Good morning, brothers and sisters.
Starting in 1 Timothy, chapter 6, verse 12. Paul is writing to Timothy, and he says:
Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life to which you were also called and have confessed the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
I urge you in the sight of God, who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus, who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate, that you keep this commandment without spot, blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ’s appearing.
Then we will turn to John 18. Starting with verse 30—I’m sorry, starting with verse 30. The Pharisees had brought Jesus, after trying Him by themselves, to Pilate.
They answered and said to him, “If He were not an evildoer, we would not have delivered Him up to you.”
Then Pilate said to them, “You take Him and judge Him according to your law.”
Therefore the Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death,”
that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled which He spoke, signifying by what death He would die.
Then Pilate entered the praetorium again, and called Jesus, and said to Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered him, “Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you concerning Me?”
Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and chief priests have delivered You to me. What have You done?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered up to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.”
Pilate therefore said to Him, “Are You a king then?”
Jesus answered, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”
Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?”
One other set of verses: Hebrews 11, starting with verse 8.
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance, and went out, not knowing where he was going.
By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.
And then, down to verse 13:
These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, were assured of them, embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.
And truly, if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return.
But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.
Our Father, we want to thank You, yes, to begin with, just for the table which was brought out so wonderfully: that we ask for one thing and we get something much larger. We are grateful because we have all been recipients—those of us that know Christ—of those things. We have asked for maybe the saving of our very physical life, and we found that we have been given eternal life instead.
So we thank You. And now, as we turn to You and want to see Your Son, and as we look at this confession of His, we want to understand, Lord, how we can be identified with Him in this confession.
And so, Lord, we turn to You. We ask that the Spirit would open the Word to us, and not just open it to us, Lord, but speak it into our hearts. Speak it into the deep part, Lord, not just the mind. We want to get hold of these things, Lord, and we want our spirit to be able to reach up and hold fast to them.
Lord, we confess that we are leaky vessels, those who have slippery hands, and left to ourselves, we will lose everything. So we come to You and ask that You would help us—help me in speaking, help us in hearing. Most of all, Lord, we just want to make sure that it is Your voice that registers from Your Word. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I think the Lord has a way of—you know, you reap what you sow. I would always just complain, “Oh, how can that brother be up there crying?” And the Lord has said, “Well, you’ll see.”
So now, the hymn that I chose was different. I’m surprised you didn’t know it. But I hope, as we go on, you’ll see why I chose that hymn.
As we have been going through John, the thing that struck me in this chapter was the idea of the good confession. Stella, did you get it right? She was wondering what I had chosen out of this one.
But it is the confession, and I wanted to look at this because in Timothy, I read the verses out of Timothy because it says Timothy had a good confession. But Timothy cannot have a good confession unless Christ has a good confession, because the two are intertwined, as we will see.
The idea of confession means to declare or to openly admit something. It carries with it this idea also of identifying with what you are confessing. You are identified with it. You are drawn into it. It has become part of you, what you confess.
So we want to look at Christ’s confession first, and then we want to see: what about our confession? What is our confession?
When we look at Christ’s confession, I want to look at two things. First of all, who or what elicited this confession from Him? Something drew this confession out of Him. Secondly, we want to see what it is that the Lord Jesus actually confessed. What was He confessing to, or what was He confessing of?
When we look at John 18, we find that the Lord has just come out from being accused by the Sanhedrin of teaching bad things. Finally, it was said that He had confessed that He was the Son of God. They found Him worthy of death, but they could not put Him to death because the Romans were ruling their land. So they had to come to Pilate to put Him to death.
Just to understand this: as He is coming, His confession is not to the Jews. He has already confessed to the Jews who He was. He told them quite plainly, “You have been with Me for these years. You know the things I have taught. You have seen the things I have done. You know Me.”
He told them that the works in Him were the works of the Father. So they should have known who He was. He should not even have had to tell them, because the works told them who He was.
But they had to bring Him in to Pilate. Pilate was really kind of irked, as my mom would say. He was irked at this. They got him up early in the morning and brought Him to do this. He did not like the Jews as a people. He thought they were bothersome. They tried him; he did not like them.
So he comes out and says, in effect, “Just go deal with it yourselves.” Then they bring up this idea that they cannot put Him to death. So they bring Him before Pilate, and he says, “Oh yeah, so I have to hear Him. What did they accuse Him of?” So he asks them.
We need to understand that Christ’s confession is elicited, drawn out, and given to Pontius Pilate.
Now, Pontius Pilate represents the whole government of Rome. He is not just representing Palestine; he is representing the government of Rome. And we really want to look at it in a different way: Rome is symbolic.
Rome is symbolic of the whole world order. The Greek word for the world order is cosmos.
When we think of the cosmos, and we think of Rome and even how the world order is set up, it is all set up to govern the material. It values only the material. It is a material world.
Why do we fight in the Middle East? What do we want? We want oil. It is a material thing. Why do we want peace in the Middle East? It is not because we want peace as something that is a nice idea for philosophy. We want it because we want the goods that we get from that area.
Everything that the cosmos is about is about material things.
All these material things are temporal. When we look at Rome, how can they tell that somebody is mighty? They tell it materially. They look at Rome’s army. Rome had the greatest army in the world. That is why they were able to conquer all these places.
So materially they were strong. They had the strength of this army. They had the greatness of their generals. They had material wealth. They conquered all these places, and all these places brought tribute to them. They had wealth, gold, silver, cattle—everything you could think of, everything you wanted materially, they had.
They were wealthy also through their accomplishments. Think of their engineering feats. I think Kenny’s ancestors helped them make the aqueduct. You never know. Pittman—that sounds Roman. Speaks Latin, huh?
But you look at their engineering feats, their buildings, and things of that nature: they are all material accomplishments. Their system of laws was known for keeping peace in the land, but it was material. Their laws were written on paper. Their system of government was a republic.
All these things were to keep control of their empire materially. That is what they wanted. So Jesus comes—not to confront, but to confess before this world order the things He will confess.
There is one other thing about the cosmos. In 1 John 5:19, John says:
We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.
So really, when we are looking at the cosmos, it is not Rome that is in control, just as it was not Greece that was in control before the Romans, and it was not Britain that was in control later on, and it was not the United States that was in control later on.
Really, in control of everything was our adversary, the devil. He is in control of the cosmos. He is in control of this material world.
In my Greek dictionary, Vine says that cosmos means “the present condition of human affairs in alienation from and opposition to God.” So when we look at the cosmos, when we look at Rome, they are not friends to God.
They are the enemies, just as we were enemies before we came to Christ. That should really ring true to us. We were enemies. You look in Ephesians, Colossians, and Romans 5: we were alienated and enemies to God. That was because we were caught up as part of the cosmos. We were in this world system.
It is to Pilate, who represents the world—this cosmos—that Christ makes His confession. Again, He is not confessing to God. He is not confessing to the Jews. He is confessing to the cosmos, to the whole world.
He is saying this to the world that is in alienation from God, to the world that is in opposition to God. That is who He is making His confession to.
What is this confession? By reading it, we can see a couple of things. First of all, He admits, “I am a king.”
That is really, really important, because the cosmos does not recognize Him as being a king. Just ask people about Jesus Christ. Ask them who He is. What will they tell you? They will probably tell you He was a good teacher. That is how the cosmos looks at Jesus Christ: He is a good teacher.
But He is saying to Pilate, and He is saying to the world, “I am more than what you see. You might see Me as a teacher, but I am a king. You need to understand that. Not only am I a king; I am a rightful king. I came into this world to be this king.”
Pilate is saying, “Are You a king?” The emphasis is on You. He is probably looking at Jesus and saying, “How is Jesus dressed at this time? Does He look like a king?” No.
But Jesus is saying, “I am more than a rabbi.” When you read the Gospels, remember the Sermon on the Mount. You get to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, and what is the testimony of the people? The people say, “This Man is not like the scribes and the Pharisees. He teaches with authority.”
It is not that He simply taught with knowledge, like He knew the Scriptures. They said He taught with authority. What are kings known for? Their authority—the authority that they have. He came teaching with authority.
Buddha’s claim was that he was an enlightened teacher. That is all he would say about himself. Even his followers say he is the enlightened one. But Christ confessed and testified of Himself that He was a king. Buddha would never have done that, but Christ did, because Christ knew who He was.
Secondly, He is more than a prophet. A lot of people say, “Well, He was a prophet. He foretold things.” A prophet is one who speaks forth what God is trying to communicate to us. At most, they say, He just relayed the things that were on God’s heart to us. That is how the world sees Him: a teacher or a prophet. That is as far as they will go.
That is Muhammad’s claim. Muhammad claims to be a prophet. But Christ claims to be more than a prophet. Christ says, “I am a king, and I have the authority of a king.” It is not just, “I am relaying the Word of God to you.” He says, “I am the authority behind that Word. I can bring it to pass. I am a king.”
So firstly, His confession is that He is a king.
Secondly, He makes a confession about His kingdom. This kingdom is the kingdom of God. What does He say about this kingdom? He says, “It is not of this world.” It is not of this cosmos. It is not of this world order.
What does He mean by that? He means that in its nature and in its methods, this kingdom does not work like the kingdom of this world, the cosmos. It is not like it in its very heart, and it is not like it in the methods that it uses.
The nature of the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ is eternal. You might say, “What do you mean, it is eternal?” Eternal means what? It lasts forever.
And not just that it lasts forever. Some of us have shoes that last forever. We have shirts that last forever, shirts that you might have had for a long time. But over the washing and the wear and tear of the years, what happens to those shirts or shoes? They wear down. They fade.
The eternal kingdom does not wear down. The eternal kingdom does not fade away. Rome faded away. It was replaced by another kingdom, and that kingdom, in turn, faded away.
We can speak of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon, the Third Reich, Britain and its great colonial kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Do not think that we can trust in these kingdoms of the cosmos. They fade away. That is just their nature.
The nature of them is to fade away. But the nature of Christ’s kingdom is eternal. It does not fade away. It does not diminish. It does not diminish in its power.
Another thing about this kingdom is that its nature is truth. He says:
You say rightly that I am a king, for this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should be a witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.
In other words, the foundations of this kingdom are built on the truth. The cosmos is built on this foundation: that God is not true.
We know that because that is the foundation that was laid in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent came to Eve: “Hath God said?” In other words, saying that God is not true. “You yourselves should be the ones who are like God. You are the ones that should be ruling these things.”
But this kingdom is built on the truth—the truth of who God is. And you know something? Our faith is built on this foundation: that God is true. That is our whole thing.
We have faith in Christ so that we are saved, so that we have salvation, because God is true. That is the only reason that we can believe that. There is no other reason. God is true, and He has proved Himself to be true.
Has that not been what we have been learning in Genesis? All along the way, whether it has been Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Joseph, they have all been finding out this: that God is true. He has made promises, and He has kept His promises. He is trustworthy.
Even so, Abraham could offer up his son because he had to believe that if Isaac was the one in whom God said the seed would be, then God was going to raise him from the dead. The whole thing is that God is true.
As King, therefore, the King of this eternal kingdom is full of grace and truth. That is how we began the Gospel of John: He is full of grace and truth.
Grace means goodwill toward man. When we sing in one of our Christmas carols, “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” everything that God has planned for this earth, from the beginning—even in the redemption that He has provided in Christ—has been with goodwill toward man.
Everything He has done has been with goodwill toward man. But you cannot say that about the cosmos. It has not ruled out of goodwill toward man, because the one who is behind it is a usurper. He is a thief. That is what Jesus called him. He is a thief, he is a robber, and he is out to destroy you.
There is no goodwill toward man in the cosmos. All that goodwill is a veil. Behind it is, “I want control. I want, I want, I want.”
Christ is full of truth. He showed perfectly what God was like—who God is like. He showed what is true about God.
The thing that we find out in the Gospel of John, in the Gospels, and even throughout the whole Bible, is that God has portrayed through Scripture and through Jesus Christ that He is a Redeemer.
Not only is He a Redeemer; He is a willing Redeemer. It is not that we have had to twist His arm or anything like that. He willingly made plans to redeem the earth from before the foundation of the world. That is what Scripture tells us.
Not only is He willing to redeem man, but He is able to redeem man, as we see with the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the giving of the Holy Spirit. He is able to redeem man.
But we also have to understand this: God will judge. That is His nature. He has to be true to Himself, and there is judgment on the world because of sin. He will judge.
That does not negate His redemption in any way, but it says this: “I am true to who I am.” Even Christ cursed the fig tree. God will judge.
We understand also from seeing Christ that God is holy. Yet we find in the holiness of God there is grace. There is goodwill toward man.
Look at all the things in the Gospels where Christ interacts with men. His holiness is not diminished, but at the same time His holiness does not keep Him afar off. He heals, He touches, He encourages, and He raises from the dead. There is goodwill toward man, even though there is holiness.
Yet we find that in His calling to Himself a people, there is accountability. We find all these things in the Scriptures and in Christ when it comes to showing forth who God is.
In the end, when this confession is made to Pilate, Pilate asks the question—a question for which he does not stay for an answer, nor do I think he really wants an answer. He says, “What is truth?”
A lot of people say he was jaded, but the thing is this: what is truth? I will tell you what truth is. Truth is eternal and is not relative.
Do you understand that? You know what relative means? It means it changes with each era. Truth is eternal. It does not change.
That is why God is who He is: because He does not change. He is the same today, tomorrow, and forever. That is why we can put faith in Him: because He is true. He is the truth. He does not change.
It says, “Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” God has made it so that each one of us has something of eternity in our hearts.
What I mean is that there is something in our hearts that God has put in us that responds to Him. For Pilate, I think Pilate buried it with all his dealings with the cosmos. It hardened him, and he could not hear. He could not hear the truth.
That is a danger to us. Steve Sheridan has been sharing the warnings, talking about hardening our hearts. Do not harden your heart if you hear His voice. That is a real danger.
But God has put eternity in our hearts that we might respond to Him, and in that, we might be redeemed. Because that is who God is.
What is our good confession as Christians? I just have to start out this way: we have no good confession, or a good confession cannot come out of us, until we make a confession that all men must make.
When God was preparing the way for His Son to come on the earth, He sent a prophet to prepare the way. You remember that was John the Baptist. John the Baptist came with a message: “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand.”
What was the confession of men? Men came to John confessing their sins.
You see, until we come to the place of confessing our sin, there is no good confession for us. The confession of all men, when they stand before God, will be this: they sinned. They have sinned. That will be the confession of every man: “I have sinned.”
They came publicly, testifying. When they came, they were testifying to the cosmos, “I am not fulfilled by this order. There is something deeper that is not right, that has to be fixed.”
So they came publicly to John, before everybody. There were Roman soldiers watching, Pharisees and Sadducees watching, and tax collectors and others watching. The whole cosmos, the whole world order, was taking notice of this. Men were coming, confessing their sins.
Thirdly, they came to God through John’s preaching. It is not just that they were confessing to the world; they were confessing to God by coming to John and saying, “I am a sinner. I am a sinner, and I know it. I know what that means, and I want to be forgiven.”
Until we come to that confession, we can have no good confession. There is no good confession for us, because this is the only confession we can bring.
You might say, “Well, I have done all these things.” What did Jesus say about the Pharisees who would come and say, “Well, I have done all these things”? He said, “You guys are like whitewashed sepulchres. You look good on the outside, but inside you are just like every other man. You are a sinner.”
It does not matter how you dress it up. A monkey in a tuxedo is still a monkey. You cannot do anything about that.
Christ came, and this is how we get this good confession: Christ came and identified Himself with the confession of man.
In other words, man confessed himself to be a sinner. Christ came and took that confession upon Himself. When He came before John the Baptist, John said, “No, no, no, You cannot come here.” Jesus said, “Permit it, so all righteousness can be fulfilled.”
What He did was take that confession of man upon Himself: “I am a sinner.” He took it upon Himself, even though He had no sin. He bore it to the cross, and He bore it to the grave, that He might redeem us.
With this having taken place, now those who believe can have a good confession.
What is the good confession? Our good confession is made when we identify with Christ’s confession before Pilate. That confession is, “I am not of this world.”
That is our good confession. That is why I read Hebrews 11, when they confessed, “We are strangers and pilgrims.” We are not a part of this world anymore. It has no more hold on us. We are not seeking the things in this world anymore. We are strangers and pilgrims in it, and we are looking for that city that God has.
That is our good confession. We are not confessing that we are kings, like Christ did, but we do have the life and the nature of that King in us through the Holy Spirit.
When I identify myself as being part of His kingdom, I am saying, “I am not of this world anymore.”
This declaration we make publicly, and generally we make it at baptism. When we get baptized, we are not saying, “Oh, my sins are being washed away.” We are saying, “I no longer belong to this world.”
As I go under the water, I am dying with Christ as He died to this world and to my sin. As I rise up, I am saying that that attachment to the world that was in my heart is not there any longer.
That is what I am doing in baptism. I am declaring, I am making the good confession, that I no longer belong to this world, but I belong to Christ. I am no longer looking for the things in this world to satisfy me. I am looking for that city which has foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God.
As He identifies with us in going to the cross, we identify with Him as He goes to the cross and as He rises from the dead. We identify with His death, we identify with His resurrection, and we identify with His ascension. All those things are included in this good confession.
When you look at Joseph, many of us are in Joseph right now. Joseph is a great example of this. Joseph went down into Egypt, and when he was there, he was in the riches of the Egyptians. Everything that Egypt had to offer was his.
It was Moses who was schooled by the Egyptians. But Joseph, in the end, said, “We are going to be here for a while, but I want to tell you: we are not going to be here forever.”
That is something in our confession. We need to understand that we are not going to be here forever, or that this earth is not going to be here forever. We need to really see that and adjust our lives accordingly, because this is not going to last.
Joseph said, “When you guys leave, take my bones out of here, because I do not belong here. This is not my home.”
That is what they did at the end. When Moses took them out of the land, they took Joseph’s bones. If you are reading Joshua, they buried Joseph’s bones in Ephraim.
You see, brothers and sisters, he made the good confession: “I do not belong here.” Even though I have to live here, and I will die here, my heart is not here. My heart is chained to Someone else, whose kingdom is greater than this kingdom and whose King I love.
Now, here is the practical part. We have had this nice little teaching. We go home and say, “Oh yeah, Jim taught a lesson. It was wonderful.” But you have to have the practical.
Your confession—your good confession—will be tested. It will be tested by the cosmos. The cosmos will come and say, “You might have said that, but you are really mine, and I will show you.”
In Hebrews 4:14 and Hebrews 10:23, it talks about holding fast your confession.
Once we have made this confession, that confession is going to be tried. We are not kept from the trying of that confession.
Remember when Peter said, “I will never deny You.” That is what we say when we are baptized, right? “Oh Lord, I am Yours now forever. I will never deny You.”
You remember what Jesus said: “Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat.” He did not say, “And I prayed that he would not,” or, “I forbade him to do that.” He said, “But when you have recovered, strengthen your brethren.”
He is saying, “I am letting you go through the test because what is really being tested is going to be your faith.” Your faith is valuable, because that is what our confession is based on. Our good confession is faith that we believe in God.
In Hebrews 4, it is talking about entering into the rest of God. For us, the rest of God means that there are no more works for us to do as far as our salvation is concerned. The Lord has brought us into rest. We rest in Christ.
But you know something? How many of us rest in Christ? That is the big question. How many of us rest in Christ?
How many of us, when we go out and we have done something wrong, when we sin, when we backslide, rest in Christ? What do we do? We try to make it up.
That is the cosmos. In every religion, how do you get into good graces with God? You do something. “I will bring an offering. I will do this. I will have my own Lent. Whatever I have to do.” That is the cosmos.
But it says that we are to hold fast to our confession. Hebrews 4:14 says:
Seeing that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.
What is our confession? That Christ has saved me. Then you have to hold fast to that.
The word for “hold fast” here is different from the word in Hebrews 10. One way it is explained is with the word prevail. It is like Jacob when he wrestled with the angel. Remember how he prevailed because he held on to him? This is the same thing.
Brothers and sisters, if we could only get to the place where we would prevail in this—that we let Christ bring us to the Father.
When we backslide, when we sin, we let Christ bring us to the Father. That is the only way to the Father. There is no appeasing God. There is nothing you can do to appease God. But Christ has appeased Him.
It is through Him that we come to God. We follow Him into the holiest. We do not come with some other kind of gift, saying, “Well, I will give You this, and that will make up for it.” No. We come only by Christ.
He is the One who has made atonement, who has appeased God because of His offering for us. If we could only see that it is by Christ only that we can come to God, we would be free of a lot of things.
Not only that, if we could see how great that sacrifice was, I will tell you this: we would be on our faces. We would be on our faces to understand what this offering really was, what it really means, and what it really cost.
We would never doubt again that there is another way to come to God. If we could only have our eyes opened to that—and pray that the Lord opens our eyes to see the magnitude of His Son in the eyes of God the Father, and even in the eyes of the cosmos, which would not recognize it but in the end has to bow down to Him.
Everything bows down to Christ in the end.
So we are to hold fast. We let Christ take us to the Father, not our performance. That is the way of the world.
Secondly, Hebrews 10:23, which Steve used last week, says:
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
This “hold fast” is not the idea of prevailing, but of holding on to something very firmly. Your grasp is tight. You are not going to let it go.
I want to tell you this: getting into the presence of God, you must prevail in letting Christ take you there. I am really saying that is a fight. It goes against everything in your natural man.
Your natural man says, “No, you have to do something else. You have to do something. You have to add something to Christ.” It goes against every fiber in your natural being. That is why I said you have to prevail. You have to prevail in Christ to let Christ bring you to the Father.
What is our hope? It says, “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope.” Well, what is our hope? In 1 John 3, it says, “Beloved, now we are the children of God. It does not yet appear what we will be, but we know that when we see Him, we will be like Him.”
Our hope is that we will be like Christ. We will be transformed into His nature—not His deity, but His nature as man, as the new man.
How does this come about? How do we hold fast? Let us go to 2 Peter 1. I will talk fast now because we are running out of time.
Simon Peter, a bondservant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have obtained like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ:
Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ our Lord,
as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue,
by which have been given to