I was thinking. Yeah, it was not good. Okay.
Let’s read a couple of Scriptures before we begin. For those of you that know, when I’ve been speaking lately, I’ve been going through the Gospel of John. I’m not going through it verse by verse, because otherwise I’ll be here till the Lord comes back.
What I am doing is, as we go through, there will be something that catches me—something I feel the Lord has caught me with in the chapter—and that I will bring out. So, with that in mind, let’s open up and read a couple of verses from John Chapter 12.
Starting with verse 20:
Now there were certain Greeks among those who came up to worship at the feast.
And they came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him, saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”
Then there are a couple of other verses I would like to read. Hebrews Chapter 3, beginning with verse 1:
Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus, who was faithful to Him who appointed Him.
Then, in 1 Timothy Chapter 1, verse 15:
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.
Let’s pray.
Father, we want to be like the Greek who came to Philip and said, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Lord, that is our prayer today. We do not want to hear a good teaching. We do not want to have anything that will take away from our seeing the Lord Jesus as He is.
Lord, we ask You to reveal Your Son, that He might be lifted up and that we might be drawn to Him. Lord, that is our prayer this morning. Give us Thy Holy Spirit to open the Word, to show us Jesus. We ask this in Christ’s name.
Okay, this morning we are in John Chapter 7. John Chapter 7 is a really negative chapter. I do not know if you guys have looked at it, but it is negative because we start out with Jesus’ brothers, and they do not believe in Him. We end up with the Pharisees and the priests denying that Jesus is the Christ.
Then, between our start and our finish, we have all this questioning and misunderstanding: “Is this Him or not?” It seems to be a negative thing. But in spite of all this, you see Jesus Christ. You see the Christ of God who has been given to us.
As I was reading this, like I said, I am not going to go verse by verse through it. But there is something in it that I think the Lord would have us see—or at least something the Lord showed me.
Let me give you a little background of Chapter 7. We find the Lord Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles. He is back in Jerusalem. He has not been in Jerusalem probably for about a year and a half, and this is the beginning of the last six months of His ministry.
Most of that ministry, as we know, will be to His disciples. But from John Chapters 7 through 10, we find Jesus in Jerusalem, probably around the time of the Feast of Tabernacles and just after.
For those of us who do not know much about the Feast of Tabernacles, there were three feasts that all Jewish men were supposed to attend: Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Tabernacles was probably the most joyous feast of them all.
Partly, I think, because it came after the Day of Atonement. The Day of Atonement was on the tenth day of the seventh month, and the Feast of Tabernacles began on the fifteenth day. How joyous it must have been to have the weight of sin off of you and then go celebrate what really was the Lord’s provision.
That is what the Feast of Tabernacles was: the Lord’s provision for them in the wilderness. They were celebrating how God had provided for them all the way through the wilderness, culminating in the idea that now they were in the land.
This feast lasted eight days. Generally, most feasts were seven days, but this one went an extra day. It was one of the most joyous times: people sharing, living in booths—temporary huts. You had people not just from Jerusalem, but from all over the known world where Jews lived.
We also find in this chapter that the brothers of Jesus, at the beginning of the chapter—in John Chapter 7, verses 1 through 9—find Jesus at home in Galilee, where He had been for a while because the Jews were seeking to kill Him.
By “the Jews,” John means the rulers, not all Jews: the chief priests, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, the scribes, and the teachers of the law. In John Chapter 5, after Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath and told him to pick up his things and go, He had a controversy with them. Toward the end of that chapter, it says they wanted to kill Him.
From that point on, He went back and ministered in Galilee. That takes us to about Matthew Chapters 16 and 17, perhaps Mark Chapter 9 and Luke Chapter 9, in the Synoptic Gospels. All the things you find in those chapters are happening, but John does not tell us those things. He brings us to these snapshots that show us Jesus is the Christ, that we might believe in Him and have life in His name.
His brothers say, “Why don’t You go and show Yourself? You are up here in Galilee, where nobody knows You. Why don’t You go down there and show Yourself?” Jesus says, “My time to go up to the feast has not yet come.”
The whole thing is that Jesus has a time. The time is not set by Himself or by what He thinks are the greatest opportunities. There are three verses I want to deal with—one word in those three verses. Three times John uses the word sent.
In John 7:16, Jesus says:
“My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me.”
Then, in John 7:28:
“You both know Me and know where I am from, and I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know.”
Then, in John 7:33:
“I shall be with you a little while longer, then I go to Him who sent Me.”
What is this? A One who was sent. Now, I read a verse from Hebrews. I never thought much of this, but Jesus was One who was sent. What is one who is sent? The word for one who is sent is apostle.
An apostle is somebody who is sent by God with the authority of God to do a task. That is what an apostle is. He carries an authority—not the authority of his own flesh. Paul said, in effect, “You look at this guy and he has nothing.” But he did not carry the authority of his stature. He came in the authority of God.
As Jesus laid aside all His glory, He became God’s Apostle to us—the Apostle of our confession. Now, that is the second thing: what is our confession? What do we, as Christians, confess to?
Someone used a verse this morning:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:
From whence shall my help come?
My help cometh from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
That is Psalm 121, one of the Songs of Ascents. But the whole thing is, our confession is like Paul said in 1 Timothy: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
Really, what we are finding out is that Jesus Christ was sent to show that God is out to save sinners. That is His purpose. That is what He has been sent for.
The One who was sent is faithful. In John 7:18, He says:
“He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true.”
Another translation says that He who seeks the glory of the One who has sent Him is faithful. Faithful. What does that mean? It means He is faithful to His teaching—all of His teaching. Whatever He is saying, He is true to it. He does not diverge in any way.
It is like saying, “You guys obey the law, but not this part.” No, He is true to the whole thing. He is faithful to what God has given—to the teaching God has given us. He says, “I am here. God is out to save men.” He is faithful to that teaching. He is out to save all men.
He is faithful to His mission. We know that Christ was obedient unto death—obedient and faithful to His mission, even unto death, even the death of the cross, as Philippians 2 tells us.
Finally, He is faithful in order that God can reveal who God is. God is our salvation. Is that not Jesus’ name? That is what Yeshua means: “The Lord is salvation.”
Our Lord, our Christ, the Apostle of our confession, is faithful to show that it is God who is our salvation.
Jesus meets resistance, and the first place He meets resistance is in His teaching. From John 7:14 through 24, people have a problem with His teaching.
He comes up secretly. There is no fanfare with Him coming. Is that not just like our Lord’s coming into the earth? He comes without the fanfare of the earth, but He comes with the fanfare of heaven—to those who will hear and those who will see.
They find Him teaching in the temple. The thing that amazes the people in Jerusalem is that He teaches as though He has letters. Most people in Israel spoke Aramaic, but it seems that Christ was teaching in Hebrew.
For somebody from Galilee, that was almost unheard of, because where you learned to speak Hebrew and read Hebrew was in the schools of the rabbis. They saw Him teaching in Hebrew.
It does not mean people could not understand Hebrew; it means they were not reading it. Some of you who are Chinese can understand Chinese when it is spoken, but perhaps you have been so far away from it that you cannot read it anymore. You can understand it when it is spoken, but you cannot speak it very well.
I grew up in a family where my grandparents were immigrants. My parents grew up speaking Polish, but they moved really far away and did not teach us any Polish. I have some Polish kids at school, and I always love to have Polish kids at school because it makes me feel more comfortable.
You can say things like, “Jak się masz?” or “Dzień dobry,” and they answer back—or some people do not. I remember having a Polish girl in California whose mom and dad were immigrants. At parent-teacher conferences, she brought her mother, who only spoke Polish.
Her mother looked at my name and started speaking Polish. Her daughter was translating, and she bawled me out: “What is the matter? Why do you not speak Polish? Look at that name!” I ruined the whole conference, did I not?
My mom can understand Polish, but it is hard for her. She really has to think about how she would speak. So here we have Jesus teaching in Hebrew. They are amazed, saying, “This man has never been to a rabbinical school. How can He do this?”
They were impressed by that, but what was He teaching? It does not tell us what He was teaching, does it? But from His actions and His other sermons, we know what He was teaching: God is salvation.
He says, “My doctrine is not Mine.” What is His teaching? His teaching is that God sent Him into the world in order that God would save men. Now, who would resist that? You think about it: who would resist that?
He begins to show us who resisted, because in the rest of the verse He says, “Did not Moses give you the law?” We have people who take the law and say, “The law is our salvation.”
Even when Paul was talking about the Jews in Romans 10:1-4, he said:
Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.
For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.
For they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God.
There is something we can look at here. When we do not know God—and what it means to know God—Steve gave a great message last week. One of the things he mentioned was, “Depart from Me, I do not know you.” What that meant was, “I do not have an intimate relationship with you.” That is true.
What keeps us from having an intimate relationship? I think the biggest thing is that we find something to replace it, because we think that is really what God wants.
These people think what God wants is a people who are righteous by the law. That is the thinking. In another way, it is like saying, “We want to placate God.” We do not really want to know Him; we want to make sure our backs are covered.
“I want to make sure that I am right with God, but I do not really want to know Him. I am satisfied with this because I think that is all He really wants. God, what do You want from me? Obey the law? Okay, I can do that.”
Even the rich young ruler said that. He came to Jesus and said, “What can I do to have eternal life?” Jesus’ first question was, “Do you know the commandments?” He said, “Oh, yes, I know the commandments, and I have kept them all.” But something was missing.
We find a lot of things to fill our lives with. We can say, “If I give God His due, which is obeying the law, then I can do whatever else I want to do.” But Jesus continued on and said, “Yet none of you keep the law.”
There are all sorts of ways of getting around it. He says, “You have a commandment that says, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ but you get around it. You say, ‘Whatever I could use to help you, I have given to God.’” There is a way of getting around it.
Nobody obeys the law. We have little traditions and other things like that where we think that is what we have to do, but really there is no obeying the law. Even in this sense, He says, “You are seeking to kill Me.” Well, gee whiz, is that obeying the law? It does not seem like it to me.
How deep is the law? Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says it goes beyond skin deep. It is a spiritual thing. It is also talking about what is in your heart—the things you think are hidden. God sees, and He wants a whole person.
These people are saying, “We will placate God.” Yet Jesus goes back and uses the Sabbath law:
“Moses therefore gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath?”
This goes back to why they wanted to kill Him. He is saying, “This is what God is about. This is My teaching: God wants to save men.” And He is saving them without the law.
Do you remember that man in John Chapter 5? He had been there thirty-eight years. He could not move or walk. What would the law do for him? Think about it. What if Jesus came and said, “Brother, all you need to do is obey the law”? It would have done nothing for him.
But Christ’s teaching is that God wants to save sinners. We know this man was a sinner because, when Jesus found him in the temple, He said:
“See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.”
Seemingly, this man was in that condition because of his own sin. Jesus comes to a sinner, one who has broken the law, and says, “It is time to get up and walk.” He is teaching that salvation is apart from the law.
Salvation is not in the law. It is in the Person of God. It is God who saves.
We are in a generation, a country, and a world that thinks somehow our good works avail to us before God, and we do not need God as long as we have this. You ask anybody if they are going to hell, and they say, “No, I do not think so.” You ask why, and they say, “Well, I think my good outweighs my bad.”
That is not what you are judged by. It is not your good against your bad. You are judged against the righteousness of God. Who will stand?
Even Paul, who was a Pharisee and, as far as the law was concerned, blameless—even he found out something about himself: “I covet.” One part of the law you break, and you have broken the whole law.
Coveting does not seem like adultery, does it? It does not seem like killing. But coveting is saying, “God, You did not give me all I need. He has it, and I want it.” It is not being satisfied with what God has given you.
But what has God given you? God has given you Himself.
His teaching is that God is salvation. Where do we find that man? We find him in the temple afterwards. An infirm man could not serve God or be in the priesthood, and yet we find that he is there because God saves. God made him whole. God made him able to worship, serve, and do those things an infirm man was not allowed to do in God’s presence.
God saves.
Secondly, there was resistance to Him being the Messiah. That is found in John 7:25-31. In verse 27 they say:
“However, we know where this Man is from; but when the Christ comes, no one knows where He is from.”
There are all sorts of teachings. We have them even about the coming back of Christ. “When is the Lord coming back?” Remember the pamphlet, 88 Reasons Why the Lord Will Come Back in 1988? Or do you remember The Late Great Planet Earth?
The Antichrist was supposed to be King Juan Carlos Bourbon of Spain, who would bring the old Holy Roman Empire back together. That was a pretty good one. I remember Chuck Smith talking about the Jupiter Effect—all the planets lining up, with cataclysmic earthquakes and everything supposed to happen in 1977.
That meant 1984 was supposed to be when the Lord came back. So, 1977 could be the year—seven years before, you know. There are all sorts of teachings about that.
There were teachings also about the Messiah. One came, I think, from Isaiah 53:8, where it says, “Who can tell His generation?” They took that to mean nobody would know where He was from. He would just appear on the scene: “There He is.”
They say, “We know where this Man is from. This cannot be the Messiah.” Later, in John 7:40-42, they say that Scripture says the Messiah is supposed to come from Bethlehem, the seed of David, but this Man is from Nazareth.
All they had to do was look up the records. The Romans were like the Germans: they kept good records. They would have found that His parents were in Bethlehem when He was born, and they could have checked the genealogy and seen that they were from David.
But we judge by appearance. “We have seen Him in Galilee. We grew up with Him. He must have always been from there.” Suddenly, there is this idea: “He cannot be Messiah for these reasons.”
But remember John the Baptist. When he was in prison, he sent his disciples to Jesus and said:
“Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”
Some people say John the Baptist was just trying to get his disciples to follow Jesus. I think John was saying, “I am in prison near the Messiah. How come I am still in prison?” Even though he said, “He must increase, but I must decrease,” why was he still in prison?
That is the way we would think, right? “Why am I still here, Lord? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we should look for someone else.” Remember what Jesus replied.
After the disciples had gone about the whole day with Him, He said, “Now go tell John what you have seen.”
The deaf hear, the blind see,
The lame walk, demons are cast out,
And the poor have the gospel preached to them.
Then He added this little caveat:
“And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”
In other words, the proof of the pudding—the proof of Messiahship—is where? In the deeds. All the deeds Christ did were to show that He was the Messiah and to show that God wants to save men.
What did He say about a smoking flax? He would not quench it. A bruised reed? He would not break it. All of these things show who He is.
Later, the people say, in John 7:31:
“When the Christ comes, will He do more signs than these which this Man has done?”
He was sent as Messiah, and He is faithful. Even though people do not believe Him, He does not say, “Oh, crud. I quit. I am going back home to Bethlehem. You think it is Nazareth, but I am going to Bethlehem.” He did not do that.
He knows that God’s will is to save men. That is where He is at. That is what He knows. That is His mission. That is what He is faithful to: God is going to save men.
We were studying Matthew 16 at the table, and this really struck me. After the disciples said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” He said that the Son of Man must go to Jerusalem and be mistreated and killed.
He did not step back from that. He knew He was going to be killed, but He did not shrink back because people were not believing in Him. He said, “I know Him who sent Me. He is true. He is real.”
“You may not be real in your belief in Me. You may not be true, but I know the One who sent Me, and He is true. Because He sent Me, I know that when I go to die, You will raise Me up again.” He is true.
They did not see Him as Messiah; they had replaced Him with a teaching. Some of us do that too. We replace that relationship—that looking to the living God—with a teaching.
Last, we have a call to salvation. There is resistance afterward to this, but after all these things have happened, where everybody is resisting, He calls them to salvation.
To me, that has got to be one of the strangest things. You would think He would say, “You guys are accursed,” like the Pharisees said: “These people are accursed. They are going astray.” Why did the Lord say that? Because He was out to show that God wants to save men.
This is the Feast of Tabernacles, which we talked about. It was just after the Day of Atonement, and it showed God’s provision in the wilderness. They took water from the Pool of Siloam and poured it out at the altar for seven days. On the eighth day, they did not do that.
It seems that on this eighth day, when they would not be pouring out water, Jesus cried out. Now, these words that He cried out—I would cry out, but I would break all your eardrums. It was not as if He was simply saying, “Come to Me, all who are thirsty.”
No, His voice was filled with emotion. He cried out with a loud voice, full of emotion, full of the love of God for an erring child. He stood and called:
“If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.
He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
I just want to put this before you. He is calling men to salvation. But if you look at the time of the feast, this is already after atonement. The Day of Atonement has come, and yet He is calling to salvation. What does that mean?
Some of us limit salvation to the death and resurrection of Christ. Now, you might say, “Well, Jim, that is pretty big.” It is. It is huge. But it is not all.
The cross bought our atonement at great cost. That is nothing to sneeze at. Please, do not think I am saying it is something small. It is something huge, and you and I who are sinners saved by the blood of Christ know that.
The resurrection gives us justification. He was raised for our justification. Is that not what Scripture says? Raised for our justification.
But if this is all that Christ has done for us, it is not a full salvation. Salvation is not only atonement. It is not only justification. There is sanctification, and there is glorification.
Many of us only see what Christ has done for us as atonement and justification. Because of that, we say, “I am incomplete.” Some of us who are younger might say, “Okay, Jesus died for me. Now what?”
Jesus died for me. Now what? Then we go out into the world because we figure there is nothing else. Or some of us say, “Okay, Jesus died for me. Now I must prove myself worthy.” We begin to sanctify ourselves—or try to sanctify ourselves.
That is like somebody trying to operate on himself. Here is a graphic picture: our sanctification is really our spiritual circumcision, right? What person in here circumcises himself?
Why do we not? I will tell you why: because it hurts. Not only that, we are not the skilled ones who have that skill. We will mutilate ourselves. What was supposed to be whole and perfect becomes some monstrosity. It is not what it was supposed to be.
Here we have a limiting of salvation. The people at this feast are saying, “Okay, everything is done.” Then Jesus comes out—no water is poured—and says, “If anyone thirsts, if this is not enough, then come to Me.”
Really, I just want to say this: it is not enough.
What does He mean by “he who thirsts”? A lot of people say it is a thirst for anything. Some of us thirst for love. We look everywhere for love—in the world and in people—and we do not get it. We are unsatisfied, and Christ says, “Come to Me. You will find love.”
Some of us want power. We try to get it through our jobs, position, the army, rank, fame, or something like that. We find out we are still empty. Christ says, “Come to Me, and you will find the power of a new life.”
But the whole thing is that we are thirsting for something we do not have. We do not have it in ourselves. It comes from some other source—not from ourselves.
Chuck Smith said this: it is the deepest sense or desire in our heart for fellowship with God. It is the deepest desire in our heart for fellowship with God.
When something is so deep, you can bury it and not notice that it is there. A lot of us do that. If you have pain, I can ignore pain for a long time because I have a good pain tolerance. But others cannot.
In us, we have a deep desire. We are made with that deep desire. That is what Genesis is all about, right? Made in the image of God. He breathes His life into us. We were made to have fellowship with Him like no other created thing.
This has everything to do with Jesus going back to the One who sent Him. It was not enough that Jesus died and rose from the dead. If it was enough, why did He not just stay with us?
Would that not have been great? Jesus is still here. Let’s go see Him. But that is not the salvation of man—that the risen Jesus would just live here on earth. Otherwise, do you not think God would have just said, “Okay, He is here”?
No, He had to go back to the One who sent Him. Why? Nobody knows. That is the problem: we do not know. Had He not ascended back to the Father, the Holy Spirit would never have been given to us.
Here is part two of our salvation. Jesus said:
“He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
John explains:
But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
Jesus was glorified when He ascended to the Father on high and sat down at His right hand. Then the Spirit was given out.
Think about this water. He did not say water would trickle. He said, “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said.” This goes back to the Old Testament.
There are a number of Scriptures I could give you: Zechariah 14:8, Isaiah 58:11, and Joel 3:18. But I am going to give you Isaiah 44 because it really hits it on the nose. It is Old Testament, but it is New Covenant.
Isaiah 44:1-4 says:
Yet hear now, O Jacob My servant,
And Israel whom I have chosen.
Thus saith the Lord that made thee,
And formed thee from the womb, who will help thee:
Fear not, O Jacob, My servant;
And thou, Jeshurun, whom I have chosen.
For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty,
And floods upon the dry ground:
I will pour My Spirit upon thy seed,
And My blessing upon thine offspring.
Who will help you? What is the Holy Spirit called? Helper. This is what we have. This is the fullness of salvation.
How do you get sanctification? Sanctification is not a work of the flesh. Sanctification is not a set of rules that is followed. It is a life within you that is moving you. You do as this life is urging you to do. That is sanctification.
It is not something you do on your own. In 2 Thessalonians 2:13, Paul says:
But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.
Peter, in 1 Peter 1:2, echoes the same thing. You have been elect by the foreknowledge of God and by the sanctification of the Spirit. It is the Spirit who is in you, living in you, who leads you into sanctification.
If sanctified, what does it say? Justified? Glorified. It is Christ’s Spirit in us, living in us—the life of Christ in us—that sanctifies us, and that becomes that garment of glorification.
How did they know they were naked? Remember Stephen was talking about that. When man sinned, how did they know they were naked? Something dropped. It was their glory. It was the glory they had with God from the beginning.
Christ has regained that glory. Remember on the Mount of Transfiguration? He could have walked right back into heaven as a man. But He did not, because God wants to save men.
So He left that glory, came back to the cross, was raised from the dead, ascended back up, and said, “I want to bring them with Me. I want them to have what I have, because that is what You wanted in the beginning.”
God wants to save men. So He says, “If anyone thirsts,” but He does not say, “Let him obey the law.” He does not say, “Just let them read their Bible and pray and go to church.” He says, “Let him come to Me.”
Let him come to Me. You see, brothers and sisters, there is a transaction that has to happen, but it is a personal transaction. It is a transaction with this living Christ.
It is this living Christ that we transact with. It is not just a doctrine in a book. That is what we have to get hold of, brothers and sisters, more than anything: Christ is a living Being who wants us.
He wants us as His body, to live through us. It says, “Out of their bellies.” Another word for belly would be like the word used for womb. The womb is where the seed of life is implanted.
That is where the seed of life grows, if it is given the opportunity to grow. That is what this whole thing about spiritual exercise is about. You have to give the opportunity for that Spirit in us to grow.
If we allow that life to grow in us, that life will not stop. It will keep filling and filling until we cannot contain it. We end up being the blessers of those around us.
We cannot hold it; it spills over. Christ spills over to everyone. Just like when Peter went to Cornelius and preached the gospel, the life spilled out even to the Gentiles. It is not held in. It goes out to all.
So He says, “Your salvation is not that you work sanctification. God is your salvation.” Do you see that? It is God. That is my salvation. It is God who is in me, to will and to work His good pleasure.
It is by my submitting to God—submitting to Him when I sense Him—that saves me. It is His life in me that saves me.
Do you remember the book The Saving Life of Christ? Ty Gunnen was a British guy. It is an incredible thing. It is not about the saving life of Christ on the cross; it is about the saving life of Christ that is in me.
It is more than my sins being forgiven. It is that the sin of my nature is overcome. That is salvation. Yes, sins forgiven, but power over the sin of my nature. That is salvation. That is the salvation God wants for us all.
Now, to close: in the end, the Pharisees got really, really mad. They sent officers to take Jesus, and the officers came back. They asked, “Why did you not bring Him?” The officers said, “Never man spake like this Man.”
The Pharisees answered, “Are you also deceived?” The J. B. Phillips translation says, “Are you guys stupid?” They said, “This crowd that does not know the law is accursed.” Some translations say “damned.”
Then Nicodemus steps out and says, “Does not our law judge a man before it hears him and knows what he is doing?” They fire back at him:
“Are you also from Galilee? Search and look, for no prophet has arisen out of Galilee.”
That was a very negative thing. They were saying, “Go and search, and you will see that He is a liar.” But I want to turn that around, because if they had really searched the Scriptures, they would have found something.
In 2 Kings 14:25, it says:
He restored the territory of Israel from the entrance of Hamath to the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord God of Israel, which He had spoken through His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet who was from Gath-hepher.
Remember Jonah? Gath-hepher was within five miles of Nazareth. I guess they did not know the Scriptures.
Another thing: the prophet Jonah. What did the Lord say was the only sign He was going to give them? The sign of Jonah. Is it not interesting that He chose a Galilean prophet to do that?
Here is my thing: they said, “Go out and disprove it.” I am saying, “Go and look and prove it.” Prove that this is what God wants.
That is what we need to do. God is out to save men. That is what Jesus was sent for. He is the Apostle of that, right? God is out to save men. Go find out that is true.
Search the Scriptures. Find that not only is that His heart, but find that He has provision. It is not just the reading of it. When you read 2 Peter 1 and it says He has given all these promises, we read it and say, “Okay, He has given us all these promises.”
No, that is not enough. It is time to say, “God, what are the promises? What are they? I do not know what they are. You have got to show them to me.” I am not saying you are demanding it. I am saying you need to search as if you want to find.
None of this searching just to placate. “Oh, yeah, okay. He is starting to search a little bit.” No. Do you really want to find something? If you really want to find something, you look for it, right?
I am wearing a little retainer right now, a top center, and I am very self-conscious about it. My tooth looks snaggletoothed because I am having an implant done. My thing broke because I take it out when I eat, and then I forget where I put it.
Usually, you do not see me without my little tooth because I put it back in. But you can ask my daughter: she knows that I am looking all over for it—under this and that—thinking, “I have got to find it.”
What do the kids at school say if they see me without my tooth? They say, “Mr. B, when did you take up hockey?” But the whole thing is this: do you really want to find it?
God says it is there for us. Remember Isaac. We give Isaac a bad name because he just wanted to eat Esau’s dinner, but he did some good things.
He allowed Abraham to take him and tie him. He had to be about thirty years old when he was going to be sacrificed, but he laid himself down, even though Abraham would slay him.
When Isaac was on his way to Egypt, God said, “Isaac, do not go. Stay here in the land, and I will bless you.” We think that when God says, “Stay in Christ,” it is a passive thing—that everything just will be brought to us. But that is not the case.
You have got to go and find out what is in the land. Isaac did a couple of things. He planted in the land, and God blessed him because he planted. Planting and farming meant he had to do things. He had to plow up the land, put in the seed, and care for it. God blessed it because he did.
Then he came to the place of needing water. First, he dug up the wells of his father. But it got beyond that. Pretty soon, he started digging for himself. Why? Because, “I need water.”
This is where we stop: when we sense our need for God—not in a way that says, “Oh Lord, I need a job,” but within, saying, “God, if I do not find You for myself, if I do not find You, I cannot live. This is all fake. I have got to find You.”
If we dig for ourselves like that, it says we find living water. Living water was not stagnant stuff. It was the stuff that bubbled up. But the thing is, he dug for it.
Brothers and sisters, yes, we are saved by grace, and all these things are ours. Praise the Lord. Thank Him for that. But some of these things are hidden. The Lord has them there for us, and He is saying, “Will you not look and find Me?”
“If anyone thirsts.” Are you thirsty? Come for Him. Dig for Him. Look for Him. Because it says when you look for Him with your whole heart, you will find Him.
Let’s pray.
Our heavenly Father, we want to thank You that Your desire, Your will, is that man would be saved. Lord, not just that man would be saved from hell, but would be saved to the uttermost, because You say it in Your Scriptures: those who come to You through Christ are saved to the uttermost.
Lord, I pray. I confess that I have been happy—or maybe the word is not happy—but I have been okay for so many years just to sit and say, “Okay, I am saved.”
But Lord, I know I am reaching the point now of saying, “Oh God, if I do not find You as my life, I am done.” Oh Lord, I pray I would be moved.
I pray if there are any here like me, Lord, that they would be moved also to find that You are the One who gives water, and that within us we will find rivers bubbling up to eternal life. Lord, help us, we pray. In Christ’s name.