Belief: A Choice and Not A Choice

Preservice

Sabbatical: The elders have granted me a Sabbatical this summer. This Fall will be eight years as lead pastor. A sabbatical is biblical (remember Sabbath) but it’s also practical. It delivers advantages that are hard to attain in any other way. Rest, releasing of burdens, connection with family, and shows us two things… this is the Lord’s church, He will sustain and guide us (I’m not essential), and that it is good for my formation and growth to know that too… that I’m better for you and the ministry of the gospel, refreshed, passionate, and invigorated for our upcoming season in the church.

My family and I are taking a few trips starting in the middle of June (June 19)… you might see them here and there over the summer, they love being here, but my first Sunday back will be Aug 14 resuming my duties. I will not be preaching though until Aug 28 or Sept 4. PastorJosh will be assuming a lot of my duties with the staff and elders filling in where necessary. I am grateful to the elders of the church for taking care of me and my family, it is an honor to serve you and do gospel ministry together.

This morning we are also praying over our elders.

Want to acknowledge the amazing work that our elders have done leading us these last few years:

Navigating through the union of two churches

Navigating through the pandemic

The blending of two cultures into one

Peter Bertella, Steve Westover, and Pastor Walt LeCouter and Steve Armstrong (Steve could not be here because he is at home with the flu) … we are grateful for your heart, leadership, and commitment to hear from the Lord and lead us well.

Let’s thank them and acknowledge them for their service.

We also want to pray for our incoming elders… Jeff Kamp, Paul Wright, and Pastor Josh Lott

We are going to be navigating and undergoing some building renovations and upgrades, leading with Pastor Josh during my Sabbatical.

Introduction

We are finishing the account with the blind man who recieved his sight from Jesus. He was and will be again this morning interrogated by the religious leaders about the healing, Jesus, and what’ really behind the event.

The present passage is about healing, about blindness, about Moses, religion, rules, and about Jesus; but most of all it’s about God and his heart as demonstrated and revealed through Jesus.

The Pharisees want to drive a solid wedge between Jesus and God. If anything good has happened, they say, it’s God’s work alone, and Jesus can have had nothing to do with it.

This morning we are going to talk about three types of people that we see in this passage.

If you are able, would you stand with me as I read our text this morning. John 9:24-41

This is the word of the Lord. Let us pray. Please be seated.

Faith that is...

The first type of person that we are going to look at is the the person whose life has been unarguably touched by the hand of God. This would be the blind man in our story.

This is where faith just is. God did it. It’s as true as we know that water is wet and the gravity that holds us down. We may not understand it (some of you might actually), but for the majority of us, it just is and we operate because we know it is.

I want to read an excerpt of a book to you this morning. If you would hang with me for moment, it’s a little long, but it’ll be worth it.... and I think it will help illustrate my point a bit further.

There is a book by Daniel Nayeri; Everything Sad is Untrue. He is an unbelievable story teller. In describing his life from his 12 yo perspective, he takes you on his fascinating life journey. He begins with his growing up years in Iran to then being in Oklahoma with his mom, sister, and an abusive step-dad. You’ll laugh out loud, cry, and be in awe over his journey.

In his book he tells of how his mother and sister come to faith in Jesus. His mom and dad are blood descendants of the prophet Muhammad in Islam (sayyed) which means that they both are revered in thier community. While visiting her mom in London, her daughter got her finger smashed in a door because of some kids that bullied her. He writes:

AS MY MOM RUSHED her to a hospital to have her finger sewn back on, my sister hardened her expectations for the world into a tight ball. She cried most when she saw the needle that would sew it back on. My mom told her she’d never have to go back to the school. When my dad got back from wherever he was, he took her for ice cream. And then they all came back to Ellie’s (Daniel’s maternal grandmother) apartment. I remember that my sister went straight into the bedroom to sleep and my mom cried as she told Ellie what happened. That’s how my sister almost lost her finger. But I didn’t just tell you the story for no reason. I told you because it was the start of everything that would come later. It was the first step of how we ended up in Oklahoma.

And it wasn’t even the weirdest thing that happened that day. I wonder sometimes, if I had looked at the space under the door to the bedroom, where my sister was sleeping, whether I would see beams of magic light shining from inside. Because when my sister opened the door and walked out a few hours later, she was suddenly happy again, as if everything was going to be alright. And when they asked her what happened, she said she’d met an angel. BELIEVE ME, I KNOW how it sounds. But imagine you’re six and you came home every day crying, begging not to go back to school. And the grown-ups just pat you on the head and say, “There there. It’ll get better.” But it doesn’t get better. Only worse. Until today, you got your finger chopped off in a door and everyone realized they should have let you stay home. If that was you, would you walk out two hours later into the living room—where the adults are sitting at the table having tea and biscuits and kicking themselves—and would you tell them everything was fine, or would you milk it a little?

The answer is you’d milk it so hard it would turn into butter. There is no reason to come out and say you’re fine. But that’s what she did. She said she was lying in Ellie’s bed. By the door was a rolled-up Persian rug that we had brought with us for Ellie. When my sister woke up, she saw a man sitting on the rug. She didn’t know him, but she wasn’t scared. When she described him—kind eyes, brown hair, a glow like a TV in a dark room, white robes—Ellie gasped and said, “Oh my God, you saw Jesus.” And my sister said, “Yeah,” even though she had no idea who Jesus was or what he looked like, because we didn’t have pictures of him in Iran. He only said four words, “It will be okay,” which is funny, because that’s what all the grown-ups said, and it wasn’t. Ellie was the happiest I have ever seen her. Maybe because it meant there would be another exile. “Your daughter’s a Christian,” she said to my mom, who was furious. “Yeah!” said my sister, “I’m a Christian!” Because she saw it made my mom twitch. That was the moment that everything started to blow up. It wasn’t the bang.

He continues a little later...

When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true.

Nayeri, Daniel. Everything Sad Is Untrue (pp. 169-172, 195-197). Levine Querido. Kindle Edition.

God has done something, you’ve responded, you’ve received it, and it just is.

Healing of disease. Provision of something outside of your means. Transformed life/heart/will. Peace where there was none. It just is and you know it, and it would be a cosmic crime if you were to deny it. This is where I would say belief is not a choice, it just is.

If your experience with God, or whether or not you can experience God, is a debate topic in the church, you don’t need to engage. Live in God’s grace. Let us be dealt with by the Lord himself.

Biblical examples: Saul in becoming Paul (Acts 9); Blind man (John 9); John the Baptist; etc.

So there really isn’t anything else to say to this point other than… God bless you… this man in John 9… you who just know God’s work in your life… bless you. The rest of us fall into either of the other categories… we either refuse we are curious.

Faith that refuses...

The second type of person that we are looking at this morning are the those who would rather deny what has just taken place before their eyes, rather than question their interpretation of God’s word. <pause> This is where the religious leaders are in our story this morning.

What they are working through is this: If Jesus is a sabbath-breaker, and hence a sinner, he can have nothing to do with God and God wouldn’t have anything to do with him. But John wants us to see that Jesus’ action in healing the man is the clearest indication that this view of the sabbath is itself wrong. God is doing a new thing, opening up his new world of healing and hope. The Pharisees’ insistence on staying within their own self-imposed interpretation of the law only shows how drastically they are themselves out of tune with God’s plan.

‘We follow Moses,’ ‘We are following the law,’ they say (v29). This was their big argument and contention. Yet John wants us to see that Moses spoke of Jesus himself (5:45–47). God did indeed speak through Moses. John wouldn’t have denied that for a moment. But when you understand Moses aright, you will see that his law points forward to the ‘grace and truth’ which comes through Jesus the Messiah (1:17). Moses, after all, did far more than merely issue a code of law. He told the story of God and Israel, a story with a beginning and a continuation but, as yet, no climactic end. John wants us to see that Jesus is himself the climax, the true end of the story—and indeed the beginning of the new story which grows out of the old, and which in turn is now spreading throughout the world.

Adapted from Wright, T. (2004). John for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-10 (pp. 141–142). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

For the religious leaders there is a lot at stake. The nation of Israel went into exile for 70 years because they neglected the Sabbath for hundreds of years. When they left it wasn’t a pleasant parting… it was bloody, traumatic, chaotic, and furious.

2 Chronicles 36:15-21 “But the Lord, the God of their ancestors sent word against them by the hand of his messengers, sending them time and time again, for he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they kept ridiculing God’s messengers, despising his words, and scoffing at his prophets, until the Lord’s wrath was so stirred up against his people that there was no remedy. So he brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who killed their fit young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary. He had no pity on young men or young women, elderly or aged; he handed them all over to him. He took everything to Babylon—all the articles of God’s temple, large and small, the treasures of the Lord’s temple, and the treasures of the king and his officials. Then the Chaldeans burned God’s temple. They tore down Jerusalem’s wall, burned all its palaces, and destroyed all its valuable articles. He deported those who escaped from the sword to Babylon, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years.

For 70 years, they longed to come back, and when God brought them back, they sought to be diligent to hold to the law, specifically the Sabbath. Then throw in 400 years of silence in the intertestamental period (between OT and NT) where there was no prophet, fresh revelation of God, nothing… God didn’t leave, He was working, now speaking to Israel through Jesus, but many initially missed it.

There was a lot at risk. Not only for them personally, but for the nation.

However, we can be so set, so convinced, so stubborn that we miss the point and that which truly matters.

Sometimes confronted with information we still want to see what we want to see.

Towards the end of the chapter this is demonstrated in their reaction to what actually took place! John 9:33-34 The blind man said, “If this man were not from God, he wouldn’t be able to do anything.” “You were born entirely in sin,” they replied, “and are you trying to teach us?” Then they threw him out.”

The hard-hearted/blind to God are stubborn, condescending, dismissive, and all together unreasonable. Let that be a warning for us.

For us that are challenged, and maybe find the natural tendency to have everything concrete and the way we think things should go… there is another way that helps us be faithful but yet open to God’s movement in our lives and in the lives around us… it is having a...

Faith that’s curious

The third person we are talking about this morning is you and me and who we hope to be.

Sometimes faith conflicts with our CURRENT understanding and perception for how things should be. Sometimes we elevate our understanding of the black and white text over who we know God to be and how He works. If we can’t imagine it or doesn’t fit in our box on how “God has to work” we MISS IT! Gamaliel knew this and warned the Jewish council to take concern how they interacted with the disciples of Jesus after the ascension.

Acts 5:33-39 “When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law who was respected by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered the men to be taken outside for a little while. He said to them, “Men of Israel, be careful about what you’re about to do to these men. Some time ago Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a group of about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, and all his followers were dispersed and came to nothing. After this man, Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and attracted a following. He also perished, and all his followers were scattered. So in the present case, I tell you, stay away from these men and leave them alone. For if this plan or this work is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You may even be found fighting against God.” They were persuaded by him.”

May we be a people that looks to the character and heart of God when discerning where and what He is doing.

How do we discern what is right when we can deceive ourselves?

We have His word which never changes. We can trust His Word. He even puts His word above His own name (Ps. 138:2)

Examine the situation. Look at what is being challenged? What is the perceived threat? So what do we know about what we want? Does it align with who God is?

The question we should always be asking ourselves is: does what we think we know about the Word align with who we Know God is. Its CRITICAL (maybe even more important) that we have a foundational understanding of the CHARACTER of God than it is that we know all the rules in the rule book.

What is God’s character? Ex 34:5-7 “The Lord came down in a cloud, stood with him there, and proclaimed his name, “the Lord.” The Lord passed in front of him and proclaimed: The Lord—the Lord is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. But he will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ iniquity on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.”

What is the outcome? Is it life or is it inflicting pain? Is it loving or is it selfish? What are others around you saying, those who you trust, those who love you, those who love Jesus, those who want you to flourish?

So if we were in the position of the religious leaders, pharisee’s, scribes, et al., how would we look at what Jesus did? Anger, fury, resentment, or would we see it was kind, gracious, loving to give sight to a man who had been that way since birth… whose purpose (the blind man) was to be an instrument of God to be glorified (v3).

May we be a people that looks to the character and heart of God when discerning where and what He is doing. May we be open to being wrong and therefore having our minds blown.

Could I recommend a few books that speak to the “others” coming to give their allegiance to Jesus and born-again by the Sprit?

David Bennett- “A War of Loves”; A gay man’s journey to being gripped by Christ

Gregory Coles- “Single, Gay, Christian”; A man growing up in the church with same sex attraction

CS Lewis- “Surprised by Joy”; A British academic, scholar and writer, a skeptical atheist and his journey into faith

Charles Colson- “Born Again”; A democrat, presidential advisor, nicknamed the “hatchet man” who gives his life to Jesus and transforms ministry in prison.

Preston Sprinkle- “Scandalous Grace”; the first chapter is the conversion of noted serial killer Jeffery Dahmer.

What do those names do to you… are you hardened… like, “No WAY!”… or are you curious like, “God, really??”

God desires to reveal Himself through each of us, regardless of stature/position

God desires to reveal Himself to each of us through others. Opportunity to love or to be loved. Opportunity to show grace or to be given grace, and receive it.

Having a curious faith is one that allows us to see how God might be working. Faith is in fact looking and walking in ways that haven’t fully materialized before us… faith materialized is certainty.

When we don’t see faith materialize before us, but we can know and understand God’s character and know that it will materialize, it will happen, always better than we hoped. One of the ways we know God acted on our behalf is because what happens is better than we could have hoped for.

Conclusion

Would you please stand.

This account is for us, by John’s intent, to see and know

It’s important to know who God is.

Jesus did these things in front of the religious leaders that these works would put an exclamation mark on the things he’s already been saying.

God is working now. God is bringing you opportunities in your life to please Him. Hebrews 11:6 says it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God apart from faith. May you always be curious, may you always be listening, praying, reading, and loving people in your curiosity.

I will promise you, if you are genuinely curious… you won’t miss God, you won’t miss out on what he’s doing, you won’t be found to be fighting against him. Jesus promised this… Matt 5:8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

If you are convicted, if you want to see God move in your life in this way, I want to invite you to come pray with anyone on our team this morning. I want to invite staff, elders, deacons, and ministry leads that are here to come down now. At any point between now and the time you leave, if you would like prayer regarding this, please come down and someone will be here to pray with you.

If you want to yield your life to Jesus, asking Him to be King of your life, we want to give you an opportunity to do that also. God is moving in your life, you sense it, and you want to give your allegiance to Him. If that is the case, pray with me...

<Will write out prayer here>

Amen.