported from a great distance away. And John’s commentary on Judas’s response explains just how expensive it was. V.5 indicates that it was worth more than what an ordinary worker would make in an entire year. Further, the fact that the fragrance filled the entire house testified to it’s high quality.

But she wasn’t done. Not only did she poor it on Jesus’ feet, but she also wiped Jesus’ perfumed feet with her hair. Women wouldn’t have let down their hair like this, much less used it in such an intimate way, much less at a public dinner. This too was a remarkable, almost unprecedented, act.

The question, of course, is what this meant. Why did Mary do such a thing? I read a good deal about this, this week. There are all kinds of ideas about what Mary was thinking. Some suggest it was her way of anointing Jesus as king. Others believe it to be an astounding act of one who saw herself as the lowest servant of the greatest master. Perhaps it was spontaneous; the only thing she could think of in light of Jesus’ unmatchable gift.

In the end, however, there are two things that all agree on. First, whatever else Mary might have meant, she meant it to be an extravagant act of affection and devotion. And second, as we’ll see in just a bit, it was ultimately, though unknown to Mary at the time, an anointing of Jesus body for His burial.

Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and He would be worshiped as such, but He’d come first to die and rise from the dead. In the end, Mary’s act of humble love, extravagant as it was in earthly terms, couldn’t begin to touch what Jesus was about to give (His own life). What looks, therefore, on the surface to be an absurdly over-the-top gesture, ends up being absurdly inadequate both for what Jesus had already brought her (Lazarus back from the dead) and, more significantly, what He’d come to bring her (forgiveness and reconciliation).

Be amazed by this, Grace. Be amazed by the unparalleled love of God in Jesus Christ. There is no proportionate response. We offer ourselves, therefore, as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to the Lord. This is the essence of faith and Christian discipleship. We offer all that we have to gain more than we could ever imagine. No sacrifice that we might make or gift we might give could possibly compare to that which Jesus soon would. What’s more, God’s grace is such that every sacrifice we might make in faith will be repaid one billion-fold in the life to come. Mary gave everything she had, which certainly seemed nuts to those present, because she had eyes to see that Jesus is infinitely greater. O, that we might have her eyes! What would it look like in your life if you truly knew the amazingness of the grace of God? Don’t be afraid to consider it.

Even though (as Jesus will soon confirm) Mary’s action was entirely appropriate, not everyone was happy about it. In a foreshadowing of what’s to come,

4 … Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, 5 “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” 6 He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.

Obviously, for reasons John makes clear, Judas’s response was sinful and wrong. But the thing that kept coming to my mind and heart as I tried to wrestle with this text this week was concern over what my own response would have been.

I don’t think stealing from Jesus and the ministry would have been my temptation. But I do think I’d have been a bit too rational. Instead of the poor, I probably would have been thinking about how the money would have made sure our important ministry was able to continue without the stress of not knowing where the next few days’ expenses would come from.

How about you? What is your first thought when you hear of someone acting in some way that only works if God is real? How do you respond when someone does something in obedience to Jesus that looks foolish by ordinary standards?

What if you had a friend who actually sold everything they had—every last possession and asset—to support a church planting effort and orphanage among an unreached people group? Are you more likely to be genuinely inspired by their faith or believe them to be nuts?

What comes to your mind when you hear of someone moving to a third world country with six young kids to live among the locals in the name of Jesus? “How irresponsible” or “Jesus is worth it”?

How about someone who, as a means of communicating the love of God, always has their home open to and filled with strangers who need a meal and a relationship?

How about the person handing out sandwiches, blankets, and gospel tracks to the homeless?

Of course, not all of us are called to do all of these things, all the time. But I’m afraid that not only do many of us do them none of the time, but we also often look down on those who do (probably as a defense mechanism to keep us from having to acknowledge our own fear and faithlessness). May we learn from Mary and Judas that extravagant praise and costly obedience are right whenever we’re following Jesus.

Finally, then, consider Jesus’ response with me.

7 Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. 8 For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

There are three keys to these two verses. First, Jesus shut down Judas’s reasoning, both because He knew Judas’s true motives and because his logic was wrong even on the surface. Jesus affirmed the rightness of Mary’s action in the face of Judas’s verbal protestation and, more than likely, the unspoken protests of some of the rest. In essence, Jesus said, “Judas, I know your real motives. Quit pretending to care about the poor. However, even if you weren’t a thief and your concern really was for the poor, you’d still be wrong in your priorities at this hour.

Second, Jesus revealed the fuller meaning of Mary’s act. An alternative translation helps us better understand what Jesus meant. “Leave her alone; it was intended to be kept for the day of my preparation.” In other words, Jesus was most likely revealing that the perfume Mary had just poured on Him had been set aside by God for this exact purpose. It’s possible that this perfume had been passed down for generations. Mary might have thought of it as her inheritance or insurance or something else, but Jesus reveals here that the Father had bigger and better plans. It was intended by God to be kept for this day, for this reason: to prepare Jesus for the death He was about to die, in love, for the world. That’s amazing to consider, isn’t it?

And third, Jesus is always first. This is in line with the first point, and the reason Judas was wrong even if he was thinking about the poor. We can only really help the poor when we love Jesus first and most. This is because what the poor (and everyone else) needs most is not only physical food, but food that satisfies eternally.

Grace, the urgency of the things of earth combined with the wisdom of this world will always conspire to keep us from having our quiet times before jumping into the day’s demands. Slowing down to be still before God will never feel as urgent as crying kids or work/school deadlines or car repairs. The to-do list will always yell louder than our Fighter Verse time if we let it.

Grace, we should help the poor (and tend to our kids, work, school, projects, duties, etc.) according to Jesus’ command and example, but we should do so having drunk fully from the cup of God’s grace in Jesus. Jesus is always first if we want to love others best.

I said at the beginning that the two big ideas of this passage are that God’s sovereign purposes were funneling all people, promises, and history to a single place, time, and Man and that getting even a small glimpse of that leads to extravagant, holy praise. And the main takeaways are to trust in God through every circumstance and praise Him in the highest. May we do so today in ever-increasing measure, in the power of the Spirit, having been cleansed and freed by the One for whom no praise is too extravagant. And as we do, we will become an even greater blessing to those around us.

Although we live in a culture that talks incessantly about injustice and oppression, it’s often hard to picture a culture with less clarity on what those things really mean. To avoid making that mistake ourselves, let’s begin with a few definitions.

Injustice – Depriving someone of justice.

Oppression – To afflict, mistreat, hold down, or exploit.

Those are pretty basic, right? Not much controversy yet. But, you’ll notice that each of these definitions presuppose a standard. And that’s where the problem begins. How can there be injustice if there isn’t first justice? Likewise, how is it possible to mistreat someone if there isn’t an objective standard for how people should be treated in the first place? And it’s the failure to properly define the positives that lead to such distorted understanding of the negatives.

Biblically, it’s clear that the positive of injustice is justice. And biblical justice is giving that which is deserved, or that which God requires.

The biblical positive of oppression is a little trickier. In most basic terms, it’s probably love. To oppress someone is to give them that which is bad, keep them from them some rightful good, or to take from them something that is theirs. But to love someone is to graciously give them that which is best, strive together with them for every good, and to take their burdens from them.

As we see constantly, apart from clear and specific definitions of justice and love, injustice and oppression can simply become placeholder words for whatever we might not like at the moment. In this way, we can simply cry “injustice” whenever someone attempts to hold us accountable for our actions. And we can cry “oppression” whenever someone withholds something from us that we want.

That is not to say there aren’t tragic injustices and acts of oppression in the world today. It is also not to say that Christians are allowed to be indifferent to injustice and oppression when we find it. It is to say, however, that there is a great deal of confusion about what those really mean, which leads to a good deal of confusion about what it means to rightly oppose them.

With all of that, welcome to Orphan Sunday. This is an annual event that we’ve participated in for many years at Grace. Insodoing, we’re joining Christians and churches from around the world in seeking to put down the oppression and perversion of justice for the fatherless, while also lovingly fighting for their cause. We do so primarily because God has commanded it. And God has commanded it primarily because it paints such a clear picture of the gospel.

To all those ends, we’ll consider one of the greatest marks of both godlessness and godliness, as well as some practical ways we can work together against injustice and oppression and for justice and love for the orphan.

The big idea of this sermon is that the way we treat orphans is the great divide of humanity. God has called His people to care for the orphan as a living picture of His care for us. At the same time, His fiercest condemnations are for those who do otherwise. And the main takeaways are that we would fight together to grow in the kind of Christ-like character out of which orphan-care is entirely natural, and to fight together to make a real difference, for the glory of God, according to the Word of God, in the lives of the fatherless.

Let’s pray.

I wonder what you think of when you think of the most significant mark of godlessness. In the next few seconds, try drawing to mind whatever biblical passages you can think of that speak to the things that most frustrate God. Or, what might we do that is most antithetical to God’s character?

You might be surprised to find out that the continual refrain of God’s Word is that one of the surest pieces of evidence of godlessness is the exploitation of the weak and vulnerable—particularly the widow, the sojourner, and the orphan. There is no surer sign that you do not know the love of God than that you wrongly take from others or hold them down simply because you can.

I want to show you numerous passages that speak to this to help you feel the weight of what God’s Word has to say about this and to help you see that this is not a minor issue in the Bible. Let me say this as clearly as possible. According to God’s Word, we cannot believe our faith is genuine and knowingly participate in the oppression of or deprive justice from the fatherless. One of the greatest marks of godlessness is mistreating the orphan.

Exodus 22:22-24 You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. 23 If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, 24 and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

Deuteronomy 24:17-18 “You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow’s garment in pledge, 18 but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.

Psalm 94:3-7 3 O LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult? 4 They pour out their arrogant words; all the evildoers boast. 5 They crush your people, O LORD, and afflict your heritage. 6 They kill the widow and the sojourner, and murder the fatherless; 7 and they say, “The LORD does not see; the God of Jacob does not perceive.”

Isaiah 1:23 Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them.

Isaiah 10:1-3 Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression, 2 to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be their spoil, and that they may make the fatherless their prey! 3 What will you do on the day of punishment, in the ruin that will come from afar? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth?

Jeremiah 5:26-28 For wicked men are found among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men. 27 Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of deceit; therefore they have become great and rich; 28 they have grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds in deeds of evil; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy.

Ezekiel 22:6-7 “Behold, the princes of Israel in you, every one according to his power, have been bent on shedding blood. 7 Father and mother are treated with contempt in you; the sojourner suffers extortion in your midst; the fatherless and the widow are wronged in you.

Malachi 3:5 “… I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against…the fatherless… and do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts.

In Job, the mistreatment of the vulnerable is among the worst possible charges against someone.

Eliphaz’s harshest accusation was tied to the mistreatment of the fatherless. Job 22:9 You have sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless were crushed.

And Job laments the wickedness of the wicked, declaring, Job 24:9 There are those who snatch the fatherless child from the breast, and they take a pledge against the poor.

Finally, consider carefully the company kept by those who pervert justice for the fatherless; consider it and tremble!

Deuteronomy 27:15-25 “‘Cursed be the man who makes a carved or cast metal image, an abomination to the LORD… 16 “‘Cursed be anyone who dishonors his father or his mother.’ … 17 “‘Cursed be anyone who moves his neighbor’s landmark.’ … 18 “‘Cursed be anyone who misleads a blind man on the road.’ … 19 “‘Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.’ … 20 “‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his father’s wife, because he has uncovered his father’s nakedness.’ … 21 “‘Cursed be anyone who lies with any kind of animal.’ … 22 “‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his sister, whether the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother.’ … 23 “‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his mother-in-law.’ … 24 “‘Cursed be anyone who strikes down his neighbor in secret.’ … 25 “‘Cursed be anyone who takes a bribe to shed innocent blood.’…

The orphan-oppressor is on par in godlessness with the idolater, the parent-curser, the thief, the most sexually perverse, and the murder.

Can you see how detestable it is in the eyes of the LORD to put down, mistreat, afflict, exploit, or pervert justice for the orphan? Can you imagine harsher words from the LORD concerning those who do? Is there worse company than that which orphan-harmers keep? Is it clear that one of the greatest marks of godlessness is to oppress or deprive justice from the fatherless? Is it obvious that according to God’s Word, one of the key questions we’re meant to ask when we consider whether or not our faith is real is how we treat those who cannot stand up for themselves and have no one to stand up for them?

In kind, older brothers and sisters, it is no small thing to pick on your younger siblings. Bosses, it is not inconsequential for you to use your employees rather than serve them. Parents, can you see more clearly now why, one of our dedication questions is, “Do you promise to…serve [your children] and not use them? Husbands, it is a treacherous thing to use your strength against your wife. Abortion is a great abomination, the killing of the most vulnerable of all. Consider the words of the LORD and tremble!

While it’s good for us to hear God’s word on the matter of godlessness as it relates to the cause of the orphan, I imagine that’s not the main application for us here, this morning. If you are participating in any way in depriving injustice for the vulnerable, repent now, but for most, this next section is probably where our prayers, thoughts, repentance, and actions need to be most directed.

Grace, it is not enough to merely not harm the weak. The great scriptural divide is not between those who oppress orphans and those who are indifferent to them. The chasm between godlessness and godliness is between those who pervert justice for the fatherless and those who lay down their lives for justice for the fatherless.

In other words, as you might not have considered, but now probably expect, one of the greatest biblical marks of godliness is the pursuit of justice and love for the orphan. Reading, memorizing, and meditating on Scripture is very good. Sharing the gospel with unbelievers is right. Spending time in prayer pleases God. Christian fellowship is vital. But right up there with those things (along with the rest of the means of grace), and in some ways more so (for reasons we’ll come to near the end), is pleading the cause of the orphan.

Again, I want to steep you in scripture to demonstrate this and then help explain why this is the case according to God’s design.

The first and main way we see orphan care as a great mark of godliness is in the simple fact that God is merciful toward the orphan and, therefore, orphan-care is what God does. If godliness is sharing in God’s character and actions, then plainly seeing that God is entirely committed to being a Father to the fatherless and all that entails, is the first step toward godliness in us.

Deuteronomy 10:17-18 For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. 18 He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.

We considered Exodus 22:21-24 earlier from the perspective of the wickedness of mistreating orphans. Consider it again from the perspective of God’s determination to crush those who do. …22 You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. 23 If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, 24 and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

Hosea 14:1-3 Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. 2 Take with you words and return to the LORD; say to him… 3 … In you the orphan finds mercy.”

Psalm 10:12-14 Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up your hand; forget not the afflicted…14 … to you the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless.

Psalm 10:17-18 O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear 18 to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.

Psalm 68:4-5 Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides through the deserts; his name is the LORD; exult before him! 5 Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.

Psalm 146:5-9 Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God, 6 who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; 7 who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. … 8 … The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down… 9 The LORD watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin

Again, if godliness is sharing in God’s character and actions, may God help us see plainly that His character and actions are for the vulnerable. Several years ago during Orphan Sunday, I preached an entire sermon on this and my main point was that all the greatness of God is for the fatherless. That is, right at the center of God’s own heart is a love for the orphan.

Spend some time this week meditating on the passages I just read and prayerfully consider what it would mean for you as an individual and for us as a church to think, feel, and act with greater godliness in this area.

The second main way the Bible teaches that orphan care is essential to godliness is in the fact that God not only fights for the cause of the orphan, but He also commands His people to join Him in it. We don’t just have His examples, we also have His charges, and our first passage helps us to see that the two are inseparable.

Deuteronomy 10:18-19 [God] executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. 19 Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Deuteronomy 14:28-29 (see also Deuteronomy 24:19-22 and 26:10-13) “At the end of every three years you shall bring out all the tithe of your produce in the same year and lay it up within your towns. 29 And the Levite, …and the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, who are within your towns, shall come and eat and be filled, that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands that you do.

Deuteronomy 24:17 You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow’s garment in pledge…

Psalm 82:3-4 Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. 4 Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Proverbs 23:10-11 Do not move an ancient landmark [moving someone’s property line so as to make their portion smaller and yours bigger] or enter the fields of the fatherless [to take it or its fruit from him], 11 for their Redeemer is strong; he will plead their cause against you.

Jeremiah 22:3 Thus says the LORD: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.

Zechariah 7:9-10 “Thus says the LORD of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, 10 do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart.”

What’s more, God consistently calls His people to orphan care as a true mark of genuine repentance. When the Israelites began to recognize the folly of their ways and turn their grumblings to God, God would often call them to show it in their actions and not just in their words. Among the first actions God would call for was to stop oppressing the weak.

Isaiah 1:16-17 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17 learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.

Jeremiah 7:5-7 if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, 6 if you do not oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, 7 then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever.

James 1:27 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

In relation to the fatherless, then, what does genuine godliness look like? As we’ve just seen, it means being merciful toward (Hosea 14:3), being genuinely concerned for (James 1:27), feeling deep sympathy for (Deuteronomy 10:19), expressing generosity toward (Deuteronomy 24:19-21), providing help for (Psalm 10:12), sacrificially rescuing (Psalm 82:4), feeding, freeing, watching over, lifting up, upholding (Psalm 146:7-9), protecting (Psalm 68:5), prospering, and defending (Jeremiah 5:28) the orphan. It is not merely not harming them or being indifferent to them. It is actively working to end their oppression and lift them up in love that marks genuine godliness.

Grace, let me quickly say three things about this. First, everyone in the Church must give ourselves to all that God calls us to. And among the things God has called us to work against those who would oppress the vulnerable and for their flourishing in love. You and I personally need to care about the orphan. Second, not everyone in the Church can do every good thing that God calls us to do all the time and in the same way. God gives specific burdens and gifts to specific people at specific times. Third, God means us to be strengthened by one another’s gifts. I might never be as burdened for and gifted in orphan care as my wife is in the same way as she will probably never be as burdened for and gifted in doctrinal precision as I am. But instead of looking down on each other for lacking our burdens or feeling guilty that we don’t share them, we’re meant to learn God’s fuller heart from one another. Fourth, and this is a big deal and good news, God looks to us as a people and not merely as individuals. Grace, find joy in the fact that God is pleased by what we do collectively, as a body. He is pleased by what we give ourselves to as a church as well as with us in our personal obedience. In that way, the orphan care that any of us do as a covenant community is orphan care that we all do.

This leaves us with two questions that I want to close with: 1) Why is orphan care so much a part of the heart of God and the call of God on His people? and 2) What might this really look like in practice?

Orphan care is central to God’s heart and commands because it so clearly portrays the gospel. Orphan care is in many ways the gospel incarnate.

What orphans experience physically and emotionally, all mankind experiences spiritually. Orphans are vulnerable and helpless on their own. They have nothing to offer and no way to rescue themselves. Their only hope is that someone would be merciful to them.

That is all of us in Adam. We are dead in our sins and have no way of escaping. We cannot rescue ourselves or to be reconciled to God on our own. Our only hope is that God would turn to us in His mercy and grace. And He has, Grace Church, through Jesus Christ His Son!

There is, perhaps, no clearer picture of this physical/spiritual orphan parallel than in Ezekiel 16.

4 And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling cloths. 5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born.

6 “And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ 7 I made you flourish like a plant of the field. And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full adornment.

This also shows up over and over as God ties His commands for orphan care to the fact that the Israelites were once helpless slaves themselves in Egypt (Exodus 22:21; Deuteronomy 10:19, 17:19, 24:18).

And it is also a key aspect of our salvation. By grace through faith, we are not only forgiven and cleansed of our sins, we are also adopted into God’s family as His sons and daughters.

Ephesians 1:3-5 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will…

The sweetness and goodness of this spiritual adoption is why we are reminded every week that “by the blood of Jesus you are welcomed into the presence of God as his beloved sons and daughters.”

The great divide between godlessness and godliness is so closely tied to orphan-care because orphan-care is so closely tied to the gospel of Jesus Christ. What is true of the orphan physically is a clear picture of all of us spiritually. And in these ways, the way we treat orphans speaks loudly concerning the way we understand our relationship to God.

Finally, then, what does this look like in practice? Truthfully, more often than not it is messy and difficult. Just as doing ministry to sinners as a sinner is often hard, so too is caring for orphans. The very fact that there are orphans means something is broken. What’s more, the system that is in place to care for orphans is broken—the government in assuming responsibility for something it’s not designed for or charged with and the Church in abdicating our role. It’s challenging because of so much brokenness, but it’s also worth it because of the gospel.

That said, the Orphan Sunday team at Grace has given us nine ways that we can work to this end. Would you please prayerfully consider how you might take a step toward one of them or help someone who already has?

For the glory of God and the good of the fatherless, according to the commands of God, empowered by the Spirit, and as a living picture of the gospel, let us increasingly give ourselves (individually and collectively) to this particular form of godliness.

John 11:45-54 Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him, 46 but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. 47 So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. 48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” 49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. 50 Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” 51 He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, 52 and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. 53 So from that day on they made plans to put him to death.

54 Jesus therefore no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there to the region near the wilderness, to a town called Ephraim, and there he stayed with the disciples.

Can any of you kids remember the main reason John wrote his Gospel? For bonus points, do any of you remember where John tells us?

John 20:30-31 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

As we continue to move through John’s Gospel and consider the different stories he shares with us about Jesus, let’s keep in mind that the two primary applications of them all is to believe that Jesus is the Christ. But let’s also remember that believing that Jesus is the Christ has implications for every aspect of our lives, every corner of the universe, and every pocket of society. In other words, believing that Jesus is the Christ has countless practical implications. As I’ve said before, is that in the same way that truly believing this room is on fire necessarily means taking action, truly believing that Jesus is the Christ necessitates certain action as well. John helps us in all these ways—knowing that Jesus is the Christ, what that means, and how we ought to respond.

Grace, I invite you to be in continual prayer that the Spirit would be pleased to work all of that out in us in increasing measures as we continue to make our way through this Gospel.

That said, as he has consistently done, in our passage for this morning John describes the response of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracle (raising Lazarus from the dead). Once again, it’s critical for us to notice that John often spends as much time describing the effects of Jesus teaching and actions as he does Jesus teaching and actions. As his purpose statement indicates, he’s as concerned with how people responded to Jesus as he is with how Jesus engaged the people in the first place.

We’re told, therefore, how “many of the Jews” reacted to Lazarus’s resurrection. Some believed and some didn’t. Those who didn’t told the religious leaders. Most of the religious leaders were knowingly confused. One, however, had a measure of (misguided) insight. And as a result of all of that Jesus laid low as His time was near.

The big idea of this passage is that by believing in Jesus we gain everything by giving up everything. And the main takeaway is to take a fresh count of the cost of following Jesus. Let’s pray.

When we read the Bible, we need to do so prayerfully. We will never understand or appreciate it apart from the Spirit’s help. We also need to read it thoughtfully. We need to have our brains engaged as we seek to make sense of what the author intended to communicate and how that fits in with the larger story of the Bible. And we need to read it personally. We need to imagine ourselves in the story and in the place of the readers.

Along those lines, I invite you to imagine yourself having just witnessed Jesus bringing a man back to life after he’d been dead for four days. How do you think you’d respond? What do you think you’d say or do (or not say or not do)? Would you tell someone? Would you try to question Jesus? Would you freeze up? Something else?

John records four main responses of the witnesses and then Jesus’ response to the responses.

First, most simply, and most understandably, John tells us that some of the witnesses to Lazarus’s resurrection believed in Jesus.

45 Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him…

We are right to wonder how anyone could respond in any other way?! How is it possible to witness someone with the power to raise someone from the dead and not believe they are who they say they are? How could they not believe?

And yet, as we’ve seen several times already in John’s Gospel, witnessing and even being the object of Jesus’ miracles does not have any direct connection to believing in Jesus.

What’s more, we’ve also seen that “believing in Jesus” and “Believing in Jesus” are not the same thing. There is belief and there is unbelieving belief. Genuine, Holy Spirit enabled belief is the conduit by which the Father has determined to convey saving and sanctifying grace. Unbelieving belief, however, is useless. Unlike ordinary unbelief, it’s harder to detect (in others and in ourselves). It looks a lot like genuine belief. But it is different on the most fundamental level. It is imposter belief. It is a veneer of belief. It is hollow belief. It is impressed by some aspect of Jesus and believes some things Jesus says, but falls short of the kind of belief/trust/faith God calls for. It is the kind of belief that accepts some of Jesus’ Christness, but not all of it. It is a pick-and-choose kind of belief. Again, it is useless. It is not sufficient to carry the grace of God.

John has taught us to always be on the lookout for this imposter belief. He has taught us to be careful of mistaking unbelieving belief for the real thing. Many in John’s Gospel who “believed” initially (usually after witnessing one of Jesus’ miracles or hearing Him teach something profound), end up turning away from Jesus once the cost of following Him gets too high for their liking—that is, once what it means to genuinely believe in Jesus becomes clear. Therein they demonstrate the inauthenticity of their initial “belief”.

John does not explicitly tell us what kind of belief these people had. He uses the same language that he’s used in the past to describe the belief of both genuine believers and unbelieving believers.

The upshot of all of this for you and me is twofold. First, we need to be careful to examine our belief. It is proved genuine, not by intensity of feeling or any particular experience, but by perseverance and fruitfulness. Where genuine belief is present, it will continue and it will produce increasingly good fruit. That’s because genuine belief is always produced, empowered, and kept by the Holy Spirit. Second, this is also a warning against building a ministry around the kind of “alter-call” approach that was so popular for so long. We need to proclaim the gospel of Jesus and we need to call people to respond to it and it is good to do so with both individuals and (large) crowds, but our aim is not professions of faith, it’s followers/disciples of Jesus who are eager to trust in Jesus and obey all of His commands.

None of this should make us inherently skeptical when someone claims to be trusting in Jesus, but it should turn our prayers and actions quickly toward discipleship. Where genuine belief is present, it needs to be (again, by God’s design) nurtured and cared for. It needs to be shepherded and tended. Grace, I urge you, therefore, to learn about or make use of the discipleship tracks we have here. They are intended to help you obey Jesus’ Great Commission and help people understand the true nature of belief.

We don’t know the nature of the belief of the “many Jews” of v.45, but it is good to thank God for the spark of faith that Jesus’ miracle produced in them and remain hopeful that it grew into something mature and bright and persevering. That ought to be our disposition today as well.

When we are confronted with the claims of Jesus, there is genuine belief, unbelieving believing belief, and outright unbelief. John tells us that many fell into one of the first two categories. He also tells us that some fell into the third.

The text doesn’t explicitly tell us that they didn’t believe, but it clearly implies it. John describes the second group in contrast with the first. There were those who believed…

46 but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.

John doesn’t tell us exactly why this second group felt the need to tell the Pharisees. Perhaps, like the parents of the blind man Jesus healed (in chapter 9), they were simply afraid of being put out of the Synagogue for not reporting such a thing. Perhaps, it was because they genuinely believed this was a matter for the Pharisees to handle. Or, perhaps it was for some other reason altogether. Regardless, John makes it clear that doing so was the result of the fact that they didn’t believe that Jesus was the Christ. They didn’t believe that Jesus’ miracle was from God.

Again, we’re left with the question of how this is possible. How could people see what this group had just seen and not truly believe in Jesus? This is a big theme for John. He highlights it over and over so that we don’t miss it. His consistent answer is that sin’s blinding power is so thorough that there is nothing besides the regenerating power of God that can overcome it. There truly is nothing in heaven or earth that can open our eyes to see Jesus for who He truly is other than God Himself. There is no argument persuasive enough, now miracle spectacular enough, no love deep enough, no sacrifice sacrificial enough, no experience powerful enough, no thing beautiful enough, and no teaching profound enough to convince us that Jesus is the Christ on their own.

God’s grace will open our eyes to see what’s there or we will remain dead in our trespasses and sins. And God does so, always, only through the gospel of Jesus. It alone is the power of God unto salvation. So we must proclaim it continually, boldly, joyfully, hopefully, and expectantly. And then we must trust in God to use our faithful proclamation as He sees fit.

I’m making it a point to say this over and over because John, under the inspiration of the Spirit, has put it in front of us over and over. This is a lesson that we must learn and relearn and be reminded of over and over again. Share Christ and entrust the results to God. Grieve those who respond in unbelief, but rest in the knowledge that God is able to open the eyes of even His most hostile opponents, the most convinced unbelieving believers, the most apathetic teenager, and the one who’s heard and rejected the gospel the most.

The next reported response is that of the Pharisees. Having been told by the unbelievers what Jesus was up to,

47 … the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs.

After what I just said (about the impenetrable blindness of sin), my own reaction to this question/observation doesn’t make sense. Despite what I believe doctrinally, every part of my mind and heart is overwhelmed by this response. What we to do?! He keeps performing miracles in the name of God. He turns water into wine. He makes the lame walk. He makes the blind see. He knows our hearts. He speaks with authority never heard before. What are we to do?!

You fall down at His feet and cry out for His mercy and grace! Entrust yourself to Him entirely. Hang on His every word. Follow Him wherever He goes. Thank God for sending Him in love. Worship Him with everything you’ve got. That’s what you do!

Again, sin’s blinding power is complete. When you can’t see, you can’t see, and boy, could they not see!

As if that weren’t enough, the Pharisees named their two greatest fears. If they refrained from intervening, or if they don’t get it right, they imagined the worst-case-scenario. First…

48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him…

The first, worst possible outcome in their minds was that everyone would believe in Jesus. Again, I’m trying hard to remember my doctrine and keep my sarcasm in check, but it’s hard. Sin had taken hold of all mankind through Adam. Death reigned. Justice demanded that nothing but eternal destruction awaited every man, woman, and child. God sent salvation into the world and offered it to everyone who would receive it, not by performing admirably or accomplishing a list of difficult tasks or by proving themselves worthy, but by simply trusting in His saving grace.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

And after witnessing a man raised from the dead, the Pharisees couldn’t imagine anything worse than people receiving the grace of the very God they claimed to love. Sin is sinful. It’s blinding. And it leads to the most foolish foolishness.

The second worst possible outcome of failing to properly censure Jesus in their minds was that, “ 48 … the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”

To take away “our place” is most likely a reference to the temple. That is, they feared that if things got out of hand among the Jewish people, the Romans would restrict their access to their place of worship and sacrifice. This would, of course, be a significant blow to the practice of their religion and way of life.

Along with this, the Pharisees also feared that by allowing Jesus to continue unimpeded, the Romans would take away their nation as well. This likely did not mean they feared being driven out of the land altogether, but rather losing all remaining autonomy they had within it.

In addition to being shocked at their persistent disbelief in spite of every evidence, there are some things we don’t want to miss from the response of the Pharisees.

First, this “Council” was the Sanhedrin. It was the Jewish governing body acknowledged by the Romans. It was mainly made up of the chief priests who were mainly Sadducees. It also consisted, as John makes clear here, of a minority of Pharisees. The two groups were constantly at odds with one another. It is very much akin to the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. today. The main point, as we’ll see in the coming chapters of John’s Gospel is that Jesus united them in their fear and hatred of Him. That was a remarkable accomplishment.

Second, there is tremendous irony in the Council’s fear of losing the temple by allowing Jesus to continue. The crowds would be stirred and the temple would be taken away, but not by the Romans. The actions of these religious leaders, the Jews themselves, would destroy their temple. It would come to pass, as Jesus promised, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The Temple itself stood in front of them and they were actively working to destroy Him. They completely missed the real thing for the shadow.

Third, these verses (along with v.50) indicate that the Council members weren’t worried about the Jewish nation as a whole, much less the glory of God. They were worried primarily about losing their own place of power and prominence. Their fear was that the Romans would take away “our place and nation” and that by doing something now it would be better for them (v.50).

And fourth, there are significant echoes of Egypt in these words. God called the Israelites out of the nations in order to be blessed by Him and a light to them. The Jewish people were to trust in God and live according to His commands as a means of showing the world that God is real, God is good, God is greater than all other gods, and obedience to God is the only and sure path of blessing. Instead, however, the Jews loved God’s blessings more than they loved God and so they often sought the blessings in places other than God. In that way, God became nothing more than a means to an end for them. God punished them for this disobedience by handing them over to the nations they were supposed to be an example to. Rather than be a light to the Romans and boldly call the Romans out of their darkness, they were oppressed by the Romans. But rather than leading them to repentance, it led them to continue to fight to hang on to the scraps the Romans allowed them. Again, this is very much like the Israelites in Exodus.

Exodus 16:2-3 And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, 3 and the people of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Like their ancestors, the Council was more worried about losing Roman crumbs than eating at the banquet table of God!

Do you care more about maintaining a certain lifestyle or measure of freedom than you do following Jesus? Are you clinging in any way to the crumbs of the world instead of feasting with God? Have you given yourself to the shadows of blessing rather than the Blessing itself? Likewise, are you afraid to speak truth to the powers that be when they step outside of their God-given role and authority, fearing their wrath more than God’s? Are you content to go along with the sinful current of the culture rather than speaking the truth in love to it as Jesus did?

The final response recorded by John was that of the high priest, a man named Caiaphas. He had a harsh rebuke for the entire Council. He “said to them, ‘You know nothing at all.’”

That’s true. So far, so good, right? Perhaps he saw the folly of their ways and was about to stop them from making the biggest mistake of all time.

He went on, “50 Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.”

That sounds even better, right? Does he get it? It almost seems like he understands what Jesus came to accomplish and is trying to set everyone else straight. Jesus did come to die for the people, His life for theirs. It is better that Jesus would die in our place, than for all of us to die.

But to make sure his readers didn’t come to this mistaken conclusion, John clarified in the next few verses.

51 He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, 52 and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.

Do you see what this means, Grace? There was some sense in which Caiaphas was given a prophetic word from God. It was supernaturally revealed to him that Jesus would die for the nation of Israel and for all those whom the Father had given to Him. That’s amazing in its own right. What’s more amazing, however, is how badly Caiaphas misunderstood the prophecy. As the next verse indicates, He understood that to mean that they ought to work to end Jesus’ life, rather than mournfully rejoice that Jesus came to offer it freely.

53 So from that day on they made plans to put him to death.

Again, it’s hard to overstate the tragedy in this blunder. The High Priest had received a word from the LORD. It was a true word. It was a word of greatest hope and love. It was a word of life and salvation. Instead, he took it as a Divine mandate to put to death a troublemaker. He took it as a charge to end Jesus’ life so that He couldn’t bring the hammer of Rome down upon the Jews. It really is difficult to imagine a more costly and significant mistake.

As I mentioned above, we need to be people of the Word of God. And to be people of the Word of God means prayerfully, thoughtfully, and personally reading God’s Word consistently. But as we see here, it also means reading it humbly. And at the very least, that means being slow to believe we understand God’s Word rightly when no one else does/has. It means reading it corporately, with the help of brothers and sisters in Christ, near and far, living and dead. And reading the Word humbly means making sure it’s the Word we’re looking to and not our own impressions or feelings, or simply the impressions or conclusions of others.

With the Passover mere weeks away, the one at which Jesus would die for the nation and also the scattered children of God, and the one at which entire Sanhedrin determined to see Him killed, Jesus withdrew to prepare.

54 Jesus therefore no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there to the region near the wilderness, to a town called Ephraim, and there he stayed with the disciples.

The big idea of this passage is that by believing in Jesus we gain everything by giving up everything. We can’t hang on to any of our own ways or the ways of this world. We must surrender all to Him. But insodoing, we’re given infinitely more in the reconciliation, fellowship, and satisfaction of God. And the main takeaway is to take a fresh count of the cost of following Jesus. Is that the nature of your belief. Where it is, praise God and continue pursuing Jesus in faith. Rejoice in the gospel, the good news that God has provided and is providing for you all that He requires of you.

But where it isn’t, where you find that you are like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day who were not willing to give up everything, who weren’t even willing to give up the leftovers of their oppressors to gain the eternal and unlimited feast of the Son of God, be warned. This is for you a blaring warning siren calling you to consider your own life and destiny. It is a fresh call to cast aside every lesser treasure that is coming between you and the Greatest Treasure.

It is good, that we now turn to the Lord’s Table, the beginning of the Feast that awaits us.

As we do, you’ll notice a few simple changes to our liturgy.

First, we’re acknowledging that we’ve already examined ourselves during the exhortation and assurance of pardon. We recognize that we don’t need to do it again.

Second, in light of the vision we’ve cast for the past year concerning the relationship between membership, baptism, and communion, and our recent decision to amend our constitution in that regard, you’ll notice that we remind you of God’s intended order. We are meant to come to faith in Jesus, be baptized as a sign of our inclusion in the family of God, and then take part in this family meal. For all kinds of reasons, this order can get confused in our lives. In my own life, I came to faith in Jesus through a parachurch ministry that didn’t emphasize baptism at all and neither did the church I attended at the time. For that reason, without realizing anything was off, I took communion for years before being baptized. If your hope is in Jesus, we invite you to take part in this meal today, but if you haven’t yet been baptized as a believer we encourage you to come speak to one of the pastors/elders about why the order matters.

And third, with these changes, the order is changed slightly. Momentarily, I’ll read our new, slightly modified invitation and then pray. Immediately after I pray the ushers will dismiss you by row. Having already examined ourselves according to Christ’s command, we’re glad to sing together as we’re coming up to get the bread and juice. Once everyone is seated again, we’ll pray the same corporate prayer that we’ve prayed in the past and then eat and drink together.

John 11:38-44 Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. 39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” 40 Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” 41 So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” 43 When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” 44 The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

What would you consider the greatest accomplishment of your life? Or, to come at the same thing from another angle, what have you done that you’re most likely to be remembered for? Or, one more time, what do you still hope to accomplish that will continue on after you die?

Prior to the event described in this passage, Jesus’ teaching and miracles set Him apart in awesome, unmistakable, and unparalleled ways. In this passage, however, He was able to demonstrate and display the glory of God in a greater way than ever before! He caused a four-day-dead man to come alive. Even if the story of Jesus’ life ended after the events of this passage (which, of course, it doesn’t!!!), it would be the most spectacular story of all time. I’m not sure how you answered my questions, but I’m confident that none of them would have come close to what we have here. Jesus is glorious beyond measure!

One of the keys to seeing the fullness of the glory displayed in this passage is in recognizing that Lazarus’s resurrection didn’t come out of nowhere. As we’ll see, God repeatedly promised that the dead would rise. We’ll even see a few examples of this in both the OT and NT. At the same time, we will also see that the resurrection of Lazarus is different. Jesus did this to provide the strongest piece of evidence yet that He was who He said He was, to provide a small picture of what awaits all who join Martha in believing that Jesus is the Christ, and to usher in His time.

The big idea of this passage is that if you believe in the resurrected and resurrecting Jesus, you will see the glory of God in even greater ways than this. And the big takeaway is that we would live like those who will be raised from the dead into everlasting joy and fellowship with God.

This is our third week in John 11 (with one more to go). It is the story of three siblings whom Jesus dearly loved. One of them, Lazarus, was deathly ill. The other two, his sisters Mary and Martha, called for Jesus that He might heal their brother before he succumbed to his sickness. Before Jesus got there, however, Lazarus died. Upon His arrival, the sisters were, understandably, distraught. But Jesus quickly reassured them that something remarkable was about to take place. In fact, Jesus promised Martha that Lazarus would rise from the dead. Rather than provide the comfort it should have, Martha misunderstood Jesus and sort of brushed the promise aside. She said to Jesus, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (11:24), but what she really wanted was Lazarus back now. Jesus corrected her, but in her misunderstanding, Martha subtly revealed something significant. She revealed her foundational belief that there would be some type of eschatological resurrection for the people of God. She had no doubt that one day Lazarus would rise along with all believers. But where did that belief come from?

Jesus’ words in Matthew 22 and John 20 both indicate that Martha’s resurrection conviction was rooted in the OT Scriptures. In Matthew 22, as a part of an answer He gave to the Sadducees (who didn’t believe in a resurrection), Jesus said (in v.31) “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: 32 ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” With these words, Jesus taught that the Sadducees were mistaken in denying the resurrection. If God is (not was) the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then although they died they must still be alive, having experienced some type of resurrection.

Likewise, in John 20:8-9 John explained that the resurrection was promised in the Scripture, “8 Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” John taught that the Scripture taught resurrection.

That Jesus and John believed the Scriptures taught a general resurrection for God’s people and specifically that Jesus would rise from the dead is clear. What might not be as clear is where in the Scriptures that’s taught. Where in the OT do we find teaching on the resurrection?

The beginning of the answer to that question is found almost all the way back in the beginning. In Genesis 22, we’re told in that Abraham believed in God’s power to raise the dead. We’re not sure how Abraham knew this, but Hebrews 11:17-19 makes it clear that he did. “[Abraham] considered that God was able even to raise [his son, Isaac] from the dead…” (v.19).

Similarly, in Job 19:25-26 we read that Job believed that he would rise as well, “25 For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. 26 And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”

David believed this too. In Psalm 16:9-10 (and several others like it) he wrote, “9 … my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. 10 For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.” While it is clear from this passage that David believed in his own resurrection, what’s more, we know from Acts 13:35 that this is ultimately a promise of Jesus’ resurrection.

Isaiah prophesied (in 26:19; see also, 49:10, 49:15, 71), “Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.”

Likewise, in one of the clearest passages yet, in Daniel 12:1-2 we read, “But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. 2 And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Jesus affirmed this in John 5:29. We see it in Acts 24:15 as well).

And Ezekiel was told by God (37:12), “12 Therefore prophesy, and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people…’”

In addition, there are at least two places in the OT where a type of resurrection actually took place. Both Elijah and Elisha are said to have been the means through which God raised an individual from the dead.

In 1 Kings 17:17–22 we read of a woman whose son became ill and died. Elijah said to her, “’Give me your son.’ And he took him from her arms and carried him up into the upper chamber where he lodged, and laid him on his own bed…21 Then he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried to the LORD, ‘O LORD my God, let this child’s life come into him again.’ 22 And the LORD listened to the voice of Elijah. And the life of the child came into him again, and he revived.”

And Elijah’s protégé, Elisha, experienced something similar according to the resurrecting power of God. This story is found in 2 Kings 4:18–35.

There are other OT passages that teach similar things, but I hope to have shown you enough to convince you that the Scriptures repeatedly and consistently taught a resurrection from the dead for the people of God. That is, I hope it’s easy for you to see that Jesus’ words ring true (Matthew 22 and John 20) and Martha’s conviction was well founded (John 11:24).

What’s more, I hope this brief look at these passages helps you to grow in confidence that the Scripture always holds true. It has been the fool’s and the devil’s errand since the beginning to try to poke holes in the promises of God. May you find fresh encouragement this morning in the complete trustworthiness of God’s Word and therein fresh motivation to read your Bibles thoughtfully, prayerfully, corporately, consistently, and practically.

Again, while it’s clear that Mary and Martha were not expecting Jesus to do what He did, it is also clear that God had promised and displayed His power over death and promised a future, eternal resurrection for all His people. Their belief in their brother’s resurrection was well founded.

Far from merely an OT concept, though, we find resurrection to be a significant teaching of the NT as well. 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Peter 1:3, Romans 8:38-39, 2 Corinthians 5:15-17, Romans 6:4, and Revelation 20 are among the many NT passages that speak to the resurrection of Jesus and those who trust in Him.

More still, as is the case in the OT, there are other examples of resurrection in the NT too. Jesus caused Jairus’s daughter to rise (Matthew 9:25), though unlike with Lazarus, He told those present to tell no one (Mark 5:43). And in Acts 20:9-10 we read of Paul raising a man named Eutychus from the dead as well.

While all of that is beyond the scope of this sermon, John’s Gospel is not. And in John’s Gospel we find three key resurrection categories: Lazarus, Jesus, and Christians. Let’s consider each and their significance for our lives.

Everything we’ve considered so far was meant to set the proper backdrop for our passage this morning. In it we’re shown the resurrection of Jesus’ beloved friend. And in that, once again, Jesus accomplished three main things: He provided the strongest piece of evidence yet that He was who He said He was, He provided a small picture of what awaits all Christians, and He ushered in His time.

At the end of our passage from last week, we read that Jesus “was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled.” Our passage for this morning opens by telling us that this was the case once again. “38 Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it.” Jesus was both deeply sad and indignant. He grieved death and the unbelief of the children of God (v.40, “Did I not tell you…”). These things cause Him to make His way to Lazarus’s tomb.

Standing before the cave, the significance of the fact that Lazarus had been dead for four days was recharged. It was significant in that according to Jewish tradition the fourth day meant there was simply no hope left that he might be healed/raised. This is one of the things that set this resurrection apart from anything and everything that had come before.

It was also significant in that it meant that certain biological/physiological aspects of death had kicked in. For that reason, Jesus’ command to take away the stone away from the tomb was shocking and distasteful. That’s the heart of the exchange between Jesus and Martha in v.39, “Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.'” It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to get our minds around Martha’s concern. After that long, the body would start to decay to the point that it would have ordinarily been very unpleasant to open the tomb.

Even though there was misunderstanding and even some measure of doubt among the sisters (and certainly among their fellow mourners), their faith was stronger than their disbelief. Therefore, despite her best judgment, when “40 Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?,'” Martha who was evidently in charge, relented and called for Jesus’ command to be obeyed, “41 So they took away the stone.”

At that point, as John records Him doing increasingly, Jesus turned to the Father in prayer.

41 And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.”

The heart of Jesus’ prayer was twofold. First, He thanked the Father for their perfect fellowship and unity. This is an echo of Jesus’ words in 5:19 and 10:30. He and the Father are one and are, therefore, eternally of one mind.

In this is a sweet picture of the fellowship that is ours with the Father, through Jesus, as well. Because of Jesus, God hears us whenever we pray. He is eager to hear from you; not to receive new information from you (He, of course, already knows everything perfectly), but as an expression of your faith and as a part of your growing fellowship with Him. Take everything to God in prayer, Grace, He delights to hear you every time.

The second key aspect of Jesus’ prayer was a desire for those present to hear His prayer, witness the miracle that was about to take place, and therein know that Jesus was truly from God. While many still doubted, Jesus prayed and acted in such a way as to remove all earthly obstacles of disbelief.

Grace, it is good and right of us to follow Jesus’ example in doing what we can to answer the questions and objections of skeptics. Peter said it this way, “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you…” (1 Peter 3:15). Apologetics matters. We ought to be able to help people who struggle with the claims of Christianity to understand them better. Likewise, as Peter went on to say in the next verse, we also ought to live in a manner consistent with the gospel. Our lives ought to testify to the truthfulness and transforming power of the gospel. Let us know if you’d like help in knowing where to start.

And yet, as we’ll see next week, removing every earthly obstacle is never enough. We can prove the reasonableness of Christianity beyond a shadow of doubt, but apart from heavenly grace, it will still not be enough. If Jesus’ teaching, prayer, and miracle were not enough to convince the unbelievers who were “standing around,” then we should not be surprised to find out that there’s nothing we can do finally allow people to see God’s glory. It doesn’t change our charge, but it does properly ground our hope.

With that, “43 When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ [and] 44 The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

This is simple, but profound. Let’s not miss this. Listen to me carefully as I tell you what you already know. Lazarus was dead. He had been dead for four days. He was all dead. Jesus prayed to His Father and then Lazarus came back to life. That’s not normal. It doesn’t usually work like that. This is a miracle of the most remarkable kind. Praise God for this, Grace Church. Don’t be content being unmoved by the power of God over death.

What’s more, what we have here is a picture of every conversion that has ever happened. If you are a Christian, this is what has happened to you. Because Jesus rose from the dead, defeating sin and death (more on that in a minute), at some point, when you were dead in your trespasses and sin, God said to YOU, “____, come out!” Come out of your spiritual death and darkness into my light and life.

1 Peter 1:3 “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

And as you did, Jesus said to the world, your flesh, and the devil, “Unbind him, and let him go!” Come out of your sin and rebellion into my righteousness and freedom. Come out of your blindness and confusion into my truth and sight. Be made alive and be made holy!

Romans 6:4 “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

Lazarus’s physical resurrection is a picture of true conversion, of the spiritual resurrection (regeneration) that takes place whenever someone comes to faith in Jesus. This is glorious indeed!

Jesus called Lazarus back from the dead, but unlike when He caused Jairus’s daughter to rise, Jesus gave no instructions for the witnesses not to tell others. In fact, as we saw last week, Jesus waited long enough to allow a crowd to gather so that they would tell others for His time had finally come.

I told you there were three main resurrection categories in John’s Gospel. We just saw the first in Lazarus. The second, but by far the most significant, is the resurrection of Jesus. Of this, I simply want to point out two aspects of it for now.

First, two weeks ago, in John 11:25-26 we saw Jesus’ claim to be the means by which God’s resurrection power comes into the world. “Jesus said to Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.’” We simply cannot miss this or be unaffected by this. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. He is the means by which we are saved. And we gain access to that not by performing well enough to earn it, but by believing that Jesus already did. Believe in Jesus today, Grace Church and you shall never die!

Second, Jesus’ claim (to be the resurrection and the life) was ultimately proven true and accomplished in His own resurrection, which we will come to in the beginning of chapter 20. It was in His own resurrection from the dead that all His teaching was vindicated and His power was unleashed.

Obviously, we’ll unpack this in much greater detail as we move to the resurrection in John. For now, though, know that Jesus could raise Lazarus and you from the dead because He rose from the dead.

Finally, in John’s Gospel we are taught that because of Jesus’ resurrection, at Jesus’ return, all who hope in Him will have our bodies raised and reunited with our souls to live forever with Jesus and all the saints in the new heavens and earth. Jesus explicitly taught that all Christians will be raised from the dead to the Father’s heavenly home where we will dwell forever as His beloved sons and daughters.

John 14:1–3 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

We will rise, Grace. We too will be resurrected. A significant portion of the glory Jesus promised Martha she would see is that by believing in Him, she would (and we will) be glorified like Him!

The question this puts before us is whether or not we are living like we will be raised from the dead. How is your life any different from those who don’t believe in the resurrection? Can you name any practical differences that your belief in your resurrection makes in the way you live?

Let me suggest a few things…

Obey Jesus this week in some area you have been too afraid to. Since you will rise from the dead, we need not fear anything but God alone; including death. So share the gospel with that person you’ve been avoiding. Have that conversation that’s seemed too hard. Act on that promise that will leave you in deep trouble if it turns out not to be true.

Find some way to artistically communicate the reality and glory of the resurrection. Find a way to help people to see and appreciate the contrast between those who will rise with Christ and those who will arise apart from Christ. Help people to feel the beauty and terror of the resurrection.

One more. Change one of your life’s goals or come up with a new one. If there is no resurrection it makes sense to give yourself to eating, drinking, and being merry, for tomorrow we die. If there is no resurrection it makes sense that we pursue as much comfort and ease as possible in this life. But living differently in light of the resurrection means aiming at different things than those who don’t. Make it your ambition to share the gospel with everyone who lives within a half mile of you so that they too might rise from the dead. Aim to give 25 or 50% of your money away to gospel causes. Make it your goal to pray every day for your kids and the kids in your DG, that they might believe in Jesus and share in His resurrection. Because the resurrection is true, determine in the Spirit’s power to engage your civil authorities in a manner that is unashamed of the gospel and the resurrection hope it brings. Determine not to miss Church (here or elsewhere if you are on vacation) once in 2024 since it is the greatest practice for the resurrection.

Again, Lazarus is a picture of this and a preparation for Jesus’ imminent resurrection and ours. Awesome.

In conclusion, I want to bring you back to something I’ve mentioned twice. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead in a unique way primarily in order to accomplish three things: to provide the strongest piece of evidence yet that He was who He said He was, to provide a small picture of what awaits all Christians, and to usher in His time.

To the first, we’ll see next week that “Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him” (11:45) and that the Pharisees worried that ” If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him” (11:48). Jesus, once again, continued to remove every earthly obstacle to belief in Him that all the Father had given to Him might believe.

To the second, we saw this morning that if our hope is in Jesus, we’ve already experienced something very similar to Lazarus’s resurrection on a spiritual level and will one day experience it in fullness, body and spirit. Lazarus provides a picture of our regeneration and future resurrection.

And to the third, Jesus rose Lazarus at this time because His time had finally come. Again, we’ll see next week that ” Jesus therefore no longer walked openly among the Jews” (11:54) and “from that day on they made plans to put him to death” (11:53). With the Passover at hand, then, Jesus would return to Jerusalem and usher in the New Covenant in His blood.

Everything is coming quickly to a head in Jesus’ life and ministry. May the Spirit continue to open our eyes to the truth and glory of who Jesus is and what He’s done to rescue us from sin and death and bring us into the Kingdom of God. And may we live increasingly in light of these glorious things for the glory of God.

John 11:17-37 Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. 18 Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. 20 So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” 27 She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

28 When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” 29 And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. 31 When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32 Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. 34 And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus wept. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

In the way of a reminder, or to bring you up to speed if you weren’t here last week, we’ve made our way to John 11. It’s largely the story of Jesus’ love for a trio of siblings, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, who lived together in a town called Bethany (which, as we see in v.18, was very near Jerusalem, and as we will see, turns out to be significant during Passion week). The story and Jesus’ love both hit their climax when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead (next week). Along the way, however, we encounter several other real, practical, exemplary ways in which Jesus cared for this family as well.

Last week, as we considered the first 16 verses of the chapter, we saw that Jesus received word from Mary and Martha that their brother, Lazarus, was sick. They urged Jesus to come quickly, and Jesus reassured them that this illness would not result in death, but glory for both Him and the Father…and then, curiously, He waited two more days before He began making His way to Bethany.

In our passage for this morning, Jesus arrived and remained at the outskirts of Bethany after Lazarus died from his illness. Having heard that He was near, Martha ran out to meet Him and later urged Mary to visit Him there as well. Both were grief-stricken and attempting to make sense of why it took so long for Jesus to get there and what it might look like for Him to help even now. For His part, Jesus grieved with each of the women, reassured them that this story would not end in tragedy, and explained His power and glory quite a bit more.

The big ideas here are the deep compassion that was embedded in Jesus’ love, the faith of the sisters, and the unparalleled glory and resurrection power of Jesus. And the main takeaway is to trust in Jesus’ promises—all the way from salvation to glorification—no matter what. Let’s pray.

This portion of the story is neatly divided into two parts. The first part records Jesus’ encounter with Martha and the second, His encounter with Mary. Let’s look at each.

Our passage opens with a clear time stamp. It tells us that by the time Jesus got to the edge of Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for four days

17 Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days.

This is significant in at least two key ways. First, it is significant in that it meant word had time to spread. Friends and family had time to hear and gather. As v.19 says, “and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother.” And the main point of this is that there was a large crowd and lots of witnesses to the fact that Lazarus died. Given where this story is heading—both the story of Lazarus and the larger story of Jesus’ ministry on earth—these witnesses will prove exceedingly significant.

In this is a simple, but important reminder. Christianity is a religion rooted in fact and truth. It is historical and real. It is not the product of “someone’s authentic self” or “personal truth”. Christianity rises and falls on whether or not the things it claims actually happened. If they didn’t, Christianity is false and we shouldn’t be here. If they did, and these witnesses help us to see that they did, then Jesus is everything, then there’s no other place on earth that makes more sense for us to be than right here, right now.

The second key is that four days was significant. One commentator says it this way (Kruse, TNTC, 244), “Had [Jesus] left immediately, Lazarus would still have been dead for two days. So nothing would have been gained by his immediate departure [when He first received the news and call from Mary and Martha]. However, there was something to be gained by waiting two days before setting out. The spirit of the departed was thought to hover around the body for three days in the hope of a resuscitation. The raising of Lazarus after four days, then, would have been clearly seen as a manifestation of the glory of God.”

It seems that either the Jews had seen Princess Bride or the Princess Bride writers were familiar with the Jews because both had similar types of dead: “sort of dead, mostly dead, and all dead”. Likewise, both believed that mere mortals can do something about “sort of dead” and “mostly dead,” but that once someone hits “all dead” status everything changes. For the Jews, apparently, “all dead” started on day four and for that reason Jesus waited until then in order to completely separate Himself from Miracle Max and all other imposters. That’s the fuller significance of vs.5-6, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” His love for them mean that He wanted what was best for them. And what was best for them was to understand that His power and glory were altogether different.

Having caught word that Jesus was near (v.20), “[Martha] went and met him.” For reasons we’re not told, “Mary remained seated in the house.” Although she will come into the picture soon enough, she initially stayed behind.

Understandably distraught and confused, “21 Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.'” No greeting, no thanks-for-coming, no preamble at all; just grief that her brother was dead and that Jesus hadn’t come in time to do anything about it.

How often are you functionally like that, Grace? How often, with Jesus present in your life to bless you, do you rebuke Him for not being present and blessing in the ways you determined He should? How often do you find yourself disappointed because of the circumstances in your life in spite of Jesus’ repeated promises to use all of them—sweet and bitter alike—to bless you and accomplish the greatest good for you? While her grief over the loss of her brother was certainly appropriate, let us learn from this passage the folly of thinking we know better than Jesus.

Nevertheless, misguided and discouraged as she may have been, Martha remained hopeful that Jesus could still do something about her brother’s death. Therefore, she said to Him, “22 But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” In effect, she said, “You obviously blew it on the front end Jesus, but perhaps you could still do something on the back end? It’s not too late for God to work here, is it? And you have unprecedented access to Him, right Jesus?”

It’s not clear exactly what Martha wanted Jesus to ask for and God to give, but Jesus’ reply would have cut straight to her greatest hope; one it seems that she hadn’t even allowed herself to consider. “23 Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.'” Again, Jesus knew Martha’s unspoken desire. Above all, like any of us, she wanted a resurrection miracle even if she never considered it as a legitimate possibility. And, perhaps surprisingly, without qualification or amendment, He assured her that she would get what she secretly hoped for.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve asked Jesus for? Was it as big as a resurrection? He is, as we’re about to see, entirely able, Grace. Likewise, what’s the tightest link you’ve ever experienced between any prayer and Jesus’ answer? Has it ever been as tight as this? He is, as we’re about to see, entirely able, Grace. What remarkable news it was that Jesus gave Martha! We obviously expect her to respond in thanksgiving and praise, right?

As surprising as Jesus’ answer was, Martha’s response to it is just as surprising. Rather than resulting in thanksgiving and praise, Martha was skeptical. Again, it’s almost as if she never even considered the possibility that Jesus might do something so remarkable, so completely and immediately. And her skepticism led to misunderstanding. She assumed that Jesus was speaking in eschatological terms rather than immediate terms. Therefore, “24 Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.'” And if we’re to finish her thought, it’s probably something like, “but that’s not what I asked. I want some type of comfort now.”

Again, can’t we be like that too, Grace? We’re so often so slow to recognize God’s kindnesses in our lives.

Unfortunately, I recently fell into this trap myself. For years, along with many of you, I’ve marveled at how spectacularly God has blessed our little church with physical fruitfulness; dozens and dozens of babies over the years. On one hand, it’s entirely natural and on the other hand, there’s something clearly supernatural about it as well. Well, some of the original planters of Grace were here a few weeks ago and I asked them what stood out to them about Grace Church today compared to when they were last here (20ish years ago). Without hesitation they mentioned the number of kids. They told me they prayed over and over for such a gift. Instead of immediately recognizing it as the awesome answer to prayer it is, I got caught up in my “rational” thoughts wondering if the unusual fruitfulness we’ve experienced really is the kindness they asked God for; just like Martha.

Well, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that Jesus’ kindness never runs out for His people. Martha made one request (bring some comfort now). Jesus granted it, but Martha mistook Him for promising a different, a future, blessing (raise Lazarus at the fullness of time). Instead of correcting her, Jesus upped things to another level entirely.

Jesus had already claimed, “I am the bread of life.” “I am the light of the world.” “I am the door of the sheep.” “I am the good shepherd.” And now, in response to Martha’s confusion, Jesus made the fifth of His seven “I am” statements in John’s Gospel, “25 Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.'”

Martha was hoping for something, anything, to immediately stem the pain. Jesus went one better. And in order to make sure she didn’t misunderstand this time, Jesus explained exactly what He meant by it, “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.'”

The gist of what Jesus put in front of Martha is the simple fact that her aims, as big as they might have been, were far too small. She wanted, at most, a resurrection, but standing in front of her was the resurrection. And if she, or anyone else, would receive that, it would no longer be death to die! Death is no longer to be feared for any who live and believe in Jesus. Jesus was about to prove that in part by raising Lazarus from the dead, and then in full by raising from the dead Himself as the true firstborn from among the dead (Colossians 1:18).

Having promised something greater than Martha had dared imagine, Jesus asked, “Do you believe this?”

This is the great question that everyone of us must consider for ourselves and then put in front of everyone on earth. We are beckoned over and over in John’s Gospel to receive Jesus as the Christ, and promised over and over that if we do, we will be made alive spiritually and never again die spiritually. Do you believe this, Grace? Do you live and believe in Jesus as the resurrection and the life? Is that the single and great hope of your life and eternal life? John has shared example after example of why it should be, but is it?

What’s more, we’re meant to tell the world about who Jesus is and what He offers and then ask exactly what Jesus asked Martha, “Do you believe this?” It is not enough to know it. Knowledge of Jesus and the things He’s said and done are not enough. The world must believe, truly believe them, and so we share and call them to respond to it in faith.

Confronted with this question, Martha emphatically replied, “27“Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” What an awesome, faithful response! By God’s grace, Martha was able to see and hear Jesus for who He was/is, and therein truly believe in Jesus for who He was/is, and therein never die.

Evidently Martha was convinced and impressed enough that she left Jesus and “28 …went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, ‘The Teacher is here and is calling for you.'” And evidently Mary’s trust in her sister and Jesus was high enough that “29 when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him.”

Again, Grace Church, may we learn from these two remarkably faithful women. “When she heard it [that is, when she heard her sister tell her of Jesus’ summons], she rose quickly and went to him.” May we be as quick to respond to Jesus’ call and commands as Mary was here. May we stop trying to fit our obedience around our own pursuits, or hobbies, or kids’ hobbies. May we stop putting off Jesus’ summons until a more convenient time comes along. Be warned by the seriousness of Jesus’ reply to the man who said he’d follow Jesus once he buried his father, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22). And may we stop believing the lie that there is anything greater than a call from “the resurrection and the life,” the “Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

Which of Jesus’ commands do you need to stop putting off today? Who do you need to reconcile with? Who do you need to serve? What sins do you need to repent of or who do you need to lovingly confront in their sin? Do you need to begin having faithful quiet times? Do you need to make the Great Commission a greater priority in your life? Do you need to stop telling lies? Do you need to confess a secret sin? Is there a specific promise of Jesus that you have been reluctant to trust?

For reasons we’re not told, Jesus still refused to enter Bethany and, therefore, according to v.30, Mary had to go to Him. She found Jesus right where He’d been when He talked to Martha.

Presumably out of concern for Mary, the friends and family who’d gathered to comfort the sisters followed Mary when she ran out of the house. John tells us they did so even though they didn’t know where she was going. “31 they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there.” This ought to remind us of the love of Jesus we saw last week. The love of Mary’s consolers was marked by concern and a willingness to move toward Mary to help in (what they presumed to be) her overwhelming grief.

Rather than leading the crowd to Lazarus’s tomb, however, Mary was leading them to Jesus. In her grief, desperation, and trust, “32 when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet.” She threw herself down before Jesus, placing herself at His mercy.

Like her sister, without any introduction or greeting, she immediately poured out her heart to Jesus, “saying to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Both sisters were of one mind. They knew that Jesus could have prevented the death of their brother, were hurt and confused as to why He didn’t, but remained hopeful that something still might be done by Him. There was deep and profound faith in their lament.

There is much for us to learn here as well. There is a way to be faithful before God answers our prayers and there is a way to be faithful after. Beforehand, faithfulness trusts that God hears, cares, and is able. For these reasons, we pray expectantly and hopefully, knowing that God is never bothered by our requests and He always hears them in love. Afterward, if He grants our requests, faithfulness pours itself out in gratitude. And it is more satisfied in God than whatever it was that He granted. More to the point, there’s a way to be faithful even when God does not grant our request. That kind of faithfulness is not naively happy or hopelessly despairing. It acknowledges the pain of the loss, but continues to look to Jesus for comfort and the better way He has for us, whatever it may be. That’s what Mary was doing here and that’s what we ought to do when we find ourselves in her shoes.

This kind of faithfulness is perhaps best seen in contrast to some of the Jews. Unlike Mary (and Martha) who, though grieved, continued to trust in Jesus, “37 some of [the Jews who’d followed her to Jesus] said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?'” Both grieved Lazarus’s death, and both understood Jesus to have been uniquely able to do something about it, but Mary responded to the disappointment in faith, while certain Jews did so in doubt.

The rest of the passage describes a profound sadness that permeated Mary, the rest of the Jews who were with her, and Jesus. There was grief over Lazarus (from Jesus, Mary, and the Jews), grief over the grief of the sisters (from the Jews), and grief (from Jesus) over the grief (of the Jews), over the grief (of the sisters). Vs.33-36 are profoundly emotional and moving.

33 When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. 34 And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus wept. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

Jesus was “deeply moved” and “greatly troubled.” There is compassion, sadness, and even a touch of anger in these words. Jesus was filled with emotion as He considered the death of His friend, the sinfulness of sin to pay such wages, the shaky and fleeting faith of the children of Abraham, and the grief of everyone present. And yet, Jesus remained steadfast, firmly anchored, in His resolve to do the will of the Father. Though “deeply moved” and “greatly troubled,” Jesus determined to help in the best way possible.

One of the more important distinctions that I’ve heard is between sympathy and empathy. One of my favorite authors (Rosaria Butterfield) recently said that empathy is like jumping into a rushing river to save your friend and sympathy is like throwing her a rope. Both are expressions of compassion and love. Both mean good things for your friend. And yet, while your friend might prefer empathy in the moment, sympathy almost always offers the better chance of providing real help.

As we’ll see next week, it was deep sympathy that Jesus brought with Him to Bethany. He cared profoundly for this family, but instead of merely throwing Himself into their grief, He grieved and kept His feet on solid ground in order to be able to help most fully and effectively.

As we saw last week, genuine love for another always seeks what’s best for them, no matter the cost. And in a world that is increasingly confused about what’s best, love often seems like not love, even as not love often seems like love. Let’s look, therefore, to Jesus once again. He did not give this family what they most wanted because He loved them too much for that. Instead, He gave them what they most needed. He grieved with them, but not on their own terms. He grieved with them in a different kind of hope and trust in the plan of the Father.

In all of this, and in conclusion, we see the true nature and expression of love and the rightness of trusting in Jesus no matter what. Since Jesus is the resurrection and the life and He expressed those truths most fully by rising from the dead, we cannot miss His infinite and eternal love and trustworthiness. May we give ourselves wholly to believing in Him and following Him in all we do. And in order that “though [we] die, yet shall [we] live.”

John 11:1-16 Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. 3 So the sisters sent to him, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” 4 But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. 7 Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” 8 The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?” 9 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. 10 But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.” 11 After saying these things, he said to them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.” 12 The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.” 13 Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. 14 Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus has died, 15 and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” 16 So Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

This is a remarkable passage on all kinds of levels. I know that by saying that almost every week, it loses some of its punch, but this is a remarkable passage. It’s stands out to me because of how clearly it shows both Jesus’ genuine humanity and His genuine love.

Ideally, to best see these things, we’d be able to deal with John 11 all at once. It’s one story that needs to be seen together to really appreciate any of the individual pieces. However, as you can see, it’s a long passage and there’s a lot going on in it. For those reasons, we’re going to need to break it up a bit. This week we’ll focus on the first sixteen verses. And in those, we’ll focus on its description of the exceptional love Jesus for a trio of siblings. We’ll consider the fact of Jesus’ love for Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, the origin of that love, four glorious expressions of it, its nature, and its future.

The big idea of all of this is that Jesus has a genuine, personal, practical love for all who trust in Him. And the big takeaways for us are to focus on understanding the nature of that love, in order that we might walk more fully in it, and in order that we might grow in it for those around us.

As I mentioned in my introduction, this passage is primarily about Jesus’ love for three individuals and the way that love is inseparably connected to the glory of God. Let’s begin to consider those things by establishing the fact of Jesus’ love for them.

God is both transcendent and immanent. He is both beyond us and near to us. He is both outside and inside His creation. Most of us tend to emphasize one of those truths over the other (just like God’s sovereignty and our agency). Either we think of God primarily in terms of His holiness, His set-apartness, and the ways He is different from us, or we think primarily in terms of His sameness, nearness, and personal friendship with us.

For those in camp transcendence, passages like John 3:16 fit neatly in explaining God’s love. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” According to this verse, God loves “the world” in a broad, general, and even eternal way. And that’s certainly true. God’s love for His creatures is transcendent.

But what we have in John 11:1-16 (all of 11 really) is the kind of passage those in camp immanence like to point out. It doesn’t describe a generic love of Jesus for all the people of “the world” or even just the people of a specific town. It paints a clear and remarkable picture of Jesus’ love for three particular people in a deeply personal and practical way. John 11 is the story of Jesus love for each of them individually and sincerely.

The fact of Jesus’ love is explicitly stated twice in the first five verses, first by Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s sisters, and then by John.

1 Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha … 3 So the sisters sent to him, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” And again in v.5 we read, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”

We’ll come to the origin, expressions, and nature of Jesus’ love for these three in just a moment, but let’s not be quick to move past the fact that the eternally existing Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, the light of the world, the Word of God, the one through whom all things were made, the Lamb of God, the miracle-worker, the temple-cleanser, the one who knows everything in a man’s heart, the Christ, the one with all authority, the bread of life, the one who is one with the Father, the door, and the good shepherd—the transcendent one—also loved these three people in very real, personal, and specific ways—as the immanent one. Jesus really, truly loved Lazarus, Mary, and Martha.

And as we slow down to make sure we really understand that, let’s also remember that Jesus loves everyone who hopes in Him like that as well. If your faith is in Jesus, the fact of Jesus’ love for you is indisputable according to the Bible. Neither your thoughts, feelings, words, or actions, nor those of anyone or anything else, can change the fact of Jesus’ real, personal, deep love for you.

Grace, as you wake up each morning, let your first thought increasingly be, “I am loved by Jesus.” Fight to make that thought echo in your mind throughout the day as feelings of doubt and guilt and loneliness and shame and fear and inadequacy and anxiety and discouragement creep in. He’s near me (always), He knows me (good and bad), and He loves me (unconditionally). That’s always true for all who are in Jesus, and truly believing it and receiving it changes everything.

The fact of Jesus’ love for the siblings (and us) is clear. Before we come to the specifics of Jesus’ love for Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, let’s back up just a bit to consider the little we know about the origin of that friendship and love.

For the last several chapters in John’s Gospel (for nearly five months now), we’ve seen confrontation after confrontation between Jesus and “the Jews,” followed by rejection after rejection of Jesus by the Jews. That might tempt us to think that Jesus’ ministry was marked by nothing but confrontation and rejection. Clearly, this passage stands in stark contrast to that notion. For that reason, we might wonder how this loving friendship began.

Interestingly, John doesn’t tell us. V.2 sounds like it might, but as we’ll see in just a bit, it refers to a future action of Mary (chapter 12), not an earlier one. Truth be told, we’re not sure how Jesus came to meet and love this family. It’s possible that Luke describes the initial encounter in his Gospel.

Luke 10:38-42 Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. 39 And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. 40 But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” 41 But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, 42 but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

The timing of this passage in Luke as it relates to our passage in John isn’t clear. Likewise, Lazarus isn’t specifically mentioned by Luke. Nevertheless, as John makes clear, Jesus had met this family in Bethany at some earlier point and over time, in ways not recorded in any of the Gospels, developed a friendship and love for this family throughout his ministry. It is precisely because Jesus and His followers faced so much rejection and persecution that such a deep love could develop so quickly.

And in this, once again, Grace, is another aspect of Jesus’ life and ministry that we must follow. We are to give ourselves to sharing the good news of Jesus with the world and to sharing our hearts with them as well. The Apostle Paul worded it this way, “So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thessalonians 2:8).

Following Jesus’ example in ministry is not merely repeating the same facts that Jesus shared. It’s also genuinely loving those with whom we share them. It’s pursuing fellow followers of Jesus and genuine gospel friendships with them. And for the most part, that happens by going through the ups and downs of following Jesus together over time. I’m so thankful to share that with so many of you, over so many years.

We’ve seen the fact and origin of Jesus’ love for this family. Let’s now consider its nature and expressions. In this passage we see four particular expressions of Jesus’ love, and in them the nature of Jesus’ love is seen.

As I mentioned a bit ago, from these four love-expressions we can begin to see the nature of Jesus’ love for this family. Jesus’ love is best understood as the affectionate pursuit of that which is best for Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. It is not (as we so often believe today) making the biggest deal possible about them. It is not that Jesus liked the way they made Him feel. And it is not (clearly) doing whatever they wanted Jesus to do for them.

The love Jesus had for them was about gladly paying the necessary price (whatever it might be) to give them what was (truly, genuinely, and eternally) best for them. They believed that was preventing Lazarus from dying. Jesus had something else in mind. Jesus knew that what was best for them, for His watching disciples, and for all of us, was to maximize their ability to see and delight in the glory of God. And He knew a better way to get that to them than anything they imagined. And in that, Jesus loved them more deeply than they had imagined. He had an even fuller expression of love than they imagined.

The fact, the origin, the expressions, the nature, and finally and briefly, the future of Jesus’ love for this family and this family’s love for Jesus. Three simple, but profound things…

First, Jesus’ love for this family will reach its penultimate point in v.43 when He raises Lazarus from the dead. But it will not reach its ultimate point, it’s fullest expression, until chapter 20 when Jesus Himself is raised from the dead and the glory of God is most fully revealed.

Second, at the beginning of chapter 12, Mary’s love for Jesus will (unknowingly to her) express itself most fully by anointing Jesus for His death and preparing the way for Him to save the world from our sins. “Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” That’s what John was speaking of—looking back upon—in 11:2.

And third, this family will express their love for Jesus by hosting and protecting Him each evening from Friday to Wednesday of Passion week. We’ll see that soon as well and how it played a key role in God’s plan.

The main thing to see in each of these things is that Jesus’ love for this family was, is, and forever will be awesome beyond measure. We must learn from this the true nature of love. We must receive this love from Jesus, live in light of it, and extend it to the whole world. To be a Christian is to have this love from God and to have this love for His people. It is a different kind of love to be sure. It is a kind that can only come from the Spirit of God in us. But it is a far, far greater love than any and every other kind.

Thomas seems to have begun to get a taste of this which is why, in v.16 he said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” He was at least beginning to recognize that the kind of love he most needed and needed to give was not the kind that was most comfortable or common, but the kind that is most filled with the glory of God. May we come to see this increasingly as well in order that we might love like this as well.

John 10:22-42 At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. 24 So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”
31 The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. 32 Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” 33 The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” 34 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? 35 If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— 36 do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? 37 If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; 38 but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” 39 Again they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands.
40 He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained. 41 And many came to him. And they said, “John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true.” 42 And many believed in him there.

Last Sunday we looked at the demand the Jew’s made of Jesus and at Jesus’ initial response to it in vs.22-30. The demand was for Jesus to end the “suspense” and tell “us” “plainly” whether or not “you are the Christ”. And Jesus’ initial response was fivefold: (1) I’ve already told you enough about who I am such that if you don’t believe me about those things, you won’t believe me about this one either. (2) I’ve already shown you enough about who I am such that if my works haven’t already convinced you, neither will speaking more plainly about this. (3) Your unbelief is rooted in the fact that the Father has not yet given you to me. (4) The blessings for those who receive me as the Christ are beyond measure. And (5) I and the Father are one. In all of that we also marveled at the staggering glory of Jesus and the staggering power of sin that keeps us from seeing it apart from God’s grace.

This week, we’ll pick up where we left off—with the Jew’s response to the things Jesus said. Their response, as Jesus so plainly predicted, was persistent disbelief. And their disbelief led them to pick up stones to stone Jesus and then, after an interesting argument by Jesus, to the lesser response of seeking to arrest Jesus. In the end, though, John tells us that there was another group of Jews, a large group, that came to believe in Jesus.

Throughout his Gospel, John has been stacking the glories of Jesus, one on top of the other—glorious things He said, did, was, fulfilled, and promised yet to do. At the same time, he has also been stacking the rejections of the Jews—in anger, slander, intimidation, censure, and murder. The power of sin is seen in the persistent rejection of the Jews and the growing divide between them and Jesus. And the greater power of grace is seen in that in the end, God overcame the disbelief of many. In all of this, we can see that the power of sin is great, but the grace of God is greater still.

My prayer is that you would respond to this sermon by giving yourself in even greater earnestness to praying for and sharing the gospel with the unbelievers in your life and for a greater pursuit of the awe and wonder at the person and saving work of Jesus that ought to drive your prayers and sharing.

Once again, last week, we considered Jesus’ response to the question of the Jews: Are you the Christ? This morning, we’re going to consider the Jew’s response to Jesus’ response. They moved, as we’ll see, from disbelief to murderous intent, to resigned to capture.

Though unstated, that the Jews didn’t believe Jesus’ claims is clear in their response. Because they assumed that Jesus couldn’t be who He said He was, the only other possible conclusion was that He was a blasphemer. And the only acceptable response to that kind of blasphemy was stoning.

There were certain crimes for which the God-commanded penalty was death by stoning. Blasphemy was among them according to Leviticus 24:16. We’ve seen this response before from the Jews. At the end of chapter 8, “58 Jesus said to [the Jews], ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ 59 So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.”

As we’ve seen several times already, their logic was mostly sound (though possibly not entirely, as we’ll see in just a bit). If Jesus wasn’t who He said He was, He was a blasphemer who should be stoned according to the law. Their problem was not ultimately in their logic, it was with their first premise (that Jesus could not be the Christ). The main point here is that it was their disbelief in Jesus’ claims that led to the response that followed.

Before we move on, I want you to lock in on the fact that this is how disbelief always works. For non-Christians, those who do not believe in Jesus, the things of Jesus seem foolish; sometimes more, and sometimes less, but always foolish in the end. In 1 Corinthians 1:18, Paul wrote, “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing [that is, to those who are without belief].” And when peoples’ unbelief causes Jesus’ teaching to seem foolish, it affects everything. To disbelieve His claims, His commands, His description of the God and the world, His offer of salvation, His promises of what’s to come, and everything else He said, makes it all seem foolish. It can’t not.

But even for Christians, so much of our lives are still shaped by the folly of our disbelief. Every time we sin or are even slow to obey, it’s still only because some (perhaps hidden) pocket of unbelief causes some aspect of Jesus’ teaching or promises to seem foolish to us. If you and I truly believed everything the Word of God says about who He is, who we are, what He’s doing, and what it means to live the fullest life, if none of it seemed at least a little silly to us, we’d walk continually in the kind of perfect peace, joy, love, courage, and obedience we see in Jesus. In other words, practically, this means that every time we skip a quite time, or talk trash, or hesitate to evangelize, or fear man, or get more excited about our hobbies than Jesus, or spend our money on worldly things, or look at filth on the internet, it’s rooted in some form of unbelief and the folly that accompanies it.

Therefore, Grace, consider the folly of the response of the Jews to the Son of God standing before them, recognize that it stemmed from their unbelief in the truths of God, and then aim your prayers directly and consistently at your own remaining unbelief and that of the people in your life, in order that they and we might live in the wisdom and abundance Jesus came to bring.

Again, it was the unbelief of the Jews that caused them to respond to Jesus as they did. And it was because the Jews persisted in unbelief, that they persisted in attempting to carry out the due penalty for one who falsely claims to be God (for blasphemy). Zealous for the law and incensed by all that Jesus said, the Jews picked up stones to stone Jesus (31).

Before they could launch the first stone, in a further attempt to reveal the folly of the Jews and help them to see the truth, Jesus asked, “32 … “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?”

We considered these “good works from the Father” last week (turned water into wine (2:11), miraculously healed an official’s son (4:43-54), healed a man crippled from birth (5:1-9), fed the 5,000+ (6:1-5), walked on water (6:16-25), healed a man born blind (9), and performed many other signs at that time as well (2:23, 3:2)).

Jesus’ point here is simple and familiar. “As you consider what to do with My words, consider the things you’ve seen Me do. I’ve made big claims to be sure, but to prove that they are from the Father, I’ve done marvelous works that could only come from someone who is one with the Father. You would do well to weigh the spectacular things you hear from Me against the equally spectacular things you see in Me. If I hadn’t done the things I’ve done, your skepticism and unbelief about the things I’ve said might be warranted, but if you can bring yourselves to believe your eyes, you ought to believe your ears too.”

There is a similar principle for you and I as well. We must preach the gospel to the world, but we must also live lives that testify to the truthfulness of what we teach. One of the means God uses to convince people of the truthfulness of the gospel is its transforming power in the lives of Christians. That’s what Jesus meant when He said, “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” Matthew (5:16). If you are going to proclaim the gospel’s power to forgive, free, and transform, it should be obvious that your message makes the most sense if your life is marked by the holiness, humility, freedom, courage, and love that comes from having been forgiven and accepted by God.

In the same way, who are you most likely to believe when they tell you of the effectiveness of a muscle building pill, someone who is puny or someone who is ripped? Or of a diet pill, someone who is fit or someone who is way over weight? Or of a golf coach, a scratch golfer or a 25 handicap? Or of a parenting book, someone whose kids are unusually well behaved or exceptionally disobedient?

Ultimately, it is the grace of God that opens the eyes of the spiritually blind. In that way, God is not somehow prevented from being able to save someone because of our hypocrisy, but Jesus’ example and our charge is clear. In our ministry, we are to call people to look at our lives as evidence of the truthfulness of our message.

Well, would this work on the Jews? Would Jesus recalling His good works convince the Jews to rethink their disbelief? Jesus’ good works only served to incense the Jews when He first performed them. Instead of standing in awe as they should have, they angrily accused Him of breaking the Sabbath when He healed the man born blind (in chapter 5), for instance. But would it land any differently this time around? Look at v.33 to find out.

“The Jews answered him, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.’”

Jesus’ point fell on deaf ears yet again.

Not yet ready to give up, however, Jesus changed His tactics a bit once again. As He often did, Jesus used the Jews’ own exegesis against them. Look at v.34.

34 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? 35 If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— 36 do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?

This needs a bit of explaining.

In v.34 Jesus quoted Psalm 82:6-7. In full, those two verses read,

6 I said, “You are gods,
    sons of the Most High, all of you;
7 nevertheless, like men you shall die,
    and fall like any prince.”

It was agreed upon by the Jews that this Psalm recalled God speaking to His people, most likely to the Israelites after having received the law from God, through Moses when he met with God on Mt. Siani. The idea that Jesus was trying to impress upon them is that God called the ordinary Israelites (Jews) (“them…to whom the word of God came”) “gods” and “sons of the Most High.”

Jesus took their interpretation of this Psalm and used it against them. If the Jews who were questioning Jesus understood that passage to teach that God Himself called “all of you” “gods,” then why would it be blasphemous for Jesus to refer to Himself as the Son of God, which is an even lesser claim? Jesus pressed His point even more in stating, this is “your law” and your interpretation of it. And we all know that the “Scripture cannot be broken.” In other words, if it was true then as you say, it is true today. If it wasn’t blasphemy for God to say it of His people then (“you are gods”), why would it be blasphemy for me to say something lesser today (“I am the Son of God)?

It’s not entirely clear if Jesus believed the Jewish interpretation of Psalm 82 or if He was just using it against them because that’s what they believed. What’s more, there were certainly some things Jesus said that would have been blasphemous if they were not true, even if this wasn’t one of them. Regardless, however, it seems that Jesus’ argument landed (if we are to read the switch of the Jews from stoning to arresting as a lessening of the sentence pronounced on Jesus).

Returning, then, to His previous argument, Jesus said, “37 If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; 38 but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Jesus effectively said to the Jews that even on their own terms, they were wrong to respond to Him as they did. And then He used that to point them back, once again, to His miracles—they show that my words are to be believed because they, like my works, are from the Father (who is in Me, and I am in Him).

One practical thing for us to see here, Grace Church, is that bad doctrine is bad. And one aspect of the badness of bad doctrine is that it always has holes. The reason the Jews could be tripped up doctrinally by Jesus is because their doctrine was off to begin with. And like all bad doctrine, theirs couldn’t consistently and comprehensively explain the world. They had wrongly concluded certain things about the Christ that prevented them from recognizing the Christ when He came.

It’s a silly example, but a long time ago, I had no idea what a hamster looked like. Therefore, when I saw my sister’s pet hamster scurrying around on the floor in our living room, I could only assume it was a mouse. I was a bit confused by how unelusive it was as I went after it, but since I had already (wrongly) concluded it was a mouse I wasn’t deterred from my quest to kill it.

In that way, one of the things I tell skeptics regularly is that Christianity is uniquely able to explain everything we experience in this life because it is uniquely true. Christianity is uniquely able to explain why hard things exist, why we have a sense of morality, why there are different kinds of things, where genuine meaning and purpose comes from, why we have longings for things we cannot see, and on and on.

There have been a number of alternative, competing worldviews that have gained a foothold and showed some measure of staying power over time. But every one of them has holes in it that will eventually be discovered. Atheism’s gaping hole is its complete inability to explain our innate sense of morality and meaning. The gaping hole in all other religions is their inability to offer a satisfying means of atonement. The gaping hole in the transgender movement is its inability to account for basic biology. The gaping hole in the sexual revolution is its attempt to suggest that there can be any legitimate constraints on desire. The gaping hole in modern notion of government as the solution to every problem is its observable inability to solve any problem.

The truth alone, which is given to us in God’s Word alone, because God alone is truth, has no holes.

Again, perhaps convinced, or at least tempered by Jesus’ exegetical argument, the Jews seem to have put their stones down and determined instead merely to arrest Jesus.

39 Again they sought to arrest him. “But,” as has been the case several times before, since His time still had not yet come, “[Jesus] escaped from their hands.

Jesus’ time was merely a couple of months away, but it was not yet. Therefore, as John has made clear over and over, since nothing can thwart the providence of God, Jesus was able walk away untouched by the ever-increasingly incensed Jewish leaders.

The glory of Jesus is beyond measure. Consider Jesus’ glory, Grace Church, and be amazed. If even a tiny fraction of John’s description of Jesus and Jesus’ claims about Himself are accurate, Jesus is more glorious than anyone or anything else we’ve ever seen. But then consider the destructive power of sin, such that it can blind us from that kind of glory. Learn from this the horrible nature and shocking power of sin. Sin is not to be taken lightly. It kills and destroys everyone who serves it. It cannot be tamed by anyone born of man. We are right to tremble at its devastating and universal effects. Once, and only once, we have truly considered the glory of Jesus and the horror of sin, can we begin to truly grasp the amazingness of the grace of God that can overcome that kind of sin and reconcile us to that kind of glory.

And it is for that reason that what we read in v.42 can be true.

40 He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained. 41 And many came to him. And they said, “John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true.” 42 And many believed in him there.

The Jews in Solomon’s Portico persisted in their unbelief because their sin had so thoroughly blinded them to the glory in front of them and the grace offered to them. But by the grace of God, the Jews in Batanea (“the place where John had been baptizing at first”) were given eyes to see and, therefore, “many believed in [Jesus] there.”

Once again, Grace, sin goes all the way down in us and destroys all of us. But the grace of God, which came in the person of Jesus Christ, goes deeper and heals more thoroughly still. There is no part of you that sin has not touched and will not eventually destroy, but there is also no part of you that the grace of God, won by Jesus, cannot reach and restore. This is the power of the cross. Awesome!

Once again, in this passage we’re given the story of another aspect of the glory of Jesus, the blinding power of sin, and the greater grace of God. As I mentioned in the beginning, my steady prayer throughout the week has been that God would be pleased to cause us to grow in amazement at the waves of the glories of Jesus that continue to break upon us in John’s Gospel. I’ve prayed as well that God would use this text to help us consider in greater measure the power of sin to so thoroughly blind and the boldness of Jesus to continue to proclaim the truth in the midst of such opposition.

I urge you, therefore to take these truths displayed in this passage and pray in greater earnestness for, and share the gospel in greater courage with, the non-Christians in your life. Don’t let up on your pursuit of taking in all the glories of Jesus or prayerfully sharing them with the world. Please feel the urgency to take this beyond basic agreement and vague, general application to memorizing specific glory-passages and praying for and sharing with specific people.

And finally, as you do these things, consider carefully your definition of ministry success. Do you have a category for ministry success looking like it did in Jesus’ life? If anyone’s ministry has ever been “successful,” it must have been Jesus’ ministry. And yet, the very Son of God, the very Christ we proclaim, “succeeded” in watching as most of the people He declared the good news to ultimately rejected Him. And in that way, have you considered the fact that ministry “success” is simply living consistently as a Christian, sharing the gospel in truth and love, and calling people to respond to it in faith? Live authentically, pray earnestly, share boldly, and rest thoroughly as you entrust the results to God.

John 10:22-30 At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. 24 So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”

This passage in John 10 records yet another encounter between Jesus and “the Jews”. In many of the previous encounters, Jesus said or did something that elicited a response from those who heard or saw Him. In this encounter, however, He was merely walking “in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon” (23) when the Jews confronted Him with a question of their own.

The result of their questioning, once again, was a back and forth between Jesus and the Jews. For His part, Jesus explained why the Jews should have believed Him, why they didn’t believe Him, and what was at stake because of it. For their part, as we’ll see next week, the Jews felt that Jesus gave them what they needed to condemn Him and so they tried to arrest and kill Him.

In all of this we learn a few more things about Jesus’ nature and are reminded of a few others. And on a practical level, we’re faced yet again with the exact same question as Jesus’ original hearers were: Do we believe Jesus or not? Do we accept His claim to be the Christ or don’t we? Will we follow Jesus or forsake Him?

The main point of it all is that Jesus has said and done more than enough to convince anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that He is the Christ and one with the Father. What’s more, all who turn to Him with God’s help will be rescued from sin and death and will be given blessings beyond measure. Let’s pray that it would be so.

The opening line of our passage sets the stage. John 7-9 is set during the Feast of Booths (Tabernacles). John 10:1-21 probably describes an event that took place sometime shortly after that Feast. And our passage for this morning, as John makes clear, took place during the “Feast of Dedication” (Hanukkah). The Feast of Booths is late September/mid-October and the Feast of Dedication is two months later in late November/early-December.

While the main literary role of John’s reference to the Feast is simply to establishing the timeline, his theological reason is much more important: to help us see that Jesus is the fulfillment of it! What, then, is the Feast of Dedication and what does it mean that Jesus fulfills it?

One commentator (Kruse, TNTC, 236-237) explains the Feast’s origins like this:

The Feast of Dedication is not one of the feasts prescribed by the Mosaic law. It celebrates an event that took place in intertestamental times [in the time between the OT and NT]. Following the victories of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, Greek culture and language were introduced to the subjugated nations, including Judea. After the death of Alexander this policy continued [through several different nations/rulers for several hundred years. Eventually, a Syrian leader, Antiochus IV, went a step too far for the Jews to take. He attempted to implement laws which meant]…that practices such as Sabbath observance and circumcision were prohibited, and the books of the Law were burnt. In 167 BC the temple in Jerusalem was desecrated by offering swine’s flesh on the altar, and Jewish people were required to offer sacrifices to pagan deities. This led pious Jews to revolt against Antiochus IV, a revolt led by [Judas Maccabeus (“Hammer”)]. They fled to the mountains, from whence they conducted guerilla warfare…Their campaign was crowned with success, and in 164 BC the temple was rededicated to the worship of Yahweh…the Feast of Dedication was modeled on the Feast of Tabernacles…It lasted for eight days, involved the carrying of palm fronds and beautiful branches, and eventually included singing of the Hallel (Psalms 113-118). According to the Talmud, lamps were lit in the people’s homes as well as in the temple [which is why it is sometimes called the “Festival of Lights”].

There are three main elements of this Feast, and Jesus is the fulfillment of them all. The Feast of Dedication has a hero, a deliverance, and a symbol. Judas Maccabeus was the hero, successful guerilla warfare was the means of their deliverance and recapturing of the temple, and light was the symbol of remembrance.

Jesus, of course, is the true hero. Every godly leader and every significant victory of the Jews was a pointer to the greater leadership and victory of Jesus. Jesus is the deliverance and the temple. He would lay down His life, His Body, the True Temple, so that none might be lost and God might dwell with all, and all with God. And Jesus is the light of the world, the light that overcomes darkness.

This realization ought to do two main things for us. First, it ought to stir us to worship. Jesus’ glory is such that all history really is His story. God, the Father, in His infinite wisdom and goodness was driving all things, since the beginning of creation, to Jesus, His Son. If we’re able to even begin to get our heads around the fact that every earthly victory experienced by God’s people, as staggering and freeing as they were on their own, was a mere signpost, pointing to the immeasurably superior victory that Jesus would win for His people, then we can begin to see the rightness and eternally satisfying goodness of worshiping Jesus.

The second thing that it ought to do, then, is to make clearer still the staggering power of the sinfulness of sin. When we close our eyes in a dark room, the darkness seems nearly complete. If we close our eyes in a room with the lights on, there’s usually a bit of light that gets through. And if we stand outside on a cloudless day with our face turned toward the sun, it doesn’t matter how tightly we clench our eyes, it’s impossible to block out all the light. Since Jesus’ glory shines infinitely brighter than the brightest star in the sky, we’re right to marvel at sin’s power to block it all out, such that the Jews standing in front of Jesus (and millions around the world today) could not (and cannot) see Jesus’ glory through the darkness.

John has made a point of showing Jesus at the different feasts of the Jews. A significant reason for that is to show his readers that they all point to Jesus, that Jesus is the fulfillment of them all. And in that, John was further highlighting the folly of the Jews for failing to receive Jesus as the Christ.

With that, let’s get to the question of the Jews that set this whole exchange in motion during the Feast of Dedication.

On the surface, it seems as if the Jews were simply seeking clarity from Jesus, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly” (24). That’s a good question and a reasonable request. If Jesus is the Christ, that means a whole lot of things. What’s more, the main purpose of John’s Gospel is to convince his readers that Jesus is the Christ. Along those lines, let me urge you yet again to believe in Jesus as the Christ. Listen to Jesus’ words, consider His glory, learn from the hardness of hearts among the Jews and receive Him as the Christ today. This is not some throwaway, 2,000-year-old cult belief. Jesus is the Christ and that means more than we can possibly imagine (some of which we’ll come to shortly). And because of that, as the Jews (seemingly) requested, hearing Jesus speak plainly on the matter seems entirely relevant and thoroughly significant.

As has often been the case throughout John’s Gospel, however, things are often different than they first appear. As the rest of the passage makes clear, the Jews were not really interested in gaining clarity concerning Jesus’ claims. This was not a matter of sincere children of the promise eager to receive Jesus as the promised Christ. Instead, it was another attempt to get Jesus to publically admit to something with which they could condemn Him.

Surely aware of their treachery, as He always was, the only question was how Jesus would respond to it. Let’s consider the several layers of what He said.

Jesus’ immediate reply was a mild rebuke, “25 Jesus answered them, “I told you…”.

When I first read this passage as I was preparing to preach on it, I remember thinking, “But did He?” Had Jesus plainly and explicitly said “yes” to the question of whether or not He is the Christ? He did to the Samaritan woman in chapter 4, but had He ever done so among the Jews? I found a helpful summary of Jesus’ most staggering claims (in 1-10:21). Listen carefully to see if you hear a Christ-claim among them (Kruse, TNTC, 238).

He told Nicodemus… that he was the Son of Man who came down from heaven (3:13-14). Following the healing of the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda Jesus told ‘the Jews’ the works he did were the works of his Father…(5:16-18). Jesus told them God had entrusted all judgment to him and granted him to have life in himself so that he could raise the dead, both of which are divine prerogatives (5:22, 24-26). During the Feast of Tabernacles he told ‘the Jews’ that he knew God and had been sent by God (7:28-29). He also publicly invited those who were thirsty to come to him and drink, promising to give them the streams of living water of which the Scriptures spoke (7:37-38). He told ‘the Jews’ that before Abraham was born I am’ (8:58), appropriating for himself the divine name. [And] He presented himself as the good shepherd (11, 14), identifying himself with God who, in the OT, is the shepherd of Israel.

Again, those are some spectacular claims and they typically elicited significant responses. But, as you probably noticed, the short answer to my initial question is “no”. Jesus hadn’t yet explicitly claimed to be the Christ among the Jews. Of course, Jesus wasn’t lying when He said “I told you…”. His main point was that He’d told them enough about who He really was such that if they didn’t believe what He’d already said, speaking plainly about this wouldn’t make any difference.

What’s more, Jesus went on to explain that He’d not only spoken plainly about who He was, but He also acted plainly. “25 The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me…”. He’d turned water into wine in a very public way and performed many other signs at that time as well (2:11, 2:23, 3:2). He’d miraculously healed an official’s son (4:43-54), He’d healed a man crippled from birth (5:1-9), He’d fed 5,000+ people from a few loaves of bread and fish (6:1-5), He’d walked on water (6:16-25), and He’d publically healed a man born blind (9).

In other words, Jesus was telling the Jews that He’d already done and said more than enough to make it clear who He was, such that doing or saying something even more plainly wasn’t the real issue. Increased clarity from Jesus was not what was keeping the Jews from believing.

We know that’s true and what Jesus meant when we consider the whole of v.25, “25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me.” I’ve said and done more than enough already, but you still don’t believe. Tragically, persistence in unbelief is what marked most of the Jews of Jesus’ day.

Again, in this, we see another example of the sinfulness of sin. Sin’s death and blindness is so complete that the very image of God standing in front of them, talking to them, sharing the mind of God, and performing the works of God (on top of being the true fulfillment of the Feast of Dedication) was not enough to overcome it.

Before we look at what Jesus said is at stake in accepting or rejecting Him as the Christ, consider the fact that once again, embedded in Jesus’ words is the answer to an implied question—why, in light of who Jesus was, what He said and did, in light of His unsurpassed glory, did the Jews still refuse to accept Him as the Christ? Why did they continue in their unbelief? Why were they not able to overcome sin’s grip?

25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. … 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep… And in v.29 we see that the sheep are those whom [the] Father…has given… to [Jesus].

The explicitly stated reasons for the Jew’s persistent unbelief (this is far from the first time Jesus gave this kind of answer) were twofold. First, Jesus said they did not believe because they were not among Jesus’ sheep. And second, Jesus said that they were not among His sheep because they had not been given to Him by the Father. There’s work to be done to explain exactly what this means and doesn’t mean, but I think we should all be able to agree on two things from this passage in this regard.

      or

The debates surrounding these truths within the Church seem to come almost exclusively from an attempt to deny or overemphasize one of them. The thing for us to see is that the whatever the source of the tension we feel when we face these truths, it is entirely unbiblical. They are continually put right next to each other in the Bible without explanation or apology.

Among the clearest examples for me has always been Philippians 2:12-13. In it, Paul commands his readers to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” You are responsible to work out your salvation. Do it. Follow God. Your faith hangs in the balance. But without pause or blush, the sentence continues, “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” You do it because if you don’t, you will die in your sin, but if you do it, it, it will be according to God’s will, work, and pleasure.

Grace, both truths (God is sovereign and we are responsible) are simply, gloriously, and simultaneously true. Any tension is man-made, not God made. Often, they are presented as at-odds with one another when people debate the extent of God’s sovereignty over salvation, but Scripture consistently presents them as inseparably connected and entirely compatible.

We must consider all of these elements of the disbelief of the Jews when we share the gospel with our friends and neighbors today. We must understand that sin’s power to blind is complete, that they need God’s grace to overcome it, and that they must choose to believe in Jesus. We can’t miss or ignore any of those elements when we evangelize the unbelievers in our lives. And taking them into account means at least three things. It means that we must share the gospel (for no one can be saved apart from it), we must share in prayer (for we are powerless to save anyone on our own), and we must entrust the results to God (for His grace is sufficient).

In calling the Jews to believe in Him, Jesus explained that He’d already told them and shown them enough to prove that they should. He also explained why they couldn’t hear or see Him as they should. From there, in vs.27-29, Jesus continued His reply to the Jews by offering a handful of blessings that come with believing in Him. I’ve told you plainly, I’ve shown you plainly, I’ve explained the problem plainly, and now I’ll state the rewards plainly.

What’s at stake in believing in Jesus? Positively, it’s the ability to hear Jesus’ voice, be known by Him, follow Him, and receive eternal life and security from Him. That’s awesome!

Negatively, what’s at stake is stated explicitly elsewhere (3:18), but only implied here. Those who reject Jesus as the Christ remain condemned, at enmity with God, blind to the things of God, and separated from the pleasure of God. Clearly, there’s a lot at stake. Consider these things carefully, Grace.

Finally, Jesus responded to the question and request/demand of the Jews, not by doing what they asked, but by being clear on something just as significant. Rather than say plainly that He is the Christ, Jesus said, “30 I and the Father are one.”

What, exactly and precisely this means has been the topic of countless prayers, study, and writing for two thousand years. Perhaps the most helpful formulation for right now is the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s answer to the question of “How many persons are there in the godhead?”.

There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.

Jesus declared here something the Jews couldn’t possibly have fathomed previously. Jesus claimed to be one with the Father in power, glory, and substance. God is one in essence, and three in person, and Jesus is one of the persons of the godhead.

That the Jews understood at least the main point of what Jesus was saying is evidenced by the fact that, as we’ll see next week, the Jews responded by picking up stones to stone Him (31).

And so, Grace Church, consider Jesus’ words and believe in Him. Consider Jesus’ works and believe in Him. Consider what’s at stake in belief and disbelief and believe in Him. Believe in Jesus and allow that belief to transform every single though, feeling, and action of your life. Believe in Jesus and take that belief into the world, sharing the love of God with the world, calling the world to repentance, sharing with the world what it means to live abundantly in every facet, and bringing hope for this life and the next to the world. That’s what Jesus was after in His ministry and in this passage, and it is what He commissioned us to be after as well. Soli Deo Gloria.

1 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. 2 But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5 A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” 6 This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

7 So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. 11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

This morning will be our third week in this passage. On the first week my aim was to help you understand and respond to these verses as John’s first readers would have understood and sought to apply them. The second week, last week, we considered what Jesus meant by the abundant life He came to bring (v.10).

This week, we’re going to look at this passage from another angle still. We’re going to consider its implications for leadership within the local church today. The main question I mean to answer is: What does this passage teach us about how God intends Grace Church to be led. While it might not be immediately obvious that this exchange between Jesus and the Jews is intended to answer that question, I hope to help you see that it is and that it is good news indeed.

(Let me say one more thing before I pray. Much of this sermon is shaped by Timothy Witmer’s book, “The Shepherd Leader.” I’ve taught on that book many times in many contexts. Insodoing, I’ve made all kinds of notes and changes to my notes. It was from them (not the book itself) that I turned for help in this sermon. I say that mainly because at this point I’m not sure how much is mine and how much is Witmer’s. I haven’t knowingly quoted anything from his book, but I’m confident that many of the ideas and at least some of the structure is his.)

There’s a lot of disagreement and confusion today about what constitutes good leadership. You’d have to have your head buried pretty deeply in the sand not to hear the constant buzz about political and economic leadership. Everyone seems to be full of confidence in their assessment of what’s wrong with a leader, but there doesn’t seem to be any clear, agreed upon standard for what makes a good leader.

Is it any different in the Church? If I were to ask you to describe your understanding of God’s design for church leadership, what would you say? What constitutes good or bad leadership within a church? What does God mean leaders to do (or not do)? What’s the goal of church leadership and how do we know these things? How confident are you in your answers to those questions and how consistent do you think they’d be throughout the people in this room right now?

If we are to begin to understand John 10, its description of Jesus’ leadership of His people, its implications for leadership within the Church today, and how all of that ties into the rest of the biblical passages on church leadership, then we need to go back to Genesis. Beginning there, we’ll do a quick flyover of the rest of the Bible as well in order to get our heads around the backdrop for Jesus’ statements in our passage and beyond.

The first thing to see in our journey back is that God’s leadership of His people has always been described as shepherd-leadership.

For instance, in Genesis 48(:15), in blessing his son, Joseph, Jacob calls on the name of the Lord and insodoing refers to Him as, “the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day.” In this, we see that Jacob understood God’s leadership to have always been shepherd-like.

Likewise, in Psalm 23 we read the familiar words, “The LORD is my shepherd…” Because this is most often read in times of suffering (and it certainly has implications for suffering saints), it can be easy to miss the heart of the passage: God leads and comforts His people like the very best shepherd does his sheep.

Psalm 80 begins, “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock!”

Isaiah 40:10-11 says, “Behold, the Lord GOD … 11 will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.”

As I’ve tried to help you see many times over the years, the things and relationships God created and established are not random. Why did God design sheep as He did (needy, vulnerable, and prone to wander)? He did so to teach us a bit about ourselves and in order to make room for the role of a shepherd in our minds. And why did He do that? He did so, in large measure, to give us clear and visible categories for His own nature and leadership of His people.

Understanding Jesus’ description of His leadership in John 10 and its implications for us today begins with the fact that He was continuing something God had established from the beginning—good leadership is shepherd leadership.

If that’s all we had, it would help us better understand what Jesus meant, but it wouldn’t help us much in the way of understanding what it means for leadership within the Church today. But, God’s Word doesn’t merely describe God’s leadership as shepherd leadership. It also describes God’s appointed leaders as shepherd leaders as well.

In Psalm 77:20 (also Isaiah 63:11) we read, “You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” God shepherded His people through the shepherd leadership of men like Moses and Aaron.

Likewise, in Psalm 78:70-72 (also 2 Samuel 5:2) we read, “He chose David his servant and took him from the sheepfolds; 71 from following the nursing ewes he brought him to shepherd Jacob his people, Israel his inheritance. 72 With upright heart he shepherded them and guided them with his skillful hand.” David too is called a shepherd of the people of God.

2 Samuel 7:7 says, “In all places where I have moved with all the people of Israel, did I speak a word with any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel…”. Here, the leadership of Israel’s judges is referred to as shepherding.

And in the most sweeping terms yet, in Ezekiel 34:2-5, God chastised the collective leaders of Israel for their failure to shepherd God’s people as God did and commanded. “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? 3 You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. 4 The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. 5 So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts.”

Grace, do not miss the fact that in His infinite wisdom, God determined to provide a good deal of His shepherding care to His people through human shepherd leaders. In addition, don’t miss the fact that God chose to shepherd His people through His people knowing that His appointed shepherd leaders were sinners. Moses disobeyed God and was prevented from entering the promised land. David committed adultery and lost a son because of it. And the sin and fate of many of the rest of Israel’s leaders is summed up well in the Ezekiel 34 passage.

Again, if that were all we had, we’d be helped indeed in our understanding and application of John 10. But again, that’s not all we have. Not only did God provide direct shepherding care to His sheep, and not only did God provide indirect shepherding care through fallen human shepherds, but God also promised to provide a different kind of shepherd, One who would perfectly shepherd His people.

In the midst of rebuking Israel’s leaders for their treacherous shepherding (even as Jesus did in our passage for this morning), in Ezekiel 34:22-23 we read of God’s promise that “I will rescue my flock; they shall no longer be a prey. And I will judge between sheep and sheep. 23 And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.” Jeremiah 23(:5-6) promises something very similar.

The key for us to see here, in case it isn’t already obvious, is that Ezekiel prophesied well after King David had reigned and died. That means, of course, that Ezekiel wasn’t prophesying about how much better David’s shepherding would be when he did come in the future. Instead, Ezekiel was looking back on David’s good shepherding of God’s people, to heights of prosperity they’d never known before or since, and promising hat God would send an even greater shepherd than David from the line of David to perfectly care for His sheep—to rescue them and lead them as no human shepherd had been able to do.

Now things are starting to become a bit clearer. Grace, do you see it?! In John 10:11 (“I am the good shepherd”), Jesus was claiming to be the fulfillment of Ezekiel 34:22-24. Jesus was the perfect shepherd from David’s line that God promised to send.

All by itself that has significant implications for the Church today. Jesus did indeed lay his life down to “rescue [God’s] flock,” so we can be saved. And He did indeed live and lead perfectly according to God’s perfect plan. Jesus came as the good shepherd and He promised to lead us from heaven until He returns. What more do we need? What more would we want? And yet, once again, there’s more.

Just as God’s shepherding care didn’t end with Himself in the OT times, neither does it end with Jesus in NT times. Jesus commissioned His Apostles to shepherd others as He had shepherded them. It is for that reason that we read Jesus’ words in Matthew 10:6 charging the Twelve to “Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Likewise, at the end of John’s Gospel we find the foundation for what was to come. John 21:15-17 “…Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 […and again,] “Tend my sheep.” 17 …[and again,] “Feed my sheep.”

The heart of what it meant for Jesus’ apostles to carry out the mission Jesus gave them was to call Jesus’ sheep and shepherd them as they came; to be good shepherds of Jesus’ flock. Jesus did not merely shepherd the early Church from heaven, He continued to do so through human shepherds on earth.

But Grace, one more time, God’s shepherding of His people, with His people, didn’t end there either. The disciples and apostles were not the last shepherds among God’s people. God has given the Church, from the time of the end of the apostolic age, through today, and until Christ returns, the office of elder to carry on His shepherding care for His people.

In Acts 20:28 Paul commanded certain Ephesian elders (20:17) to, “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.”

Likewise, in 1 Peter 5:1-2, Peter commanded, “So I exhort the elders among you… 2 shepherd the flock of God that is among you…

And in Hebrews 13:17 we see this again, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.” God’s undershepherds are charged to keep watch over the souls of God’s people as good shepherds.

From God Himself directly, to God through various sinful, inadequate humans, to Jesus, the promised Good Shepherd, to Jesus’ disciples and apostles, to the office of elder within the Church today, God has always cared for His people as a shepherd and provided a significant measure of that care through human shepherds.

All that sets us up a lot better to consider what Jesus’ teaching in John 10 meant on a practical level; both for His shepherding and ours. As Witmer points out in the book I referenced at the beginning, the primary shepherding functions that God performs for His people and has called His leaders to perform for His people on His behalf, are knowing, leading, feeding, and protecting. The rest of the Bible tells us a lot more about each of those areas of shepherding, but John 10 gives us a good start.

For a shepherd to tend his sheep, he needs to know which sheep are his and his sheep need to know he is their shepherd. We see this plainly in vs.3-4, “To [the shepherd] the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name…[and] the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.”

In v.14 we find the same thing, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.”

And again in v.16 we read, “And I [Jesus] have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.”

On a practical level, then, as elders, it is our job to keep a careful watch on our membership. We are charged to do our best to bring before you only those who give a credible profession of faith for membership and to seek to remove those who no longer do so from membership.

And on a more personal level, it means knowing each of you as well as possible. It means knowing who you are living life alongside of you well enough to know your joys and struggles in the Lord. It means understanding your life and family and job and friends and gifts and ministry enough to pray for you in specific and heart-felt ways. And it means allowing you to know us in those ways as well.

This is why everyone of you who are members or have been at Grace for a while are put in a shepherd group which is overseen by an elder who is especially charged to know you well. It’s impossible to shepherd well if we don’t know who the genuine sheep of God are and what you are going through in life and ministry.

Second, we see in this passage that a good shepherd, the Good Shepherd, not only knows who His sheep are, but also leads them to where they need to be for fullness of life. Look again at vs.3-4.

“3 …. The sheep hear [their shepherd’s] voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.” And not only do they know His voice, but they listen to His voice when He calls and leads (v.16).

Jesus tells and shows us where to go for the most satisfying meals, for the best drink, and for the safest places to rest. He loves us and goes before us everywhere the Father calls. His words are perfect and sufficient and His example is complete.

In a similar way, godly elders are charged to lead by example in godliness and ministry. Godly leaders, like a good shepherd, have God’s authority to call God’s people to God’s will for God’s glory and your good. It is right for us to set a vision for Grace Church as God’s Word charges and God’s Spirit burdens. There is a unique way that our shepherding work is meant to set the direction, God’s direction, for Grace Church.

This is why we work hard to be clear on issues like eldership, deaconship, membership, discipleship, ministry to kids, missions, women’s ministry, men’s ministry, baptism, and worship (those are just some of the areas we’ve wrestled through over the past years).

Again, we really are charged by God to lead, with real authority from God, but we are to do so for your good and God’s glory, not our own selfish gain. The 1 Peter passage I read from earlier finishes like this:

1 Peter 5:1-3 So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: 2 shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; 3 not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.

The next thing we see in John 10 in the way of functioning as a good shepherd is that He feeds the sheep. He makes sure they are nourished and well fed.

9 I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.

Jesus feeds His people with the best food. His people will never lack anything we truly need. He feeds His people with more even than bread. He feeds His people with His Word and even with His own flesh and blood as we saw in chapter 6; that is, He gives all of Himself to us to be satisfied in forever!

Again, as elders under Jesus we too are charged to feed you all as shepherds. The primary way we do that is through teaching and preaching. And the primary thing we teach and preach on is the Word of God. Feeding you anything else may satisfy on some level, momentarily, but God’s word alone satisfies fully and forever. This is why we are so careful to in choosing songs, curriculum, books, and resources. This is why the main type of preaching you hear at Grace is expositional—book by book and verse by verse through the Bible. And this is why we insist on counseling you through your decisions and hardships from God’s Word, and encourage you to do the same for one another. Other resources may have some value, but only insofar as they are consistent with the Word of God.

Finally, perhaps surprisingly, the aspect of Jesus’ shepherding that gets the most attention in John 10 is His protection of His sheep. He begins by warning of the dangers of false shepherds, those who would only pretend to know, lead, feed, and protect for the good of the sheep.

1 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.

5 A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”

8 All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them.

10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

In contrast, however, Jesus truly protects His sheep from wolves, robbers, strangers, thieves, and anything else that would come to kill and destroy.

9 I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved …

10 I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

15 …and I lay down my life for the sheep.

17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again.

At the cost of His own life, Jesus protected His sheep. He did so ultimately by teaching us truth, protecting us from lies, and then dying to pay for our sins, protecting us from sin’s death.

In the same way, as elders, we are charged to protect. On the highest level we protect you all from false doctrine and division. We protect from false converts or malicious sheep gaining a foothold in membership or leadership.

And on a more personal level, we work hard to protect you from your own sin and folly. We mean to walk alongside you closely enough to know when you stray, lovingly enough that you want us there, wisely enough that we have something to offer, and consistently enough to walk with you all the way to restoration. Our protection is always first in prayer and then in loving words of correction and calling you back onto God’s path.

We know that we don’t do all of these things perfectly, but so did God when He called us. On our best days, we echo Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11:1 where he called his readers to follow him as he followed Christ. On most days it is our joy to point you to Jesus and walk with you toward Him, come what may. And when we act in ways that are less than good-shepherdly, we mean to be quick to model humility, love for the wounds of a friend, and swift repentance.

Having considered what all of this means for leadership within the church, and particularly the kind of leadership elders are called to, I’d like to close with a few simple words on what all of that means for all of you. In other words, we’re right to ask, given what makes for a good shepherd leader, what are the implications for the sheep. There are many implications, but I want to focus on one (which is actually four) in particular.

And here it is: Wherever you find a command for someone toward you, you have also found a command for you. If someone is commanded to love you, you are implicitly commanded to accept love from that person. If someone is commanded to confess their sins to you, you are implicitly commanded to prayerfully listen and point them to the gospel. And if elders are commanded to know, lead, feed, and protect you, you are commanded to be known, be led, be fed, and be protected.

Grace, on the most basic level, prioritize becoming a member and functioning as one. Be consistent and active in your participation. DGs, more even than giving you new information, are intended to help you be known. On a deeper level still, be honest. Don’t keep your joys or struggles or decisions to yourself. Don’t walk in secret sin. Don’t be slow to share your needs. Make your prayer requests known. Be quick to invite us into your hobbies, work, families, and lives. Help us to know you so we can best shepherd you, for God’s glory and your good.

Everyone is a leader in some sense. And we need your input to be the best leaders we can be. At the same time, as we’ve seen, God has charged elders with a particular kind of leadership, which means that you are charged with a particular kind of followership. Practically, be in prayer for us to lead in God’s ways and for God’s purposes and for yourself to gladly come under that leadership. Ask good questions, share good insight, and then be good followers. Be eager to be led by us and make it easy for us to lead, not because we are perfect, but because it is God’s design. Ask God to give you a disposition of eagerness to follow us was we follow Jesus.

Listen carefully as one of us exposits God’s Word each week. That means being here each week and working to grow to be an expositional listener. Prepare well to listen as carefully as possible and apply as quickly as possible whenever the Word of God is preached. Likewise, make it a priority to take in the teaching we offer here. We’re careful to give you the best cuts of meat and so you would do well to avail yourselves of it when it’s offered. Come to Berea and continue pressing in on sound doctrine throughout the week. Make G2g a priority to better learn how to love and lead your family. Study on your own and humbly consider what you find in light of what we share. Be eager to have a bent toward trusting God and therein trusting us to give you good meals. I’m so thankful that our church is so marked by this.

Finally, sheep are vulnerable and need protection. Make it easy for us to protect you. Be eager to share with us the books and music and theological resources you’re taking in. Let us help you learn to discern between good and bad doctrine. It’s our joy to help you understand what you’re dealing with and how to best make use of it. Consider carefully the documents we put out to clarify certain doctrines and practices for Grace Church. Be grateful for the care we put into selecting songs and books and resources. We are enthusiastically committed to guarding the purity and unity of Grace Church. Work hard alongside us to help us do that well.

Again, Grace Church, this is God’s design for all our good. God has shepherded His people from the beginning and often through His people. Jesus modeled shepherd leadership perfectly and according to His sovereign grace and wisdom, commissioned apostles and then elders to shepherd His flock in kind. He did so not because He needed our help or because we have anything good in us that He didn’t give to us. He did so because He loves us, means to teach us humility, and is immeasurably kind to invite us into His saving and sanctifying work. None of us have led or followed perfectly which is why He laid down His life for us. And it is also why He sent His Spirit to empower us for all that He requires of us. Let us thank God, therefore, for being the Good Shepherd, for providing human shepherds as one means of caring well for us, and for granting us the privilege of being known, led, fed, and protected in all the ways we need.