Good morning, brothers and sisters.
I would like to read a verse before we begin. It is in Exodus 33, verse 18. This is Moses speaking:
“Show me, I pray thee, thy glory.”
Then, in John 12:20-21:
Now there were certain Greeks among those that went up to worship at the feast:
these therefore came to Philip, who was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus.
Let us pray.
Father, this is our request for today: we pray that we would see Jesus, that You would show us Him. Lord, I pray that Your Word would come out unadulterated, that there would be no blockage from what Your Word says about Your beloved Son.
Open up the Word to us in such a way that an explanation or a picture is not what is needed. What is needed is You opening our eyes to see Your Son.
Lord, that is our request. And so we ask You, Holy Spirit, to open the Word to us and to bear witness of Your Son, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
As you can see, my topic—or the thing that has been on my heart—is the Gospel of John. After I shared last time, I was wondering, “Lord, what do You want? Where should we go?”
I always have things that I would like to do. I would like to teach out of Genesis, but Jerry is doing it. There are lots of things I would like to do, but this had come across my heart.
Then, at the conference, one of the things that was brought up was about seeing the Lord—even seeing the Lord for the first time. Some of the questions asked there were, “Do you remember the first time you saw?”
It made me think about how much the Lord wants us to see. What better way to give Him a vehicle to show us than to open His Word and ask Him to show us?
We can be as bold as Moses, who could say to God, “Let me see Your glory.” God did not upbraid him and say, “You do not know who you are.” God let him see.
That is my prayer. My prayer is that, in going through the Gospel of John, the Lord would reveal His Son. Not that He would show us what to do, or who we are, or things like that; but, more than anything, that we would see His Son.
Because it is only when we see the Son that our hearts can be captured and we can become transformed. We can sing songs, but real worship comes from a heart that is able to behold Him.
The Lord is looking for worshipers like that. That is what it says in this Gospel.
I am not going to teach the whole book today, okay? But I want to look at it as an introduction. We will read some Scripture from it, but I am not going to give much of an introduction about John or what is in the book itself.
I will only say that the one who wrote it, John, was one of the twelve disciples. He tells us in his first letter, 1 John, that he saw Him and handled Him.
That is what I pray the Lord would show us: show us what John saw and handled, so that we also can see and handle the same, and have fellowship.
I think, more than anything in the world—more than anything in heaven—God wants to reveal Himself to us, especially in these days, when we are so apt to run off and become caught up in the whirlwind that is our life today.
But we want to behold Him.
What is the purpose of the Gospel of John? John states his purpose very succinctly in John 20:30-31:
Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book:
but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
and that believing ye may have life in His name.
That is the purpose for his writing this. He wants us to know.
For the introduction to this whole Gospel, let us read the first eighteen verses of John 1.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through Him; and without Him was not anything made that hath been made.
In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not.There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John.
The same came for witness, that he might bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him.
He was not the light, but came that he might bear witness of the light.
There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world knew Him not.
He came unto His own, and they that were His own received Him not.
But as many as received Him, to them gave He the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on His name:
who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us—and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father—full of grace and truth.
John beareth witness of Him, and crieth, saying, This was He of whom I said, He that cometh after me is become before me: for He was before me.
For of His fullness we all received, and grace for grace.
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.
I have often wondered why people suggest that unbelievers read the Gospel of John. Personally, I think it is the hardest one of the Gospels. I can follow a story—I can follow the birth to the end—but John seems so mystical.
There are so many statements in it where you are going, “What does he mean?” Why would you want to give that to an unbeliever? Why not start them off with, “Jesus was born of the virgin,” and start there?
But Dana said something that was really interesting and really stopped me: it is because John shows Jesus for Who He is. Not that the other Gospels do not show Him for Who He is, but this takes it to a whole other sphere.
The other Gospels were written earlier. This is the last Gospel written. Some people think it was written sometime between AD 75 and AD 95.
Here are our introductory verses, but this is what we are going to see. I am not going to cover every verse, but I am going to cover the things that I think really show us what we want to see.
There is so much in here. When you start studying something like this and looking at it, it is just so immense. How can I pretend to know some of this stuff? “The life was the light of men”—it is so immense.
I can only give you what has been made real to me. I cannot give you an exegesis on some of these things. I love Sproul’s definition: exegesis can become “exit Jesus,” so we have to be careful.
Verses 1 through 4 speak about the person of Christ. Then we are going to see the method of revelation that Christ chooses. Then we are going to see that revelation. Finally, as a good teacher, we must apply it.
Right from the beginning, this Gospel is different. Matthew starts out giving a genealogy. Luke starts out giving a story about John the Baptist’s birth. Mark starts out writing about service.
But this Gospel starts out so differently. It starts with eternity. I do not know how to describe eternity. All I know is that eternity is vast. It is big.
If you have ever been up in the mountains and looked at the stars, it is like time stands still. In California, we have the Sierra Nevada. We used to backpack up there, put out our sleeping bags, and, when night came, just gaze at the heavens and see all the stars.
It is like there was no time. It is like you are gazing into eternity. It is so vast, so measureless.
That is where this Gospel starts. This Gospel starts in eternity. In other words, it is not about history; it is about eternity. It starts with God in eternity.
I cannot explain to you how this is. All I can say is that this is what it says: “He was in the beginning.”
He was in the beginning. Before all things were created, He was there. Before there was a Mary or Joseph, He was there. Before there was an Abraham or a Noah, He was there. Before there was an Adam, He was there. Before there was light, He was there.
This is Him. He is the Eternal One.
Sometimes, I think we have gotten caught in a place where our Jesus—the Jesus we know—we have made Him small. I am not even going to say “condensed,” because that is not a good word. But He is small.
I am going to show you three pictures. You are going to say, “What the heck does this have to do with anything?” Just bear with me, okay?
This is a picture of Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach. This is where my brother and I used to go body surfing. The beach is shaped like a crescent and is maybe two or three hundred yards long. It is very nice looking, very pretty. California is pretty; we have mountains and beaches.
Now, you can say, “Well, that is the beach.” If I went there, I would say, “That is the beach.” But if we take it to a bigger thing, that picture is located at Laguna Beach.
But if we take it even farther, we can say that if I were standing in that water, I would not just be standing at that little beach. I would be standing in this big ocean.
The Pacific Ocean is the biggest ocean in the world.
Sometimes, when we are looking at the Lord, we look at Jesus and see Him as Jesus of Nazareth. Or we see Him only in all His humanity. When we think of Christ, we think of Him as human.
We know that He is the Messiah and God, but what we see is only the human part of Him. We see Him walking the earth. That is what I mean by the human part.
If we take it out a little farther, we can see what God has done with Him. He is the Lamb of God. He is the Messiah. Sometimes that is where we stop. Our sight of Him stops that far. It stops at that map.
We say, “Okay, we cannot go any further.” But because we cannot go any farther, does that mean that God is not as great? No. In reality, He is great. We just have not seen how great He is.
If there is a riptide in the Pacific Ocean, you might think, “I will just dig in my toes. It is no big problem.” But if you think, “Oh my gosh, I am in the biggest ocean in the world; it is going to suck me right in,” there is a whole bigger idea of it, isn’t there?
It is an awesome thing that you are in. We use the word awesome so much that we have dumbed it down, but that is what He is. He is awesome in the magnitude of His being.
I cannot describe it. I have no words for it.
But John says He was in eternity, and eternity was in Him. That is how great He is.
John shows us Jesus as God, and the emphasis in his Gospel is that He is God. That is another word we have done something with, so that it has lost its true meaning.
Brother and sister, we are so familiar with the incarnate One, but not with the eternal One. John is here to say that the incarnate One is the eternal One.
That is the crux of his message. He is saying, “If you can see this, and everything else points to this, you will behold Him.” That is what we want to see.
God is on a whole different level than this earthly plane we walk on. To see Him merely as the One Who walked the earth does not do Him justice. It does not give Him His due, because He is more than the One Who just walked the earth.
He is greater—if you can believe that—than the One Who just walked the earth.
What does this tell us about the person of Christ? He is eternal. He is eternal in His nature. He has no beginning, and He has no end.
He is today. He is tomorrow. He is yesterday. He is forever. No beginning, no end—that is Him. He is eternal.
He is God. How can I comment on these things? This is what is. There is nothing I can say that can make it more real. You have to understand: this is it. This is Who He is.
He is the agent of creation. Think of Proverbs 8:27-30. It speaks about wisdom being present in creation. It is a picture of Christ and His part in creating the world. He is the agent of creation.
Life is in Him. We can say that He is the source of life.
The Greek word zoe means life, but it means more than that. Its real definition is life with no death in it. To me, that is a really interesting definition: life with no death in it.
The way we know life is that, basically, we are going to die—unless the Lord comes back. Our life is punctuated with death.
But what is death? What makes death death is separation from God. His life has no separation from God in it.
That is a mind-blower. Because of the Fall, we were separated from God. We were cut off from life. When we come to the Lord, we are reunited with this life that cannot be separated from God.
What does Paul say in Romans 8? Neither death nor life, nor things created—nothing can separate us from the love of God. We now have this life that cannot be separated. There is no death in it.
That is an incredible statement to think about.
His method of revelation—what is it? In John 1:14, it says, “And the Word became flesh.”
We know that the Word is God. I am not going to get into what logos is, but a logo represents what you see. When you see the Coca-Cola label, it represents the company of Coca-Cola. When you see Jesus, He represents God.
“The Word became flesh.” Some of you might say, “That is not Jesus.” Am I right? But do we know what He looks like? We do not, do we?
We have had artistic renditions that have put in our minds what He looks like, and so we reject anything different. It is the same way with the world. When they come to see the Lord in the flesh, they say, “No,” because it does not fit their interpretation of Jesus in the flesh.
But the Word became flesh. The punctuation does not end there. It was not that He became flesh and said, “This is what I look like,” and then went back. That is not what it is all about.
He is not merely a fleshly figure, so that seeing the figure is enough. The sentence does not stop with, “The Word became flesh.” It carries one step farther: “and dwelt among us.”
What does it mean that He dwelt among us? This is where He manifests Who He is.
Do you dwell in your house? Are you at home in your house? How at home are you? Can you put your feet on the table? Can you watch baseball? Can you have newspapers strewn all over the place and be okay? You are comfortable there, right?
What it is saying is that He became flesh, and He was at home among us. In other words, He could be Who He is. Because He became flesh, He did not change His nature.
He could be Who He was. That is what is so interesting about the Scripture Tommy read this morning: “How can You eat with sinners?” Because I came to save. That is My nature. I came to save.
If you understood My nature, you would understand why I can eat with them.
He was at home among us. He could be just Who He is among us, in front of us. He could be God.
John says, “And we beheld His glory.” We looked at it. It is not that we just saw it; we scrutinized it. We watched it carefully. We studied it.
The word for glory here is doxa, which is where we get the word doxology. Glory is the nature and acts of God in His self-manifestation.
In other words, when He came to dwell among us, we could see His nature through His acts. He did not pull punches.
When He came, He did not come out as a fireworks show, showing beautiful light and everything like that. If I were God, in my human nature, I would want you to know. I would be zapping this and lifting that and creating mountains.
But that is not the way He came. He did not come to show His attributes, so to speak. He came to show His nature.
What did He reveal to us about His nature? John 1:14 continues: He is full of grace and truth.
What are grace and truth? We know that we are saved by grace, and we know that grace means unmerited favor. That is a big part of it.
But to put it in a bigger perspective, grace is the whole—the entire wealth of God’s redeeming love. It is nothing spared. The entire sum of His love is grace.
There is nothing we can do to earn it, but it is His nature: grace.
Truth is everything that is true about God, and that is a good definition. But I found another definition that I thought was really neat: truth is the performance of that redeeming love.
In other words, the Lord Jesus was not all talk. God is not just out there saying, “Here are the rules,” and that is all He does. In His nature is also the performance of that redeeming love.
There are many incidents we could use, but this one, to me, speaks volumes. It is in Matthew 8:1-3, right after the Sermon on the Mount.
And when He was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed Him.
And behold, there came to Him a leper and worshipped Him, saying, Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean.
And He stretched forth His hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou made clean.
And straightway his leprosy was cleansed.
To me, that is one of the most wonderful pictures of grace you can find. It is not that the Lord was able to do something. The leper knew that the Lord was able to do something—that is why he came.
The question was not whether the Lord was able to do something. The question was, “Are You willing to do so? Are You willing to touch even me?”
What was revealed? This is so beautiful: “I am willing.” And not only did He say, “Be clean,” but it says He touched him.
“I am willing,” and He touches. That is what grace is.
Grace is the touch of God in your life that frees you from everything that kept you from Him. Remember, leprosy was a type of sin: ceremonially unclean, cut off from society, and all those things.
The touch of God turns all those things around and puts them at nothing. That is grace. That is the wonderful grace of our Lord Jesus.
That is the manifested nature of God. You want to know what God is like? This is a picture of what God is like. He acts in grace. He has compassion. He loves not only in word, but He loves in deed and in truth.
This is Moses, for those of you who cannot see. He has the Ten Commandments. The law came through Moses.
The Lord had given a revelation before. He gave it to Moses. It was the law.
When sinful man looks at God—and I know, because I am a sinful man—we see the unapproachable light, the One Who is so pure that we could never approach Him because of who we are.
Do you remember before you came to the Lord? Was that not what you thought of God? He is out there with His scoreboard, ready to knock you down.
There is a Western Exterminator sign in California with a man in a top hat bending over a little bug, saying, “Nah, uh, uh,” while he has a big, huge mallet behind him. Is that the picture of God that many of us have?
I am not saying that picture is not true in one sense, because God is holy, and we cannot come into that presence.
When the revelation came to Moses, the people said, “We do not want to—we cannot look at this. We want nothing to do with this. You go before Him.” God said, “That is okay.”
But one thing you need to know about this revelation: the law is not redemptive. There is no redemption in the law. There is no perfection in the law. You cannot be made perfect by the law.
You might ask, “Why did He give the law?” He gave the law to show you yourself, so that you would come to Him, so that He could give the next revelation—the better revelation.
The law makes no one perfect. The law shows us that we fall short of the glory of God.
Even though man could not see God in that way, God could still communicate Who He was to Moses. Remember the verse we read about Moses saying, “Let me see Your glory”?
In the next chapter, God said, “You cannot,” and He covered Moses. Then the Lord declared His name:
And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.
And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness and truth;
keeping lovingkindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin;
and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation.
There is judgment. But what do you see here? Compassionate, gracious, slow to anger.
People talk about the God of the Old Testament being different from the God of the New Testament. I do not know. When God is introducing Himself to Moses, saying, “This is Who I am,” it looks a lot like Jesus to me.
But we have a better revelation: grace and truth.
Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Another version says that grace and truth are realized through Jesus Christ.
What does realized mean? I think it means that it has become real to you. You see it as truth. You see it as something you can count on.
Grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. We do not have to fear judgment for our sins. That should be forever behind us—forever behind us.
The Lord did not mute the light that overwhelmed man at Sinai, but He became a prism to it. He allowed that light to come through Him, and the many facets of that light were revealed in Him.
The law shows one facet: the holiness of God, which you cannot measure up to. But the light of God is many-faceted.
Have you ever used a prism before? They are like the coolest things in the world. It is like magic. You put it there, and suddenly you have that whole spectrum of colors. It is incredible.
When you read the New Testament, when you read the Gospels, you can say, “Look at the many-colored light that comes through Jesus Christ.” There is a picture of God to us. Look at it.
All those components are ours. This is Who Christ is. He is God, and yet He became flesh. He dwelt among us. He manifested God to us in His actions and in His words.
What does that have to do with us? What is the application for us?
Since He became flesh, it is for us to behold Him. That is what we are to do. This is what we are to do as men: we are to behold Him.
Not just to look. I think the New American Standard says, “We saw His glory.” It is not a good translation. It is beheld. Study Him. When you look at Him, you study; you think about Him.
This is one of the things we do not do. Have you ever taken eighth graders to an art museum? You really see art appreciation there. You can have these wonderful pictures, and they say, “Yeah, okay, we saw these things. Now what do we do?”
My poor wife—I am sorry, I will tell you this story. The first year after we got married, we came to visit her brother in Maryland, and we went to Gettysburg.
You know I am a history guy. We went to the battlefield, and that was pretty cool, but then we got into the museum. My wife loves me, and she knows that I am going to read everything.
I mean, I am reading everything. Barb, so wonderful, must have walked around the museum four, five, maybe six times before I was finished, and never showed me that it upset her.
Another little story about museums: Steve Bishop invited us to San Diego once. My best friend Jerry, Barb, and I were there. He said, “Let us go into the aeronautics museum.”
Steve was at the other end, just sitting. Barb came alongside him, and he said, “If I knew they were going to read everything, I would have never suggested this.”
The reason I am saying this is because we have lost, or are losing, the will to behold.
Especially you younger ones, because everything is so visually oriented. You cannot behold; you have to be doing something.
“Be still, and know that I am God.” We say, “For how long?” It means quiet yourself.
We cannot. We are all ADD. We cannot sit still. We cannot sit still long enough to look at the Lord and allow Him to show us Himself.
It is something we have to ask the Lord to break.
We have to behold Him. We have to look at Him; otherwise, we will not see Him. He will not be manifested.
It is not a glance that does it. A glance might catch our eye, but hopefully that glance draws us in and brings us to where we behold.
God wants us to behold. That is why He manifested Himself. He did not hide Himself; He manifested Himself.
You have to look. You have to look. You have to focus on Who He is. You have to be caught that way. This is our application: we need to behold Him.
John 1:12 says:
But as many as received Him, to them gave He the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on His name.
It goes on to say that we are born not by the will of man. In other words, your genealogy does not matter.
Our sister here, Chinese, comes to the Lord; you cannot say, “Well, I am related to Confucius.” It does not matter. Those ties are broken.
Anyone who believes now has the right to be a child of God. What that really means is, “I have the right to Him. I have the right of access to Him.”
He is mine, just like my children have access to me at any time.
My children come to me even when they are in trouble, and even when they are doing things I do not agree with. They still have access to me. It is the same with us.
What we want to do is exercise this right. This is the application. If you are now children of God—if you have been made children of God and given that right—exercise that right.
Come into everything that has been given to you. That begins with access. I am not talking about some prosperous life. I am saying it begins with access to the living God.
We want to exercise this right. We want to lay hold of Him. Is that not one of the Scriptures we used in the conference—that I might lay hold of Him?
Why has God manifested Himself to us? That I may lay hold of Him, that I might apprehend Him, that I might have Him and all that He is for myself, because He is my salvation.
He is a Person Who is my salvation.
John 1:10-11 says:
He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world knew Him not.
He came unto His own, and they that were His own received Him not.
How does this apply? T. Austin-Sparks talks about this being the Gospel to the religious—those who know the truth.
It is like John 5:39:
Ye search the scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness of Me;
and ye will not come to Me, that ye may have life.
The Scriptures point to Me, and you will not come to Me.
We need to acknowledge Him. We need to say, “I know Who You are, and I know what is Yours.”
That is where man failed, did he not? Read Romans 1. They refused to acknowledge God because they made themselves god.
But we are to acknowledge Him. By acknowledging Him, we give Him His rightful place.
We give Him His rightful place as we see Him continually revealed. We do not get it all at once. But as we see more and more of Him, we are to give place to Him as He shows us Who He is.
He knows that we are but dust. He knows our frame.
I love Jacob. When Jacob saw God, he said, “I will give You ten percent.” Is that not what he said? “If You bring me back, You will be my God, and I will give You ten percent.”
You know something? God said, “Okay.” God said, “I will take the ten percent.” Later on, He got more of Jacob. Then He got more of Jacob.
At the end, Jacob’s testimony is not his testimony of himself, where he says, “Few and evil have been the days of my life.” But if you look in Hebrews 11, it says, “Jacob worshiped.”
You cannot worship unless you behold and give yourself to Him Who is worthy. We are to acknowledge Him and give Him His rightful place.
We are to let Him lay hold of us. That is another wonderful thing about Jacob. You read the story of Jacob, and God is always calling him back and getting hold of Jacob.
But Jacob, in the end, lets Him get hold of him, even to the point where he will give up Benjamin, which was his heart. “I will give You my heart.”
He wants to lay hold of us too.
To end, this was written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing, you may have life in His name.
I was reading G. Campbell Morgan commenting on this verse. He said that belief implies submitting yourself to Whom you believe.
It is giving yourself to Whom you believe. It is not merely mental assent, saying, “Yes, I believe.” It is seeing the worth of Him in Whom you now put your trust.
You give yourself totally as what you see is total. Remember, we said to give Him His rightful place as He is revealed to you continually.
Every time we give ourselves to Him, we think we are giving ourselves totally to Him, do we not? Then He takes us a little further, and He says, “Submit totally.”
This is what God is after. This is what He is revealing. He is revealing Himself in such a way that we will respond.
It is not just to say, “Well, this is Who I am.” He reveals Himself in such a way that there is a heart response to Him.
Some of our heart responses will be, “I want nothing of You.” Some of our heart responses will be, “Lord, I want You, but there are so many other things I love.”
And some of us will have a response that says, “Lord, I just want You.” He wants the response.
Go to Him and be honest, because He will take every response.
Even if you say to Him, “I do not want You,” He is not going to twist your arm and break your will. But that does not mean that He will not come after you more and more.
Because that is grace. That is the grace of God. That is Who He is. He is full of grace and truth.
As we go through the Gospel of John, John wants us to see, from the beginning, that what we will be seeing in this Gospel is God manifesting Himself to us so that we can behold Him.
In beholding Him, we can be captured—not by words we read, but by the Person that He is. For that is His desire.
Let us pray.
Lord, I thank You that You are not so great that we can come to this and say, “I just do not understand.” But I thank You that You came down and became flesh, and You dwelt among us so that we can see You.
Lord, we want to see You. We want to see You, and we want whatever happens because we see You to come about. We want to be captured by Your love.
We want to be captured by the Person that You are—not just Your love, Lord. We want to be captured by You.
Lord, we cannot ask You to open our hearts. We can ask You to open our eyes. Lord, we ourselves have to open our hearts to You.
As we contemplate these things this week, bring us to the point where we can open our hearts to You and say, “Lord, I open to You. Come in. Come in afresh.”
Let me see You fresh, as the first time. Capture me again, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.