Sermon Tone Analysis

The Cause of Truth

May 10, 2009

*John 18:37*

 

In Experiencing God Day-by-Day, Henry Blackaby quotes John 8:32 which says* */You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

/Then he adds:

God's truth never restricts you; it always sets you free!

Are you discouraged?

Is there a sense of bondage in a particular area of your life?

A lack of victory over a certain sin?

A harmful addiction?

It is possible that you do not yet understand a truth about God that can release you.

If you feel powerless to meet the challenges before you, take encouragement from the promise of Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

If you are defeated by circumstance, hold on to the truth of Romans 8:28 that God can work your most difficult situation into His good.

If you are enslaved to a particular sin, work the truth of 1 John 1:9 into your life, which promises that if you confess your sin, God is faithful to cleanse you from /all /unrighteousness.

All of these truths await the Holy Spirit's implementation into your life.

It is one thing to know /about /the truth.

It is yet another thing to experience the truth of God being worked out in your life.

God's truth will have no effect upon you unless you accept it and believe it.

Perhaps you have already read and heard accounts of God working mightily in the lives of others.

But have you allowed God to implement those truths into your life?

What truth about God would you like to be experiencing in your life?

Ask Him to implement that truth into your life today.

Our message this morning is based on one verse in John, chapter 18 – verse 37. It’s a powerful testimony of why God came in bodily from to this earth.

Let’s turn to it know and study it together.

/Then Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king.

For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world— to bear witness to the truth.

Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice."

/ Very closely joined to that declaration of why Jesus came is another declaration – why this gospel was written.

Flip forward to chapter twenty.

At the end of this chapter is one verse which sums up John’s reason for writing his gospel: /but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.”

/(Jn 20:31)

The purpose of all that is written in the Gospel of John is to bring people to trust Christ as God's Son and thus give them eternal life.

Therefore this morning my goal, too, is that those here who do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God might be drawn to Jesus by the power of God the Father working through his Word, and that everyone might leave this place today loving the truth of Christ more deeply and that they would also be assured of their eternal life.

And let me preface what I have to say with a warning so as to awaken you to the seriousness of listening to the Word of God.

When Jesus spoke and no one believed, John explains their unbelief in John 12:38–40 by quoting Isaiah 53:1 and Isaiah 6:10”: /"Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?"

Therefore, they could not believe.

For Isaiah again said, "He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart and turn for me to heal them."/

It’s a sad thing to turn to God for what you can get out of Him.

There is another passage in Isaiah that helps explain how God blinds the eyes and hardens the heart of those who will not believe.

It is Isaiah 64:7, where the prophet laments, /"There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities."/

Therefore, the way God blinds and hardens is by withdrawing from the person's life and leaving him to his sin.

Have you been blinded and hardened by your sin?

Only when we see our sin will we give ourselves to God.

He deserves all the glory not only for providing a way of salvation through the death and resurrection of Christ, but also for effectually applying that salvation to our lives by continually drawing us closer to Christ in faith.

/"No one can come to me,"/ Jesus said, /"unless the Father who sent me draws him . . .

No one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father"/ (John 6:44, 65).

God in His omniscience knows in advance who will respond and who will remain indifferent.

So the warning is this: Believers, give God all the credit for drawing you into the kingdom of Christ, and let the truth of Christ stir you up to greater reliance on him; do not callously turn from lost sheep for you had to be carried into the fold yourself.

Unbelievers, give heed to the Word of God and pray that God might open your eyes and soften your heart, lest you be found blind and hardened and without hope.

Listen, because God has spoken these things that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing you will have life in his name.

End of the warning.

Let’s turn back now to the text that laid hold on me for this Sunday, John 18:37.

Here, several hours before his death, Jesus makes a statement about his birth which I want us to ponder.

Jesus and Pontius Pilate are together in the Roman praetorium, and Pilate is trying to get Jesus to say something that will show him worthy of crucifixion.

Backup to Verse 33 where Pilate asks: /"Are you the king of the Jews?" /Jesus' answer to this question is what hooked me on this text.

Now look at verse 36 and 37. Jesus says:

/"My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world."

Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king.

For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.

Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice."/

This would be a great Christmas text even though it comes from the end of Jesus' life on earth, not the beginning.

The uniqueness of his birth is implied; the purpose of his birth is given; and the pre-condition of that purpose is mentioned.

The uniqueness of his birth is that he did not originate at his birth.

He existed before he was born in a manger./

/The purpose of his birth was to bear witness to the truth: /"For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world: to bear witness to the truth."/

And the precondition of that purpose, the thing that enables you and I to agree that Jesus testifies to the truth is that you and I are "of the truth."

/"Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice."/

Let's look at each of these three: His uniqueness, His purpose, and the precondition more closely now.

First then, the uniqueness of his birth.

"/For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world."/

The personhood, the character, the personality of Jesus of Nazareth existed before the man Jesus of Nazareth was born.

There is a great mystery here.

Sometimes in quiet pensive moments, I look at my children and observe their uniqueness and their personalities, and then I would think of a time when they never existed.

Do you ever reflect on the great mystery of where your children’s spirits came from?

Before conception, there was no child, no spirit; and then, in the womb God gave them a spirit.

Or did you think, you did?

We know how flesh and blood grows by cell replication.

We can watch this miracle happen under a microscope.

But no one has ever seen a spirit being grown, your soul being grown.

The souls your children have will go right on existing when their bodies decompose in the grave.

Once they were not, but now they are and will be forever and ever.

All I know is that God created the personhood, the souls of my children, out of nothing because I know we can’t create souls.

This is a great mystery.

So often we think we created our children, don’t we?

But this is not what happened at Jesus' birth.

The theological word to describe this mystery is not creation, but incarnation.

The person, not the body, but the essential personhood of Jesus existed before he was born as a man.

His birth was not a coming into being of a new soul, but a coming into the world of an infinitely old soul.

Micah 5:2 puts it like this, 700 years before Jesus was born:

/But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days./

The origin of the Messiah who appeared in Bethlehem is from eternity.

Therefore, the mystery of the birth of Jesus is not merely that he was born of a virgin.

That miracle was intended by God to witness to an even greater miracle —namely, that the child born at Christmas was a person who existed “from ancient days."

He was not merely born, as John 18:37 says; he came into the world.

Listen to how Jesus puts it in John 8:56–59.

He says to the Jews:

/"Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad."

The Jews then said to him, "You are not fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?" Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." /So they took up stones to throw at him.

Why? Jesus said He was God – the great I AM of Exodus 3:14 /"Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am."/

Christ was before Abraham, indeed before all creation.