John 1:15-16

The Shepherd's Church

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Hello everyone and welcome to the Shepherd's Church. Now tonight we're just one message closer to finishing our study of John's prologue, which is verses 1 through 18.

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And as we inch closer and closer towards that finish line, I want us to examine verse 15 and 16 tonight, and then next week we'll finish off the prologue completely.

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And we're going to be looking at who is Jesus and why his life matters above all else.

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But before we turn to the text this evening, I feel compelled to say just a few words about the prologue that we find in John, because it's not like the rest of the gospel.

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It's special. And I think we would be wrong if we examine such an incredible book as the

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Gospel of John without ever stopping to look long enough to gaze at this prologue and all of its beautiful features.

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As we've said before, the prologue is incredibly Christ -centered. For starters, the prologue,

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I would say it like this, is one of the single greatest amalgamations of Christocentric theology that has ever been written.

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And if you want that in normal human words, I would say that it's one of the densest and most concentrated looks at Christ in all of the

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Bible. In fact, if I could carry only one Bible around for the rest of my life, and that Bible only had one chapter in it, it would be a really close race on whether it would be

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Romans eight that I would include in that Bible, or if it would be John one, because we all know

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Romans eight and all the beautiful theology that's there. But in John one, we get a picture of almost all of Christian theology.

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We get a picture of Jesus being the eternal, infinite, divine son of God.

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We get a picture of Trinitarian theology where Christ is in personal relational intimacy with God, the father and God, the

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Holy Spirit for all of eternity. We get a picture of creation theology where he's the creator and the sustainer of the universe.

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We get a picture of redemptive historical theology that he's the hope of the Old Testament.

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He's the point of the prophets. He's the one who illuminates dark and man. We get a picture of salvation theology and the fact that he's the incarnate

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God man who came down among the people that he created, was rejected by them and murdered on a

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Roman cross. But yet, after three days, he rose from the dead and he adopts those centers into the family of God.

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And he's even the one who sends the spirit of God to dwell within those people to make them little walking, talking tabernacle temples for the glory of God.

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So in this one single little unit of a chapter, we get to see so much of Christian theology and it's all so beautifully

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Christ -centered. The second reason that the prologue is beautiful, but yet it's different than the rest of the gospel is that it's not only dense, but it's a different genre.

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It's an entirely different kind of literature than the rest of the gospel, which is narrative.

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Now let me be clear, the prologue doesn't advance a different purpose, even though it's a different genre, it does advance the same purpose, which we have learned is that we would believe

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Jesus is the son of God, that he's the Christ, and that by believing in those things, we would have life in his name.

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And that's John 20 verse 31, and we're going to repeat that verse and that purpose every single week.

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But while different genres do things differently, John is using a different genre to advance that purpose in a different way.

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And that's for our benefit, because often when you're trying to learn about something, especially in a deep way, you need to look at it from different angles in order to understand it better.

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It would be like me, if I wanted to explore the intricacies of what it looked like or felt like, or what it was like to be a dad, well, then

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I could write a poem or a song about that, and I could experience that from a creative, emotive level.

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I could write a journal entry about how being a dad affects my life, and I could look at that from a reflective type of level.

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I could write a research paper on how fatherhood has a profound effect upon this generation and future generations, and I could look at that from an academic level.

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And I could even write a fictional story where I'm exploring a particular father and his children and how they grow through adversity to become a strong family, and I could do that from another side of the creative spectrum.

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And all of these approaches will be getting at the very same thing, but I would be doing them from different ways, which would help me understand it in a much richer, deeper, more complete way.

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So as we began this study with the prologue, we're looking at a different genre of who Christ is, but we are going to be moving into a new genre of literature, the primary genre of literature in the

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Gospel of John. I want us to be aware that this is coming, and the miraculous is even going to happen soon because instead of just examining one or two verses, which is what we've been doing in the prologue, and there's intention in that because of how deep the subject matter is, we're actually going to be examining 10, 12, maybe even 20 verses in the coming weeks because those verses belong to an entire unit.

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While we can examine the theological depths of the prologue in a very slow and deliberate way, when we come into the narrative portions of this book, we're gonna be looking at stories, we're gonna be looking at events, we're gonna be looking at moments in time that really need to be viewed as a whole unit.

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So I say all of this because I want us to understand where we're going and why we've done things the way that we've done.

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We've taken a slow approach through the prologue on purpose so that we can examine the beautiful Christ -centered doctrines that it presents.

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In the future, we're gonna be taking a little bit of a faster approach so that we can look at who

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Jesus is and so that we can understand him in real time as John describes him.

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So with that, I wanted to give you that background. Turn with me to verses 15 through 16 as we're gonna learn what

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God, by the power of his Holy Spirit, would teach us about Christ his son. So turn with me to 15 and 16 as we begin.

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John says, John testified about him and cried out saying, this is he whom

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I said, he who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for he existed before me, for of his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.

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Now today, I want us to examine two points about Christ that come right out of this text, and those two things are number one, that Christ is supreme over all things.

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And number two, that Christ is sufficient in all things. Christ is supreme over all things, and Christ is sufficient in all things.

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So let's look at the first that Christ is supreme over all things. Now, to get at this,

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I want us to look at what John is doing when he... When John says, John testified, he's not talking about himself.

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We need to understand who he's talking about and what does he mean by testify, so that we can understand how he's getting at this doctrine that Christ is supreme.

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You see, when John uses the name John in the gospel, he's never referring to himself.

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In fact, none of the times that John uses the word John is he ever referring to himself. In almost every case, except for one, he is overwhelmingly talking about this man that we know today as John the

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Baptist. He's talking about the cousin of Jesus Christ who was born to Zechariah and Elizabeth, and it was about six months older than our

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Lord. So he's talking about John the

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Baptist. What does he mean when he says that John testified? When he says that John testified, he's talking about John sharing a message about what he knows.

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It's almost like when you get into a courtroom setting and you hear someone telling what they know they're not coming in having prepared a master's level thesis on the intricacies of a certain thing.

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No, they're sharing what they know, what they observed, what they saw, what they heard. So when

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John the writer is talking about John the Baptist testifying, he is testifying about what

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John knows. John shared a particular message to a particular people at a particular time, and it was based off what he knew, and I think you and I would do very well.

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Before we get out what John knew, we also talk about who he was talking to and why that matters, because it's incredibly important.

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In the first century, and this is the audience John was speaking to, the elder was always greater than the younger.

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The elder was always greater. They had more honor and more dignity. So we remember

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John is six months older than Jesus, and in this time, that would have meant he had more honor than Jesus.

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In this society, if you were in a particular vocation longer than another person, then you also had honor.

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And we know that John had been in ministry longer than Jesus, so that gave him a sort of double honor that would have been totally upheld in the first century

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Middle East. We also know from history that John had a thriving ministry, almost like a megachurch at his time, so that when

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John spoke, crowds would come and flock to John in order to hear him speak.

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So then in a lot of ways, John had more time in the ministry. He had a bigger ministry, and he was older than Jesus.

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So John would have been superior to Jesus in this time and in this place.

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But what I find fascinating about John and about the gospel writers,

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John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is that none of them focus on the superiority of John's ministry.

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None of them even focus on the rise of John's ministry. This gospel and others do not focus on the rise of John's ministry or the early days of his ministry or how it grew through the struggles or the victories or none of that.

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The gospels pick up on the very day that John's ministry begins to die.

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They begin on the day that his ministry goes into decline, and I find that absolutely fascinating because the point of the writers is not to talk about John, but to talk about John's attitude towards his ministry and John's attitude toward Christ.

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That's the point. Look at what John says. This was he of whom I said, he who comes after me has a higher rank than I.

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You see, all through the early years of John's ministry, when it was growing, and when people were becoming excited in John's ministry,

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John had been preparing them for the day that he was going to give all of it up. John is essentially saying that the only purpose for his ministry was to prepare people for Christ.

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John is saying my life's purpose was not to build up my name or my fame or my notoriety, but it was to get you ready for him.

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And this, my friends, is a wonderful blueprint for ministry today.

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This attitude that John has. You see, because churches do not exist to become large spectacles to advance their own name and advance their own agenda.

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Churches don't exist to build up their own name and gather large crowds. Churches exist to build up the name of Christ.

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Churches exist to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus. Just as John was seeking to prepare people to meet

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Christ, our goal is to prepare people for the coming of Christ, the second coming of Christ, when they will meet

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Jesus face to face. That's our goal. The Shepherds Church, so long as I live and so long as I have breath in my lungs to the to the grace of God, I pray that that we will only ever be about that, that our explicit purpose will be the ministry of helping the saints prepare to know the coming king.

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That we will never turn the focus on ourself, that we will never be about our own glory and about our own growth and about how many people that we have coming or whatever, that our goal will be an eschatological purpose, that we will be preparing people to meet the coming king.

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Just like John did not know exactly when Jesus would step into his earthly ministry, we don't know when

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Jesus is coming back, but we can faithfully serve and then we can faithfully prepare the sheep and prepare the people of God to get ready for the coming of Christ the king.

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And that is what our entire purpose is about. And while that's a great corporate application, there's also a wonderful personal application that can be found in John's attitude towards his ministry as well.

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And I think we'll give a little background on that just so that we can understand what's going on. We can understand how

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Christ is supreme because Christ is not only supreme over our ministries, Christ is also supreme over the entirety of our lives.

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So let's look at a little bit of background really quickly so that we can see how

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Jesus was not only supreme over John's ministry, but also supreme over him as a person. If you think about where John was standing when it comes to his time period and the culture that he was around, this would have been an incredible statement for him to have uttered that this

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Jesus is the one I was preparing you for and he's greater and I'm less. It would have struck right at the heart of what everyone thought was normal.

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Most would have expected a man like Jesus, this no -name Nazarene who just shows up to give incredible deference to John, maybe even coming under his wing and joining his other disciples and being mentored by John in the ministry.

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But instead, before Jesus is ever quoted as saying a single word in the

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Gospel of John, John states the obvious conclusion, this man is greater than I. And you can imagine the shock that was on everyone's faces.

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I imagine it this way, maybe John was preaching a sermon and right in the middle of the service, he points to the guy who shows up late to service and the guy who no one in the crowd knows, who's been humbly living kind of on his own for 30 years.

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And he just shows up and John says, you know what, guys, everything's done.

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My work here is finished. This is the guy that I've been telling you about. I'm not even going to finish the sermon.

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Now, of course, that didn't happen, but that's just me trying to imagine what it would have been like for Jesus to show up and John to say, my ministry's finished.

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This is what we've been working for. Can you imagine how strange that moment might have felt to those who were excited about the ministry of John?

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I mean, how many people would have thought that John in that moment had snapped, that the pressure of ministry had finally caught up to him?

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You see, at this point in Jewish culture, at this point in time in the first century,

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John's ministry was probably the brightest light of excitement that these people had ever seen.

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You see, for 400 years since the prophet Malachi had spoke to the people of God, God had been silent.

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There'd been no more prophets, no more words from the Lord for four centuries.

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And apart from the status quo temple worship that went on in Jerusalem, and apart from the weekly synagogue teachings that happen in town to town on Saturday evenings, the ministry of John was the most fascinating and the most fresh thing going in the entire country because John represented the fact that God is still speaking.

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John represented the fact that a new prophet had burst upon the scene. John represented an exciting reality that God had returned and came back to his people.

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So he drew large crowds. He evoked notoriety among the crowds, and even the religious elite came all the way from Jerusalem to question him and to say, are you the

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Elijah that is to come? Are you the Messiah that is to come? People understood that what was happening here was not normal, but it was extraordinary, and it was from God.

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But John, in the midst of all of that, could have been prideful. He could have thought, yeah,

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I am the one that God is using here, or this ministry is something new and unique and special, and the country's never seen anything like this before.

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And he could have held tightly to his ministry because it was a good thing. But John says, no,

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Jesus is the one who ranks higher than me. Jesus is the one who is

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Lord. And he even says that he existed before me.

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John is not saying that Jesus was physically born to his mother

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Mary prior or before John was born to his mother Elizabeth. He's not disputing their birth order here.

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John's not saying that Jesus was born before him. He's not saying that the other gospel writers are wrong.

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What John is claiming is that while his existence began at his conception,

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Jesus's didn't. Jesus's existence are rooted in eternity.

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That Jesus existed before his incarnation. That Jesus existed before John was born.

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That Jesus existed before the earth was fashioned out of nothing. What John is saying is that this

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Jesus is Lord. And that in light of that, his ministry is nothing.

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You see, John was so willing and so joyful, even to lay down everything that he had worked for, because and to even lay down everything that was normal to cling to in his culture, because of the surpassing reality of who

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Jesus was. John was a man of God. He was a prophet in Israel, and he deserved the utmost respect.

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He had built a successful ministry. He was a good man, but yet he laid down everything because Jesus was supreme over all things.

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John could have clung to his rights and his privileges. He could have touted his birth order. He could have played the experience card.

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He could have rested and how good and how great his ministry was, but he didn't because he saw that even though his ministry had some significance, there is nothing more significant than Jesus Christ, that he is supreme over every facet of John's life.

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But I'll say that this also is one of the things that causes me to fear for you, to fear for anyone who listens to the sermon, to fear for the

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American church, to fear for individual Christians within this culture, because I'm afraid that many of us are going to miss

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Jesus because we don't treat our life in the same way that John treated his.

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Instead of Jesus being supreme over every aspect of our life, many of us are gonna let what is culturally normal get in the way of us seeing and savoring

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Jesus. And just so I'm clear, when I say things that are culturally normal, I am not talking about the things that are abhorrent to the believer that society deems normal.

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I'm not talking about homosexuality. I'm not talking about pornography. I'm not talking about gender dysphoria or anything like that.

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I'm not talking about us clinging to the things that the world believes are normal, that the Bible says are awful.

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What I'm actually talking about is that many of us are gonna miss Jesus Christ because of good things that get in the way of our life.

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I'm afraid for many believers in the society because we're gonna allow the good things that comprise our experience as Americans to compromise our experience of Jesus Christ.

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You see, John could have held onto something that was normal and good in his society, which is respect, which is honor, which is ministry experience, and all of that he could have clung to, and he would have missed

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Christ. And in the same way, we must be aware of this fact unless we allow anything that is good in our life to rise to the level of ascendancy over Christ, that we will sacrifice

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Christ on the altar of those good, damnable things. Have you seen this happen in your life?

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Have you seen how good things can sneak in and can rob you of the greatest thing, which is

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Christ? I've seen it in my life. For example, when

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I was growing up, it was always seen as a good thing for men to work hard and long hours, and that was a good way for men to provide for their family.

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In the Bible, work is considered a good thing, and while not every family looks like mine did growing up, and families are different,

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I remember vividly that both my dad and my grandpa worked very, very hard, and they both felt like that that was a normal thing in a way that they could serve their family.

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I remember my dad working two very physical jobs to pay for the bills and to send me to Christian school in junior high and high school.

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And when we'd get home, he would be so exhausted that he would crash on the couch in exhaustion because he had worked so hard.

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I remember my grandpa, he worked in the same way, very diligently.

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He would work all day as a supervisor, going all over the state of North Carolina to do his job, and then he would come home and he would work, and he would often tinker out in the building, in his shed, in the yard.

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And if you add up the hours that these men worked in a day, it was a lot of hours.

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And my point is not to say that there's a certain amount of hours that you should work.

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I'm just trying to elucidate the point that working hard is a good thing in American culture.

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It's not unbiblical to work hard. But when

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I let that cultural norm define me, and when I let that good thing become an ultimate thing in my life, it's no longer good.

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I might have all the best motivations to provide for my family, but if I find my value and my worth in my work instead of Jesus, I will become privy to overwork.

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I will actually begin under providing for my family by even killing it at my job, because my wife would feel alone and unsupported at home.

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And that is a sin that most certainly will affect my relationship with Christ.

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And I'll tell you, for many years, I've actually struggled in this area because I grew up in such a tradition of hardworking men that when

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I moved to Massachusetts, I had school and I had work and ministry, and they were all vying for my time. And Shannon and the kids often got the crumbs and the leftovers of me.

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After I graduated school, I went into ministry, and all of the excitement that came along with that, I was finally doing something that I felt called to do.

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And I'll tell you, to my own shame, there were many weeks in the early years of ministry, which

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I've not been in ministry long. So I'm recently recovering from this.

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I'm recently learning how to do this better. But in my first year of ministry,

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I think I worked 70, 80 -hour weeks every single week of the year.

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And I don't say that to brag. Again, I say that to my own shame. The average pastor is not much different.

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The ones that I've spoken to and from the stats that I've looked at, average pastor works more than 60 hours a week every week.

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And there's many reasons for that. Some of them are avoidable. Some of them are not.

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You know, funerals and weddings and sermons and pastoral counseling, and then time can just get really eaten up.

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But I think some of it has to do with the fact that many pastors have taken ministry, which is a good thing, and they've made it an ultimate thing in their life, and they've put it ahead of Jesus.

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Talk about the rankness of idolatry when you use something for Jesus and you put it above and on top of Jesus.

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Pastors look at all the wonderful things that the Lord allows them to do, and then they start defining themselves by those things instead of Jesus Christ.

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And in the wretchedness of that, they miss Him. But it's not just pastors.

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It's all of us. How often does that next promotion, which is a good thing, drive us then to overworking, consume our thoughts and make us anxious?

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How often do problems at home in the marriage leave us not feeling understood and fuels us to leave the home and to spend more time working, more trips out of state, more of this, more of that, because we're already having problems at home.

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Then we start to define ourselves in our careers. When work, which is totally a good thing, begins to define us, we will all start to miss

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Jesus in that, plain and simple. And John's approach is so refreshing in here because he got to see

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Jesus because he took a different approach. He said that Jesus must become greater. Everything else in my life must become less.

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I'm not going to define myself by the good things. I'm going to define myself by Him. Take entertainment, for example.

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There's nothing wrong with having a leisurely pursuit. It's not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with watching a moderate amount of TV.

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There's plenty of things on TV that we could watch that are perfectly fine, so long as we're not watching things that are sin.

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And I'm sure that anyone listening to the sermon is certainly in the middle of the normal range of what our society considers to be a healthy, normal amount of television.

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I'm assuming that none of us are watching 10, 15 hours of TV a day. No, I'm saying we're probably somewhere in the good, normal range of what entertainment looks like.

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But when you take that good thing and you make it an ultimate thing, you will begin to sacrifice

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Christ on the altar of entertainment. What happens when you begin watching shows that dishonor the

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Lord because you want to keep up with the story that everyone's talking about and you want to have something to share on your lunch break at work?

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What happens when you don't wisely steward your time and you become enamored by this idol of television gluttony?

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What happens when we begin to neglect our prayer life in order to stay caught up on this hit television series and when we neglect other priorities in order to binge watch over a weekend?

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What happens when we start to miss time with God in the morning because the first thing that we open after our eyes is our phones?

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Now, I don't ask these questions to shame any of us, but like John, we must decide when what is good must bow the knee to what is supreme and what is infinite.

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If the way we approach media and entertainment and our hobbies or anything else does not bow the knee to Jesus Christ, then we will certainly miss out on experiencing

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Christ. Our relationship with God will suffer. The same is true in almost any good thing that society or culture deems normal.

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If we make our relationships ultimate, like if I make my wife my ultimate thing, then

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I will miss Jesus Christ. Children are a blessing from the Lord, but if I make them ultimate, then I'm going to miss

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Jesus Christ. If your singleness defines you, then you're going to miss

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Jesus Christ. If your wealth or status or material defines you, then you're going to miss

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Jesus Christ. If anything other than Jesus Christ defines you, you will miss

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Jesus Christ. That is what John is teaching. And that is what John discovered, that Christ is supreme over every area of our lives.

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And as we think about that, I want to finish this point that Christ is supreme with just a few questions for us to consider, because it's one thing to acknowledge the supremacy of Christ over every area of our life, but it's another thing to actually live that way.

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And I would just simply ask you to think about these questions, to ponder them, to not just listen and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

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Jesus is supreme, but to listen to these questions, to maybe even journal on these questions, because this is really important that we get this right.

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Faithfulness and idolatry stand in the balance of whether we get this wrong or right. So I ask you these questions, is

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Jesus currently supreme over every facet of my life?

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And I don't want you to answer that question like a typical Christian who has good theology and say, yes, he is.

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Because I'll go ahead and guarantee that all of us in this room and everyone who listens to this sermon are sinners who are still fallen, who have been saved by grace, but still have consistent, persistent patterns of sin in our lives.

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So if anyone can answer that Jesus is currently supreme over every area of their life, then you are currently lying to yourself or you're already dead and you're in heaven.

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So when I ask that question, I just want you to be honest with yourself and say, no, he is not. And then

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I want you to ask yourself the second question, where then do I currently need repentance?

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What area of my life is Jesus currently not supreme over? And how then do

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I need help in order to repent? And if you currently don't know, like if you're honest with yourself and you say,

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I'm not sure which area of my life Jesus is currently not supreme, then do what David does and said, examine me,

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Lord. Search me and see what area in my life is still falling short of you and reveal to me the areas that I need to repent.

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If the Lord has been gracious to you and has already revealed those areas that you know you need to repent in, then

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I just simply ask you the question, what are you going to do about it? Will I live like John, happily laying down whatever is owed to me, all of the good things in my life so that I can have what is better?

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Or will I cling to these momentary, temporary good things and miss the ultimate thing that I could have in Jesus Christ?

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Miss the supreme thing, miss Jesus. What am

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I going to do about it? That's the first thing that we learn in this passage.

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That Christ is supreme. We also learn that Christ is totally sufficient over all things.

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John says, for of his fullness we have all received and grace upon grace.

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Notice that John does not only say that Christ is supreme, he's also communicating that Christ is sufficient and he's saying not of his limits we have received.

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He doesn't say of his finite portions that we have received. He doesn't say that we've been given a measure.

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John says that we've received of his fullness from the unlimited supply of Christ.

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John is saying, in fact, that I actually gave up nothing. All the honor due to me was worth nothing in comparison to knowing

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Christ. John is saying that Christ is so full, so inexhaustible, that he can give his fullness to all of us without ever running dry.

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And just to say that in a different way, we would say that he is totally sufficient. Think about it this way.

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All of the things that are good in your life that you could give up for Christ are nothing in comparison to how good he is and how sufficient he is.

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That's how the infinite works. Now, there's an entire mathematical field that is dedicated to the study of the infinite.

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And in our world, this is all theoretical because there's nothing that is truly infinite. But follow me for a moment.

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I want to actually make a point here that if I had an infinite amount of dollar bills, and I mean a true infinite amount, and I know what you're already thinking.

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Many of you are like, that would be amazing. No, it wouldn't because you'd make it an idol and it would crush you. But if I had an infinite amount of dollar bills, and I shared with you an infinite amount of dollar bills, how many dollar bills would

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I still have? An infinite amount. In fact,

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I could share an infinite amount of dollar bills with you and then also with an infinite amount of other people, and I would still have an infinite amount myself.

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And while that logic seems hard for us to grapple with, an infinite supply of anything, if it is truly infinite, can never be exhausted.

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Now, again, that's really hard for us to understand, because in the observable universe, nothing is infinite.

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While the universe is incomprehensibly large, it has limits and it has boundaries. It's finite.

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The number of atoms is countable. It's finite. It's not infinite.

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But with God and with Christ, he is the true infinite.

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What John is saying is of his fullness, of his infinitude, we have all received grace upon grace.

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So what that means is, is that if Christ is truly infinite, then he is inexhaustible.

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That means that he is able to fully satisfy every single

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Christian and to share his infinite fullness with you. This means that there's no

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Christian who's been given unlimited portion. And when he says grace upon grace, even he's not saying that he shared this infinite fullness with you once.

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I know when we think about grace, we often think, yeah, God showed me grace on the cross so that I could become a

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Christian. It's a one -time grace. But John is careful to communicate that it's grace upon grace.

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It's kind of like the ocean waves. They keep coming and coming and coming. I challenge you to go sit by the ocean and to watch the waves and to wait and see if the ocean just somehow forgets to send a wave.

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If there's ever a moment where the ocean waters are like glass and they turn into a lake because the ocean forgot to send the waves, it's not possible.

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Wave after wave after wave will continue to crash upon the shore until Jesus Christ returns.

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And in the same way, wave upon wave of grace will continue to crash over your life until Jesus Christ returns, because he didn't share with you a one -time fullness.

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He shared with you an ongoing and perpetual fullness that will supply your need every day of your life.

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Again, there's not a single Christian who's ever been given a limited portion of grace. We've all received a full supply.

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And while most of us live on the fumes of grace, what John is saying, if there's a pipeline of his bounty that is always available for us, and it makes us wonder, why don't we actually live like this?

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Why don't we live in the fullness of Christ? I think whether it's our sin or it's a lack of faith or a false belief or some form of ignorance on our part, all of these things end up choking out the fullness that we should be experiencing and leave us feeling empty instead.

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All of us at one time or another have felt and acted like we were beggars, when the

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Bible actually calls us children of the King. All of us at one time or another have tried to face our day as if we were broke and empty when we have an overflowing supply in our account.

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There have been times when all of us have felt powerless and dejected when what we've received is a sufficient supply of grace upon grace in order to carry us.

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There have been times when all of us have felt defeated when really what Christ has given us is his victory.

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How different would it be if we lived our lives by instead of defining the limits that we started living in and stepping into his fullness?

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How different would our life be if we stopped defining what was possible with God and stepped into what seemed impossible?

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Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about what many would call the word of faith, where we name it and claim it or we pray it and spray it and we get some kind of blessing out of that.

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That's not what I'm talking about. That's an aberration of what Christ and John are saying. The word of God is not promising that you'll be rich on earth.

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That's not what fullness means. Christ doesn't guarantee treasures or big houses or perfect health or total comfort on this side of heaven.

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When we talk about fullness, we are talking about spiritual fullness that is not the same as the American dream.

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The kind of fullness that God is talking about is not what Jeff Bezos can buy with 100 plus billion dollars.

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It's not what you can find from being the leader of a country. That kind of fullness is not measured in matter, but it's it's it's measured in the only relationship that truly matters.

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The fullness that John is talking about is spiritual on this side of heaven.

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The Bible is promising that whether you are poor or rich, you are full in Christ. Whether you are healthy right now or whether you are deathly ill, you are full in Christ.

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Whether you are well fed or you are starving in this moment right now, you have everything that you need.

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John is telling us that if we have Christ, though we may have nothing else, we actually have everything.

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And the opposite is also true. If we do not have Christ, but we have everything else that the world considers important, then we have absolutely nothing.

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The people of John's day would have been shocked to hear him talking like this. And the people of our day are shocked to hear us talking like this.

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They have no category for what we're talking about. The world would even look at us and say, you're telling me that everything in the world can be taken from you.

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You could lose all of your possessions, all of your investments, your cars, your clothes and everything else. And you're telling me that you can still be full.

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And if you say yes, the world would think you've went to crazy town. But the

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Christian can say that not only with full confidence, but also with joy that, yes,

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I have everything that I need. My life could look like a modern day version of Job, and I have everything that I need.

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I am well supplied. And only the Christian can say that because we know who Christ is.

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And we know that if we have him, we have everything. This is the understanding that led the apostle

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Paul to pin some of the most beautiful words in the entire New Testament. When he said in Philippians three, but whatever things were gained to me, those things

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I've counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that,

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I count all things to be lost in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ, Jesus, my

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Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things. And I count them but rubbish so that I might gain

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Christ and be found in him. You see,

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Paul strains to be able to find the words to describe just how good Jesus is and just how little and how small everything else is.

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He even uses a vulgar word that we translate as rubbish, which is a very soft

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English translation for what Paul is saying in the Greek. He's saying all of this stuff, all of these things, all of these trinkets and all of these toys, everything other than Jesus Christ is nothing in comparison to knowing him.

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And if I have him, then I have everything. And even if I had everything that the world had to offer, but I didn't have him, then

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I have absolutely nothing. That is what

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Paul is getting at. In chapter four, he makes this even more clear in one of the most misquoted verses in the

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Bible. I actually misquoted this verse in my high school yearbook, so I'm thankful that now

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I get to teach it from a proper biblical approach. Paul says, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstance that I'm in.

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I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity in any and every circumstance.

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I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need, and then

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I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Paul is not saying that I can do anything

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I set my mind to just because I'm a Christian. He's not saying that I can climb Mount Washington in January.

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He's not saying that I can win this football game. He's not saying that I can get over this bad case of the flu just because I'm a believer.

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Paul's saying that in any situation that I can find myself, I can have joy and I can have peace, and then

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I can still move forward in my life because I know the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ.

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Paul is saying that I can be poor, broken, destitute, afflicted, persecuted, drained, downcast, and whatever other situation that you could put me in, and none of it would ever be enough to take away the fullness of having

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Jesus Christ. Because when we have Jesus Christ, even if we have nothing else, we have absolutely everything.

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We are full because he is totally sufficient. And when

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I say sufficient, I'm using a definition to say that Christ is all we need.

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That there is not a single need that we have that can take away from his fullness, and there is nothing at all that can make us full but him.

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He is enough. And him can be found all of the grace that we need to face anything that this world could ever throw at us.

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So that if we had no home, if we woke up tomorrow with no car, no job, no food, and not even the proper clothing to shelter us from the cold, though that would be incredibly hard, we would still, as a

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Christian, have all that we need. Because we have him.

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The question is not, do you agree with the words that I'm saying? The question is, do you believe that?

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Do you live that? Because I'll tell you, as Americans, we are going to struggle to live out and experience all of the joy that Paul experienced in Philippians 3 and 4 because of all of the excess that we have on top of Christ.

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All of the mountain of stuff. This is what concerns me about modern day

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Christianity and about my own soul. And I hope it concerns you too, that in the midst of all of this mounting pile of stuff that we are prone to miss the fullness of Christ, that we are prone in our two -car warm house,

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American life of luxury, to live like we're not well supplied, to live like that we just need the next gadget and then that will make us full, or that we just need a few more dollars to make budget, and the droning of,

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I just, I just, I just, I just becomes the disgusting mantra of my wicked heart.

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I just need that. Just a little bit more by American standards and by New England standards.

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Most of us in this room are the upper rung of at least the lower class and probably the higher rung of the middle class.

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But by world standards, ladies and gentlemen, we are kings and queens. We are some of the wealthiest people on earth.

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If you're sitting in this room tonight, you are lavishly wealthy in comparison to the seven billion other people who currently live on planet earth.

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And this becomes even more apparent when you think about it from a historical vantage point. You and I, even if we do not think we have much, we rival the emperors and the pharaohs and the monarchs and the kings of old by the volume of wealth and the style of living that we are accustomed to.

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If you have one car to your name, then you have it better off than the vast majority of human beings who've ever lived and who have ever walked this earth.

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Only the kings rode around in carts. And yet even the lowest among us have a car.

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If you have more than a couple shirts and a few pairs of pants and you have it better off than most people who have ever lived.

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And again, this is not necessarily to our detriment. I'm not saying these things to shame us, but I would ask the question, what is our wealth actually doing for us?

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Is it causing us to stop and to stare at the sufficiency of Christ and to say that all of this stuff is nothing in comparison to him?

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Or is our wealth causing us to rest in the sufficiency of man, in the sufficiency of our wallet, in the sufficiency of our economy, in our bank account, or in our own ability to govern our lives?

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You see, we've been taught a great lie by living in America. We've been taught that fulfillment comes from having.

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And you will be happy if you have, and you will be miserable if you have not. And that cultural mythology is one of the great lies that we've all been indoctrinated to believe in.

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It will rob you of your fulfillment in Jesus Christ, because having does not make us happier and have not the have nots are not necessarily more miserable.

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That is an American lie, because we are the most rich nation on the planet, but yet we're still the most medicated people on earth.

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We have more things, and yet we also have more mental illness than almost anywhere on earth.

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We are more in debt than almost anywhere on the planet. Our national debt is in the 20 trillions at this point.

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We have so much, but yet we live so anxiously that we don't have enough. And I'll tell you, frankly, that all of this trivial surplus that we all have has made us miserable.

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Our pay raises have not fixed us yet. Having and accumulating more stuff has not made us happier.

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And I bring all of this up again, not to shame you for being wealthy. I'm not going to be like a liberal social justice warrior in this moment and try to shame you for being privileged or try to make you feel bad and apologize to the rest of the world that you were born in America, that you had no control over that.

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I'm not even trying to guilt you into selling all of your possessions, even though for a lot of us that probably would make us more joyful.

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My point, though, is simply to warn us that this society and its values are totally at odds with God.

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And if we fall into the world's pattern of thinking, we will miss

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Christ. While Jesus says that you are full in him, everything in our society says that you are in need.

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Just look at commercials. You have this problem. Take this medicine. You have this issue.

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Join this website. You wanna look beautiful and sexy to the rest of the world? Use this shampoo.

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Everything is predicated upon the fact that you're in a position of need instead of a position of fullness.

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But the Bible says in Christ, you are actually full. Jesus says, hate your life.

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The world says, don't do that. Love your life. Make your life all about you. That's how you find happiness.

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Jesus says, take up your cross and follow me. And yet culture says, no, you do you and let everyone else follow you because you're so beautiful and intelligent that why wouldn't everybody want to follow you?

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Lay down your life. Why would you do that? Jesus says, die to yourself and serve him.

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Our society says, no, live for yourself and serve yourself. I'm bringing all of this up to warn you that you and I live in a world that is diametrically opposed to Jesus Christ.

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This world and this economy and it's rotten value structures cannot give you fullness because their entire worldview is bankrupt.

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Everything in our society says you have need, you need this, you need that, you need to buy this, buy that, upgrade this, download that.

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And if we are not thoroughly diligent over our minds and our lives, we're going to miss the fullness of Christ.

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We're going to be empty and we're going to be wondering why. If we're not careful, our life is going to choke out

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Christ. All of the stuff that we have is going to choke out our experience of his fullness. We've been given the greatest treasure on earth.

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If we're not careful, we'll trade it in for stuff. We'll be distracted by our shiny toys instead of reveling in the infinite.

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And as C .S. Lewis once famously said, we will go on making mud pies in the slum when a holiday at the sea has what has been offered to us.

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We'll be like a diver who accidentally drowned while he was holding a perfectly good oxygen tank.

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Dear Christian, we must remember where life is found and we must not allow the sheer excess that we have to poison us and to choke us out from seeing and experiencing and savoring everything that Christ has to offer.

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John is telling us that Christ is all sufficient. To live differently than that is most certainly a sin and a sin that we must be prepared to repent of constantly and a sin that we must be prepared to repent of today.

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We have an opportunity right now to lay down our rights, to lay down our privileges, to lay down even good things that are getting in the way of Christ and to declare that Christ is supreme.

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We have the opportunity right now to examine our life and to see if the way that we are living aligns with scripture and if not, to repent so that we can find him sufficient.

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As I pray, my prayer is that the Holy Spirit would reveal to you ways that you can repent and would reveal to you ways that you are not finding

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Christ supreme and you are not finding Christ sufficient and you are searching for those things in places that they cannot be found.

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So as we pray, I pray that those things would come to your mind and your heart and that you would also pray along with me that you would find healing and that you would have the courage to turn to Christ, the only one who is supreme and the only one who is sufficient.

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Let us pray. Father, I thank you for the fact that you are supreme over everything, that you are better than everything, that you are greater than everything and that there is nothing at all that we could pursue that is better.

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Holy Spirit, I pray right now that you would bring to light the things in my life and the things in our life that we are resting in, hoping in, or chasing after that are not

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Christ. Maybe it's things that we watch. Maybe it's things that we listen to.

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Maybe it's things that we do. But Lord, I pray that you would reveal those things.

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And Lord, I also pray, just from my own experience, knowing how hard it is to actually repent.

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Lord, I pray that you would give us a special dispensation of your grace. Right now, that we would be able to repent, that we would be able to turn to you, and that we would be able to gain victory in these areas, that we would lay anything and everything down at the foot of the cross of Christ that is keeping us from Christ, because any good thing that keeps us from him is not good at all.

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Lord, I pray that we would find you sufficient. Lord, I pray that we would find you good.

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And Lord, I pray that we would wrap our entire lives around knowing you. Lord, reveal to us the ways that we fall short.

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Holy Spirit, give us the strength to repent. And Lord, with the time that we have left, would you help us to worship in Christ awesome and glorious and beautiful name, we pray.