Searching For Life

When I was a kid in school, I learned about a guy named Ponce de Leon. Ponce came from Spain with Christopher Columbus on his second trip across the ocean and settled on the Island of Hispaniola. He was a military commander and farmer. Eventually he became deputy governor and late he became governor.

In 1506 he discovered an island that we now know as Puerto Rico and in 1508 he returned to be governor of that island. He remained as governor until two years later, King Ferdinand of Spain replaced him as governor with Diego Columbus, the son of Christopher.

He was quite hurt by this action. But King Ferdinand, as a consolation prize, gave him 3 ships and allowed him to sail off and do some exploring.

That’s all historical fact. But here’s where things get a litttle wacky and muddy. The story I learned was that Ponce de Leon was obsessed with stories about a Fountain of Youth, a magical spring of water that could make old men young again. He had heard the Natives of the area tell of such a spring and he believed that the water could heal his own physical ailments.

So when Ponce de Leon “discovered” Florida in April of 1513, and went ashore on the southeast coast, he believed that this was the land where such a spring could be found.

This story has in the recent years been called into serious question for various reasons, the main one being that Ponce de Leon never mentioned the fountain of youth in his correspondence with the King. Historians say that he really was a pretty smart guy and that this who story about him searching for a Fountain of Youth was made up by a Spanish historian who didn’t think too much of Ponce and wanted to make him look silly.

At any rate, the idea of a fountain of youth has been around for many centuries. Even Alexander the Great made mention of a stream of water that could “turn old men into boys”.

People desire life. They desire something more than only living in their physical bodies with all our issues and problems can offer.

Jesus knew this. And in his conversations with people, including the religious leaders, he addressed their insatiable need for life.

Last week, Jesus made known the authority that he has as the Son.

This week He continues on. And note how He switches from referring to Himself in the third person “The Son” or “The Son of Man”, to talking in the first person

John 5:30–47 ESV

30 “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. 31 If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true. 32 There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true. 33 You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. 34 Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. 35 He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. 36 But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, 38 and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. 39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. 41 I do not receive glory from people. 42 But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44 How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

(ESV)

Witnesses to Jesus

30 “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. 31 If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true. 32 There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true. 33 You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. 34 Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. 35 He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. 36 But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me.

37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, 38 and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. 39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

41 I do not receive glory from people. 42 But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44 How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

I recently read a story about a man named John Loftus.

John is from northern Indiana. He grew up in a Christian home and was taught about Jesus, how He came to earth, lived among us and sacrificed Himself so that we could be right with God.

But as a kid, John struggled with various things. As a teenager, he was arrested a number of times for theft, running away, and things of that nature. But at the age of 18, he testifies that his life took a dramatic turn as he gave himself to the Lord in repentance and faith and asked Jesus to forgive him for his sins.

He talks about the change that took place in his life. He says that he received the Holy Spirit and shared the Gospel with everyone that he knew.

For him, the miracle of the Gospel was the change that it brought to his life.

He later went to Bible college and graduate school, receiving three Masters Degrees and worked toward his Doctorate degree a lack of funds brought his studies to a halt. He went on to pastor at various churches in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

He became an outspoken apologist for the Christian faith. He was convinced that Christianity was true and was equally convinced in his ability to defend Christianity against most agruments. He was an eloquent teacher and in 1996 was listed in the “Who’s Who of America’s Best Teachers”.

While serving as a pastor, he also taught philosophy at a secular university. It tested his faith, but he said that he believed he could continue to teach philosophy so long as he had a caring Christian community to fall back on.

But in the years of 1991-1996, he began to seriously question the faith that he had spent years defending. He says that there are 3 things that changed his thinking:

A major crisis

New information

Minus a loving, caring, Christian community

Over the course of a few years, these 3 things added up to an assualt of such proportions that he ended up denying his faith. He writes, “There were just too many individual problems that I had to balance like spinning plates on sticks in order to keep my faith. At some point they just all came crashing down.”

Basically, there were just too many facts in the Bible that didn’t add up for him. Intellectually, he just couldn’t line up his faith with reason.

But there was something else going on. He writes something very revealing:

After being saved I wanted to show God how grateful I was for his gift of salvation by committing my life over to him with all I had. Even though I knew it was by grace that I had been saved, I almost always felt guilty that I wasn’t doing enough in response to God’s love. Whether it was spending time in prayer, evangelizing, reading the Bible, tithing, forgiving someone who had done me wrong, or whether it was struggling with temptations of lust, pride, selfishness and laziness, I almost always felt guilty.

Then he goes on to say:

Today I am pretty much guilt free. That is, I have no guilt in regards to the Christian duties mentioned above. I am free of the need to do most of the things I felt I had to do because I was expressing my gratitude for what God had done. .....

I’m living life to the hilt, pretty much guilt free, primarily because my ethical standards aren’t as high. In fact, I believe the Christian ethical standards are simply impossible for anyone to measure up to.

Today, John Loftus has his own website called “Debunking Christianity”.

We look at the lives of people. We look at our own lives. We see people on different tangents, some of them doing great things, others running their lives into ruin.

At the core of all of us, there is the search for meaning. Really, it is the search for life.

People ask, “What is the meaning of life?” That’s what we all want to know.

He came unto his own but his own didn’t receive him.

It’s possible that many of us know someone like this. Maybe they haven’t been a prominent teacher like John Loftus. But maybe they have grown up in church and have even at one time made the decision to follow Jesus. Maybe their lives changed and we saw them acting and living differently. But if you talk to them today, you find that their belief and their faith is on the rocks. It’s been ship wrecked because of intellectual questions that they just couldn’t answer.

Maybe it’s because they didn’t recognize him.

I know people like this. One of them is very close to me. I’ve known him all my life. He’s smart. Very smart. Always an A student in school. He made a decision to follow Christ later in life than I did. And he made a go of it for a while. Today his faith is on the rocks. He doesn’t know where he stands before God. There are just too many unanswerable questions in his mind.

I have a cousin who also grew up in church, made a decision to follow Christ. He’s also very intelligent and well-spoken. Today he willingly will tell you that he considers himself an agnostic (meaning that you can’t know that there is a God).

Today as Jesus is talking to the Jews, the religious leaders, who knew Scripture better than anyone, whose knowledge and mastery of the Scripture gave them special privilege and status.

And maybe you are feeling like I’m starting to sound like a broken record, because I’ve said this before

As he is talking to these guys, he says something that’s actually quite astounding and had to sound to them as accusatory and condemning:

And I may sound like a broken record because I’ve said this before. But the

English Standard Version Chapter 5

39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

Wow, what a thing to say!

To men who were God’s chosen people, His covenant people. They had the law and the prophets, their Scriptures.

They were smart. They were knowledgeable. They could debate anybody and defend their positions.

in fact, that’s what they did and still do.

We were watching a TV show where the host went into a religious school in Jerusalem where young men study to become rabbis. One of the things he noted was how they love to sit around and debate about the scriptures.

They love to take contrary positions and then sit and debate them. It’s part of the learning process.

But that’s part of a tradition spanning centuries. Because my understanding is, this is how the religious leaders of the day were.

These guys made a living out of studying the Scriptures, debating them, and telling others how they should live.

And Jesus, like he did with Nicodemus honed right in on what was driving this approach to Scripture. It was a search for life and meaning.

To them, this was life. To them eternal life was gained by studying the Scriptures.

If they could just learn enough, get a good enough grasp on the Scripture, learn to defend their position, learn to be good enough, then they could be right with God. Then they could have life.

And what they failed to see is that all Scripture points to Christ, the One who has the authority to have life within Himself.

Jesus tells them, “You claim to follow Moses. But Moses was actually writing about me and you don’t believe in me. Which means you don’t actually believe Moses.”

So it’s a double whammy. Not only do you not believe that I am who I say I am, but you don’t believe Moses on whom you have set your hope.

You know, we can shake our heads and click our tongues and say, “Goodness, you religious leaders. Why didn’t you believe in Jesus who was standing right in front of you? Why didn’t you realize that he is the ultimate revelation that Scripture talked about?”

We could do that or we could examine ourselves. We can examine our own approach to Scripture

We love our Bibles. We try to make sure that they aren’t mistreated.

We have Bibles with gold lettering on the front, gold on the edge of the pages, and red for the words of Jesus.

We sing songs like:

I Believe the Bible

Cling to the Bible

The B I B L E Yes That’s the Book for Me

Every Promise in the Book is Mine

We Mennonites believe in simple obedience. If it says it, then we should do it.

We say that we have a high regard for the Scriptures.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As Mennonites, we consider ourselves to be people of the Book. We are biblicists. If the Bible says it, I believe it. If the Bible says it, I do it. At least if I think it’s appropriate. We believe in simple obedience.

And out of that attitude of simple obedience, we construct some rather elaborate manuals of church standards and rules to live by.

I was on the website of one of a conservative Mennonite group and they have a document entitled “Decrees For To Keep”. If I were to print it off, it would be about 58 pages long.

There are about 6 pages that comprise a statement of Theology.

The other 52 pages or so comprise their church standards, giving instruction on things from the kind of things they are allowed to read, recreational activities, explicit instructions on how to dress, what kind of cars to buy, how church services are to be conducted.

For some of us, this is familiar territory. For others of us, maybe not so much.

And I bring this up with the utmost caution. I don’t want to criticize or find fault with churches that have a list of standards or rules like this.

I know that many of you are probably wondering my beliefs about things like the prayer veiling, peace and non-resistance, simplicity, and other things that have defined us for centuries. And I don’t blame you for wondering.

You are certainly welcome to ask me. And in the future, I do plan on addressing some of these things.

But there has been something that is holding me back from taking a hard line on some of these things: That is, I believe that in many cases, our tendency to define ourselves by making a list of rules feeds into us thinking that by doing a good job of following these rules, we have life and significance. And if we don’t do a good job at following these rules, we don’t have life and we feel guilty.

We become very much like the religious leaders that Jesus was talking to. We look good, and we are doing good things. But as I read these 58 pages of Decrees for the Keep, I have to ask, “Where’s Jesus? Where is the life?”

Is it in keeping the decrees?

We search the Scriptures. We sing songs like

“Yes I Believe the Bible”

The B I B L E, Yes that’s the book for me

Every promise in the book is mine.

We have beautifully printed Bibles with gold lettering on the front, and red lettering for Jesus words.

We memorize Scripture to hide it in our hearts.

We love our Bibles. We love the Scriptures. Every decree in this list has a Scripture verse beside it.

But here are two traps that we can easily fall into:

We read the Bible with a closed mind.

We read it in order to support our own beliefs

We read it in order to support our own ideas about God

We create a certain religious system and then we search the Scriptures for verses to support that system

For us, in our traditions, we may think (if we are honest) that if Jesus was on earth today he would be a Mennonite.

We believe that the written word is God’s ultimate revelation to us.

We believe that God’s revelation is a written revelation. And so we tend to worship the words of our Bibles

We think that God said, “I want to reveal myself to my people. So I’m going to give them a Book.”

And when we do that, we get caught up and stumbling over the hard-to-explain things in the Bible and the debatable points of the Bible

But our Bibles are not God’s revelation to us. The are a record of His revelation to us. The words in this Book are a record of God’s perfect revelation to us: that is Jesus

Jesus says this to the religious leaders of his day. “You have spent your lives searching the Scriptures for life and meaning. But you failed to realize that the Scripture actually points to me. And you refuse to come to me so that you might have life.”

Folks, this is at the heart of why I teach like I do. It is the heart of why I have chosen to go through the Gospel of John.

It’s because we can spend the rest of our lives talking about the prayer veiling, peace and non-resistence, all good and worthwhile and much-needed topics.

But if we miss that all of the Scripture actually points to Jesus, then I have failed in my teaching.

And the reason that I ask this question is because Jesus is the ultimate and perfect revelation of God the Father. Paul says in that Jesus is the image of the Invisible God.

.

And you hear it talked about in different ways:

The search for significance

The search for meaning

The search for purpose

What we are really looking for is LIFE. A life that is abundant, eternal, significant.

In days of old, people talked about the Fountain of Youth. Legends existed of streams and fountains which could make old men young again, could make a person live for eternity.

Seems far fetched, but we aren’t that much different. We seek out and grasp at tangible things we think might give us life and significance.

Could be jobs, careers, pleasure.

For good religious folks like us, it could be even the Scriptures.