Junk Drawer Jesus: Headphones - John 5:31-40

Listening Habits

Listening to your favorite music has come a long way. It all started with Thomas Edison and his phonograph. Record players, reel-to-reel, 8 track players, transistor radios, cassette players, iPods… now we listen to ear buds that are no longer connected to the player by a wire… and we’re listening on our phones. Edison wanted to capture sound that could be played at a time later than the original. And, rather than going to the opera house or the auditorium to hear an orchestra, you could have one of these in your home. Now… listening to music is totally personal.

Radios and cassette players in cars took the personal to another level. Anyone remember arguments over what radio station to listen to or what cassette was going to be played in the player? You don’t have to do that any more… these days, even if dad is playing his favorite Spotify list, Luke can listen to whatever he wants on his headphones, all the while telling dad to turn it down a notch so that the car sound doesn’t overwhelm the airpods. That’s how personal it is.

But the argument centers on the very question in front of us today: what are you listening to? We’ve reached the chapter in Junk Drawer Jesus where we’re looking at another item in our spiritual junk drawers… and we’re talking about headphones. Headphones can be found in a lot of junk drawers. In fact, I have a few sets myself… it was a bit of a shock to me when I got a new phone last fall and realized there’s no headphone jack. That’s a relic of the past… and that means all those ear buds I have that have wires are no longer usable.

What are you listening to?

That’s a big, big question. What has your ear? or maybe a better question: who has your ear? We are bombarded every day with noise. Have you ever been in a place where all you could hear was your heartbeat? We don’t have basements here in deep south Texas. Too much sand, for the most part. But I’ve always enjoyed a good nap in a well-built basement. Some of you hike the outdoors. Get away from the city and you’ll discover how quiet it is. But noise always finds us. And our ears are the battle ground. Almost none of the noise offers us eternal life. And when there’s so much noise, from social media and entertainment personalities, self-help gurus, political figures and players, and so much noise coming from so many directions, hearing the life-giving voice of Jesus becomes very, very difficult. And I would offer that when it comes to hearing Jesus we’re going to need a little more than a trip to the basement or the quiet of the outdoor wilderness.

When I says “hearing Jesus’ voice” I mean that quite literally. How are we at listening to hearing Jesus? It’s a question that doesn’t seem obvious to us. After all, we live in a very visual world. We’re not only bombarded with thousands of voices every day, we’re bombarded by thousands of images. Our worldviews are sight-based. Seeing is believing we are told. But what if I told you this?

Hearing is believing

John 5 is part of one of the longest talks of Jesus in the four biographies that we have. It all starts with Jesus healing a guy who hasn’t been able to walk for 38 years. Everyone is astonished. But it causes an uproar because Jesus is healing people on the Sabbath and the religious establishment is totally upset. What’s amazing to me though, in the conversation that follows, Jesus is not doubling down on what can be seen. Jesus doesn’t say, “Let’s go to the replay booth and get a ruling on exactly what happened”. They all saw what happened. What they can see isn’t in dispute. Their anger is being fueled by what they hear: Jesus does the will of His father. In fact, this healing is in concert with His father’s desire that everyone believe His son. They don’t believe Jesus. And along the way in this conversation, Jesus says this:

John 5:24 “Anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.”

It’s not about what you see. It’s about what you hear. Believing comes from hearing. “Seeing is believing” isn’t the only thing in our spiritual junk drawer. This has to do with the headphones. The question becomes: how does one hear Jesus?

Again, we’re going to get a bit dicey when it comes to identifying stuff that we’ve heard and picked up along the way and stuffed into our spiritual junk drawers. And just like all the other stuff we’ve looked at, what makes these so difficult to let go is because they’re based on a kernel of truth. So here’s a few:

Make sure you have quiet time with God so you can hear his voice inside you.

One of the best places to hear God’s still small voice is in the rustling of the leaves and breaking of the waves.

God talks to me through my thoughts and what’s in my heart.

God’s always giving me signs and speaking to me through them as long as I’m looking for them.

God speaks to me through my dreams.

I hear God through the low hum of creation.

Now hear me closely when I say, Bresson isn’t saying God never does this. He has spoken through these things in the past and continues to do so. The question is this:

How does God normally communicate?

And this is where it gets dicey. This isn’t what we want to hear. Because we know what the answer on the other side of this is. The common denominator in all of the junk drawer items mentioned above is that I’m the the one controlling the narrative about what God is saying to me. It’s all about what’s inside you, what you’ve experienced. If there’s any one thing that the Bible is pretty clear about it’s that what is inside of us isn’t to be trusted. And it’s totally subjective. I had a pastor friend of mine years ago tell me a story that highlights the difficulty of this. He was in a church where there had been some heated discussion about the color of carpet… thank you Jesus, we didn’t have this, LOL. But that’s what was happening in that church. He was paid a visit during the week by one of those who was being very vocal about the carpet and she came by to tell him that God had visited her in a dream the night before and had told her that the carpet color should be red. The pastor asked her what time God had appeared to her in a dream, and she said 9pm. The pastor responded… that’s funny. God appeared to me in a dream at 11pm and told me the color of the carpet should be blue. That sounds like an extreme story that is bending the discussion about how God speaks into total subjectivity, but it does highlight the problem of authenticity.

Again, it’s not that God hasn’t or doesn’t use those means to communicate, but it’s not the norm. And not only is it not the norm, God has more important stuff to talk to us about than the carpet. In fact, throughout the Bible, you simply don’t have God communicating about much of anything outside of the salvation story. So when we think about God communicating, which of those things in our junk drawer are going to tell us this:

John 3:16 “For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”

Creation and waves and wilderness will not communicate any of those things specifically to us. None of those things can tell us the thing we need to hear most: salvation through the forgiveness of sins.

Here’s another question:

How has God promised to speak to us?

That’s where the John 5 conversation comes in. Again and again and again, Jesus points to His word as the source of eternal life. We read it moments ago:

John 5:24 “Anyone who hears my Word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.”

Anyone who hears my Word. The Word is where God absolutely promises to give you His eternal life. There no promises like that attached to dreams or quiet moments. When you walk through those doors on Sunday you are absolutely guaranteed to hear God speaking life and forgiveness to you in and through His Word through the Holy Spirit. He promises to speak to you through the preached Word and the visible Word in the Sacrament. Guaranteed.

God speaks to us through His Word, the Bible. You and I living here in the United States have a gluttony of Bibles. Not only do we have multiple copies in many of our homes, we’ve got the apps on our phones, we can got our choice of sermon podcasts and videos on demand. How many of you have the YouVersion? Great Bible app. Has great Bible reading plans. I love the verse of the day. I also have the Logos Bible app on my phone. I’m in Logos just about every day. A Bible app is a great way to hear from God. So many great thoughts that God has for us right at our fingertips. Hearing God’s voice is always just a finger touch away.

But there’s also this…

God promises to speak to us through the spoken Word because he promises to give us faith and life through hearing. Literally.

We talked about this last week. It’s all over this conversation Jesus is having in John 5. “Anyone who hears my word” is just the beginning. Jesus uses the word “testify” or “testimony” 10 times in this paragraph… and talks about His Word and what he’s saying and hearing through the ears another 5 times. A dozen and a half times, Jesus is emphasizing the way to eternal life is through hearing the spoken Word. You can’t miss that here. So much so, there’s an absolutely remarkable statement that Jesus makes right in the middle of it all:

John 5:34 “I say these things so that you may be saved.”

We’re so focused on content and making sure the right things are believed. We read that statement as if Jesus is saying, “look, I’ve been saying these things about belief and eternal life so that you’d know how to be saved”. That’s how I was taught to read that verse. But that’s not what he actually says here. “I say these things so that” what? “So that you may be saved.” Has it ever occurred to us that Jesus saves people with His speech? That when He speaks, he saves?

St. Paul repeats Jesus’ words almost verbatim in Romans 10 when he says:

Romans 10:17 “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes through the Word of Christ.”

He’s not saying that “faith comes from the content and information that is heard”. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a preacher say that about this verse. It’s not what Paul is saying, It’s not what Jesus is saying in John 5. Faith comes from the act of hearing itself. Hearing the audible Word.

There’s a popular Christian saying out there attributed to St. Francis of Assisi… and I’ve heard this for years:

Go and preach the Gospel; use words if necessary. - St. Francis of Assisi

While this is a great sentiment… that we should back up the Gospel we talk about with our actions… there are two problems with the statement.. first off, there’s no record of St. Francis ever saying this. Second, it’s simply not true. Because here’s the reality:

Go and preach the Gospel; words are always necessary. - Jesus

The only way to know the Gospel, the only way to believe the Gospel, the only way for the Gospel to give us life, save us, forgive us is for the Gospel to be spoken and then heard. Through the ears and into the heart.

This really is the only way to deal with our unbelief. Hearing the Word. Our faith is constantly under attack. And usually it’s not overt or direct. The devil doesn’t show up to try and talk us into not believing although that does happen all too frequently. Our faith is attacked by indifference. We don’t really believe that Jesus uses His Word and hearing to save us. The world is so scientific now. Science tells us that two cars trying to occupy the same space at the same time is an accident. There’s nothing about God in this… driver’s error causes most accidents. Right? Science has an explanation for every thing. To talk as if the world is full of the supernatural where God is actively engaged in our lives and speaking through Word and Sacrament to us is nothing more than superstition.

In fact, we as Christians, fall for this. We’re told that faith is believing what isn’t seen. We have a verse for that Hebrews 11:1

Hebrews 11:1 Faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.

Is that faith? Faith as “believing what isn’t seen” becomes a blind faith. But that’s not the whole story. The writer of Hebrews goes on to say that the Old Testament saints, like Moses and Abraham, didn’t believe what was seen… sure. But instead, they believed the Promise. They believed the Word proclaimed to them in the Promise. That’s not blind faith. Faith comes from hearing. Hearing is believing.

What is it that makes what I’m saying right now different than the announcements about the pumpkin patch?

I’m speaking God’s Word. I’m speaking Jesus’ words. And I’m speaking Jesus’ words from Jesus about Jesus because this is where faith originates.

John 5:39–40 “You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. But you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life.”

There’s a lot we could unpack there, but what we need to see is this: the Scriptures, all of them testify about Jesus. From Genesis to Revelation, it’s all about Jesus. And the purpose of all of it is to give you eternal life. To give you forgiveness and grace. The sermon isn’t just another TED talk. It’s not just a bunch of useful or interesting information. God’s Word does something. It gives us life. It changes us. The Gospel changes us.

That’s Jesus’ promise to you throughout the entire Bible. Dreams? maybe. Still small voice during quiet time? maybe. Through the Preached Word heard by the ears and believed in the heart? Guaranteed. Absolutely. Where are you going to hear that you are unconditionally loved and forgiven? Where is it you will hear with your ears that Jesus always has you? Right here. Right now. In the Scriptures where Jesus Promises to give you himself.

Let’s Pray

The Table

When Jesus speaks, he saves. We receive what he says in faith. He gives us life, salvation, and forgiveness. And all of that happens here at this Table. This is the Word FOR YOU. This is Jesus saying, I love you. This is Jesus saying your mine. This is Jesus saying I forgive you, again. In real time, and in real space.

Benediction