John 2:23-3:12 (War on False Faith)

The Shepherd's Church

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The underlying thread that's held this gospel together so far has been the kingdom of God.

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It's not been explicit. It's not been overt. It's been underneath, though, every single word, every single phrase, every single sentence, every paragraph in every story.

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It's kind of like a house frame. You don't see it, but everything is held together by the frame of the house.

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The walls are hung to it. The pictures are hung to it. The doors are hung to it. Everything in the gospel of John is hung on the concept of the kingdom of God.

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For instance, the prologue of John is where Jesus comes to set up his kingdom.

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It's verses one through 18. He comes to set it up. Verse 19 is where we see

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John the Baptist coronating him for his kingdom, anointing him for his kingdom. Verse 35, we see

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Jesus assembling citizens for his kingdom. Chapter two, verse one through 12, we see

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Jesus talking about demonstrating, living out the kingdom. And then a couple weeks ago, we saw

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Jesus go on the offensive and take on his greatest enemy, which was false religion.

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Why? So that he could set up a kingdom. Now tonight, we're also gonna be looking at Jesus going on offense.

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This is the second time Jesus is going to attack something, and this is the second great enemy of the kingdom of God.

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It's not false religion, it's false faith. Jesus attacks that. So if you will, turn with me to John 2, 23, and we're gonna go all the way through chapter three, verse 12.

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We're gonna talk about what Jesus, how Jesus attacks false faith and how he establishes his people to have true faith.

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Let's pray as you're turning, and then we will read the text together. Lord, Lord, I pray that the most basic question that each of us could ever ask is that how do we have faith?

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How do we enter the kingdom of God? How do we know you? How do we love you? How do we walk with you? How do we be in relationship with you?

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Lord, I pray that if that question is not answered by someone here tonight, meaning they don't currently already have an answer for that, that Lord, I pray by the power of your

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Holy Spirit that we would know how it is to have a relationship with you, that we would know what it means to walk with you, to love you, to know you, and have true saving faith.

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And Lord, for anyone here who has had that, Lord, I pray that it would never grow old.

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Lord, I pray as we proclaim these truths tonight that they would not be dusty relics on a shelf, but Lord, they would be gemstones for your glory.

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They would be things that cause us to sing and things that cause us to proclaim, and that Lord, you would give us a renewed vigor and a renewed passion for your truth and for your word.

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Lord, we ask that in Jesus's powerful name, amen. Let's start with John 2, 23.

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Now, when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover during the feast, many believed in his name, observing his signs, which he was doing.

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But Jesus, on his part, was not entrusting himself to them, for he knew all men, and because he did not need anyone to testify concerning men, for he himself knew what was in man.

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Now, there was a man, a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.

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This man came to Jesus by night, and he said to him, Rabbi, you know, or we know that you have come from God as a teacher, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.

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And Jesus answered to him and said, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, they cannot see the kingdom of God.

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Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he's old?

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He can't enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born again, can he? Jesus answered, truly, truly,

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I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

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That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you that you must be born again.

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The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it's going. So is everyone who is born of the spirit.

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Nicodemus said to him, how can these things be? Jesus answered and said to him, are you the teacher of Israel and you don't understand these things?

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Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we've seen, and you do not accept our testimony.

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If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how are you gonna believe you, or how are you gonna believe when

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I tell you heavenly things? This is God's word. Now, it's clear to me that John's purpose, as we said a moment ago, is that this book is about the kingdom of God.

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That's Jesus' purpose in coming is the kingdom of God. But it's also clear to me that John has a purpose for writing the book.

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Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God. John wrote the book to tell us about faith so that you and I could believe.

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He makes that abundantly clear in his purpose statement. I hope that we say this often enough so that you know the purpose of the gospel of John is

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John 20, 31. And in that passage, he says, these things have been written so that you would believe that Jesus is the

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Christ, the son of God, and that by believing in him, you will have life in his name. So here we have Jesus' purpose for coming,

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John's purpose for writing, and those two intersect in the fact that you cannot enter the kingdom of God unless you have belief.

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Jesus' purpose for coming, John's purpose for writing come together. Now, what we're gonna learn today is that not all belief is created equal.

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There is a kind of faith that will save you, and there's a kind of faith that will damn you.

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There's a kind of faith that will leave you still in your sins, and it won't give you the eternal life that is promised.

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Needless to say, I think this is a serious issue that we must understand if we wanna be part of the kingdom of God.

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Now, let's go into this. Let's talk about the background a little bit. John starts right away when he was in Jerusalem.

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That connects back to the first, or to a couple weeks ago when we talked about what Jesus was doing in Jerusalem.

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And many believed in his name, observing the signs that he was doing. This is John's way of telling us that Jesus did not just go to Jerusalem for the

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Passover, and he didn't just go to flip over the tables and chase the money changers out with a whip and prophesy the downfall of the temple.

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If he did that, that would be an eventful weekend. Like, who of us can boast that we did that on a weekend?

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Right? But he does more than that, because he doesn't just come to tear down the old system of religion.

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Jesus has come to build the kingdom of God. He's come to establish a new covenant for his people where God and sinful man can come together again through faith in Christ.

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This means, from a background perspective, that Jesus spent time in Jerusalem teaching, that he spent time in Jerusalem preaching.

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It's clear to me, I think, that based off other texts, that he was probably preaching the kingdom of God. And he was doing signs before the people.

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It says that they were observing his signs that he was doing. Now, what I find fascinating is that John doesn't give us any record of that.

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And this is a frustrating thing, if you want to know what happened. Because you're like, I want to know what sermons Jesus preached while he was in Jerusalem.

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I want to know what signs that he was committing to cause these people over a weekend to give up their lack of faith and become believers.

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But John doesn't give us a record of it. Why? Because it's not a part of John's purpose.

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And let me explain to you why. The purpose of John is that these things have been written so that you will believe.

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John talks about miracles in other places. John talks about signs in other places. He talks about Jesus's ministry in other places.

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But this section is unique. This section talks about false belief.

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And John purposely ignored some of the other things that might have taken the attention off of this topic so that he could focus on this topic because it's dire important.

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John wants us to understand what false belief is, what true belief is. And it just makes sense why

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John would do this. Jesus has just went on a full -scale assault of the temple trying to tear down false religion.

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And now he's going after false faith. So he doesn't include the miracles, the signs, the wonders.

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We'll have to wait to heaven to figure out what that was like. But he does give us a teaching on false faith.

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And I think we need to understand its nature, its causes, and its cure. Now, why do

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I call it false belief? Because it's counterfeit. It's a fraud. It's a belief that might inspire you, but doesn't end in salvation.

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Says that they believed. But the key word in the passage is Jesus did not entrust himself to them.

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That word entrust is an English translation of the same word believe.

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So what it really says is they believed, but Jesus did not believe in their belief. Jesus didn't have faith in their faith because he knew that it was counterfeit and it was false.

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And it was not focused on what it should have been focused on. It says that Jesus knew their hearts and he did not entrust himself to them.

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Why is this important? Well, in the modern world, I think we're prone to miss how serious that this actually is.

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Because let's be honest, if a weekend of ministry happened like this, where you have a charismatic leader who just cleans out a temple, and then thousands of people are believing in him, we would call that a win in modern

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American Christianity. Churches today would make infographics and post them on their website.

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They would make hype videos talking about hundreds of baptisms, hundreds of people who were saved. Leadership would post emails.

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They would do everything that they could to get the word out about how awesome that this was, that all of these people were believing.

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But in this moment, people were believing and Jesus is not celebrating. He doesn't hand out

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T -shirts and he doesn't make Instagram posts to celebrate it. I know they didn't have that.

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Jesus says that he did not entrust himself to them. He didn't give himself over to them because he knew their hearts and he knew the source of their belief was not in him.

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Another modern example might be today when you say that you believe in Jesus, I think we kind of assume that that's a legitimate statement of faith.

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If you raise your hand at a church service, with every head bowed and every eye closed,

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I know that was more of an 80s and 90s thing, we assume that that's real. If you check off a card on a welcome card that says

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I put my faith in Jesus today, you get counted on the numbers as a legitimate salvation.

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If you pray the prayer of faith, it's in the book of Second Hesitations. It's not in the

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Bible. We assume that that's a sincere prayer and that results in sincere faith.

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But that's not what happened here. That's not what happened here. It says many believed in his name, observing his signs, which he was doing, but Jesus on his part was not entrusting himself to them for he knew all men, humanity.

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Now, I want us to dig in a little deeper. Most of our time today is gonna be spent in these three verses, but we are gonna dip into chapter three because I think that chapter three illustrates this so perfectly.

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And I believe that, let's start with false faith. What is false faith? If we look at that, we're gonna learn four things about false faith that I think we need to understand if we wanna have true faith.

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First thing, false belief actually exists. Not every person who puts their faith in Jesus is saved.

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It says on that day, many are gonna come to me and I'm gonna say, depart from me, I never knew you.

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But Lord, we do many miracles in your name, I don't know you. False faith exists. According to this passage, many believe that Jesus did not entrust himself to them.

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And the dichotomy is, is that people had decided, they'd made a decision to believe in Jesus, but Jesus didn't believe in them.

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What a picture of false belief, a belief that Jesus doesn't believe in. That's the first point, false belief exists.

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We need to know that. Second, false belief has a false direction.

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It's the second aspect of it. And instead of Jesus being the object of our faith, false belief puts something else as the object of our faith.

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It says many were observing his signs, which teaches us that they were placing their faith in what he could do and not in him.

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Their faith wasn't in Christ. Instead, they were looking at his signs, his miracles, his wonders.

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They had faith in what he could do and not who he was. It was misdirected faith.

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They weren't in awe of the person, they were in awe of what he could do for them. They weren't believing in Jesus for Jesus' sake, which is one of the character traits of true belief.

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Now to this kind of belief, Jesus does not extend the welcome mat into the kingdom of God.

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He does not open the gate to that kind of belief. And unless repentance happens, that person will be left weeping and gnashing of teeth on the outside looking in.

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Modern examples of this, putting our faith in the wrong thing, looking to something other than Jesus to save us.

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Modern examples of this abound. I call this the Jerusalemite error. Putting your faith in what

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Jesus can do instead of who he is. Look, think about this. How many people have put their faith in how they feel?

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I feel like I'm close to God today, therefore I'm saved. I don't feel like I'm close to God today, therefore I'm not.

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That's called emotionalism. That's putting your faith in something other than Jesus and it's false faith.

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We put faith in our experience. We call that experientialism. We put faith in our performance of religion, in our obedience.

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That's called legalism. We put faith in the fact that we made a decision. I've talked to many people who said, on May the 2nd, 1983, in a pastor's study,

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I gave my life to Jesus and I made a decision for him. And although I don't live for him and although I don't do anything for him and although I really don't love him and although I don't wanna read the

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Bible and I don't wanna walk with him, I made a decision. That's called decisionism. It's Jesus plus your decision.

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Many today are putting their faith in how woke and how social justice -y they are. We'll call that liberalism.

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Many in the South, where I grew up, put their faith in the fact that their parents brought them to church and their parents are

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Christian. We'll call that traditionalism. Many today, especially in Texas and other places in the

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South like that, put their faith in how the nation is doing. We'll call that nationalism. Many Christians have wedded themselves to the

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Republican Party. Maybe we call that conservatism. I've heard many people who are not

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Christians say, I want to go to church so that I can have a community so that I can have people who love me because Christians are the nicest people and I just wanna have good friends.

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I've heard that, that's called collectivism. There's men and women who have so much pride in their denomination.

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We'll call that denominationalism. There's men and women, I went to seminary and I have become this at times who love their doctrine so much.

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We'll call that theological narcissism. What I'm trying to point out here is that we can put our faith so quickly into something other than Jesus and that is false faith.

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I prayed a prayer one time, I was baptized one time, I saw a sign one time, somebody prophesied over me one time.

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All those things are in addition to Jesus, they're not Jesus. All these things get added to our faith.

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So Jesus plus religion, Jesus plus obedience,

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Jesus plus wokeness, Jesus plus social justice, plus the church, plus health and wealth, plus signs and wonders, our faith is in Christ alone.

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Not those things. That's a misdirected Jerusalemite faith.

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And sadly, it's the kind of faith that we often adopt in the American church. And it's the kind of faith that Jesus thoroughly rejects.

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You see, because true faith delights in Jesus Christ. He becomes the object of our worship.

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He becomes the pearl of great price that we're willing to sell everything that we have in order to have him.

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He becomes our greatest affection. He becomes our life's purpose. Everything that we do, we live an undivided life with him at the center of it.

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Faith's true object is Christ alone and nothing else. Now, crowds had faith in his signs.

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They didn't have true faith in Christ. They had faith in what he could do. That's why it's false faith. And Jesus, on his part, did not entrust himself to that.

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That's the second thing. False faith is a misdirected faith. Third aspect of false faith is that false faith actually does not impress

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Jesus. Jesus is not pleased by our effort or the fact that we tried.

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There's no participation trophy in the kingdom of God. You're either in or you're out. You see, in this passage, we see

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Jesus's divine knowledge on display. He knew their hearts. And he said that he knew all men, which is not just the group that he has in front of him.

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That's all women, men, children, boys, girls. It's everyone. Jesus has perfect knowledge of our hearts and they do not impress him.

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He offers no condemnation or no commendation here, no praise, not even a rebuke.

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He just doesn't give himself to it. Now, I mention this because, again,

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I see this kind of faith creeping into American Christianity and it bothers me.

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Just like these Jerusalem crowds, many are turning to Jesus for what they can do for them.

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And we think that just because we've tried and just because we've had some modicum of faith that Jesus is somehow pleased.

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Well, I went to church. I read my Bible that one time. Jesus has to be pleased.

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And I'm better than most people, right? Christianity today has become a cesspool for this

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Jerusalemite error. And the point is that Jesus is not impressed with our false religion and our false faith.

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And he's especially not impressed some of the harshest passages in the Bible are to pastors.

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It's not a glorious job. You have the holiness of God bearing down on top of you and how dare you put up with that kind of error in the church?

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How dare you champion easy believism and easy faith and cheap grace?

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You see, as angry as Jesus is over false religion or false faith,

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I think he's especially angry at pastors who are weak minded and convictionless and continue to lead like jellyfishes and never say anything at all about the deep things of God and never talk about sin and never talk about hell and never lead their people to understand the

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Bible. Instead of trying to teach people the right way to approach

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God, that Christ is utterly sufficient to meet all of their needs, many churches do the opposite.

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Many Christians do the opposite. And we'd be here all day if we tried to explain all of those things.

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So I just wanna say that I think, more than just giving a list of examples,

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I think we all, especially in this country, we need to repent for the way that we have left our first love, the way that we've become attracted and in love with his things instead of him.

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Either Jesus is going to be everything to you or Jesus will make sure that he is nothing to you. He says in this passage, he did not entrust himself to that.

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There's no middle ground with the real Jesus. Jesus doesn't go out into the kingdom with his pom -poms celebrating our best effort.

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It's just not true. Either men are gonna regard Christ the Lord as holy with their whole hearts and their whole affections or Christ is gonna observe our lukewarm faith and the

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Bible says that he vomits that out. Revelation 3 .16 is the 3 .16 you might not know of.

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We go to John 3 .16, for God still loved the world, amen. Revelation 3 .16, the lukewarm I will spew out of my mouth.

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It's serious. That's the third. The fourth aspect of false faith, more than it just exists and more than the fact that it doesn't impress

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Jesus and it's misdirected, it doesn't actually save. It can't save.

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This is I think the most important statement and let's just talk about it from a very brief perspective here. Salvation is when

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God draws near to a sinner so that he can reconcile him and save him but if Jesus is not drawing near to these sinners, then there's no salvation that's happening.

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Salvation happens when God comes in and dwells in the heart of the sinner. This is not happening here.

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Jesus is holding back. There's no salvation in this. It's a

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Christless Christianity and if you can do the math on that, if you're an English major, that just means that you're left with I -A -N, nothing.

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There is no such thing as a Christless Christianity because without Christ, you're not a Christian. It's a contradiction in terms.

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Now, I go into these things for us today because I think sometimes it's incredibly important to understand what the false thing is so that when we compare it to the true thing, it shines all the brighter.

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We're a people of contrast. We see contrast. If you look at a person in a crowd, it's hard to pick them out but if you look at a person walking in Death Valley, it's a little bit easier to see them.

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If you look at the stars during the daytime, you can't see them.

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It's too much light. You look at them at night and you can see them in all their glory. I want us to see true faith against the dark and ugly backdrop of false faith so that it will shine more brightly as we examine it but we had to go there.

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We had to look at that and I pray that if that is you, if that's where you're at, if that's the faith that you have, then hold on tight because I'm gonna share with you the hope.

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Right now, let's look at the nature of true faith for just a moment and I'm going just from this passage.

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I'm not gonna go all over the Bible to talk about true faith. This passage says that passion, it teaches us that passion is not enough to save you.

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So if we're talking about salvation and how do you get to be saved, passion's not enough. Jesus doesn't take note of their passion and their fervency and their energy.

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It means no matter how ardently they were believing, it means no matter how excited they were for Jesus's kingdom, it means no matter how ramped up that they were to see this man doing all of these miracles, the passion actually didn't matter for the fact that they were saved or not saved.

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Passion was not enough. See, the thing that matters in salvation is not your passion, it's not your sincerity, it's not your authenticity.

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It's the fact of matter. Will Jesus Christ entrust himself to you? That is whether you were saved or not.

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It's not on you to manipulate God into loving you. It's will God entrust himself to you?

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That's what this passage is teaching us. It's not how we approach God. It's how God through Christ approaches us.

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It's not how loud you sing in church. It's not how passionately you pray or sing worship songs out of tune in your car.

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I don't do that. It's not if you're committed to reading the word or piously implementing everything that you can implement.

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It's not about that. It's whether Jesus is gonna entrust himself to you. It's whether Jesus is gonna ransom you and rescue you.

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And if he's gonna do the work, even if we're sincere, authentic, eager, and passionate, we can be sincerely wrong.

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We can be eagerly out of touch. We can be energetically deceived.

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Unless Jesus Christ entrust himself to a person, that person is not a

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Christian. That's the simplest reading of this text. They believed, but he did not entrust himself to them.

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They believed, but their belief did not get them what they were thinking it was gonna get them. We can't read this passage any other way.

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They believed, but it did not save them because Jesus did not entrust himself to them.

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That's the first point. Passion's not enough. The second, I would even say, maybe it's more striking that faith is not enough to save you.

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And let me unpack this. Let me understand because we've heard that our whole life. Believe in Jesus and you'll be saved.

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But these people did that and they were not saved. They were damned.

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And the ultimate reason was not because of their poor faith, ultimately.

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I wanna make that clear. The ultimate reason that they were not saved is not because of their poor faith.

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Because all of us has imperfect faith. None of us has believed in Jesus perfectly. If that were the case, it would be about performance and Jesus is not about that, at least not ours.

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The ultimate reason why these people are not saved is because Jesus did not entrust himself to them.

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I'm gonna say that several times because I want that to work itself down into us. Good faith ultimately doesn't save you.

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I've read books from the greatest atheist who understands the gospel better than I do.

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His understanding of the terms, his theology and his good doctrine did nothing for him to save him.

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Good faith doesn't save you. Being saved by Jesus produces faith. Do you hear the difference?

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Faith alone by itself doesn't save you. Being saved though produces good faith, righteous faith, true faith.

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Now, let's examine this for a second. If the only thing that was needed was for them to just have better faith and if the only thing that was needed for them was to have a better approach, there's no person more qualified than Jesus Christ to teach that class, but he doesn't do that.

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Because it's not about the content of their faith, it's about that Jesus did not entrust himself to them.

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If we believe that salvation is just a three -step method that we have to get right, then we've turned

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God into a vending machine. We've turned God into a thing that we can manipulate.

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We've turned God into a scratch -off ticket. If we just scratch the right boxes, then we can get the prize.

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It's not who God is. That's not what salvation is. That's a pagan way to believe. Salvation happens when

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Jesus graciously, in spite of our sin, in spite of our failure, in spite of how undeserving that we are, grants the greatest gift that has ever been given to us by grace alone.

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Through wooing us, electing us, choosing us, saving us, calling us, whatever you wanna call it, Jesus is the author and the perfecter of faith.

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He's the first mover in our faith. He's the one who has to entrust himself to us in order for us to even have faith.

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Again, he's not a vending machine. The reason these people were not saved again was because Jesus did not entrust himself to them, which means that there's something more central to salvation than just our faith.

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It's a work of God. Yes, we must believe rightly. We must approach

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Jesus with reverence and honor. Yes, I'm not saying that we shouldn't, but there is something underneath all of that that Jesus is entrusting himself to us before faith even comes.

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That's the second thing. Our faith is ultimately not enough because if we had the greatest faith in the world and Jesus did not entrust himself to us, we would still be lost in our sins.

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Either that or we believe that we can have perfect faith and that God has to save us.

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And that somehow God is in debt to us and somehow God owes us because we came up with the formula. And I would say if we believe that, then we overestimate our ability and we underestimate the power of sin.

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That's the second thing. The third aspect that we learn about true faith in this section is that our ability also is not enough as well.

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We'll cover this one a little shorter because we've kind of covered this already. The Bible tells us that all of us have fallen short of the glory of God, that no one is righteous, no, not even one, that all deserve the wrath of God, that the punishment for our sin is death.

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Not even one of us is righteous, no, not one. There's no one who comes to God by their own human effort, not even one.

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That's the biblical message. It's all over the Bible because we have a sin nature that renders us totally dead.

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Now I've never worked in a morgue, but I've been to a funeral. If you yell at a dead body, they don't jump up if they're really dead.

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Not like Princess Bride, where they're only mostly dead. Dead people don't think, they don't breathe, they don't talk, they don't act, they just lay there.

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I mean, that's not controversial, I don't believe. Bible says we're dead in our sin.

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What ability does that communicate that we have to do anything if we're dead? We're in a coffin, spiritually speaking.

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What ability does a corpse have? If we're in a sin and we're dead, we have no ability to do anything.

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We have no ability to come to Jesus rightly. We have no ability to believe rightly. We're just like these people in the crowd of Jerusalem.

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We may be religious, we may be passionate, we may be sincere and we may be authentic, but we don't have real true belief if we are dead and have not been made alive.

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We're deceiving ourselves. Look at what Jesus is saying here. Jesus on his part was not entrusting himself to them, for he knew all men.

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Not just this crowd, it extends down to all of us. If you're a human, that word men, don't let it deceive you.

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It means mankind, anthropos. It's not a gendered term, although sometimes in the

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Bible it says men because that's the way that language works. We have to choose a gender sometimes. It means all people.

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If you are a person, then Jesus knows your heart and he knows the depravity of it. And he knows that it is desperately sick and wicked.

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That's Jeremiah 17. All men, all women, all children, all people, he knows our hearts are desperately infected with this plague called sin, which renders us dead.

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None of us then can approach him rightly. None of us can make a proper decision that would impress him and none of us can manufacture the type of belief that would cause him to welcome us into his kingdom on our own.

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In our sin, we approach him only with self -serving, self -deceiving, selfish motivations.

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We approach him for the things that he can do for us. That's what was happening in Jerusalem. And that's what happens to us when we are not saved and we try to approach

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God. We do it out of self motivations. Now I know that's a hard pill to swallow.

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That in our sin, we would never love him. That we may clap as he performs signs and wonders.

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We may enjoy a great sermon, especially if it was not too long.

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But in our sin, we could never love him. It's a hard pill to swallow because inside of each and every single one of us is this little voice that says, not me.

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I can, I'm different. Sin doesn't have its hold on me like that. I can master it.

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I'm the Lord of my universe. When I wake up, I'm my own man, I'm my own woman. Sin doesn't have a hold on me like that.

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And that, in my opinion, is the greatest power of sin is that it leaves us believing that not me, but someone else.

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It doesn't have its power over me and it renders us just prideful enough to damn us.

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Apart from divine intervention, we're lost. That's the point.

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Jesus knows that we cannot, in our frame and in our creaturely constitution, make a decision for him.

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He doesn't entrust himself to that kind of faith. Now, let's summarize for a second because we're gonna land the plane here in just a moment.

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And I wanna leave us with hope because if it's all hopeless, then what are we gonna do?

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If no one can be saved, then what's the point, right? I wanna recap.

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False faith does exist, it's real, it's focused on the wrong object, it's not adoring

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Christ, it's looking at what he can do for you. False faith doesn't impress Jesus and false faith will not save you.

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True faith is not about our passions and our abilities and our knowledge and our spirituality and all of those other things.

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In our flesh, we're lost. We can't have true faith, which means that all of us in our flesh would be in the camp of false faith.

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Now, the sum total conclusion that you and I need to wrestle with with this is that since you and I don't have what it takes to have true faith, how in the world can we have true faith?

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And it's here that I wanna flip over now to chapter three and I wanna look at what

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John does for us and I think he does it deliberately. It's the tale of two men and I wanna show it to you right now.

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He's gonna illustrate his point with Nicodemus and then he's gonna subtly point us to Jesus Christ.

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So let's look at chapter three. I'm gonna read 25 in chapter two first though.

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And because he did not need anyone to testify concerning man, for he himself knew what was in man, now flip over to chapter three, now there was a man.

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It's not accidental. He knows what's in man and now John is gonna give us a man for us to examine.

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He's gonna put Nicodemus under the Petri dish of our spiritual lab and he's gonna have us look at and evaluate and see this man who's one of us, can he do it?

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Can he break the curse? Can he have true faith when none of us could? We're gonna look at Nicodemus because he's probably the very best example of mankind.

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He's a true child of Adam and the fact that he has faith, he's a Bible scholar in Jerusalem, he's a man who knows his

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Bible, loves his Bible, teaches other people the Bible. This man is probably the best example of us.

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He can represent us so that if he can do it, then you and I have hope that we don't need

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Christ for salvation, we can go the way of Nicodemus. Now look at what it says.

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Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. And this man came to Jesus by night and said to him,

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Rabbi, we know that you've come from God as a teacher for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.

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Jesus knows all men, here you have a man. Jesus knows this crowd who loves him only for his signs.

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What is Nicodemus touting? He's a theological scholar, but Lord, you must come from God because of the signs.

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Essentially what he's saying is I'm not interested in you, I'm interested in what you can do. I'm tired of paying

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Roman imperial taxes. I'm tired of my people not being free. I'm tired of having to teach with the

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Roman centurion looking over my back and threatening me. I want my people to have a godly kingdom. You're doing signs and wonders, maybe you're the guy.

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He's looking past Jesus to what Jesus can do for him. And in that way,

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Nicodemus is our par excellence. That means he is our perfect example of who we are.

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Because if there's anyone who could come to faith apart from the work of Christ, it'd be a guy like him. And yet he's just as confused as we are.

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He's just as lost as we are. He's just as self -consumed as all of us are. And he's not any better.

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Look at what it says, it continues on. Jesus answered him and said to him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

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And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born again when he's old?

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He can't enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he? Jesus answered, truly

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I say to you, unless one is born of water and spirit, they can't enter the kingdom of God. Nicodemus is puzzled. He says, how can these things be?

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In verse nine, Jesus said, are you a teacher? Are you one of the leaders of the

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Israelite people and yet you don't understand? I speak to you of earthly things and you can't even grasp the earthly things.

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How in the world are you gonna understand when I talk to you about heavenly things? See, Nicodemus is our perfect representative.

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He's our perfect example because we are just like him. Without Christ and without God's help in salvation, we are enamored with Jesus.

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We are impressed with Jesus. We're excited about Jesus's work. We might even go to a church and get plugged into a small group or get plugged into a missions project.

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We might do all kinds of things out of excitement, but we look past Jesus for what he can do for us, just like Nicodemus.

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This guy had the perfect pedigree if pedigree were important. He was trained at the best schools.

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He had the Ivy League theological education and he doesn't get it. He doesn't even get when Jesus uses the most common examples even a child can understand.

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And it's not because he's dumb. This man is intelligent. It's because he doesn't have the spirit of God. It's not because he is insufficient in his humanity.

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He's probably the best representative of us. It's because Jesus didn't entrust himself to him.

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He's a child of Adam and he doesn't know the things of God. Do you see what

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I'm getting at here? Neither Nicodemus nor we in our flesh can understand the things of God.

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The whole passage is highlighting one simple point. And if you take only this from the sermon, that would be great.

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John 2, 23 through chapter 3, 12 is highlighting our inability to save ourselves, our total inability to rescue and redeem ourselves.

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I love how he compares the new birth versus the old birth. Nicodemus is puzzled and says, can an old man enter into his mother's womb?

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I have to think he was joking right there. I have to think he was trying to be sarcastic. That's just weird.

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Jesus compares the new birth to the old birth because none of us in this room birthed ourselves.

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If you did, that would be an interesting story. None of us caused our birth. None of us chose the

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DNA that compounded to make us who we are. None of us birthed ourselves.

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And in the same way, the metaphor cannot be more clear. If we didn't birth ourselves, then how in the world can we birth ourselves spiritually?

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If we were not the author of our physical birth, then how in the world can we be the author of our spiritual birth? That's the metaphor.

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That's what it means. We didn't choose it. Like a prenatal newborn floating in a realm of darkness, kicking and prodding along, that's where we were in total inability until the contractions of the soul happened and cast us out of the darkness and into light.

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We were dead and now we're alive. And it wasn't because of us.

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It's only because of God. Now, in our flesh, we're just as confused as Nicodemus.

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He's our great and true representative. We scour the things of God. We frown at the things of God and we look puzzled at the things of God like a sheep looking at a brand new gate.

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It's a Southern thing, I guess. I don't know. Maybe if you're a rancher, you'll get that one. But in our flesh, we're just like Nicodemus.

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Praise God that he's not the only representative. Praise God that God sent us a better representative.

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Praise God that Christ is our true and perfect representative because it says

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Jesus knew the heart of men. So we needed a man. We need someone who could perfectly stand in our place who could be just like us in order to save us.

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But we needed someone who was better than us, someone who was God in the flesh because no one, not even Nicodemus, had the power to rise above the sinful human condition.

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So we needed a man who could stand in our place and we needed God who was more powerful, who could actually do the work.

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See, this Jesus came to humanity to fix the broken sinful condition that Nicodemus, religion, the temple, the law, and none of that else could fix.

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Jesus came to kill the power of sin in our life that leaves us self -deceived. Jesus came to die the death that we should have died so that we could have new life.

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Jesus came ultimately to entrust himself to his people so that they could live by the power of the

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Holy Spirit and no longer by the power of death. Every inability in Adam and every inability in Nicodemus, Jesus Christ has overturned.

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And he's given us the kind of birth that we need so that we could finally be called a child of God, born again so that we can have faith, see the order, not have faith to be born again, born again so that we can have faith, born again so that we can abandon the false patterns of faith that we carried for our entire lives, born again so that Christ will become our greatest treasure, not working hard to try to make

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Christ your greatest treasure so that God will love you, that's not the same, born again so that we can have new passions and new abilities and new faithful faith, born again so that we can become empowered by the

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Spirit of God. Now, again,

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I told you that this whole text is about human inability and it capstones off with the pure and perfect ability of Christ.

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So if you're here today, this is where we'll end. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, I will not be calling for you to raise your hand when everybody's eyes are closed,

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I will not be asking you to sign a card, I will not be telling you to email me later, what

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I will tell you is to pray that Christ the Lord will awaken you, what I will tell you is to pray that Christ the

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Lord will give you life, what I will pray is that Christ the Lord will give you a new birth. Because if I leave you here with any other hope that you can do something in order to be saved, then

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I have rendered you just as hopeless as these people in Jerusalem and that is not my heart. If you are not in Christ, I want you to pray and ask the

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Lord Jesus Christ to redeem you, he alone can save, if you are in Christ. These truths are glorious.

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Think about how shallow it'd be if we had to hope in ourselves and think about how incredible it is that we get to hope in a perfect savior who saved us even when we were his enemies.

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He did everything, we did nothing, what a God. Let's pray.

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Lord Jesus, I thank you for this passage. Lord, I thank you that on a week when we are talking about human inability, that you gave me a week that I struggled with and then you broke me of, you caused me not to put pride in myself or hope in myself and that Lord, you allowed me to taste the truth of the scripture that I can do nothing, we can do nothing, we can do nothing.

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Apart from Jesus Christ. Lord, I hope that each of us in our own way would experience that this week.

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And Lord, we would abandon the ways that we tend to live like we have power and control and that we would trust in the all sufficiency of Christ.

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Lord, I pray that you'd make us mindful of that. Lord God, if someone's listening online or is here and they're not sure of the state of their soul, they're not sure if maybe they've deceived themselves into believing that they were a

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Christian because of X, Y, and Z reason, that Lord, by the power of your

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Holy Spirit, you would convict their hearts. You would cause them to pray that they would cry out to you with confidence.

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Lord, I pray even right now in this moment that someone would be saved because of your work and your power and not from anything else so that only you can get the glory.

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Lord, as we close out our service with song, I pray that we would give you glory.