Sermon Tone Analysis

Lord, Help My Unbelief

November 15, 2009

*John 5:33-47*

 

In Experiencing God Day By Day, Henry Blackaby quotes Mark, chapter 9:24  which says:*  */Immediately the father of the boy cried out, “I do believe!

Help my unbelief.”/

Faith does not come from ignorance.

Faith is based on what we know.

Before we will trust others with something precious to us, we first try to find out if they are trustworthy.

This father was asking that he might come to know God in such a dimension that he could trust Him to cure his son.

His son had been possessed by an evil spirit since early childhood.

The father did not know Jesus well, but he had heard and seen enough to convince him that if there was any hope for his son, it lay with Jesus.

In desperation he cried out to Jesus for help.

Jesus' response was to heal his son.

The desperate father had correctly gone to Jesus with his problem even though he was struggling with his faith.

When you are struggling to believe, that is not the time to avoid Christ or to be ashamed of your struggle.

You will never increase your faith by not going to Jesus!

Rather, Jesus wants to help you with your belief.

He can not only meet your need, but He will also give you faith to trust Him to provide for you.

If you are struggling to believe that God can take care of Good Shepherd Community Church, it is because you don't know Him as He wants you to.

Go to Him and allow Him to convince you of His ability to meet every need you will ever face – physical, emotional, spiritual, financial.

“Please open your Bible to the Book of John, chapter five, and we’ll read verses 33 through 47 /You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth.

Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved.

He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light.

But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John.

For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me.

And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me.

His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen,  and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me,  yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

I do not receive glory from people.

But I know that you do not have the love of God within you.

I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me.

If another comes in his own name, you will receive him.

How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father.

There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope.

For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.

But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

/

Let’s pray.

Lord God, Father of Jesus the Christ, help our unbelief this morning.

Open our eyes and ears to what you want us to learn about You.

Amen

We to need focus on something that is massively important, namely, the way Jews viewed the Old Testament Scriptures and how those Scriptures relate to Jesus, and what difference it makes for us.

This is a good place for this focus because twice in this passage Jesus says that the Old Testament Scriptures are written about him.

Look at John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus says, “because you think that in them you have eternal life; and /it is they that bear witness about me/.”

The word /Scriptures/ here refers to the Jewish Scriptures, what we call /the Old Testament/, and what they called the /Covenant/.

We call it the Old Testament, or Old Covenant, because we believe that the Messiah has come—namely, Jesus—and by his death and resurrection has inaugurated a New Covenant.

Luke 22:20 Jesus refers to this new Covenant when He says * */After supper he took another cup of wine and said, "This wine is the token of God's new covenant to save you—an agreement sealed with the blood I will pour out for you.

/

The most decisive thing about this New Covenant is that Jesus, the Messiah, died for sinners so that both Jews and Gentiles who trust him would become the heirs of the Old Testament promises.

In other words, all who believe in Jesus the Messiah are included in the blessing of Abraham.

And all who don’t believe in Jesus are excluded from the blessings of Abraham.

In other words, anyone will be an heir of Abraham’s blessing if he believes in Jesus, the Messiah.

So Paul says, “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. . . .

If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:7, 29).

So the entire Old Testament is precious to Christians, because all Christians are counted by God as true Jews—beneficiaries of all the promises made to the covenant people.

Also,  The Old Testament is precious to Christians because it’s a book about God’s work with Israel in preparation for the Messiah who would come not only to save Israel but to save the world from the power and punishment of sin.

And so I ask God for all of us this morning, “Lord, help my unbelief.”

God promised Abram in Genesis 12:2-3, /“I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you . . .

and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”/

Paul shows us that this promise is fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus, the Messiah.

He says, /“The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’”/ (Galatians 3:8).

So we as Christians don’t reject the Old Testament just because we have the New Testament.

On the contrary, we embrace it as the fulfilled word of God.

The Old Testament is a lesson book for the nations that keeps shedding light on the work of Christ.

Christ did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

Now back to John 5:39: /“You search the Scriptures,”/ Jesus says, /“because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”/

So Jesus is saying that the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, our Scriptures, taken as a whole, witness to Jesus.

In our communion services we have been following the scarlet thread – the trail of blood – through the Old Testament, the blood sacrifices which culminated at the cross.

Those sacrifices pointed to the Lamb of God.

Jesus the says, in our key passage.

/“If you believed Moses] you would believe me; for he wrote of me.” /Moses wrote about Jesus, and the Scriptures witness about Jesus.

Ponder for a moment the implications of saying that the Scriptures “witness” about Jesus.

What does the word /witness/ imply?

Listen to the way John uses the word.

In John 1:34, John the Baptist says, /“I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”/

In John 3:11, Jesus says, /“We speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen.”/

John 3:32 says, /“He bears witness to what he has seen and heard.”/

And John 19:35 says, /“He who saw it has borne witness.”/

So a witness is ordinarily one who has /seen/ something and can witness to what he has seen.

A witness gives firsthand evidence.

He was there.

He doesn’t argue that something happened.

He says, /I know it happened, I saw it/.

So what does it mean when John calls the Old Testament Scriptures a /witness/ to Jesus.

Since writings can’t see, I take it to mean that the word “Scriptures” is shorthand for God-who-inspired-the-Scriptures.

God saw Jesus and knew Jesus long before Jesus was on the earth.

He saw him as his Son in heaven eternally (John 1:1-3), and he saw what his Son would be in history when he came.

And because God saw, God could witness.

So when John says about the Scriptures in 5:39, /“It is they that bear witness about me,”/ he means that God knew Jesus perfectly and fully—as it were face to face—and that he inspired these Scriptures, and through the Scriptures revealed Jesus.

God said things and did things in the Scriptures which, if the Jews had understood the Scriptures, would have seen them for what they are, a glimpse of Jesus and the Scriptures would have prepared them to recognize him and receive him when he came.

We, too, have the Scriptures written by God as proof that Jesus is the Son of God

Perhaps the most astonishing statements about the Scriptures in the Gospel of John is John 12:37-41  /But despite all the miraculous signs he had done, most of the people did not believe in him.

This is exactly what Isaiah the prophet had predicted: "Lord, who has believed our message?

To whom will the Lord reveal his saving power?"

But the people couldn't believe, for as Isaiah also said, "The Lord has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts— so their eyes cannot see, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them."

\\ Isaiah was referring to Jesus when he made this prediction, because he was given a vision of the Messiah's glory./

John quotes Isaiah 6 which has in it his famous vision of God: “/Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”/ (Isaiah 6:3).

This is simply astonishing.

When Isaiah saw the glory of God revealed from heaven, he was seeing the glory of Jesus.

Nothing more sweeping could be said about the way the Old Testament witnesses to Jesus.

In essence, John is saying: /Where God is manifest in the Old Testament, Jesus is manifest/.

If you see God at work, you see Jesus at work.