John 4:43-54 (Signs and Wonder-Driven, Woke-Ridden, False Faith)

There are two basic ways that we can read our Bibles. There's the micro level and there's the macro level.

About 70 % of the time, the micro level is what you'll probably use. That's verse by verse through the scriptures.

But at times, you wanna zoom out and you wanna see certain themes that play out on the macro. Let me give you an example.

There's two ways that you can view a parade. If you go to a parade, you can stand on the street and you can watch the floats as they go by you and you can hear the sounds as they go by you.

You're basically interacting with the material before your eyes in a float by float, moment by moment sort of way.

That's micro. But if you get into a Goodyear blimp, 1 ,500 feet,

I thought it was way higher than that. I looked this up this week. I was sorely disappointed it was only 1 ,500 feet. But if you get in a

Goodyear blimp, you can look at almost the entire parade all at once. You can see the beginning, the end, and the middle all at the same time and you can observe certain themes in the parade by looking at it from that zoomed out sort of macro view.

Well, in the Bible, it's the same way. Every week, we can read through the Bible verse by verse, observing the language and the structure and the grammar and all of those things that I love to do.

And about 70 % of the time, 80 % of the time, that's the way I'm gonna preach. And that's the way that I think we should read our

Bibles. But every now and then, I think we need to zoom out and see some of the more pressing details and themes that are happening in the

Bible because we'll miss them if we're just going verse by verse. So that's what we're gonna do today.

We're gonna zoom out just a little bit and we're gonna look at John 2 through 4 as a unit because I believe that there's themes that are running through it.

Now, let me give you an example of how this works in the Bible. I'll give you one from Genesis. Garden imagery.

There's a theme in the Bible that has to do with a garden. For instance, human beings were made to live with God in a garden in paradise.

But because of our sin, we were cast out of the garden. But that's not where the garden imagery ends.

Actually, the whole Old Testament is filled with garden imagery because the hope of the garden is human beings living with God.

And that hope doesn't die in Genesis 3. That hope is made alive on the cross of Christ.

So what we see is, at times in the narrative, God is interjecting with these garden themes that are really beautiful if you look at them from the 1 ,500 -foot view.

For instance, Abraham was called out of the dusty region of Ur into the garden land.

And he's made promises to him that his people, his family would bless the entire world. We see the

Israelites being called out of the desert in Egypt and brought to a land flowing with milk and honey.

That's a garden land. And while they're there in front of the Mount Sinai, God gives them instructions on how to build a temple that just so happens to be decorated like a garden.

Inside the holy place, there's fruit and there's different arrangements that look like the Garden of Eden. The priests themselves are dressed up like the

Garden of Eden with precious stones that actually come from the Garden of Eden. So they're dressed up like garden priests in a garden temple.

There's a theme here. What's interesting is every year on the Day of Atonement, the high priest actually walks back symbolically into the garden.

Adam and Eve were cast out to the east and the priests come back from the west. They go through the curtain that's decorated like the

Garden of Eden. They go into the Holy of Holies, which just so happens, right, coincidentally, to have two large angels with swords guarding the presence of God.

If you remember in the fall in Genesis 3, God put two angels outside the garden to guard the presence of God. In the temple, once a year, the priests symbolically walk back into the presence of God.

Why? To showcase the hope that all is not lost. One day out of the year, you're gonna symbolically do what

Christ is gonna do permanently and forever when he comes. And think about this. What does

Christ do? On the last day of his life, he goes to a garden. He's arrested in a garden.

He's the only innocent man. Adam was kicked out of the garden because he was guilty. Jesus was arrested in the garden because he was innocent.

And we see an exchange happening here. On the cross, the thief looks at him and expresses belief and Jesus says, today you will be with me in paradise.

Today you will be with me in a garden. Jesus is placed in a garden tomb and on the third day rose from the dead, signaling once and for all that the hope of living with God forever for all of eternity in a garden paradise is still real.

And we see in the final chapter of the Bible in Revelation that we live forever in a garden with God.

From the very beginning to the end, there's this theme and it bookends the Bible. And when Hebrew writers bookend things, they want us to stop and pay attention.

Now, today we're not gonna be able to look at an entire biblical theme. That study is called biblical theology, where you trace a theme through the scriptures and there's so many.

It would take us a year to cover them all. But today we're gonna look at a small theme that's in three chapters,

John two through four. And we're gonna see how the theme starts and ends with the same bookended theme.

Now, I'm gonna give you the cheat for this. It's about how do you respond to God. In John two through four, we see three ways that you can respond to God.

The Galileans in John two and the Galileans in John four bookend the section. And in the inside part, you see the

Judeans and you see the Samaritans. There's three ways that you can respond to God. Two of them are totally wrong.

And only one of them is right. So today what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at this big overarching theme.

And we're gonna see how then shall we respond to God. Amen. Let's read the text together.

It's gonna be John four, 43 through 54. That's where we'll start.

And we'll jump around a little bit all over the place. But I hope it will make sense in the end. John four, 43 starts this way.

After the two days, he went forth from there into Galilee. For Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country.

So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans received him, having seen all that he did in Jerusalem at the feast.

For they themselves also went to the feast. Therefore he came again to Cana of Galilee, where he had made the water into wine.

And there was a royal official whose son was sick at Canaan. And when he heard that Jesus had come out of Judea in Galilee, he went to him and was imploring him, come down to heal my son, for he was at the point of death.

So Jesus said to him, unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe.

The royal official said to him, sir, come down before my child dies. Jesus said to him, go, your son lives.

The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started off. And as he was now going down, his slaves came and met with him, saying that his son was living.

So he inquired of them the hour when he began to get better.

And then they said to him, yesterday at the seventh hour is when the fever left him. So the father knew that it was at that hour in which

Jesus said to him, your son lives. And he believed, and his whole household. This is, again, a second sign that Jesus performed when he came to Judea.

Let's pray. Lord God, I pray that as we look at this larger section from John two to John four, that Lord you would teach us the three various ways that your word teaches us that we can respond to you.

And Lord, I pray that we would respond to you faithfully. That we would respond to you rightly.

We would respond to you in truth. Lord, I pray for us as a church, that we would be a church that responds to you rightly.

And that we would not be tempted to fall into both legalism and liberalism and every other way in between.

There's infinite ways to miss you, Father. But I pray that we would, by the power of your Holy Spirit, find you.

And Lord, in that presence that you've given us, that we would rejoice in worship. In Christ's name, amen.

Now, we're gonna begin today with the Galilean response. Because that's the text that we just read. We're not gonna start with another one.

We're gonna start with that one. And just like the garden theme, the Galilean response is bookended in John two through four.

Think about it this way. Jesus's first act of public ministry was in Galilee in John two.

Now he's back in Galilee in John four. Jesus's very first miracle was in Galilee in John chapter two.

Now he's doing a miracle in John chapter four. It's not coincidental. Jesus was with a small group of people in Cana in John two.

Now he's with a small group of people in John four. It's not coincidental. Perhaps though, the most compelling sign that John wants us to notice this is that it says that this was a sign.

You see, there's seven miracles in the Gospel of John. Out of all the miracles that Jesus does, that he labels sign miracles.

That he labels that these miracles are supposed to point us to the glory of Christ. And these seven miracles are supposed to demonstrate for us who

Jesus Christ really is. Now look at it this way. John two begins with the very first sign miracle when he turned water into wine.

John four is the second sign miracle where he healed the nobleman's son. So you've got a bookend here.

You've got John intentionally and purposefully trying to signal to us that these chapters are a unit and that we should look at them together.

So I didn't wanna skip that. I wanted us to do that today. So let's look at who the

Galileans are. We're gonna look at a couple things. Who they are, the nature of their faith, how

Jesus responded to their faith, and then some modern examples of the Galilean error that we see today.

And then we'll go on to the other responses as well. So the Galileans, who were they?

They were Jesus's countrymen. If you remember, Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, but he didn't stay there.

Because of a maniacal, genocidal, crazy, lunatic king named King Herod, Jesus and his family fled for their lives down to Egypt because this king was gonna kill all the firstborn kids in Bethlehem.

But when it was safe, after Herod died, they returned, but they didn't return to Bethlehem, they returned to Nazareth, which is in Galilee.

So Jesus grew up playing Galilean baseball. Jesus grew up going to Galilean kindergarten.

Jesus went to Galilean undergraduate and then to graduate school, and he became a rabbi in Nazareth. So he was becoming quite well -known in the community.

The Galileans were his neighbors and his friends and his coworkers when he was working on chairs in the shop.

He became especially well -known, though, when John the Baptist announced him publicly to the crowds that were gathering at the

River Jordan when he said, behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. But just because Jesus was popular in Galilee did not mean that the

Galileans understood him. And just because Jesus was well -known did not know that they knew how to love him well.

In fact, they utterly missed Christ, because their faith was not according to the formula that John gives us in the purpose of his book in John 20, 31.

These things have been written so that you will believe and so that you will have life in his name. What do you need to believe? That Jesus is the

Christ, the Son of God. The Galileans didn't believe that. The Galileans loved

Jesus's ministry, but they didn't really love him. The Galileans loved signs and wonders and miracles, but they didn't love the person.

You see, we begin to see in John 2 and John 4 that their faith was a sign -based faith.

It wasn't a sincere faith. John 2, 23 says, now when he was in Jerusalem at the

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

What John is tipping us off to here is that they believed in Jesus, but it wasn't a sincere faith in Jesus because they were just believing in his signs.

You see, in Passover, all the people from Israel and from out the Roman Empire who were

Jews would come into the city of Jerusalem. The city would swell to one or two million people when normally it was a couple hundred thousand.

It would go from the size of Lowell to the size of Boston during the Passover. What would happen is that in those moments, everyone from Galilee would go because it was commanded that you were to go.

If you did not go, then you were being disobedient to the law of God. So when Jesus is in the temple flipping tables, the

Galileans were cheering him on. When Jesus was in the temple casting out the money changers with the whip that he made, that would have been an awesome sight.

The Galileans were cheering him on. And why do I say that the Galileans were cheering him on?

Well, because the Judeans, the people in Jerusalem, had taken advantage of the people so much and had ripped them off so much that I think that the

Galileans were probably thrilled with what Jesus was doing. The people of the

Jewish leadership wouldn't allow you to bring your own animals. They would overcharge you and price gouge you by buying their own animals.

They wouldn't allow you to bring your own coins to do the tithe. They would price gouge you with the exchange rate.

The Jews were ripping people off from all over the country. So when Jesus comes and overthrows the man,

I'm sure the Galileans were happy with that. I'm sure the Galileans were excited. We also know from this passage that Jesus lingered in the city of Jerusalem for a couple of days.

And scholars believe that he was performing miracles there, that he was preaching powerful sermons, that he was demonstrating his wonder -working power, but instead of the people believing in him, they were believing in what he was doing.

That's where their faith was illegitimate. Their faith was in what he was doing, but not in who he is.

We see this in John 4, 45. So when he, this Jesus, came back to Galilee after leaving

Samaria, the Galileans received him. How many times have you heard a pastor say all you need to do is receive

Jesus? Well, they received Jesus, but not rightly. So there's a right way to receive Jesus, and there's a wrong way to receive

Jesus. Raising your hand is not enough. It says, having seen all the things that he did in Jerusalem at the feast, for they themselves also went to the feast.

So we know that this is talking about the Galileans in Jerusalem, because John tells us right here. They saw everything that he was doing.

They were putting their faith in his signs instead of him. They were interested in his powerful sermons.

They were excited about the energy that his ministry was drawing. They were excited about the fog machines and smoke.

No, I'm just kidding, that's today. They were caught up in the energy of his ministry and the power of it, but not in the person.

They were sign -seeking, fan -cheering, hand -raising, chest -bumping, crowd -attending worshipers who did not know

Christ. That's the nature of their faith.

It was a shallow, superficial faith that did not love Christ. It only loved what he could do for them.

We also see that it's a carnal faith. Jesus says in John 2, 24 through 25, but Jesus on his part was not entrusting himself to them.

That meant no matter how hard that they worked, Jesus was not allowing them to know him.

That's what it means. Jesus was withholding relationship from them so that they could never know him because the way they were trying to know him was illegitimate.

It says, for he knew all men, and because he didn't need anyone to testify about what was inside of man because he knew the heart of men.

Jesus is saying down at their bones, their hearts are carnal and focused on the wrong things. He knew that their motivation for seeking him was impurity and perverseness, and because of their carnality, he would not entrust himself to them.

Suffice it to say, they were sign -seeking, carnal worshipers that did not know the Lord. And this is possible.

The Bible says, on that day, many will come to me and say, Lord, Lord, didn't we do many miracles in your name? And he will say, depart from me,

I never knew you. John four adds a fourth, or adds an additional element to this where he says that they have a dishonoring kind of faith.

So it's not only an illegitimate and carnal faith, it's dishonoring to the Lord. It says, after two days in Samaria, he went forth from there into Galilee, for Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his home country.

Jesus is saying that I'm about to walk into dishonor. I'm about to be dishonored by a people who claim to know me, but they don't.

Jesus is saying that he doesn't need cheering fans. He's saying he doesn't need large crowds.

He's saying that he doesn't need sign seekers or fist bumpers or any sort of fake Instagram sort of filtered spirituality that has nothing to do with who

Christ is. All of that, Jesus is saying, is dishonoring to him. And as he leaves

Samaria, he tells his disciples that that sort of faith is not welcoming to him.

An example of this sort of faith, this sign seeking mentality, is right here in the text that we just read, the nobleman.

I've never read the text like this before until I started seeing this week what Jesus is actually saying. Says, therefore he came to Cana of Galilee where he had made the water into wine.

And there was a royal official whose son was sick at Capernaum. Now by royal official,

Jesus is talking about a man who worked for Herod Antipas. That's the son of Herod the

Great who tried to kill Jesus. So here you have Jesus talking to the son of the man who tried to kill him.

That's kind of interesting. He would have worked for Antipas. He would have been a military official in Antipas' government.

He would have probably brought taxes upon the people. You know, some scholars even believe that Israel at this time would have paid 60 and 70 % taxes, which is why all the people were starving like they are in Venezuela because the government was so overbearing on top of them.

He was a powerful Jewish Galilean. He was rich by his own might. And he was seeking Jesus for the wrong reasons.

And we'll see why, the text tells us. When he heard that Jesus had come out of Judea into Galilee, he went to him and was imploring him to come down and heal his son for he was at the point of death.

So this man may have been in Jerusalem and saw Jesus doing signs. He may have heard rumors of Jesus, the miracle worker and magical magician.

And he implores Jesus. He uses his military clout. He uses his power. He uses his wealth. And he implores

Jesus to come. Look at what Jesus says. He doesn't say, sure, I'd love to.

He says, unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe.

What an interesting way to respond. Jesus is rebuking him here. Jesus is telling him that the only reason that you're seeking me is because you want something from me.

Jesus, like a well -trained surgeon, is diagnosing a cancer of the soul that has infected this man down to the deepest parts of his soul.

It's made his heart wicked in looking for Jesus to do something for him instead of Jesus to be something for him.

This man's not coming to follow Jesus. The man doesn't even dispute that fact.

Now, listen, we can have empathy for this man. His son's dying. I can't imagine how hard that would be.

I can't imagine how fearful you would be to have the news that someone that you love is terminally ill and there's a miracle worker down the street.

But what Jesus rebukes him for is not that his request is illegitimate.

We have cares. We have things that worry us and bother us. But what

Jesus is saying is that your greatest need is not a healthy son. Your greatest need is to know the son.

Your greatest need is not to get in this moment what you want is to be reconciled to a holy

God. To know Christ and to worship him rightly. That is the greatest need that this man has and that every human being has.

And if we miss that, we miss Christ. Jesus has just rebuked the entire

Galilean population saying unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe. And this man basically says, you're right.

I'm not here to follow you, Jesus. I'm not here to repent for my sins. He doesn't mention any of that.

I'm not here to commit my life to you or to seek your kingdom, my love. I'm not here to walk with you or have a relationship with you or any of that.

I'm here to get my son healed. That's what I'm here for. He says, sir, right after Jesus just said you people will not believe unless you see signs and wonders, he doesn't say, you're right,

I'm sorry. He says, sir, come down before my child dies. You think about it.

Here you have a man who is created by Christ, woven together in his mother's womb by the second person of the

Trinity, Christ. He's standing before his creator, treating him like a vending machine instead of treating him who he is and who he's worthy.

So Jesus says to him, go, your son lives. Jesus doesn't go to the man's house. Jesus, out of empathy and love for the son, he heals him.

Praise God that Jesus, even sometimes when we approach him wrongly, he still answers our deepest needs.

He says, go, your son lives. And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoke to him and started off.

And as he was now going down, his slaves met with him and said that his son was living. So he inquired of them what hour was it when it began, and they told him yesterday, it's the seventh hour of the fever left.

So the man now confirms what Jesus just said. Unless you people don't see signs and wonders, you won't believe.

A sign and a wonder happened, and it says that he believed and his whole household believed. You see, the belief didn't come before the sign, it came after, so he fulfilled

Jesus's prophecy. Now, whether or not this man came to know Jesus rightly or not, we don't know.

The text is not clear. I pray to God that he did. But what we know now is that he was seeking a sign, he was seeking a wonder, he was seeking a miracle, but he wasn't seeking

Christ. And in that sort of illegitimate faith, he's showcasing what his heart really desires.

It's not Jesus, it's the stuff. That Jesus can give. And we're not left to wonder how

Jesus responds to this kind of faith. It says in John 2 24, that Jesus does not entrust himself to that kind of sign seeking faith.

This verse is telling us that Jesus is not impressed with showy displays of allegiance and shallow confessions.

He's not impressed with misplaced allegiances or with religious fans who raise their hand in glee when everything is going well, but who will utterly abandon him.

Remember, his disciples were Galilean too. And at the end of his life, they all scattered and abandoned him.

Jesus is not looking for fans who will cheer for him, he's looking for followers who will know him and love him for who he is.

There's a great chasm of difference between those two views. Now, unfortunately, the church today is still riddled with this sort of confusion, this

Galilean error. It hasn't gone away. I would say in a seeker sensitive church, the charismatic church, the

Pentecostal church, the mega church, and many evangelical churches, this Galilean error is still present.

Where we're fueled by fake signs and fake wonders and overhyped church productions, crowd pleasing mentalities, where we'll rile people up, but we won't do anything to minister to their soul.

These movements are not based on knowing Christ, they're based on drawing large crowds. They're about attracting carnal people by carnal means so that we'll have to keep them perpetually with things of the world because Jesus doesn't satisfy them.

These kinds of churches don't focus on who Christ is, they focused on him meeting your needs or giving you your best life now or making you healthy, wealthy, and successful.

But instead of focusing on health, why don't we just focus on the greatest healing that we need which is redemption in Christ.

Instead of focusing on wealth and how am I gonna pay the bills this month, why don't we focus on the fact that God is sovereign and he paid my eternal debt on the cross that if he can be trusted to pay that debt which was infinitely greater than my debt to my mortgage that he'll cover me there too.

Why don't we trust that the greatest relationship that I need Jesus to fix is not my marriage and it's not my children and it's not anyone else, it's my relationship with God.

And then I need Jesus to mend that and from that will outflow into the rest of my relationship's health.

You see the prosperity movement, the health and wealth gospel gets it backwards. They start with what

Jesus can do and then they think that that's gonna get you to who Jesus is, it doesn't. It makes Jesus a vending machine.

It dishonors Christ. Christ won't entrust himself to that. The seeker sensitive

Galilean inspired church movement that we have going on today is all about health, wealth, and happiness but it dishonors

Christ. It's about seeking the lost but it says in here that God's the one who seeks the lost.

Paul Washer said it really, really well. He said we wanna be seeker sensitive as a church.

We wanna be seeker sensitive but what we need to realize is that there's only one seeker and his name is

God and if you wanna be friendly to anyone in your church, you need to be friendly to him. You need to love him.

You need to prioritize him. Where we've got it wrong in modern evangelicalism is we've prioritized seekers as if someone comes and seeks

God. No one seeks God. God is the one who seeks so if we're gonna make any ministry, if we're gonna give it a priority, we've got to give it a priority of honoring

God. These types of ministries will get you book deals.

They will make you popular. I've got a bookshelf full of church growth books that basically give you a formula that if you do this, you do that, your church will grow.

I don't want anything to do with that because if your church grows on carnal means, then is it really pleasing to God?

If you preach the gospel, which is what Christ tells us to do and you never grow, you die completely obscure, what do you have to look forward to?

Well done, my good and faithful servant. Amen. I would rather trade in all the notoriety and all of the success and everything else to hear those wonderful words because everything else is like chaff.

It'll be fading away and it'll burn. I don't wanna get to heaven and Christ say, depart from me,

I never knew you. And this doesn't just apply to church as it applies to our individual faith.

What's your faith rooted in? Is your faith rooted in what Jesus can do for you or is it rooted in who he is and his person?

That's where it has to start because if not, you're gonna use Jesus. You're gonna use

Jesus in your prayer life. You're gonna use Jesus in your biblical life. You're gonna use Jesus in every aspect of your life because you're gonna want him to do something for you when he's already done something for you and what we're called to do is worship him for who he is.

All of the healing that comes into our life flows out of who Christ is. We are healed from our sins.

We are sanctified from our missteps and behaviors out of worship.

That's what Jesus says in John four. So I bring all of this up because I don't want us to have this

Galilean sort of mindset where we love Christ only for what he can do for us. I want us to love him in spirit and in truth.

That's the first error, is the Galilean error. The second is the

Jerusalem Judean error. The Judeans were the religious elite.

They were the ones that controlled the temple and they controlled the government. They were the power structures of both the religious epicenter and the political epicenter of Israel and what's hard about them is that they can prize both the liberals and the conservatives, kind of like our government today.

You had the Pharisees who were the theological conservatives who were self -righteous and prideful and ruled with an iron fist but you also had the

Sadducees who were the liberals who were in bed with Rome, who were trying everything they can to bring about a political revolution and not a spiritual revolution.

You had both of these groups together who had almost nothing in common except one thing. They both united together to kill the son of God.

John calls this group the Jews and it consists of both the Pharisees and the Sadducees and while there's very little meaningful that we can compare these groups, two, very little overlap in what they believed and what they thought, they had a united mission of putting down the son of God and I want us to look at how they got it wrong in similar ways, the

Jerusalem era, the Judean era. When Jesus comes into Jerusalem, it says in verses 13 through 14 of chapter two, the

Passover of the Jews was near and Jesus went up to Jerusalem and he found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves and the money changers that were seated at the table.

They had a compromised faith. They knew what the Old Testament required and yet they brought animals into the sanctuary so that they could rob the people blind and also the

Old Testament, it can get cumbersome to read at times, but it has rules and it has procedures that God wanted for his people.

You're not allowed to have feces in the sanctuary of God because it defiled the temple. They had animals, markets inside the sanctuary of God, defiling it because of their love for money.

They were charging, like I said earlier, exorbitant exchange rates so that you could have their temple coin.

They cared more about their money and about their religion and about their traditions than the truth of the word of God.

They were worldly. John tells us that Jesus made a scourge of cords.

I don't know about you, have you ever thought about what church would be like if Derek made a scourge of cords and chased somebody out?

I've always wondered what that must have looked like. And he drove them out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen.

And he poured out the coins of the money changers and he overturned their tables and to those who were selling the doves, he said, take these things away and stop making my father's house a place of business.

You see, the Pharisees were worldly. They were turning God's house into a profit scheme. They were lovers of money.

They were lovers of the praise of men. They wanted the best seats at the party. They prayed loud prayers so that everyone could see how righteous they were.

They craved power and they used it above people's heads. There's a story that the word sinner is invented by the

Pharisees as a way of shaming people who could not conform to their standard. They would walk around in the streets and they would try.

There's also another story that says that the Pharisees were teaching people at this time that if the whole country would just obey the

Torah for one day, then the Messiah would return. So when they would see a woman caught in adultery, they would beat her over the head with the

Bible. If they saw someone who had yelled out, you fool, to his neighbor, they would beat them over the head with the

Bible. They were self -righteous. And yet here the Messiah is right in front of them and they had not once kept the law, even themselves.

It wasn't just the Pharisees who were worldly. They were worldly in a religious way. The Sadducees were worldly in a political way, in a secular way.

They were the party of the high priest. So that meant that the high priest who goes into the temple of God was the most liberal person in that area.

They didn't believe the Bible. They didn't believe the Torah. There were parts of the Torah that they totally rejected, like the resurrection of the dead.

And they were in bed with Rome. Rome was the one who was installing the high priest. I found that out. Rome had a say -so in who got to be the high priest because Israel was a contentious people who liked to rebel.

So they put in someone who was soft, someone who would go along with Rome, someone who would love

Rome, someone who at the end of Jesus's life would stand up and say, I have no king but Caesar, betraying his allegiances.

They were chasing after the world's approval. They were doing worldly things just so that they could appease

Rome. Both groups were totally compromised.

Both groups were thoroughly worldly for different reasons, but they both were worldly. And it's out of this scene that Jesus gives his most scathing rebuke that he's ever given.

I'm gonna read an extended group of passages from Matthew 23 because I want you to see how angry

Jesus is towards the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We often get this idea of Jesus who's meek and mild, who's got feathered

European hair that flows in the wind like Fabio on the butter commercial. Maybe you've not seen that commercial.

We get that idea of Jesus, but Jesus chased these people out of the temple with a whip.

Jesus was concerned about the holiness of God. This is what he says in Matthew 23. Again, this is a lot of verses, but I want you to hear it.

But woe to you. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows' houses and for a pretense you make long prayers so that you will receive greater condemnation.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselytite and when he becomes one, you make him twice the child of hell as yourselves.

Woe to you, blind guides, who say, whoever swears by the temple, well, that's nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the temple is obligated.

You fools. You blind men. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, but you've neglected the weightier matters of the law, like justice and mercy and faithfulness.

You blind guides who strain out a gnat, but yet you swallow a camel.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you're full of robbery and self -indulgence.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside are full of dead men's bones and uncleanness.

Woe to you, scribes. Woe to you, Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build the tombs of the prophets and you adorn the monuments of the righteous, and you say, if I would have been living in those days,

I would not have killed the prophets. You testify against yourself, fill up the measure of the guilt of your fathers.

You serpents, you brood of vipers, how can you escape the sentence of hell? That's Jesus.

Talking to the religious leaders of his time because they were using their faith to abuse people and harm people, and it's an illegitimate faith.

It's worldly. The third aspect of their faith that was wrong is that it was rebellious to Christ.

John 2, 18, then Jesus said to him, what sign do you show us as your authority for doing these things?

Jesus had just flipped the tables, chased out the money changers, and they were more concerned with their church building than with Christ.

They were more concerned with their status than with holiness and with purity to the gospel. And they asked

Jesus, the one who has all authority in heaven and on earth, by whose authority do you do these things? Are you kidding me?

He's the one who made them, and yet they're looking at him like he's nothing and that he has to conform to their sort of religious standards.

I think the reason that they contrived so hard to kill him after Matthew 23 is because of how scathing the rebuke was in Matthew 23 towards them.

He called them out for their sin and for their hypocrisy, and just a few chapters later, they murder him.

But we have to be clear here because the self -righteousness of the Pharisees creeps up in us too, easily.

We have to be clear that the reason that they rebelled was not because they were not righteous enough.

None of us are righteous. We have to be clear that the reason that they rebelled against God is because they were blind, spiritually blind.

They could not submit to him. They could not see him. They could not love him because as John 3 says, they were not born again.

Jesus tells their representative Nicodemus that unless a man is born again, they cannot see the kingdom of God. He also says in verse 13 that no one can ascend to heaven, so therefore salvation must come outside of our own human ability and strength.

The final aspect of their false faith was confusion. We see that in John 3, and there's a lot going in there, but they were confused about his deeds.

They were confused about his mission. They were confused about his nature of salvation. They were confused about what he was trying to accomplish.

They didn't know God because God had not sought them. They mixed religion with politics.

That's what the Pharisees and the Sadducees did. The Pharisees were looking for a renewed religious kingdom where David would sit on his throne again.

They weren't looking for the Christ. The Sadducees were looking for a political kingdom. They were realists.

They knew Rome was in charge, so the best thing we could do was get in bed with Rome and make Rome happy, but we know how

Jesus responded to them as well. Now, there's a myriad of examples that we could give, but in John 2, 19,

Jesus says, destroy this temple. He's standing in front of the temple when he says that, and in three days

I will raise it up. Now, it's clear that Jesus was talking about his body, and it's clear that Jesus was talking about his resurrection, but it's a double meaning here because we also know

Jesus was gonna take their temple away from them. The thing that both the Pharisees and the Sadducees were using to adulterate themselves to God, God was gonna take from them, and he was gonna make the kingdom of God no longer temple -bound, but bound up in Christ.

We see this in Matthew 22. Right before Jesus goes to the cross, he tells them, or sorry,

Matthew 21, he tells them a parable. He says, therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God is gonna be taken and ripped away from you, and it's gonna be given to a people who produce its fruit.

He tells them in Matthew 22, a kingdom about, a parable about a wedding. The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy.

Jesus is saying that the covenant people of God, the ones who were invited to the wedding, were no longer worthy.

That's the shocking aspect of John's gospel. Right in the very beginning in chapter one, he came to his own, and his own rejected him.

Both the Galileans and the Pharisees, the Galileans and the Judeans. Jesus is not happy about this outcome.

He weeps over the city of Jerusalem in Matthew 23. He says, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who were sent to her.

How often have I wanted to gather your children together the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.

Jesus is saying from heaven, he has viewed the downfall, the moral decay of Jerusalem, and he has wanted to rescue her.

He's wanted to pick her up and pull her to him and save her from her sins, but she was unwilling.

Said, behold, your house, that's the temple. Behold, your house is gonna be left to you desolate. For I say to you from now on, you will not see me again until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the

Lord. Do you know what that means? The temple is gonna be taken away from them, and the only way they're ever gonna get to know

God again is if they say, blessed is Christ. Because salvation's no longer about the temple, it's about understanding who

Jesus is. So until they are willing to admit that Jesus Christ is the blessing of God, sent from God to bring the kingdom of God, they will never see

Christ again. No longer how long that they wait for a rubble, a pile of rubble to be rebuilt.

They will not know Christ until, or they will not know God until they bow the knee to Christ. This is very clear in Matthew 24, where Jesus came out of the temple and he was going away when his disciples pointed out the buildings to him.

And he said to them, do you see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down.

Why? Because they were using their temple as an idolatry, or as idolatry.

Jesus was gonna remove it. He was gonna tear one stone apart because he's the cornerstone.

He's gonna build a brand new kingdom. What we have here is the

Galileans who are rejecting Christ and the Judeans who are rejecting Christ for different reasons, but both are rejecting

Christ. The Galileans loved his ministry more than they loved him. The Judeans loved their ministry more than they loved him.

That's the difference. Now there's modern examples of this all over the place.

There's the Pharisaical churches. There's one down south. What's the name of it?

The Baptist church that is awful. Westboro Baptist church.

There's examples like that. But I wanna focus on the liberal side of things, on the Sadduceeical side of things because what

I'm seeing this year is that there's this wokeness that's coming into Christianity now.

There's this wokeness that is trying to supplant the true gospel of Jesus Christ. And I wanna take a moment just to talk about that because they're doing what the

Sadducees were doing. Instead of approaching God as a sinner who needs to repent for their sins and receive

Christ for the forgiveness of sins, the woke church says that our biggest need is not to be reconciled to God.

Our biggest need is to understand that all of us are inherently racist. That's what they're saying. That the most, the way forward in life is to understand that we're all misogynist and xenophobes and racist and whatever level, whatever label you could slap on us, that's what we are.

They trade in the biblical gospel for the woke gospel which is actually the broke gospel. Like Sadducees, the woke church is in love with the world.

They're in bed with the world. They're infatuated with the world's pagan ideas and the world's God -hating philosophers and right along with the

Sadducees, they say, I have no king but Caesar. The Sadducees are the ones who brought the idolatrous animals into the sanctuary.

The woke church is the one who brought Karl Marx into the sanctuary of God. And they put him on the altar instead of Christ.

All across the country, Christians are bowing down to the philosophies of Marx, to the

Frankfurt School, critical race theory, intersectionality instead of Jesus. And you don't need to know all these terms.

You just need to know that there is a movement in the church to replace the gospel of Christ with wokeism.

Instead of repenting for the evil that we have perpetrated against the holy God, we are now told that we must repent of our sin of being white.

You see, the way critical race theory and intersectionality works is that if you're at the top, if you're a white male heterosexual who has nice hair, for instance, then you're at the top of the power structure, you're

Derek. You're at the top of the power structure and you must repent of that.

In order to be woke, you need to repent of your whiteness, you need to repent of your maleness, you need to repent of your heterosexualness, you need to repent of your religiousness, you need to repent of racism that you've never even perpetrated.

You need to repent of sexism that you've never even thought about. You need to repent for cultural appropriations that you did not do.

And ultimately, instead of being a proclaimer of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the woke gospel says that you need to become activists for the left.

You need to raise your fist in solidarity to Black Lives Matter. And you need to go out in the streets, you need to riot and you need to rebel because silence is violence, but yet our

Lord and Savior was silent before his shearers and he accomplished the greatest justice that has ever been accomplished.

Silence is not violence. There's strength in knowing who God is and resting in the truths of God.

The same mob that chanted 2 ,000 years ago is the same mob today who chants, pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.

The same spirit of the Sadducees that abandoned biblical truth for social activism is alive and well today in the woke church.

James tells us friendship with the world is enmity with God. That should be enough for us to understand what the truth is and who we're supposed to cling to.

They're not woke, they're asleep. And if they don't repent, they'll end up dead, just like the

Jews who abandoned their God and their temple was destroyed 40 years later. The woke church will not last.

You can mark that. I'm not a prophet, but you can mark that. Because any movement that dishonors

God, God will put down. I hear a lot of times now people saying, especially they've said this to me,

Kendall, you wanna be on the right side of history. I don't need to be on the right side of history. I need to be on the right side with God.

Because on the right side of God ultimately is gonna be on the right side of history because he's the God of all history. These movements will not last.

Now again, I wanna remind us, the easiest sin to fall into is self -righteousness.

The easiest sin to fall into is haughtiness. For us to sit here and look down our noses at the woke church, the liberal church, the mega church, the seeker sensitive church and everybody else we've talked about and not look at the corruption that's in our own heart.

We don't cling to the truth in order to be elevated some way. We don't cling to the truth in order to be more significant.

Our entire significance comes from Jesus Christ and we love truth because he loves truth, that's it.

So we have empathy in our hearts for those who are being led astray. But we cling to truth unapologetically because we love our

Lord. That's the second way that you can miss

God is that you can be in love with the world, you can be in love with religion, legalism and totally miss

Christ. The third and final way is the most radical way.

You see, John said that he came to his own and his own received him not, that's true. The Galileans, they received him not.

The Judeans, they received him not. It was the Samaritans who received him. It was the ones who weren't his own.

You see, everyone in the narrative misses Jesus except the Samaritans and everyone in the narrative are seeking for something except for them.

Do you notice that? The Jews are seeking for something. The Galileans are seeking for something.

The Samaritans are not even expecting it. The woman comes to the well and she's like, why would you talk to me?

She's not seeking anything. It's because God is seeking her. That's the fundamental difference between the

Galilean error, the Judean error and the Samaritan faith. Because when we seek in our own strength and our own power to find

God, we can't. We end up a thousand different errors when we do that.

Whether it's hyper religiosity or whether it's wokeism or whatever else, we can't find God on our own. We need

God to come find us like he did at the well. He found that woman and he didn't just find her.

In his providence and his sovereignty, he sent her to the city. And when they came, Jesus even told his disciples,

I have a harvest that was prepared for you. Jesus knew the whole city was gonna come.

He had already prepared it in eternity because Jesus is the one who sows the harvest.

So the first aspect of what it means to have a true faith is that God has sought you and found you. Because if that's not true, then nothing else is true.

You'll go the way of a million errors unless God has found you and awakened you and opened your eyes. The second aspect is that not only you were sought by God, but you were bought by Christ.

We talked about this a couple weeks ago. If Jesus Christ has not died for your sins and paid for it on the cross of Christ, then you are still dead.

You are still going to hell. There is no redemption for you unless his blood is painted over the doorpost of your heart.

You also are a person who's taught by the spirit of God. The world, the woke church and the wonder -filled churches have their orientation out of alignment because it's not based on what the spirit of God teaches in the

Bible. It's not based on truth. Spirit and truth are never divorced from one another. So if the spirit of God is in you, you will love truth.

You'll be led into all truth. You will worship Christ incarnate who is truth incarnate.

So you'll be sought by God, bought by Christ, taught by the spirit of God, and you will have to respond.

Remember, that's the theme for these three chapters. The Galileans responded to Christ wrongly.

The Judeans responded to Christ wrongly. Well, just because God seeks you, Christ pays for you, and the

Holy Spirit teaches you, doesn't mean you don't have to respond. You still have to respond to Christ. You still have to turn to him.

You still have to worship him. You can't just come to him and sit on your theological hands and do nothing about what he's done for you.

If Christ loved you that much to die for you, ought we not love him? If God came looking for you when you should not have ever been found, ought we go looking for others?

Because of what he's done, now we go and do. So that you can say right along with the

Samaritan village, it's no longer because of what you, the woman, have said to us that we believe.

We've heard it for ourselves now, and we know that you are the savior of the world. I'm gonna end with this.

So far in the Gospel of John, the greatest declaration of who Jesus is was uttered by the mouths of the

Samaritans. We know that you're the savior of the world. We know that we're sinners, that you had to die for to bring into fellowship with you, and we know that, and we're gonna live for you because of that.

That's the difference. That's the difference. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you.

Thank you for showing us something over several chapters that there's ways that we can miss you.

There's ways that we can deny you. There's ways that we can rebel against you by prioritizing the things that you do over the things that you have done and who you are.

Lord, let us not be people whose only affection for you is in what you can do for us like a vending machine.

Lord, let us love you for who you are. Let us find you beautiful. Let us find you glorious.

And Lord, like the Judeans, let us not be worldly. Let us not get confused about social activism.

Let us not get confused about the lies that the world teaches on how to bring redemption to this world. We have redemption.

We have the gospel. The gospel's better than anything this world has to offer. Racism is evil.

The gospel is what cures it. There's neither slave nor free Jew nor Greek. The Bible has an answer that predates all of these different philosophies.

Lord, would you purge your church of the pagan philosophies that it is bowing down to? And Lord, would you raise up some strong men and women who will not bow the knee to the idol?

Lord, like in Daniel, would you raise up some Shadrach, some Meshach, and some Abednego who will not bow their knee and who will cling to the gospel of Jesus Christ because it is good and it is sufficient.

It's all we need. Lord, would you make the Shepherd's Church a gospel church? Lord, would you keep us and hold us fast because from the text we know that we cannot do this on our own.

We need you, God. We need you, Christ, and we need you, Holy Spirit. Let me pray these things in your awesome name, amen.