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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > Following Jesus is the end of the matter | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) All songs are from the CanRC/FRCA Book of Praise Psalm 46:1,2 Psalm 73:9 (after the law of God) Psalm 18:1,2,6 Hymn 67:1-3 Hymn 67:6-7 Scripture reading: John 1:1-18 Text: John 21:20-25 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
Ecclesiastes 7:8 says, “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning…” When we get to the end of John, surely we can agree with that piece of wisdom. The end is better than the beginning because by the end we have a greater knowledge of the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Gospel According to John was written for that purpose. John wrote it so that we may know Christ and believe in him. It was written so that we might be drawn into following Christ all the days of our life.
That’s the note on which John’s gospel ends. The way it ends is unlike any of the other gospels. John is always unique and he’s unique here too. He concludes with teaching us some important things about what it means to follow Jesus. I’ve summarized this sermon on the last section of John with this theme: Following Jesus is the end of the matter.
We’ll see how it involves:
1. Focussing on your calling
2. Faithfully bearing witness
3. Forever getting to know him
In the previous verses, there was that profound interaction between Jesus and Peter. With his three-fold denial of Jesus, Peter had fallen hard. But yet Christ graciously restored him, preparing him for future service as one of his apostles.
As Jesus and Peter are walking away from the other disciples, Peter sees John following. John refers to himself here as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” When he writes that, he doesn’t mean to say that the other disciples were not loved or less loved. Instead, it said two things about this disciple: first, he was profoundly aware of how blessed he had been by God’s grace in Christ’s love; second, he wanted people to focus on Jesus and not on him. Just in case you still hadn’t understood that this was referring to John, he adds the detail about the Last Supper, asking Jesus about who was going to betray him.
Now remember, Peter had just been told about his death. He would glorify God by being crucified as a martyr. Peter knew what his end was going to look like. But then he saw John and he wanted to know what would happen to John. If Peter was going to have a martyr’s death by crucifixion, would John too?
Jesus responds with a rebuke and a call. He first says, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” The other disciples apparently heard this, because they misunderstood it and spread their misunderstanding around the early Christian church. They misunderstood Jesus to be saying that John wouldn’t die. John would still be alive when Jesus returned.
You can imagine the anticipation that might have caused as John was getting older. Early Christians would have thought that Christ’s return was just about to happen. And then John died. That would have confused them and maybe even upset their faith. Wasn’t Christ supposed to come back while John was alive? Now John was dead, so was Christ ever going to come back?
John included this account in his gospel to correct that misunderstanding. He wanted early Christian believers to understand that Christ wasn’t saying anything about whether John would be alive or dead when he returned. That wasn’t the point at all.
The point Christ was making to Peter can be summed up like this: mind your own business. What happens with John isn’t your concern. Stop thinking about him. Focus on the calling I give to you instead.
That calling comes at the end of verse 22: “You follow me!” This is the language of discipleship. Peter is supposed to walk in Christ’s ways. He’s supposed to look like his Master in the way he lives his life. For him to be a disciple, it’s supposed to be less of Peter and more of Jesus.
This is about what we’re to focus on as Christians. Christ teaches Peter – and us as well – that we’re to focus on our calling to live as disciples of Jesus. There are two things that could distract us away from that calling.
We could speculate about what God’s purposes and plans are for other Christians. But that’s for God to know and for him only. What he has ordained for everyone is his business. Our business is to follow Jesus for ourselves. Focus on that.
The other thing that could distract us from our calling is speculation about the return of Christ. A moment ago we saw how some of the early Christians thought that Christ would return in the lifetime of John. That kind of thinking doesn’t exist today. But there’s still plenty of speculation about the end times. Who might the Antichrist be? What is the mark of the beast? And so on. Some focus all their attention on these sorts of questions, as if this is the essence of Christianity. But our focus should be where Jesus tells us to put it: follow him. Discipleship is our calling, not making predictions and speculations about the future. Christians have been doing that for 2000 years and all those predictions and speculations have not only been proven wrong, but pointless. Just like Ecclesiastes ends by saying that the end of the matter is to fear God and keep his commandments, John ends his gospel by saying that the end of the matter for us is to follow Jesus, pursue discipleship. Don’t get caught up in other matters.
We’re now at verse 24 in our text. John here is again referring to himself. He’s the one who has written everything preceding. He has given a true witness of everything that he saw and heard with respect to Jesus.
For example, he saw the seven signs done by Jesus. Remember, “signs” are the way John describes the miracles of Jesus. Jesus turned the water into wine at the marriage feast of Cana. He healed an official’s son, and then shortly afterwards he healed the paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda. Jesus fed the 5000, he walked on water, and he healed the man born blind. His last sign was perhaps the most amazing, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. John saw these things and he recorded them for us in his book, bearing a true witness to us all these years later.
John also bore witness to the teaching he heard from Jesus. We can think of the seven great “I am” statements that Jesus made. He said, “I am the bread of life,” “I am the light of the world,” “I am the door of the sheep.” He taught his disciples saying, “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the resurrection and the life,” and most famously, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.” His last “I am” statement was in John 15, “I am the true vine.”
The most controversial “I am” statement deserves a category all by itself. John bore witness to Jesus saying in John 8:58, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” The Jews right away understood the significance of that. Jesus was saying that he is “I am who I am,” he is God. If you ever have anyone tell you that Jesus never claimed to be God, this is the passage you need to show them. Why did the Jews want to kill him after he said this? Because they knew very well what he was claiming. Jesus claimed to be God, and John has truly given us the witness of that.
John loved using patterns of seven. So he not only has the seven signs and the seven “I am” statements, he also has seven transformative conversations. These also form part of John’s true witness. In John 3, Christ taught Nicodemus the importance of being born again, experiencing regeneration. In John 4, he taught the Samaritan woman about her need for the water he has to offer. In the same chapter, the royal official has a conversation with Christ which leads to faith and healing, the same with the paralytic in chapter 5. Then there was the man born blind in chapter 9, Jesus speaks with him too, and there too the end result is faith and eternal life. We have the interaction with Martha in John 11, when her brother Lazarus has died. Then, last of all, there’s the interaction between Christ and Pontius Pilate in John 18 and 19. That conversation doesn’t result in faith, but it does result in our salvation through Christ’s crucifixion.
We’ve explored all these things and many more. All these different parts of John’s faithful testimony to Jesus. It’s encouraged our faith and challenged our lives. One application of all this is simply to be thankful for this part of God’s Word. We can thank the Holy Spirit for his inspiration of the apostle John, so that we could receive this faithful witness and be blessed by it.
But there is another application we can make. All disciples are called to faithfully bear witness. John did it in his way, in his time, within his place in God’s plans. We have to do it in our way, in our time, within our place in God’s plans.
Every disciple is called to faithfully bear witness to who Jesus is and what he has done. We’re to testify with John in chapter 1 that he is the true light come into the world. He is the Word become flesh. He is the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. As John the Baptist would testify, he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. With Martha and Peter, we testify that he is the Christ, the Son of God.
A disciple wants the world to know his or her Master. There are so many people around us who don’t know him. Think about those people. Think right now about the people you know who aren’t Christians, who don’t know Christ in a saving way. Maybe it’s family, maybe it’s friends, people you work with, neighbours. I think most of us know someone who isn’t a Christian. As a disciple of Jesus, don’t you want them to know about your Master? Don’t you want them to know the joy of eternal life that comes through faith in him?
Assuming that’s true, there are three things you can be doing.
First, you can be praying for the unbelievers you know and care about. Pray that the Holy Spirit would be at work in their hearts. Pray that perhaps God would use other people besides you to share a gospel witness with them. Pray for their souls, for their eternal salvation. Plead with God out of love for them, that God would glorify himself through their salvation.
Second, you can be praying for yourself, that God would grant you a clear open door to faithfully bear witness about Jesus. Pray that God would give you that opportunity, but then also give you the eyes to see it and the courage to take it. We need the Holy Spirit’s help to give us the right words to speak at the right time. So pray and ask for his help.
Third, you can prepare yourself for those opportunities to faithfully bear witness. One way to do that is by continuing to study God’s Word, especially the gospels and how they testify to us of who Jesus is and what he’s done. You can and should study the whole Bible, but the gospels are the most explicit about him, giving us the most memorable and accessible material to fix in our brains. Another way to prepare is to think regularly about how we might share the gospel with someone, if we were given the opportunity. Think perhaps of two or three questions you might ask as a lead-in. Just as an example, “Do you ever think about what happens to us after we die?” Or, “Do you ever wonder if there’ll be ultimate justice?” Finally, there are many good books on learning how to faithfully bear witness. If you’d like a suggestion, just let me know.
There’s one last thing to say about this before moving on to our last point. We shouldn’t only regard it as a calling to bear witness as Christ’s disciples. We should regard it as a privilege, as an honour, as a delight. Our exalted King, our Lord and Master, has decided to use us as his mouthpiece in this world. Even though we’re weak and sinful human beings, we have the joy of being able to speak about him and for him. If we take that perspective, that motivates us all the more to get out there and do it.
Now we come to the last verse of the book. As I said before, no other gospel ends like this. John notes that his account has been selective. There’s a large degree of overlap between especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But even then, there are stories about Jesus that are only found in Matthew. Mark and Luke also have their own unique stories, not found anywhere else. This is true of John as well. Now John makes the point that there is no exhaustive account of Jesus’ ministry on earth. He did and said so many things, that it would be impossible to record them all. We have the important details that God wanted us to know, but we don’t have every detail.
John ends with hyperbole to emphasize that. Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Here he says that if everything Jesus did had been written down, the world wouldn’t be able to contain all the books. If you go to the British Library in London, you’ll find an astonishing collection of over 14 million books. I’m sure that if every deed of Jesus had been recorded in books during his 33 years of ministry, the British Library would have been able to accommodate the books produced. But, as I said, this is hyperbole. This is just a way of saying there was a lot and no one could possibly present a comprehensive account. We have a sufficient account, but not an exhaustive one.
Now what are we supposed to make of this concluding note? We can’t add to the things that have been written, nor should we try. So is this just a little bit of trivia to conclude the Gospel According to John? No, we shouldn’t be left with that impression at all.
The point here is that there is a lot more to Jesus. From the Bible, including John, we can know everything we need to know about him. God’s revelation of him is enough to give us what we need for our salvation and also how to respond to our salvation as disciples of Christ. But there is so much more about Jesus that we don’t yet know.
Here’s where we need to start thinking about eternity. Here in this life already we have communion with Christ. That means we have a deep relationship with him, a relationship which we can take delight in, a relationship in which we can experience much joy and peace already in this life. But in the hereafter, our communion with Christ is going next level. In fact, it’s going to keep going to higher and higher levels into eternity. We are to going to spend eternity revelling in Jesus and getting to know him better and better. He will be our endless focus. We will continually find new things about him, new things to make us love him, new things to give us joy in him. Eternity itself will not be able to contain the experience of our deepening communion with Jesus.
Loved ones, that’s what we have to look forward to. It reminds us again that the best thing about the hereafter is Jesus. It’s not being without sickness or sadness, it’s not being without temptation or sin. All those things are good, but the best thing of all is our relationship with Christ and how it will forever go from strength to strength. I want to urge you to look forward to that and live as disciples of Christ in anticipation of that. That means already now learning to enjoy Christ in communion with him.
The Lord’s Supper is the best time and place in this age to put this into practice. Whenever you partake of the sacrament really reflect on Christ and how good, gracious, and loving your Master is. You take the bread into your body and it becomes one with your body, just as you’re united to Christ. You take the wine and it becomes one with you, just as you’re in Christ and he is in you. Revel in that, delight in it, rejoice that you know your Master and look forward to the Marriage Feast of the Lamb when he will reveal himself to you in even greater ways. AMEN.
PRAYER
Father in heaven,
Thank you for the work of your Holy Spirit in giving us the Gospel According to John. Please help us with your Spirit to focus on the calling we have as disciples, and not to get distracted by other things. Help us also to bear faithfulness witness in this sinful world. Open doors for us to speak about Christ with those in our lives who are lost. Let us be instruments in your hand to spread the good news of Jesus. And Father, we also look forward to an eternity of getting to know Jesus even better. We pray that you would give us a longing in our hearts for that richer and deeper communion with Christ that awaits us.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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