2:30:31 - 2:30:35 you can find places to apply this in your life. 0:00:00 - 0:00:23 Uh to be presenting some of these ideas today. Um It's probably a year ago I was reading the Gospel of John and I asked the Lord if I could go through the whole book publicly and he said, no, not yet, you got other things you need to do. Um But now I can do chapter nine. So this is good. Who knows about 0:00:23 - 0:00:47 the rest? Who knows if I'll ever get time? But it turns out that John nine is a wonderful um wonderful chapter to just take one chapter and say, OK, what's the list of gospel principles that are in this chapter? And so we can't in this presentation, we can't give a full exposition on any one principle 0:00:47 - 0:01:05 , not that anyone ever could, but that's, that's not our purpose. We're just gonna go through the chapter and read each section and say, OK, what's the principle that this is an example of? And even that is not exhaustive, you might come up with a very different list. If you were to go through it. If 0:01:05 - 0:01:23 I go through it tomorrow, I might come up with a different list or at least some changes I'd hope that most of it would be consistent. But that's the, that's the approach here. So without further ado, let's, let's jump right in. So start verse one. And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind 0:01:23 - 0:01:51 from his birth and his disciples asked him saying, master who did sin this man or his parents that he was born blind. Jesus answered neither has this man sinned nor his parents. But that the works of God should be made manifest in Him. The gospel principle in this passage or a gospel principle is that 0:01:50 - 0:02:20 we are meant to show more of God's goodness, they're doing what he would do. No, there are layers of this in this case so we can have to parse through. Um but I will just begin this by telling you, there are people who are watching this, who have are or will experience who have experienced are experiencing 0:02:20 - 0:02:56 or will experience this very thing that there are challenges that you have faced, are facing or will face that God has purposefully put into your life designed for you to show more of God's goodness to others through how you react, through how you react to those prompts. In this case, God was glorified 0:02:55 - 0:03:31 . In other words, His goodness was made more apparent through what Jesus did and through what this man did. And we'll see that as we read the chapter. It's not a, a an overstatement to summarize the, the purpose of the mortal life of God's servants as taking advantage of opportunities to manifest God's 0:03:30 - 0:04:10 character by doing things that would not otherwise happen. That's not their only purpose. They're also here to progress themselves. But their principal purpose for being here is to show others what God is like beyond what they would otherwise know by doing what would not otherwise be done. That is the 0:04:10 - 0:04:43 call that's extended to all of us. So the label servant, it's a description and anyone that fills it fits it. So later in the chapter, what we'll read is this man says, since the world began, was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind. If this man were not of God, he could 0:04:42 - 0:05:11 do nothing. So what we'll see later is that this man, he's healed by Jesus. He knows that this has never happened before that they know of the cultural history does not include anyone being miraculously healed who had been born blind and he testifies of Christ. And he says, because he did what has never 0:05:11 - 0:05:44 been done. He went beyond the bounds of the limits. We knew he is obviously a man of God. And so he glorified God. In this case through glorifying Jesus, he did not glorify him as we'll see later at this time, verse 32 and 33 as the son of God because he did not yet know he was the son of God. This statement 0:05:43 - 0:06:13 was just based on the fact that he had been miraculously healed. And as we'll see later, he called Jesus a prophet as a result. He said, this guy is at least a prophet. Then he said it to other people. And um here I have to mention a little bit about God's justice. So this man obviously suffered his 0:06:13 - 0:06:31 whole life until now. And we, I don't know how old he was, but he was old enough that his parents referred to the Pharisees to him to find out what had happened. He he said, they said, well, he's old enough. You ask him. Um but how and he was young enough that his parents were still alive. So that gives 0:06:31 - 0:07:00 us a window. But obviously he had borne the weight of being blind his whole life and it it wasn't, he wasn't just one year old. And this is very important. There's a cost that you bear in order to glorify God and you could call it unmerited suffering. So that jesus' disciples right here in verse two 0:06:59 - 0:07:21 , they asked him, they said, what did he do or what did his parents do that? He had to carry this, excuse me, this weight of sin or uh of blindness. What sin did he commit that or his parents commit? Did he carry this weight of blindness? And Jesus said us for God's glory that, that this, that this happened 0:07:21 - 0:07:53 to him. And you say, well, dang, I mean, that seems kind of unfair why, I mean, not everyone has to do that. Well, that's true. That's true. But how much joy did this man have versus anyone else? So you cant squish all this down too? Just one single, absolute scale, right? It's, it's multifaceted like 0:07:52 - 0:08:19 a diamond. Ok? But if you, if you were born blind and then you lived your life this way for a long time and then God healed you, he gave you your sight. How much more would you appreciate that sight than anyone else? This is a real, it's a real mystery. It shouldn't be, but it's not really something 0:08:18 - 0:08:46 we take up and live every day. And that's a shame because we're the ones that lose, we, we lose out on so much joy from the things that are already around us because we don't realize the value of what we have typically until we lose it. But what, what treasure, great faith gives us to allow God to put 0:08:46 - 0:09:15 us in the circumstances that, that others might simplify and, and, and consider to be negative, even if, even if we're born into it and we stay in it our whole life because he's, he's pumping up our appreciation, our value for this thing that then we get to have forever. You see God's purpose is our 0:09:15 - 0:09:45 long term joy, our eternally enduring joy. That's what He's all about is increasing that and so often we ask him to do things or not to do things. And we, we choose actions ourselves that are not for that purpose, they're against that purpose. And we want him to increase our short term pleasure or decrease 0:09:43 - 0:10:13 our present suffering without any regard to our long term joy. And when you ask things like that, you're asking him to do something that contradicts his law, his character and his will. And when you act to that end, you are acting against God. You're fighting him because that's not what he wants. He 0:10:13 - 0:10:45 wants better things for you than you want for yourself. And as he heals your blindness to these things, you'll come to see this, you'll come to see a world that existed and you had no idea it was so much better than the darkness that you knew before. So those of you who feel like you're carrying crosses 0:10:45 - 0:11:21 and I don't diminish that you are actually doing. So there is a process whereby you come to see that cross that you're carrying is a gift and a treasure in the ladder towards Christ who was raised up on the same towards the father. And just as his being raised up on that cross in a public place in a 0:11:21 - 0:11:49 spot where a lot of people could see, expose them to greater witness of love, a greater degree of love than they could ever see before your suffering for the sake of Christ. How you react to that, you, you've gotta do it well, ok. It's not just like grit your teeth and bear it, your strength that you 0:11:49 - 0:12:27 get from God as you faithfully endure that. And the joy you show in the midst of suffering will be a light that, that shines like a beacon to those who hunger and thirst for more of God. And it will testify of Him in a way that goes far beyond what words can do. So when these things come, don't be so 0:12:27 - 0:13:04 hasty to ask God to take them away. In um in the book of Mormon, there's a story of, of this, this uh this prince named Ammon. He's, he's the heir to the throne of his father, a great kingdom. And he's overcome by a desire to, to love all people because of, of a conversion experience he had and, and 0:13:04 - 0:13:28 he was forgiven by God of his sins. And the first thing he wanted to do was find a way that, that he could do the greatest good for everyone. And so he thought that he would go to the rival kingdom where I mean, these were their, their sworn enemies and they wanted nothing more than to kill, not just 0:13:28 - 0:13:53 the kingdom, but he, he was the figurehead of the kingdom. He's the crown prince. And he said, no, I, I'm just gonna set aside the kingdom. I want to spend the rest of my life being a servant to my enemies. And he knew full well that the most likely outcome was that they would kill him and he didn't 0:13:53 - 0:14:17 care. And so he went over there and he became a servant to the king. And the first thing that happens to him is is he is in a place with other servants where they're guarding the, the king's flocks. And this, this uh band of marauders comes to steal the sheep. And his reaction wasn't like, oh dang, here 0:14:16 - 0:14:53 we go. Too bad. This is, I just have to bear this suffering for the sake of God. His reaction was oh goody. He says fantastic. Now I get to show these people how good my God is. And when you have trust in God like that, which, which seems like some major thing. But it's actually in a way, it's, it's 0:14:53 - 0:15:20 the most passive thing in the world. You know, as we're flooded by the smallest part of how good God is in our own experience. It's the easiest thing in the world to just let that flow through you. It's like, you know, I've, I've said this, I've used this, this, this uh analogy before. It's like judo 0:15:20 - 0:15:46 or tai chi. You know, you just let it flow through you. All you have to do is get out of the way. Basically. I mean, I'm not trying to minimize the necessity of using your, your heart might mind and strength, but whatever, whatever God gives you is so much greater than anything. You can give another 0:15:45 - 0:16:21 . So relatively speaking, it's, it's about as minimal as just getting out of the way and how amazing is it that no matter what could possibly happen to you in this world that, that God has overcome that, that Jesus came and he handled worse than that. And because he did that and he completed that we 0:16:20 - 0:17:01 can respond to anything in life with instantaneous trust in God, perfect confidence and no matter how much it hurts, no matter how hard it is, how alone you might feel, no matter how long it endures, no matter how impossible it might seem. We have the strength of a God who overcomes all things who so 0:17:01 - 0:17:44 freely makes us capable of rising up to what would crush us otherwise, in a second. And as we look to Him in all things all the time, we can't doubt we can't fear all of those things can only happen in as much as you've taken your sights off of Him. You've deviated from him in your purpose. Because as 0:17:43 - 0:18:09 you look to him, like like the the brass serpent that Moses put up on the, on the rod so that anyone who had been bitten by these poisonous serpents that were plaguing them would be healed. If we, if we focus our view on the Lord and all of our heart and all of our action, all of our motive, the deep 0:18:09 - 0:18:50 stuff, it's all on Him, you cannot help but be overwhelmingly full of his light. And that's what it means to have your eye single to the glory of God and your body will be full of light. This was what happened to Steven when he was stoned for the Lord's sake. His, his involuntary reaction. His heart 0:18:49 - 0:19:31 was so thoroughly focused on God that his involuntary reaction was to plead with the Lord that he would not hold this against them and imagine a peace and a power that surpasses any pain. And I think that you could probably only imagine that, I think a person could only imagine that to the extent that 0:19:31 - 0:20:05 they've experienced suffering. And and it's through experiencing that, that we can imagine the equal and opposite. And it's through imagining the equal and opposite that we can begin to find the motivation to obtain it because it carries a tremendous cost. So why was this man still blind? If it was the 0:20:05 - 0:20:33 will of the Lord that he not be blind? This is a great mystery. And it's an example of a, a larger question, which is something like why is there the opportunity to do miracles at all? Because if you, if you can only work in God's power according to God's will, how is it that whatever that is hasn't 0:20:32 - 0:21:12 already been done? The answer is the person matters, that man was still blind because as he said, no one had ever healed a man born blind and it wasn't until Jesus came that there was a way, this isn't something that, that I, I'm not sure how to phrase this correctly. But um well, ok, actually I addressed 0:21:12 - 0:21:39 this in a later slide, so we'll come back to that. Um But the slide is something like greater miracles indicate greater power and greater power, indi indicates greater godliness. And that might not be terribly clear. So we'll clear it up when we get there. But this is completely tied to the idea that 0:21:39 - 0:22:04 it's the purpose of servants to manifest the works of God. And so to the extent that you know Him, you can do that, we are to make earth more like heaven. Well, you can only do that to the extent that you are like God. There are some deep, deep. Um Let me rephrase that there are some, some incredibly 0:22:04 - 0:22:28 important ideas that are connected to that and I just don't have time to touch them. All right now. Ok. But what I, what I did want to say is I wanted to share this verse from Matthew 13. This is verse 17 where Jesus says for verily, I say unto you that many prophets and righteous men have desired to 0:22:28 - 0:22:55 see those things which he see and have not seen them and to hear those things which you hear and have not heard them. Well, why not? Because Jesus wasn't there. He was born and lived at one time and there were many things that could only happen while, uh during his mortal life and these people who desired 0:22:55 - 0:23:26 these things, they could only receive them if they happen to live. At the same time as Jesus up to that point, I, I, I'll rephrase that it was not yet possible for their desires to be fulfilled because Jesus had to be born first. Now Jesus made this promise that that is a mystery to people. He said greater 0:23:26 - 0:23:51 things. He said you'll do greater things than these because I'm here because I'm going to the father, you will do greater things than this. The full meaning of this is tied to what I'm trying to get at here. That uh well, there are several ideas here wrapped up and, and I don't, I don't think I can clearly 0:23:50 - 0:00:00 parse through them right now in this while getting to everything else we need to get to. But I'll, I'll just, I'll just leave those breadcrumbs there and maybe you can disentangle them somewhat. So you can ask me questions if you'd like. So let's keep moving. Um He said as long as I am in the world, 0:00:00 - 0:24:41 I am the light of the world that's in verse five of John chapter nine. Before we get into what it means to be the light of the world. Let me ask you this. Why did he qualify this by saying as long as I am in the world? So if you study this, you're going to hit scriptures like when he said um the night 0:24:41 - 0:25:05 cometh wherein no man worketh wherein no man can work. He says, work while it is still day. And that's another reference to what they could do while he was still there. Versus after he leaves, he says, where I'm going, you cannot come, you know the way. But basically, he says, you, you need to, to live 0:25:05 - 0:25:36 according to what I've already shown you through my example in order to come up to the place where I can meet you again and teach you more. He says, I'm, I'm going to prepare a place for you that you could be with me. What is this all about again? The person matters? So, so one reason that we, one of 0:25:36 - 0:26:01 the many reasons that we get so little out of the the bounty of stories about Jesus that we have is that we assume that far more of what he said only applies to him than what he attend intended. There are obviously things about Jesus that are unique to Jesus. But the question is how much of how he was 0:26:01 - 0:26:35 and what he said, are we meant to be able to do and say ourselves how much of who he is? Should we be as well? He said, what manner of man ought you to be? Even as I am, he said, be perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect. So shouldn't our assumption flip? The assumption is, so we we, we were 0:26:35 - 0:26:59 , I'm just gonna do an echo of, of another point here because it's, it sort of rhymes with this when we're suffering, we assume that God wants us to stop suffering. What if we flip that assumption around? And every time something unpleasant happened, we assumed it was so that we could show God, uh I'm 0:26:58 - 0:27:22 sorry, show God's glory to others through how we respond. You think that would make the world a worse place or a better place? You think that would give you more joy or less joy, you think that would bring more people to Jesus or fewer people and by how much more or less. And so here's another opportunity 0:27:22 - 0:27:50 to flip our default assumption. And instead of assuming that what Jesus said only applies to Him, maybe we should interpret it as a call to live so that it's true for us too. Wouldn't that be something right now? If, if, if someone has a basic, I should say a limited understanding of, of the scriptures 0:27:49 - 0:28:17 and who doesn't? Right? But uh if we're not too familiar with the scriptures, it might seem exceedingly blasphemous for someone to suggest that that quote unquote normal people like you and me should go around saying I am the light of the world. If, if I with no context with no uh preparation or disclaimer 0:28:16 - 0:28:44 , if I stood up and, and you know, I called, I, I said, I'm giving a talk at such and such a place on such and such a date and people showed up and I started that talk by saying, not quoting Jesus but saying, I, Rob Smith in the light of the world. What, what do you think the reaction would be? I don't 0:28:44 - 0:29:09 think it would be positive. Right? Everyone would say that's blasphemy. Who the heck does this guy think he is? This guy is nuts. That, that would probably be the nicest thing you'd hear, right? And yet doesn't Jesus say ye are the light of the world. He does look it up, it's there. He tells his disciples 0:29:08 - 0:29:31 that he's leaving. And he says, as long as I am in the world here, he says this as long as I am in the world, I'm the light of the world and in another place in John, he says, ye are the light of the world. He says, live your life so that when people see how you live, they glorify God. I think I quoted 0:29:30 - 0:29:59 this somewhere but I don't know where it is in this presentation. Maybe it's later. He says that is there a higher call than that, Jesus commanded us normal people to live. Such that when people see us that to the extent that people get to know you that they will know God better because you need to be 0:29:59 - 0:30:27 more like God than they are. And that's how that is true. That's the only way that could be true. Isn't that something? Ok. So now that you're completely overwhelmed, let me give you, let me chop a little chunk off of that corner to make it bite sized. One of the greatest ways that you can show God's 0:30:27 - 0:31:04 goodness is by trusting Him in your reactions to the demands of life. That's one of the greatest ways. So don't think of this as a charge to become high and mighty like God is, think of it as yielding to him in all things, getting out of his way and letting his goodness take the place of whatever it 0:31:04 - 0:31:49 was that was in you before. All right. So the underlying point here is that your presence matters on this planet, you matter, or at least you should, your presence should make a difference on the Godliness of the outcome of any situation. If you're involved in something, whatever that thing is, should 0:31:48 - 0:32:21 end up more like it would be if God himself were there, what a tremendous blessing we have. And then when everything's said and done and it's all wrapped up, you will have a catalog of experiences in your life where you know that you received and made use of the tremendous gift that God gave us to act 0:32:21 - 0:32:51 in his place. Not only that, but to actually make a difference because like the man born blind, he would have stayed blind if Jesus was not there. Now, this is kind of going off the script, but we read in another place of when Jesus sends out his disciples and they come back, there's the man whose son 0:32:50 - 0:33:13 had, had a lot of issues for a long time and he was throwing himself in a fire and tearing out himself. And, and the man asks Jesus why the disciples couldn't kill him or cast out the demon or however you want to spin. It doesn't matter how the disc for this purpose, it doesn't matter how the disciples 0:33:13 - 0:33:36 couldn't solve that problem. And Jesus said, why? But the point is his disciples couldn't handle it, but Jesus could. And so we see that there's a hierarchy of these things, there's a hierarchy of these things. And there's situations where more or less of God's will, will be manifest depending on how 0:33:36 - 0:34:09 much like or unlike God, the people are, this is, this is important. I think, I think that um the, the, the part of the Christian world that believes in something like priesthood or divine authority, they believe it's, it's sort of an all or nothing affair and it's not, it's by degrees, it's by degrees 0:34:08 - 0:34:49 and it's situational. And therefore it, it, it um one way to describe priesthood is simply as how much you know about God while fully living it. And so of course, that is also situational what we end up doing as we take these circumstances where God's power is given on limited basis. And that does tend 0:34:49 - 0:35:11 to be an all or nothing affair. You know, God, God telling someone you have power over water and whatever you tell water to do, water will do and we swap out the order of things and we think that that's the greater blessing. It's not, it's not because it's limited to whatever context the gift is bound 0:35:11 - 0:35:43 to. But if you have an understanding, you can apply that at all times in all places, principles are higher than rules. But we're broaching many topics that are probably not good to broach right now. Um So I'll ask you this, we're talking about a man who's born blind, who are the men born blind in your 0:35:43 - 0:36:11 life? Who are the people around you in circumstances that it's the Lord's will to change? And what kind of person would you have to be to have a, a role in that? Who are the men born blind within your own life? So not externally but within yourself. What are things in your life that are seeming burdens 0:36:10 - 0:36:43 that you can change your attitude towards? To turn into manifestations of God's goodness. It says it'll make weak things strong. What are your weaknesses? What are your challenges and how can you turn to God so that he can turn these things into demonstrations of His goodness. We all have seen stories 0:36:42 - 0:37:13 of drug addicts or someone struggling with some easily recognizable, externally measurable problem that's very useful for God's purposes and that's good sometimes the deeper issues mean so much more. And those who see those, you know, this is, this is like uh so I, I mentioned the hierarchy thing before 0:37:13 - 0:37:32 , I'll, I'll just dive a little bit more into that. Do you remember in the Exodus, the priests of Pharaoh? They were, they were, I always call this a miracle dance off like uh the priests did something, sorry, Moses would do something. The priest would match it. Moses would do something, the priest would 0:37:32 - 0:37:58 match it and this had to keep escalating until the priest ran out of firepower. Or you look at Elijah and the priests of ball and the priests of all could do things. But God believed in um I'm sorry, Elijah believed in a God who can do all things. And so he set up a test that he knew that they would 0:37:58 - 0:38:22 not be able to pass and he prepared the sacrifice and they dumped water all over the place. They even dug a ditch and filled it with water around it. And then he called down fire and God showed that he was superior that God was superior. So um this is the way it goes. But if you just have the entry level 0:38:21 - 0:38:45 understanding of God, it won't be sufficient to show the difference. So going back to the drug addicts, there are alcoholics and drug addicts and all other kinds of addictions that people turn to God and they, they are cured of. This is beautiful. It's wonderful. But what happens is people come out of 0:38:45 - 0:39:12 the woodwork and they say, well, sure. But there are plenty of people who have turned away from addictions without God. No, this is where we have to employ a little bit more specificity. The fact is that God is so good that, that he allows his patents to be used without license. What do I mean by that 0:39:12 - 0:39:38 ? There's a great deal of goodness that God has placed on this earth without marking it with his brand. All things testify of Christ, all good things come from God. However, he's so good that he's given a huge selection of good things we can do without explicitly believing in God. So you can go and get 0:39:38 - 0:40:06 married and have babies without believing in God. You can sow crops and harvest them and uh eat and have all the food you need. Without believing in God, you can build a house. You can, you can write novels uh leaning heavily on the creative quickening of the intellect, which comes through the spirit 0:40:06 - 0:40:34 exclusively and still not believe in God. He, he gives us tremendous power without needing, requiring us to, to, to explicitly see where it comes from and believe in Him. And that's ok. And there are tons of people that believe in Him and they have very incorrect views of Him and he still pours out his 0:40:33 - 0:41:09 power to an extent and useful information even in a cloud of uh limited understanding, but there comes a level of challenge where nothing less than an explicit God will. Do you have to explicitly believe Him and know what he is like in order to face those challenges? No, those challenges are not nearly 0:41:08 - 0:41:31 as rare as most people believe. I call this. Uh I don't know, you call this something like the cancer paradigm. So we all know people who have had cancer, right? And you probably know someone who's died of cancer. But if I were to ask you, what, what do you think the likelihood of you having to go through 0:41:31 - 0:41:56 something like that is, you'd probably give me a really low percentage. Why? Because when we're faced with really difficult things, the number one coping mechanism is to pretend it could never happen to you. You, you find a way to exclude yourself from the consideration. This happens with truth as well 0:41:56 - 0:42:18 . The, the number one response to new truth is to flee from it. And if you don't do that, you'll, you'll, you'll dedicate your efforts to finding a way to dismiss it out of hand without feeling guilty. That's human nature. Those two reactions. And if you can't do either of those, you might try to kill 0:42:18 - 0:42:43 the person, um either for real all the way or something approaching that by assassinating their character in ways that, you know, are not true again, you're just looking to escape instead of facing it. So we're all going to die. Right. That's death is a part of life. Well, that it's believed that we're 0:42:43 - 0:43:02 all going to die. I, I don't, uh, I don't think there's a long list of people who think that that's not true or think there'll be an exception to that. But who has faced their death. Very few, some have, but very few have acknowledged this and integrated it into the way they approach life. So if you 0:43:02 - 0:43:21 look across the sea of humanity, just the people you actually know and you assemble a list of every bad thing that could happen in life. It's a really long and terrible list, isn't it? You probably never thought about this. Did you know that in the space of possibilities in life, you could experience 0:43:20 - 0:43:41 basically all of those things. The only limitation is something that kills you precludes anything else from happening, right? So you look at job and people say, wow, well that you know, a lot of people don't even think that job was real, but even folks who do they say? Well, I mean that was he was just 0:43:40 - 0:44:11 an example, good thing. We don't have to go through anything like that. That is a data point on the path. It is, it is a step on the way Jesus is the way the truth and the life and a job like situation is on the way. So you need greater power with God. You have to find it because that's what's required 0:44:10 - 0:44:51 to contend with it all. And escaping is not the way overcoming is the way. So how do we prepare for these men born blind in our own life or in the lives of those we interact with? Well, you have to become more like God. The power of God is in living as he does so often. The consideration is, well, um 0:44:51 - 0:45:09 , God bestows his power upon people and there's this, this bucket called the commandments. And there's this bucket called this power. And there's separate buckets and different people have different theories on their relationship. But, but a lot of folks believe if you keep the commandments, God will 0:45:09 - 0:45:35 dump his power onto you. But here's a secret. They're the same bucket, they're the same bucket. Its a different way of looking at the same exact thing. God's power is in God's character. You wanna know what God's will is. It's to do what he would do in your place every time. That's the answer to the 0:45:35 - 0:45:56 question. Now, what he would do is a different question, but it's a lot easier to answer because there's a way to figure it out. If, if you are in the place where God's will is this amorphous ephemeral thing. And who knows? And it changes. It's willy nilly. It's arbitrary. Well, the only way you could 0:45:56 - 0:46:21 find out is to pray and you better hope he tells you. And most of the time he won't, the reason is because God doesn't repeat himself very often. And he's already told you because he's giving you a whole book full of what he does when and why and you don't use it, you might not even know what it says 0:46:21 - 0:46:50 . So how does the use the acquisition of and the use of God's power? How does that manifest His glory? Well, in 13 581, we read, there was not any man who could do a miracle in the name of Jesus, save he were cleansed every wit from his iniquity. And this is another dovetail into the idea, the greater 0:46:49 - 0:47:13 power equals greater godliness. And we'll come back to that if this sideshow were better organized, I would have coupled those things together. So let's transition now uh as we can continue reading, um let's, let's talk about this principle. The need to leave former paradigms for higher blessings. Now 0:47:13 - 0:47:38 we're still in John chapter nine. But for this one, I wanted to start with this principle for Mark chapter two. And then we're gonna read it in John nine. So uh in Mark 221 and 22 we read this very, very familiar uh couplet from Jesus. He says, no man also sew with a piece of new cloth on an old garment 0:47:37 - 0:47:59 . Else, the new piece that fille it up, taketh away from the old and the rent is made worse and no man put new wine into old bottles. Else, the new wine doth burst the bottles and the wine is spilled and the bottles will be marred, but new wine must be put into new bottles. And so you'll hear these phrases 0:47:59 - 0:48:26 all the time. New wine, new bottles, patching an old garment, whatever. But what was he actually talking about? One, one tool you can use in figuring out uh the meaning of things that Jesus said is read the context of the passage or the verse. So in here in Mark two, this is preceded by and followed 0:48:25 - 0:48:56 by examples of people questioning what Jesus was doing because they were comparing it to what they already believed. Comparison to what you already believe is a false test of truth. So um years ago I wrote about a book called uh The Glory of God is Intelligence. And in there, you'll find this phrase 0:48:55 - 0:49:23 replacement truth. What people seek tends to be information that corroborates what they already believe. And Christians are not exempt from this aspect of human nature. But the most valuable things are the things that are most different from what we believe, not just additional to, but that contradict 0:49:22 - 0:49:57 what we already believe, why the set of things that corroborate, what we already believe is very small. The greater portion lies in line with differences to what we currently believe. So, um how can I make a brief case for that? Well, what exactly is happening when God teaches you something? His goal 0:49:57 - 0:50:21 is your change right. Your improvement, improvement requires change and holiness means not just better but different, different and better. You can't be different if you're the same. It's, it's pretty simple. Right? And yet when we're looking around for additional light and truth, the tendency is to 0:50:21 - 0:50:46 say I want new and I, I want better without different and that doesn't happen, whatever fits that bill is extremely limited. It's just right next to what you already have. But growth from God is vertical, it's not lateral, it's not horizontal, it's vertical. And so to grow more towards God, you have 0:50:46 - 0:51:10 to get more vertical and vertical change. It's not just bolting things on to what you already have, it's replacing what you already have with something better. That's something that makes folks really uncomfortable because I should say religious folks very uncomfortable because 11 attribute of people 0:51:09 - 0:51:37 that are religious is they tend to be attracted to the promise of never changing security. They really like the idea of if I change in these specific ways, then I will always be good. And most of them, most religious people were born into their religion, which means they never had to change at all. Now 0:51:37 - 0:52:06 , that's a really sweet deal. See what God says is to come to me will cost you everything and you're never done. It's, you're always on the altar, the fire is gone. What churches say is change in these specific ways and you get to ignore all the other things about you that are wrong and imperfect and 0:52:06 - 0:52:28 whatever and what people born into churches say is because of what my parents or grandparents or great grandparents did. I don't have to change at all cause I'm raised in these traditions and I know you have to make the three changes they make us make good for me and I have AAA license to sin in all 0:52:28 - 0:52:59 other ways. That's the, that's the deal. So Jesus says in, in the parable of the true vine um John 15, I'll just read it to you. It's not on the slide. He says, I am the true vine and my father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit. He taketh away. So guess what happens to those 0:52:59 - 0:53:21 people born in their religion who never change? They get taken away and thrown in the fire and every branch that beareth fruit. He purchased it that it may bring forth more fruit. So guess what? For the people that make changes and join a religion and then stop making changes. They become a dead branch 0:53:20 - 0:53:44 and they're chucked into the fire to be a living branch requires continuous fruit. And it Jesus says right here, if you bear fruit, you're gonna get purged so you can bring forth more fruit. He that abideth in me and I in him the same bringeth forth much fruit for without me, you can do nothing in the 0:53:44 - 0:54:06 parable of the sower. He talks about this seed scattered everywhere and there are several types that don't even grow or, I mean, they don't even bear fruit at all. So, the stuff on the road doesn't even sprout their stuffs, uh their seeds on rocky soil and the, it sprouts but it won't grow roots. It's 0:54:05 - 0:54:33 burned up by the sun, et cetera. But the class that bears fruit, there's a massive difference in how much it bears. And so most people who are Christians don't realize that they do not bear fruit. And in the parable of the sower, they're not the ones bearing the fruit. And this is the reason because 0:54:32 - 0:55:02 they're stuck in their old garments and they're stuck in their old bottles. So let's read what the Pharisees did. How exactly they were evaluating Jesus based on their prior belief instead of the present evidence. So I will, I will go into what the alternative is. But let's just do this first verse seven 0:55:02 - 0:55:25 . Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies who can forgive sins? But God only that was their response to Jesus telling a man that his sins were forgiven. They said you can't do that. That's blasphemy. You can't act like God. That's bad. No, actually that is the point is for us to act like God. When you 0:55:25 - 0:55:54 see someone acting like God, it could be that they're lying or that they are uh hypocrites. But that ought to be what we expect a man of God or woman of God to do, to act like God. That's what we're called to do is act like God. That's not blasphemy. That's glorifying God. It's the opposite. Verse 16 0:55:54 - 0:56:19 . How is it that He eat and drink with publicans and sinners? So they thought that that was unrighteous. And unfortunately, many people continue misunderstanding this today and they say, well, if you're like God, you're gonna hang out with sinners because that's what Jesus did. No, that's not what Jesus 0:56:19 - 0:56:44 did. It says in another place, these were people who came to him, he was not, he was not dwelling with people that stayed in their sins after meeting him and receiving sufficient reason to change. There were people who draw drew near to him seeking to improve. So it would be more correct to say former 0:56:43 - 0:57:19 publicans and former sinners or Republicans and sinners who are really trying to change. So if the element becomes improvement, then all of a sudden the tables flip and um tables flip faster than Jesus clearing the temple. And um what we see is that the stagnant folks, if you wanna find somebody who's 0:57:19 - 0:57:40 not progressing with God, the best place to look is in a church because they're convinced that they already have everything they need. You pick a random person in the gutter. They probably know that they're all jacked up. And that's why the publicans and sinners and the sinners and the harlots will go 0:57:40 - 0:58:09 to heaven before the Pharisees and the scribes. So, the, the people judging Jesus here, they didn't bother to take a closer look at what was going on and actually use their brains. They just had reduced their whole belief system to clear buckets of good and evil and they'll never, ever change. They didn't 0:58:08 - 0:58:26 stop to say, well, why is he eating and drinking with publicans and sinners? Is it the same as it would be if any old person did it? Is it the same as it would be if I did it or is he doing things that are different? Are there publicans and sinners that are responding to him eating and drinking with 0:58:26 - 0:00:00 them by coming to God? But they didn't bother doing that. They just said, well, anyone that that that hangs out with publicans and sinners is obviously evil. So we're done here. No need to look any deeper. Verse 18. Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast? But thy disciples fast. Not. 0:00:00 - 0:59:15 Now. This one is particularly interesting to me because they lumped in John here even though they didn't believe in John. And so what you'll what you'll find with those that criticize those who are more righteous than them is they will nit pick those people according to standards. They do not themselves 0:59:15 - 0:59:48 keep the number of people that actually obeyed John were very few was very few and hardly anyone believed him when he said this is the son of God about Jesus. Jesus himself made a comment about this in another place where this is where he says um he, he basically says, we've lamented and you haven't 0:59:48 - 1:00:12 mourned, we've celebrated and you haven't danced. Um He's, he's saying, and he says, there, he says, John came uh to you and he fasted and he, he lived in the wilderness and he deprived himself of all these worldly uh goods and experiences. And you wouldn't believe in him because you said he was too 1:00:12 - 1:00:32 austere and I came doing all these things and you wouldn't believe in me because you said I wasn't austere enough. So which is it because you can't have it both ways unless you're a liar. So choose one and either way they were condemned because they didn't believe John, they didn't obey him and they 1:00:32 - 1:00:56 certainly didn't believe and obey Jesus. And this is how these people are. They, um their position is not justifiable. It's not consistent logically because they're not after the truth. They're just looking for a way to feel good without changing. Verse 24. Why do they on the Sabbath day? That which 1:00:56 - 1:01:18 is not lawful? And so here he was criticized because their understanding of the Sabbath Day was different than his, of course, his was more correct. And so this, this is, um, you know, people will look at what Jesus did during his ministry and they'll say, well, he kept the law of Moses. It's just that 1:01:18 - 1:01:39 the, the people at the time had a corrupted idea of the law of Moses. Ok. Fine. Let's roll with that. But how could they know that their idea of the law of Moses was corrupted. So they weren't lying when they criticized Jesus to say you can't do that on the Sabbath day, they really thought that you couldn't 1:01:39 - 1:02:04 . And so he pointed out in cases like this, there were several tactics. He used, one was to show the logical contradiction of their belief to, to say this can't possibly be what you think it means. And here's why or if this is actually what it means, you need to change these other things that you do 1:02:03 - 1:02:28 because that's inconsistent with what you're saying you believe. And there's a third thing he did, which I think I have a slide on. Oh, is it later? Yeah, this is the third thing he did was use miracles as evidence against their traditions. In other words to say, if God will show his power through what 1:02:28 - 1:02:52 I'm doing, then clearly, what I'm doing is not against his commandments or his will. And so if, if your understanding deviates from what I'm doing and God's showing his approval through his power, then you're the one who's wrong, not me. So we'll get to that. OK. So let's continue with this theme of 1:02:52 - 1:03:12 the need to leave former paradigms to receive higher blessings. That's what we're talking about. So now we get into John nine. We we preface this uh taking it from Mark two and now we're going to get to John Nine. It's the same theme verse six. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground and made 1:03:11 - 1:03:35 , made clay of the spittle. And he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay and said unto him, go wash in the pool of silo, which is by interpretation, scent. He went his way therefore, and washed and came seeing skipping down to verse 13, they brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was 1:03:35 - 1:03:52 blind. And it was the Sabbath day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes. Then again, the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. He said unto them, he put clay upon my eyes and I washed and do sea. Therefore said, some of the Pharisees, this man is not of God because he keepeth 1:03:52 - 1:04:20 not the Sabbath day. Others said, how can a man that is a sinner? Do such miracles? And there was a division among them, let's tackle this in reverse. There was a division among them. So every time God manifests something new, it creates a split every single time. That's intentional because you can't 1:04:20 - 1:04:50 have an upward path without creating an equal and opposite downward path that you can't avoid that. It's just reality. So there's no such thing as staying the same when you're presented with a reaction point to stay, the same is to go down. So um when these manifestations occur, they do create a split 1:04:50 - 0:00:00 . And even amongst the Pharisees, these these hardcore blind folks, there were people that responded correctly or in the correct direction to the manifestations that Jesus provided. We see this obviously in in John three, when Nicodemus goes to Jesus, but there were others in his trial, for example, 0:00:00 - 1:05:32 at the end of his life, there were Pharisees that said this is illegal. We can't do this because it was night. The law said that there had to be a public trial. The law also said that people that bore false witness needed to carry the the penalty of the crime. They were accusing someone of and there 1:05:32 - 1:05:56 were many false witnesses where they, they couldn't produce a second or third to corroborate the story. And by the law, they should have been killed and they weren't. So there's that anyway. Um So the need to leave former paradigms for higher blessings. Let me ask you some questions. Why did Jesus take 1:05:56 - 1:06:23 up nasty filth from the ground in the city of Jerusalem? Spit in it, which that was also an unclean thing and then smear this stuff into the eyes of the blind man. What did that represent? And why was that important? And then he told him now leave and find your way as a blind man, find your way to this 1:06:23 - 1:06:53 pool. That's, that's kind of far away, especially if you're blind outside of the city. And by the way, it's called One Cent and wash your eyes in that water in that pool and he did and he was healed. What do you think that represents? So why didn't Jesus heal him on the spot? Why didn't he give him his 1:06:53 - 1:07:21 sight within the city? Why did he need to smear the poop dust? Pee nasty city streets of ancient time into the guy's eyes within the city of Jerusalem. Why did John the Baptist preach outside of Jerusalem in the wilderness? Why did he preach at the exact spot that the Israelites entered into the promised 1:07:21 - 1:07:57 land and the exact spot that Elijah was taken up? They're the same place. Why was Jesus baptized in that same place? These are important questions. So um I guess in an attempt to keep this somewhat focused, the imagery here, which again, you could go into very deeply, you could look up how the pool of 1:07:57 - 1:08:23 Siloam where that water came from. There's a lot here, but let's leave it at this. And uh by the way, we know that Jesus did not lead him to that pool. Jesus caused his eyes to get caked with the nasty and then he sent him packing. The man had to find a way to the pool. How do we know this? Because later 1:08:23 - 1:08:40 on when the Pharisees asked who, who did this? He says, I don't know he would have known if Jesus had led him because Jesus would have been there when the guy could see. And you could say maybe he led him there and then just disappeared because Jesus did have this ninja Vanish thing that he could do 1:08:39 - 1:09:14 . Um But that's not what happened. Ok. So um he was led out of the city, he washed his eyes so he had to leave the paradigm of Jerusalem. So he, he was there as a beggar. He was there every day begging and you know, who came by every day and knew about him, the priests, the Pharisees, did they heal him 1:09:13 - 1:09:40 ? No, they couldn't. No one ever had done anything like that. His problem persisted. His problem was not solved. And Jesus said, you want a solution to your problem. Go somewhere else. You've already tried everything available here, go somewhere else. And what was part of that process explicitly demonstrating 1:09:39 - 1:10:03 the connection between his blindness and the filth of the city streets. Now the washing your feet, you might not know this, but it's connected to symbolically the, when you're walking in the streets, you're walking through the bodily refuse of all the people and animals. It's the sins of the world. It's 1:10:03 - 1:10:36 the sin from the fall of Adam. It's a fallen world. It's all around you. OK? He picked this stuff up and he put it right in the guy's eyes. So, um and then he told me, wash it off. So he made the, the problem more obvious and that was part of helping the man find the solution. He did the same thing when 1:10:36 - 1:10:59 he was healing the man who said, uh Lord help mine unbelief. He basically said, so you're telling me that your son has had this issue his whole life and you're only now doing something about it. That's pretty pathetic. And the guy's like, yeah, I know, but now I'm trying to be better and so you have 1:10:58 - 1:11:19 to call attention to the problem as part of helping people find it the, the motivation to make the necessary sacrifice to fix it. Maybe if he hadn't smeared poop in his eyes, the guy wouldn't have said uh, yeah, I'll walk to this pool. Maybe his faith was just enough to let Jesus smear poop in his eyes 1:11:19 - 1:11:46 . Poop dirt. And then after that, he's like, oh, well, now I'm in it. I better better walk to the lake. I wouldn't have done that or pool. I wouldn't have done that before. But now I've got a good reason. You see, sin is nothing more than choosing something that is less than what is best. And so part 1:11:46 - 1:12:08 of the solution to the problem is coming to see that it's less than what is best. Uh John says that when we love God, we don't find his commandments grievous. Why? Because they're what's best and why wouldn't you want that? And if you don't want it, it's because you don't believe it's what's best. And 1:12:08 - 1:12:27 that means you don't believe that God is good or you don't believe that what you're exposed to is coming from him as sort of a different problem. All right. But that, that question of who, who it's coming from, that's very important. And we'll get to that in a moment later in this chapter. It's also 1:12:27 - 1:12:55 a great example of that. Um OK. So I think I accidentally left this portion on here when I moved the rest to a different slide. But this is a great transition to the fact that um Jesus did this on a Sunday or I'm sorry, Saturday on the Sabbath, uh which is a Saturday back then. So the, the, the laws 1:12:55 - 1:13:18 had restrictions on what could be done on the Sabbath day and the Pharisees interpreted those to include miracles. This was something Jesus was always getting in trouble for and he went out of his way to do it. This is an important thing. So when, when most people see a purported messenger of God doing 1:13:18 - 1:13:50 things that directly contradict their belief of what's righteous, they immediately tend to dismiss out of hand that person no matter what else they're doing or why they're doing it when they ought to expect this to happen, they ought to expect this to happen. Jesus went out of his way to do miracles 1:13:49 - 1:14:13 that proved that their traditions were false and I, I explained a little bit about the mechanism of that before. But he could have taught everything he taught without touching their sacred cow of the Sabbath. He, he, he didn't have to have his disciples eat wheat as they were walking through the fields 1:14:13 - 1:14:34 on a, on a Sabbath. He didn't have to heal this guy on a Sabbath. He could have done it on a different day. He did other healings on the Sabbath uh which we're about to read one. Why did he choose to directly confront that? This is a, a question. I don't know that I can give a good answer to without 1:14:33 - 1:14:59 appealing to ideas that, that I'd have to teach you first about machine learning. Actually, I think is the easiest way to describe this. But may, maybe there's a way let's read this and we'll see if I can do it. Uh Mark 25 through 11. Uh This is when the, the, the sick man's friends drop him through 1:14:59 - 1:15:17 a roof because they can't get to Jesus. They, they punch him right through the roof. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, son, thy sins be forgiven thee. And we could talk about that in greater detail, but we won't. But there were certain of the scribes sitting there and 1:15:17 - 1:15:38 reasoning in their hearts. Why Doth this man thus speak blasphemies who can forgive sins. But God only. So that's actually the same thing we just read about from John. And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, why reason you these things 1:15:37 - 1:16:03 in your hearts, it would be a good thing to pause here and discuss exactly what they did wrong, but suffice it to say that they were showing that their motives were not like God and they should have known better. But they, they thought they were using this gift of reason for evil purposes. Verse nine 1:16:02 - 1:16:23 , whether it is easier to say to the sick of the palsy, thy sins be forgiven thee or to say, arise and take up thy bed and walk. But that ye may know that the son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, he saith to the sick of the palsy. I say unto thee arise and take up thy bed and go thy way into 1:16:22 - 1:16:50 thine house. So he says here explicitly that he he's doing this is the conditions did not exist to heal the man, even though the people had faith, the best he could do would say your sins are forgiven you, which by the way is the greater of the two blessings. But because these scribes were sitting there 1:16:50 - 1:17:20 judging him un righteously, he decided that um now they had pushed him over the line and given him a reason to heal this guy so that he could prove them wrong. So here's um oh yeah, I did put that on this slide. Sorry about that. So here from Luke 14 is the same idea. First one and it came to pass as 1:17:20 - 1:17:38 he went into the house of one of the Chief Pharisees to eat bread on the Sabbath day that they watched him and behold, there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy and Jesus answering spake unto the lawyers and Pharisees saying, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day? And they held their 1:17:38 - 1:18:08 peace and he took him and healed him and let him go. Now there's a few things we need to zoom in on here and one of them will get to again later, they watched him, we read elsewhere. They, they watched him for the purpose of finding something that was sufficient for them to dismiss him out of hand. That's 1:18:07 - 1:18:36 why many of the people that, that follow Jesus, they did it only because they were looking for a reason to deny him and we'll get back to that. But now let's talk about the fact that he asked them. Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Why wouldn't they answer him if it's what they believed? Why wouldn't 1:18:36 - 1:19:05 they just be open about it because they knew that he had stronger reasons than they did. They knew they had followed him, right? They, they were familiar with the, the way he worked and the things he knew, they knew that they could not justify their belief in the face of his reasons. And so they just 1:19:05 - 1:19:28 stayed quiet. Do we see this today? Absolutely, we do. In fact, I'd say in modern times it's more profound, uh prolific than at any other time because the internet provides so many opportunities for anonymity. And so you do find situations where people stay quiet, they won't ask you questions if they 1:19:28 - 1:19:55 have questions and they won't make comments if they have comments because they know that you will deprive them of their sufficient reasons to believe even more than you have already. And so they will hold their peace, but they will also snipe at you in forums where they don't have to put their name or 1:19:54 - 1:20:24 where you don't have an opportunity to reply and they do this because they know that if they did this to your face, you would crush them with logic and they don't want that. So now I want to say that till now we've been talking about miracles. Everything that I've said about miracles here being evidence 1:20:24 - 1:20:53 against what, what people thought was righteous. It's true for wisdom. Well, I don't know why I had inflection like that for wisdom. That's the end of the sentence. It's all equally true. One thing that you can fall prey to in reading the gospels is thinking that miracles are the best evidence. They're 1:20:53 - 1:21:27 not, miracles are down the chain in what is best, the best evidence is wisdom. It's reasoning because greater blessings result from that everything God does. It comes through faith. The greatest faith process is via reason. Once, once your evidence is so strong that it qualifies as a miracle, the blessings 1:21:26 - 1:21:45 you receive through that channel have to diminish because all things come through faith and you have less faith. If you have to be shown a miracle to believe than you do, if you can believe it through reason. And Jesus said this in one place, he says, blessed are you? He's talking to the apostles. Blessed 1:21:45 - 1:22:09 . Are you because you've seen me after his resurrection? But more blessed are those who believe on your words. He says that why? Because it's greater faith. Now, here is the chain and I'm, I've told you this before. I'll keep telling you it's wisdom then miracles and calamities and, and these are overlapping 1:22:08 - 1:22:33 gradients. This is very important. So by the time Jesus did miracles, there was already an awful lot of wisdom that he had shown and we read things like Jesus did. Well, the the man born blind is an example of this, but we read things that he had done things no one else had done as far as miracles. But 1:22:33 - 0:00:00 we also read that he taught with greater wisdom than anyone had ever heard. So the wisdom is also evidence against what people thought was righteous. And do we see this in Jesus's teaching? He does, he does use reason all the time when, when people so uh I didn't include it in here because goodness, 0:00:00 - 1:23:24 this is already long enough. Look this one up in Mark two. He responds with reasoning to these contentions. They say, well, what about this? What about that? And he gives a rock solid bomb proof explanation of why they're wrong. He's, he's basically says that can't be true and here's why and it's sufficient 1:23:23 - 1:23:51 every time. So wisdom comes first, miracles come second. And by the time you see the miracles, you can rest assured that there are fewer blessings to be had. But it's on a gradient. It's not one then two, then three. there's a a big old overlap here between the three, but the one follows the other, the 1:23:50 - 1:24:21 apex follows. So one reason that miracles are a lot more limited than folks realize is um that people don't react to them. The thing the way you expect that they would and you wouldn't either. So John 98, the neighbors, therefore, and they so this is the the man was, was given his sight, the neighbors 1:24:20 - 1:24:42 . Therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind said is not this, he that sat and begged. They obviously knew him. He had been there his whole life and the people that live right there with him his whole life, they're like, this is the same guy like this guy can see, but he's obviously 1:24:41 - 1:25:08 he's the same guy as before in verse nine. Some said this is he others said he is like him but he said I am here. Therefore, they said unto him, how were thine eyes open? OK, fair question. But can we just stop for a second and try to figure out how is it the people that had known him his whole freaking 1:25:08 - 1:25:37 life all of a sudden pretended like but I'm not sure if this is the same guy. He was, he was wearing the same clothes as before in the he was there just a few hours before. How could they not think it was the same guy? He didn't magically look any different. He just, he could see this is an example of 1:25:37 - 1:26:04 how delusional people become and how easily they do so to contort and twist so that they don't have to confront, they don't have to deal with and process a miracle when it happens. Look at Egypt, look at how long it took the Pharaoh to figure things out if he ever did. It is debatable. That's what it 1:26:04 - 1:26:28 took. So so on the one hand, don't think, oh God, please send miracles because then everything will be so much more obvious. No, it won't actually not really. But two, open your eyes and see the miracles they've already happened in three. Look even further and see the wisdom because there's a lot more 1:26:27 - 1:27:00 of that. It is almost never the case that anyone responds how they should to miracles and it doesn't matter how tremendous they are. All right. Next principle, the importance of testifying of the truth. You might think that that means some marvelous tremendous thing. You gotta stand there shirtless with 1:27:00 - 1:27:27 chains on your arms like a bendy and the painting. Um No. Right. It's, it's almost always so much simpler than that. Just say the facts. That's all you gotta do. Just say the facts. You don't have to deliver some, you know, be all, end all exposition on some doctrinal topic to testify of the truth. Just 1:27:27 - 1:27:53 say men can't be women and women can't be men. Just say, I find it hard to believe that the the fastest successful vaccine ever created took something like four years and you've done it in four months. I find that hard to believe. Just say the facts, right? If someone has answered, here's a wisdom thing 1:27:53 - 1:28:14 . If someone has answered questions that you've had your whole entire life about the gospel and yet have never found the answer to in spite of being a member of a church for your whole life, maybe you should say, hey, this person had answers to questions that I had my whole life. That is a truthful statement 1:28:13 - 1:28:43 . If some dude heals you and you're blind, you ought to say some dude healed me and I was blind. Now in all of that, you're, you're going far enough and you're not going too far and you can go too far if this man when he was asked, maybe we should read that. Now, John 910 therefore said, they unto him 1:28:43 - 1:29:04 , how were thine eyes opened? He said, he answered and said, a man that is called Jesus made clay and anointed mine eyes and said unto me, go to the pool of silo and wash and I went and washed and I received sight. They said, they then said, they unto him. Where is he? He said, I know not. They say unto 1:29:04 - 1:29:26 the blind man again, what sayest thou of him that he hath opened thine eyes. He said, he is a prophet. So look at what they asked and look at what the guy said. How were your eyes opened? A man called Jesus made clay, smeared it on my eyes. And he told me go to the pool Siloam and wash. I did it. And 1:29:26 - 1:29:54 then I could see that's as to the point as you can get. It's literally just what happened. He didn't say a holy man performed a miracle and cured me of my blindness. And he's the best thing that ever happened in the world and everybody should drop everything and follow him. He said, a man called Jesus 1:29:54 - 1:30:17 because he knew that was his name. He made clay, he smeared on my eyes. I told me go wash, I did and now I can see just the facts man. And they said, where is he? He said, I don't know because he didn't know right. Just, and then, and then they asked him again. Well, well, what do you think of him? And 1:30:17 - 1:30:38 the man said, he's prophet again, that's four words. He didn't launch into this 10 paragraph. He is the fulfillment of every prophecy. He is the son of God. He is the Messiah. Let me tell you all about it. He didn't say that. He just said, basically, well, he's at least a prophet. Obviously, he healed 1:30:37 - 0:00:00 me miraculously, he's a prophet. No, there are many people who could do something like this and who have not done something like this and we need to fix that. I will get to that more about that later. Well, later now, I guess. Let's see. Sorry, there's a lot here. I don't exactly remember the order, 0:00:00 - 1:31:29 but this is not what I was thinking was next. We'll get to more about it. Here's another principle. Praising God requires you to factually acknowledge the work of his servants, including yourself, including yourself. So calling good, good and calling evil evil. You start on you. You don't make excuses 1:31:28 - 1:31:55 for the jacked up things. You do, you own it and you fix it and you don't, you don't uh half step on the good things that you do, you call it like it is when you do good things, even if you're not blaring a trumpet before men for the alms, you do. You still need to say those things are good because remember 1:31:54 - 1:32:19 you're demonstrating God, you have to show people how good God is. And if you downplay what good means, how are you doing that? You're supposed to be doing the opposite, not, not artificially amplifying it, but really demonstrating how good it is. And so, um here's, here's a real life example of this 1:32:18 - 1:32:41 . I know a gentleman who he decided it wasn't um the best use of his time to keep going to church on Sundays. But he really liked the idea of having a dedicated time where he was focused completely on God. And so he goes to homeless shelter during that same time every week and he volunteers and when 1:32:41 - 1:33:09 they don't have anything for him to do, he just talks to people. And I, I think that's a beautiful thing. So that's, that's how you, you, you have to factually acknowledge good wherever you find it and evil. So um if, if, if this guy, if they said, well, where were you on Sunday? And he's like, uh I 1:33:09 - 1:33:38 , I just was doing stuff, you know, the facts state. I was in a homeless shelter. I was chatting to a guy or I was helping them feed folks or clean or whatever you do. And that's very different than saying, oh, I go every Sunday, I go to a homeless shelter. Everybody look at me there, there are differences 1:33:38 - 1:34:06 here. So in John 924 this is how the Pharisees reacted to this guy. They said give God the praise. We know that this man is a sinner. Now, there are two parts to this one. They were saying that in factually describing what Jesus had done for Him, that the man was not giving God the praise that He was 1:34:06 - 1:34:37 giving Jesus, the praise. Well, can you bear witness to the things that God does without explaining how he did them? Would it be to the detriment of the people there to have the story of the man gaining his sight without Jesus? If he cut that part of the story out, would it help or hurt the people? It 1:34:37 - 1:35:00 would hurt them because the path through which he received that blessing was also available to everyone else because they also could go to Jesus and learn more about the father and experience more of the father. This comes back to what I said in the beginning about. There's an awful lot that Jesus said 1:35:00 - 1:35:24 about himself that we're supposed to be able to say about ourselves too if we're doing it right. Jesus knew more about the father and lived more like him. And so he could do this miracle that no one else could do if there were a person like that on the earth. Don't you think that people should know now 1:35:24 - 1:35:57 , should it ever get out in front of the relationship between the father and the son and everybody else? No, the the the entire New Testament is full of Jesus testifying of the father, he would not be quiet about it. And yet in order to lead other people to the father, this blind man had to state Jesus's 1:35:56 - 1:36:20 role in transmitting that. Jesus said, Matthew 516, I said, I would tell you this earlier. This is the verse I was referring to let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, which is in heaven. No, no one reads that and thinks what they should when they 1:36:20 - 1:36:50 read it, he's saying be so much like the father that when people interact with you, they will come away from that knowing him better. That's what that says Jesus did this and, and he got in a lot of trouble for it as will all people who do this, John 10 30 through 33. He says I and my father are one 1:36:49 - 1:37:12 . Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them many good works. Have I showed you from my father? For which of those works do you stone me? The Jews answered him saying for good work, we stone thee not but for blasphemy. And because that thou being a man maketh thyself, God, the 1:37:12 - 1:37:40 Jews by their own admission had not seen anything he had done. That was not true to what the father would have done in his place except for the fact that he said I and my father are one now isn't this interesting that Jesus could do all the things that demonstrated that they were one and, and they didn't 1:37:40 - 1:38:04 stone him for that. But then when he made the connection to say it, they said, well, no, that's wrong. That's wrong. But it was true. Just like when he got in trouble for saying the temple would be taken apart. So that one stone didn't lay on another, he was telling the truth. They didn't like it. If 1:38:03 - 1:38:28 it's not true, then show that it's not true. But if what's being said is true, then deal with it. Those who take fault with the truth are the ones who are in error. If they want to remedy the situation, they need to change themselves. Now, they called this blasphemy and that's interesting. If you look 1:38:28 - 1:38:54 up the word, what it means is to degrade God. And this is, it's, it's, it's tied to Jesus claiming that he is the same as the father or like the father. And they said that that's blasphemy because you're a man and he's God. But they couldn't tell the difference between bringing God down to man and bringing 1:38:54 - 1:39:18 man up to God. And they are very, two very different things, two very different things. Um I'm gonna skip over the rest of these scriptures, but um even this is a very small subset of those that ought to be reviewed under this topic, but we just gotta keep it tight because this is already gonna be very 1:39:18 - 1:39:42 long. Maybe we'll read the last one, Matthew 1040. He that receive you, receive me and he that receive me, receive him that sent me. And there's a piece of proof that supports the idea that this is one of those things that we are all meant to be able to say. He even prays that we can say this in John 1:39:42 - 1:40:09 17. It's his will that we are able to say I am one with the sun and he is in me just as he is one in the father and the father is in him, we are meant to be able to say that. He said, I and my father are one you and I should be able to say that too. And that is the purpose for which we work is so that 1:40:09 - 1:40:36 all can be one in him. That's the goal. So you can't do that without factually acknowledging the work of his servants, including yourself. That's this business. And there are other verses about this, how we respond to God's servants is how we would respond to him. And if we're transmitting uh elements 1:40:35 - 1:41:02 of how he is to others that don't know Him as well, we have to be a part of that chain. And so people who would, who would get offended at this, they really don't know and understand how things work because they, they criticize what absolutely has to be the way this is done. OK. So this is an idea that 1:41:01 - 1:41:37 keeps coming up back, test your models. Um Any time you want to judge punitive truth, one thing that you should do is look at all the people you accept as righteous from the past and um test your metrics against them. So the first and foremost, make sure that your test that you're applying to whatever 1:41:37 - 1:42:09 idea person, whatever, make sure that it would not result in condemning Jesus. That's first and foremost, almost every false judgment would fail against Jesus. So in applying your metric for judgment, you'll find that uh that would result in condemning Jesus. And if if whatever you're using to test truth 1:42:09 - 1:42:33 would condemn Jesus, your metric is incorrect because he is the truth. So whatever you design to find and test truth, it, it better pass against Jesus and if it doesn't, you can throw it away, but there are others and they all help us better understand Christ. So here are a few from the New Testament 1:42:33 - 1:43:00 , namely Moses and uh John the Baptist. I don't think I told any about him and Abraham. So let's read through just a subset of these, but you could go and find more. And John 928 and 29 the Pharisees reviled against the man born blind and they said thou art his meaning, jesus' disciple, but we are moses' 1:42:59 - 1:43:26 disciples. We know that God spake unto Moses. As for this fellow, we know not from whence he is in, in John five. Jesus said to the Pharisees do not think that I will accuse you to the father. There is one that accuse you even Moses in whom ye trust for had you believed Moses, you would have believed 1:43:26 - 1:43:53 me for he wrote of me, but you believe not his writings. If you believe not his writings, how shall you believe my words? So they said that they believed in Moses, but they didn't live according to what Moses taught. And unfortunately, this is a common pattern and it doesn't really make sense why, except 1:43:52 - 1:44:19 for the fact that humans are despicable creatures. Um in actuality, they have divine potential and despicable um actuality. So you see this pattern repeating over and over again where folks point to some authority from the past and maybe it's a person, maybe it's the Bible itself, maybe it's whatever 1:44:19 - 1:44:45 and they say no, no, I believe this, but they don't live it. And then they judge things that do the judge against them, whether that's people or ideas or anything else. Again, in John five, Jesus spoke about this, this practice of setting up the Bible as, as this idol because you, you claim that that's 1:44:45 - 1:45:03 the source of truth. And yet you don't, you don't live by everything it says, you selectively choose things and then you practice a whole bunch of things that aren't in there. But you claim that they are same thing with Moses and the Pharisees John 539 and 40 search the scriptures for in them. You think 1:45:02 - 1:45:24 you have eternal life and there they would testify of me and you will not come to me that you might have life. So he's saying actually eternal life doesn't come from the Bible, it comes from me. But the Bible testifies of me. Not that there was a Bible when John, when Jesus said this but you know the 1:45:24 - 1:45:44 scrolls, the scripture, it all of this testifies of me. But you say you believe it but you're not following what you would have to if you did, which is to believe in me because it testifies of me. And he says, if you come to me, you'll have life, you'll have what you think you already have. But don't 1:45:44 - 1:46:02 , you'll find it. And that's really important. And then finally, John 840 they did this trick with Moses too. Jesus said, but now ye seek because they claim to be the Children of Moses. He said, you're the Children of the devil. He said, I'm I'm sorry. I keep saying Moses Abraham, you're the Children 1:46:01 - 1:46:20 of the devil. He said, they said, no, we're the Children of Abraham. And he said, ye seek to kill me a man that had told you the truth, which I have heard of God. This did not Abraham. Uh In other words, you might be his genetic descendants, but you do not believe what he believed and you don't act the 1:46:19 - 1:46:47 way he did either. This happens all the time. So what are modern uh examples of this? Well, you have Catholics who don't actually believe what the Bible says, even though they claim authority from Peter, you've got Mormons who don't actually believe what the book of Mormon says, even though they claim 1:46:47 - 0:00:00 that they do, they don't live. Um according to the example of Joseph Smith or the teachings of Joseph Smith, even though they claim that as a source of their authority, you've got the um Protestant branches and they claim the scriptures as their source of authority and the content of their religion. 0:00:00 - 1:47:28 But they don't live according to them, they skip over most of them and say this doesn't apply to us. And I'm not talking just about the Old Testament. They, they wanton break commandments given in the New Testament and they say that's OK and they teach the opposite of what Jesus taught in many instances 1:47:27 - 1:47:52 . So what is up with that? The problem is they're not back testing their models. This is so simple. A kid should understand it. A kid wouldn't use these words, but a child should look at that and say, hey, if what you're saying is true, then you guys should be acting a heck of a lot differently than 1:47:52 - 1:48:17 you do. So ex exercise extreme caution when your tests for truth would condemn Jesus not just that like obviously abandon those tests. They are wrong. Even if you don't have something to put in their place, get rid of them. If you would condemn Jesus, you are wrong. That is not an appropriate test of 1:48:17 - 1:48:47 truth. One more thing here, going back to John nine, see, these Pharisees thought that they had everything they needed to judge Jesus. Uh but as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 23 they claimed their authority from Moses, but they didn't live any of the things he taught, what they lived was very different 1:48:47 - 1:49:15 . And so it's quite something to have someone come along demonstrating the fruits of Moses or better and then to condemn him as contrary to Moses. And that was their problem that happens all the time today as well. So if someone were to stroll into any Christian religion being more like Jesus than the 1:49:15 - 1:49:50 people there, they would throw that person out in short order. Next principle, God will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of him. This gets back to what we've already touched upon about telling the truth, including who was involved in what happened. So John 918, but the Jews did not believe concerning 1:49:49 - 1:50:11 him that he had been blind and received his sight until they called the parents of him that had received his sight. So here they had the people who grew up around him, the man himself and they had all of these testimonies which the law said they only needed two or three that corroborated and that was 1:50:11 - 1:50:33 sufficient to tell the truth. They just kept looking for witnesses until they found what they were looking for. Which is the same thing they did when they had the mock trial of Jesus, the, the pretend trial show trial verse 19. And they asked them saying, is this your son who ye say was born blind? That 1:50:32 - 1:50:49 , that right there like pause right there. What you'll find is with crazy narcissistic kind of people. They choose their language very carefully to try to control every facet of the conversation from start to finish and preserve their little delusion of the world. That's what these people are doing right 1:50:49 - 1:51:11 here. Who ye say was born blind. It wasn't just the parents who said this. The guy said it and everyone who knew him said it. And I guess there were some exceptions of the people like we already went over who did know him and somehow it's like, no, this has to be a different guy. This can't possibly 1:51:11 - 1:51:32 be Ted. I mean, Ted was blind. This can't be Ted, he looks like Ted, he talks like Ted, he knows all the stuff about us that Ted would know but it can't be Ted because Ted was blind. That was, that, that was the, the counter witnesses that they had in any cross examination should have, should have revealed 1:51:31 - 1:51:53 this in, in two seconds. Does he look like the guy that was born blind? Yes. Does he speak? Like the guy that was born blind? Yes. Is he wearing the same clothes as the guy that was born blind, like three hours ago was wearing? Yes. Does he know all the stuff that that guy would know? You know, having 1:51:52 - 1:52:12 known you his whole life? Yes. And on and on. Right. Anyway, continuing how then Doth He, now, see, again, it's like it couldn't possibly be the thing we're hearing from every single person we've interviewed, couldn't possibly be that because it was on the Sabbath. It's God can't work on the Sabbath 1:52:11 - 1:52:30 . This is obviously not. That verse 20. His parents answered them and said, we know that this is our son and that he was born blind and you hear this and you're like, wow, great. Ok. They're gonna tell the truth. Cool parents should I mean, wouldn't you be rejoicing and be so glad that God blessed your 1:52:30 - 0:00:00 son that you love so much that now you do anything for God, like a Hannah and Samuel situation, you know, and then verse 21 the bubble pops. But by what means he now seeth. We know not or who hath opened his eyes. We know not. He is of age. Ask him he shall speak for himself. And you might say well, 0:00:00 - 1:53:15 ok, but they weren't there. How would they know? That's a truthful thing to say yet? Except they knew this guy his whole life. He was their son. They'd know his character and whether he was prone to lie or not, especially about such tremendous things because he in fact, had learned to see, somehow come 1:53:15 - 1:53:40 to see, not learned to see. And this, this is one of the things about miracles that will surprise you or wisdom, any evidence of God, you will find people that know you well, will suddenly ignore everything they know about you. If that's what it takes to not fully acknowledge the evidence that's put 1:53:40 - 1:54:00 before them, they don't know what to do with it, but they know enough of what would happen if they tried to do something with it that they stay as far away from it as they can. And we don't have to guess that this is the case. Let's read on in verse 22 these words spake his parents because they feared 1:54:00 - 1:54:29 the Jews for the Jews had agreed already that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. They treasure their church so much that they absolutely wouldn't go anywhere near anything that threatened that even if it was their son that was at stake, you know, many people 1:54:28 - 1:54:52 like that, you might be one of them. So how many spouses throw their marriage under the bus when one of the spouse says, spouses say, hey, I'm not so sure about the things I used to believe. And here's the reasons and I want to involve you in this, I'm not keeping any secrets and the reaction of the 1:54:52 - 1:55:22 spouse is I'm gonna divorce you. Why? Because I value the church more than my marriage to you. And I know where this goes. That's not the only example. Um, any treasured sacred cow can lead to this behavior and it seems like everybody has them. So I've had interactions with family members and close friends 1:55:21 - 1:55:47 who've known me my whole life kind of people and they see something I do like, hey, I wrote six books or whatever. Um, and they think, uh, yeah, I'm not gonna go there because I'm afraid of what I'll find because they know me to be a, um, a sensible person who always does what he thinks is right, who 1:55:46 - 1:56:08 goes all in on things and doesn't believe in stupid things and turns away from things that obviously aren't good and doesn't care what other people think and on and on and on and whatever is attached to me. They will have to parse that out and they are afraid of what they'll find. This is just some people 1:56:08 - 1:56:28 , not all, but that's what happens. I remember. So when I turned 18 I joined the L DS church and I decided to go on a mission and my friends who I had grown up with, who were not particularly religious in any way, but definitely not L DS. They really struggled with that because they didn't know how to 1:56:28 - 1:56:46 fit that in with the person that they knew in terms of what it would imply for them, they had to let go of something and instead of being open to maybe letting go something about themselves, they chose to deny what they already knew about me, even though that was just as true as ever. And they had a 1:56:46 - 1:57:15 whole lifetime to back it up. This is what happens. But the churchy thing, that's a big one. So they take this cop out and they say he is of age, ask him. Um So in mark 838 we read whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him also, shall the 1:57:15 - 1:57:39 son of man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of his father with the holy angels. Now ashamed is one of these words that mean something more than what it seems. So I'm going to um look that up very quickly so I can reproduce this idea for you. But in the meantime, we have to recall that this is one 1:57:39 - 1:58:04 of many uses of the word words or word in the New Testament that means much more than it seems. So what do you think it means to be ashamed of him? And his words specifically the of his words part because um most people would just think li literally, it means um you know, quotes from the Bible and that's 1:58:03 - 1:58:50 not the limit of it. Or even really the smallest part. So let's start on ashamed here and that'll help us see more of the words. Um So to be ashamed in Greek, uh it means, um, obviously to feel shame for something. Uh, but it, it's a sense of uh, unfortunate surprise. It's a sense of unfortunate surprise 1:58:49 - 1:59:12 . So when people, um, partake of the fruit of the tree of life and they're ashamed, it doesn't mean that, that, um, you know, all of a sudden out of nowhere, the people who have been mocking them all along suddenly get through and now they're, they're concerned about what other people think when they 1:59:12 - 1:59:30 didn't care at all before they had to fight against that the whole way to get there. It's not that they suddenly start caring about what other people think. It's, that it does not match what they thought it would be. And for that reason, they begin to believe the people that have been mocking them the 1:59:30 - 1:59:58 whole time. And so to be ashamed of him and his words, this is very important. His words are his character. It's his, his, what he would do in your place, how he would feel in your place and what he would say in your place. And so you find out that you thought it would be one way and it turns out it's 1:59:58 - 2:00:21 very different than what you thought. Well, of course, it's very different than what you thought. That's the whole point. If it were the same, your experience would be the same, it would not be improvement. It'd be the same. But in this adulterous and sinful generation or in other words, in this, in 2:00:21 - 2:00:45 this time where people desire things that are not what is best and believe, things that do not accord with reality. It's make believe, you know, I wish I lived in a room full of, uh, cotton candy and puppies all the time. Puppies who never grew old and died of diseases or got hit by cars. Well, that 2:00:45 - 2:01:11 doesn't exist, you know, and you can eat candy all day long and not gain weight. Um It's what that big big rock candy Mountain song, you know. No, it doesn't work that way. That's, that's adulterous and sinful. So don't be surprised when God's ways are higher than your ways. He literally told you it 2:01:11 - 2:01:34 was like that in Isaiah and not even close. He says as far as the heavens are from the earth. And so what does it mean for the son of man to be ashamed of those people? What means? He won't find what he is expecting and hoping for. Isn't that funny? This scripture means so much uh more indifferent than 2:01:34 - 2:01:53 what people think when they read it. It's a wonderful example of why you should not just blow through the scriptures. You should stop and ask, what does this mean? What does this mean? Why did he say this? Why didn't he say that and look things up. We have all these resources and uh you know, God didn't 2:01:52 - 2:02:18 do all this so that you can just uh access your phone scriptures on your phone and have even less effort. It was so that with the, the effort that you apply, you can get more out of it. So um we should live so that we're worth saving. So that when Jesus comes back, we're still here to meet him and he 2:02:18 - 2:02:47 feels joy that what he sees was accomplished by the price he pays. And it's not that hard to think about that. If you have kids, we just need to do for God. What we wish our chi Children would do for us, which isn't to, to, to bow down and worship us is, is um you know, mindless automaton slaves. It's 2:02:47 - 2:03:08 that they do the absolute best things in their lives for themselves and others so that they can feel the greatest joy if we're living our lives the right way that we can say follow our example in this until you do better and by all means, go for it, please surpass me if you can, but at least follow the 2:03:08 - 2:03:41 example until then. So don't be ashamed of, of God. Don't be, you're, you're going to be surprised, but don't be disappointed. You're gonna be surprised at what He reveals, but don't be disappointed, realize that he knows the way and he knows what we should want, he knows what is best and you have to 2:03:41 - 2:04:04 trust him. So these parents, they assumed that their synagogue attendance was worth more than telling the truth about their child, confidently, courageously telling the truth. And they threw him right under the bus. It's bad enough that this guy was blind his whole life. Now he got his sight, but then 2:04:04 - 2:04:35 his parents run him over with the bus just like that. But here's the thing, what's better the synagogue or the one worshiped there? What's more important? Your church or the being you say you go to church for the the entity that makes the church anything different than any other place. Obviously, that 2:04:35 - 2:05:04 should trump everything else, right? In John 16 2, Jesus says that they shall put you out of the synagogues. It's a foregone conclusion. If you worship God, they will throw you out of your church. Yeah, the time cometh that whosoever kille you will think that He doeth God's service. They'll toss you 2:05:04 - 2:05:35 out of their church and they'll think that they're doing God a favor that they're doing his will by doing so. And tell me that's not the case today. So the point is don't be ashamed, don't be negatively surprised when God reveals changes to you ideas, whatever changes in your life that you have to make 2:05:35 - 2:06:03 to draw nearer to Him that require you to give up something that you thought was important. And always remember that he is what is important. Everything else has to be a lower rank than that. And he told us up front everything's on the list of what is subject to change and what needs to be sacrificed 2:06:02 - 2:06:32 . Ok? Um We've just got a few more. Don't feed those who look for fault instead of truth. So in verses 26 and 27 of John nine then said they to him again, what did he to thee? How opened he thine eyes? So they're, they're just continuously interrogating his poor guy. He already told them what had happened 2:06:31 - 2:06:55 . He already told them what he what he thought. Um and they said, well, ok, well, tell us how he did it. Do you know why they asked this question? It's really obvious they were still trolling him to find something where they could just dismiss everything else. It didn't matter that with every attempt 2:06:55 - 2:07:22 to find that thing, these guys heaped up more evidence that he was, he was righteous. They were still, they were parsing for that one thing they could use to say. See, we knew it all along goes wicked because it wasn't enough to say he did it on the Sabbath anymore. They, they needed that the evidence 2:07:22 - 2:07:43 was great enough that they needed some other reason to toss him aside and they looked to try to find it. They didn't dare think maybe our understanding of the Sabbath is wrong because here's a demonstration of great power from God. Hm. That we don't have. And we have to admit that. So maybe this guy 2:07:43 - 2:08:06 knows God better than we do. No, it couldn't be, that couldn't be that we're Pharisees after all. We're the ones that, that have the authority. So, this, this guy, I like him. He's cheeky and he says, I've already told you and you didn't hear, why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to be his disciples 2:08:05 - 2:08:27 ? And they didn't like that at all? And so that's when they bounced him out of the synagogue. But here we read in Luke 67, this is the contemporary English version. Some Pharisees and teachers of the law of Moses kept watching Jesus to see if he would heal the man. They did this because they wanted to 2:08:27 - 2:08:57 accuse Jesus of doing something wrong. It's always a marvel to me to watch people, um watch hours and hours and hours of things that I of videos I make and read thousands of pages of what I write when they clearly do. Not like it. And you wonder, well, why on earth would someone do that? I mean, surely 2:08:56 - 2:09:28 there's a better way to spend your time. And the answer is they feel convicted because of the things that I've said and they continue on trying to find something, anything I say or do or don't say or don't do that's sufficient for them to dismiss everything else out of hand without feeling guilty. That 2:09:28 - 2:09:54 is their motive, period. And that shows you how deranged we are as humans has fallen creatures that you'd waste that much time when you really feel that, that you say that there's no value in this. It's a total waste of time. Why would anybody bother? And, and really all you're doing is trolling for 2:09:54 - 2:10:18 this, this, this uh one thing that's sufficient to toss out everything else. It's not justified But, but emotionally, it's enough, it's emotionally enough to not feel guilty anymore, even if it's not rationally enough. Because for example, someone, someone can, can be spot on about X and be completely 2:10:18 - 2:10:43 wrong about Y and you're still guilty on X, you gotta fix X. But they're just looking for some, some excuse to throw it all away and you can't do that. And the same thing was true with Jesus in his mortal ministry. You've got to contend with the fact that he caused a man born blind to see and no one 2:10:43 - 2:11:10 had ever done that. You have to find a way to explain that. The only way to explain it in this case is that he had greater power from God than anyone else did. And that says something about contradictions between things he might say and do and things that people with way less power, no power think is 2:11:10 - 2:11:29 right. What it says is when there's a contradiction, the guy doing things that no one's ever done before is right. That's what it means. And if it's something different, you better come up with a reason to justify it. And you're not going to, the only thing you could do is do something greater than he 2:11:29 - 2:11:54 did. That's the only sufficient counter argument to that. So, and this was the man's reply. The man born blind. He said, now we know again, I love that how cheeky this guy is. Now, we know that God heareth not sinners. But if any man be a worshiper of God and doeth his will, him, he heareth since the 2:11:54 - 2:12:23 world began. Was it not heard that any man open the eyes of one that was born blind? If this man were not of God, he could do nothing. Now to remind you miracles are an evidence of God and so is wisdom. So is endurance under suffering by the way. But I want to call attention to the escalation of this 2:12:23 - 2:12:46 man's defense of Jesus. At first all he said was I was blind. A guy put poop dirt in my eyes and told me to wash my, my face in this pool. And now I see. And then he said, well, he's a prophet and now he's coming out swinging against these Pharisees. And he's saying, look, if you're gonna take a position 2:12:46 - 2:13:07 , that's so absurd against this guy. This, this can only mean one thing you're not dealing with the fact that he has done something that no one else has done and you're being ridiculous about this and he's calling them out on their motives by saying, well, why do you wanna know? Are you gonna be his 2:13:07 - 2:13:45 disciple? Clearly not get with it. So their response to this was thou was altogether born in sins and dost thou teach us and they cast him out. No. Um, you could make a logical argument for what Jesus had already said because you can't hold the Pharisees to going by the teachings of Jesus, right? So 2:13:45 - 2:14:08 you can only hold them to what they could be expected to understand logically. Um And the, the evidence that they were shown. So you can't say, well, the chapter starts by Jesus saying that they weren't born in sin and you can see even his disciples thought that before he corrected them. But in another 2:14:08 - 2:14:30 place, he talks about this tower that fell and how a bunch of people died. And it is the same topic of, of whether affliction means that someone's in sin. And that, that's something that uh job's friends believe too that, that a person's present state of worldly prosperity, including presence or absence 2:14:29 - 2:14:49 of pain. That that was an indi indication of their relationship with God. And we know that that's not true. But Jesus said, well, you, you heard about that tower that fell and it killed all those people. Do you think that they were greater sinners than anyone else? And then he made an interesting statement 2:14:48 - 2:15:22 which uh suggested that all people would come to face all uh all trials, very interesting statement. So these people, these Pharisees um they also believed that someone born with a handicap was, was uh a sinful person. But they did not have logical reasons to believe this. This was a kind of a naked 2:15:21 - 2:15:44 tradition, you know, widespread and so they cite this and, and the reason I'm focusing on this so much to them, this would have been like quoting one of the 10 commandments. It's so obvious that this guy is in sin, but it wasn't obvious and it wasn't true, but to them, it seemed that true. And this is 2:15:44 - 2:16:04 where we all have to be super careful because what's clear cut and obvious to us might be dead wrong actually. And how's God gonna correct it? Most likely he's gonna put you in a situation where the limits of that understanding are revealed? There might be a problem that's too great for it to overcome 2:16:03 - 2:16:27 your current belief or might be crossing paths with someone who knows something better can show something better and can defend it against your position. And if you dismiss that person out of hand, you might be cutting off a life uh jacket that is thrown to you while you're drowning. Even if you don't 2:16:27 - 2:16:48 know you're drowning yet, does these situations come at precise times according to God's Foreknowledge and wisdom and love? And when you dismiss them out of hand, which is never appropriate. You have to have reasons, the reasons have to be sufficient. Given the evidence you're shown when you dismiss 2:16:47 - 2:17:14 them out of hand, you cut yourself off, you limit what else he can do to help you. So that's the first chunk. And then he says, dost thou teach us like a sinner couldn't teach us well, whether the person is a sinner or not, does not indicate that what they say is false. A person's historic righteousness 2:17:13 - 2:17:43 is evidence that suggests future righteousness. It does not guarantee because all can turn away. But it's something you have to contend with a person's prior wickedness does not preclude them doing something good or saying something good. All people are capable of repentance and also God is so gracious 2:17:42 - 2:18:04 . You know, we read about the story of the high priest correctly prophesying that it's better for one man to die than for the entire nation to perish. It says that right there in John. So and it says that he said that in his office as high priest that God gave him this wisdom, but he was wicked. I mean 2:18:04 - 2:18:37 he sentenced Jesus to death illegally and un righteously. So how's that? But he still told the truth. So this is a double, no, no. And then you get to the triplicate because they cast him out. And here's the principle, the wicked can only respond to superior evidence with name, calling fleeing or violence 2:18:36 - 2:19:00 . I guess the lying is on there too. They can lie, they can call you names. They can run away or they can use force against you. These Pharisees controlled who was in the synagogue. They could not argue with this man. They tried and they failed miserably and obvious. I mean, he was born blind. He was 2:19:00 - 2:19:21 not an educated man in those times. There was no way for that to happen and he wiped the dirt with them. Jesus wiped the dirt on him and then he wiped the dirt with the Pharisees and they couldn't deal with it. They tried every tactic they knew. And so they said, ah, you're a sinner, you can't teach 2:19:21 - 2:19:40 us anything. And then they threw him out of the synagogue. That's the exact attitude you'll see with the modern version of these clowns and they're everywhere. Bring in the clowns. All right. So don't get scared at this huge. We're almost done this two, this one and one more. Uh I'm just putting this 2:19:40 - 2:20:06 here for context. So right after he gets cast out, Jesus heard that they had cast him out and when he had found him, he said unto him, dost thou believe on the Son of God, he answered and said, this is very important. Who is he Lord that I might believe on him? No, this is the latest iteration of this 2:20:06 - 2:20:30 man incrementally responding with perfect appropriateness to the expanding evidence he had of jesus' value. So how did this start? The man born blind had nothing to lose. He was born blind. He was begging all day long. He was, he was not a little kid. He'd been in this for a while. There's no hope he 2:20:29 - 2:20:52 had explored every opportunity he had available to him to, to uh if not fixed then make the most out of his problem. And he was still in, in, in a bad way. So some random guy comes along and says, hey, do you wanna be healed? And the guy says, yes. And so he wipes poop dirt in his eyes and the guy tolerates 2:20:51 - 2:21:13 it and then sends him packing and the guy goes. Now, what degree of faith was exercised here? Would you allow a random person to put poop dirt in your eyes? I don't think so. But let's say that you were out of work and your unemployment had expired and you still couldn't find a job and you tried everything 2:21:13 - 2:21:32 you knew. And some random person said, hey, I'll give you a job and the pay, I mean, it pays more than a dollar an hour and, and, uh, it's something and it's in a field you've never tried before, but I think you could do. All right. Would you take the opportunity? Well, why wouldn't you like, what else 2:21:32 - 2:21:52 do you have that could possibly compete with that? And, and now change the situation, you have a job, you're making money and someone comes along and says, I think something better is available for you. Why don't you spruce up your resume and send it out? And now here come the excuses. Oh, I don't think 2:21:52 - 2:22:16 that could happen. And I tried this four years ago and I think that this and II I can make do with what I've got. I don't think anybody would hire me if the threshold of action is sprucing up your resume and sending it to a place you're still faithless. That is almost nothing of a cost in exchange for 2:22:16 - 2:22:38 a tremendous benefit if happens to be true. So why wouldn't you do it? It's a tiny little cost. It could mean the world now consider a different thing where you have a job and it's a good job and some crazy guy comes along. You don't know this person and say, oh, quit your job today and there's no other 2:22:38 - 2:23:01 job. Just quit your job. Trust me. You say take a hike buddy and that would be the right thing to say right now. What if, what if you had a dream the night before and as an inspired dream? And God said tomorrow a um let's say, uh a woman, a young woman is gonna come to your door and she's gonna have 2:23:01 - 2:23:23 a ponytail on one side and she's gonna be wearing a green vest and she's gonna tell you, God sent me here and you don't have any way of knowing this, but next week something terrible is gonna happen at work. And if you're there, you're gonna die. You need to quit your job. And what happens next is up 2:23:23 - 2:23:47 to the Lord. But trust him and walked away and that was the dream. And then the exact thing happened that morning. This is completely contrived this, this dream thing, but I have seen this happen to people. This happens. God does stuff like this. What would you do? Is there enough evidence there to act 2:23:46 - 2:24:10 on that? I sure as heck would quit my job. I'll tell you that's what I would do. Now, there's stuff all between this. It's a, it's, it's a these things happen. So, but God always provides a ramp with sufficient evidence for the challenge at hand. He always does. We don't go wrong because there's not 2:24:10 - 2:24:41 enough, we go wrong because we don't acknowledge what's there. If some dude miraculously gave you sight and you were blind from birth and then he came and he said, um do you believe on the Son of God? This is exactly what you should say and do. It's exactly what's rational. The man born blind is stone 2:24:40 - 2:25:07 cold, rational guy. He does exactly what you should do given the situation in every case textbook at this point, Jesus has provided this man with sufficient experiences. This is very much like the woman at the Well, by the way, you can read that story, it's very similar where all he has to do is say 2:25:06 - 2:25:50 it's me and the man said, Lord, I believe and he worshiped him, right? This is so important to understand final slide. Your response to sufficient evidence will either exalt or obese. You, you're going to go up or down, you can't remain the same. Now, you could go up by a little or a lot. So it's not 2:25:50 - 2:26:13 a binary thing. It's a two stage reaction. There's one is the binary. Are you going up or down? The second one down is down by the way, you're, you're on the path or off. That's another mistake that we make people think their gradations are going down. There's one way and when you do something that deviates 2:26:13 - 2:26:36 from it, you are out, the only way to get back on is through the gate. So this would be like a game where you had to start over at the beginning of the path. Now you can progress through a lot faster than the first time because you already know what comes after. But one thing and you're out, that's the 2:26:36 - 2:27:01 way it works, but up, up is by degrees. And so what I've just explained to you is the difference between justification and sanctification. Any who you should look in the story at the, the difference in magnitude of uh direction and magnitude of the reactions of the various characters. You've got the 2:27:01 - 2:27:23 man born blind, you've got his companions, you've got his parents, you've got the Pharisees and um with the man and the Pharisees, there's a progression path. The Pharisees become more and more darkened because every single time you turn away, you go down and the man goes up and up and up because he 2:27:23 - 2:27:47 responds correctly to each prompting to every fork in the road. And so this is how the chapter ends. Jesus said for judgment, I am come into this world. Let's pause there. He says in another place, the father judges no one because he's given all judgment to me. And then in another place he says, I judge 2:27:47 - 2:28:11 no one. This is very interesting and something people don't have the answer to, but there is an answer to it. How are people judged in this story? Judgment means that wedge, it means you get hit with a wedge and it's how you end up on the other side. There are other definitions of the word, but that's 2:28:10 - 2:28:37 what this means here. It says that they which see might not see and that they would see might be made blind. It change your reaction, changes your relationship with God. It changes what you see. When you turn away from God, you literally do not feel or think as well as you could before. I don't mean 2:28:37 - 2:29:05 you don't feel well, I mean, you the range of emotion that you can feel reduces and it moves down. It's less pleasant. The opposite happens when you go up the range increases and you feel more uh you feel better as a whole. And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words and said unto 2:29:04 - 2:29:26 Him, are we blind? Also? Jesus said unto them, if you were blind, you should have no sin. Why? Because we're not responsible for what we don't know about yet. What's beyond our capacity. But now ye say we see therefore your sin remain. Once you're shown sufficient evidence for a change that God wants 2:29:26 - 2:29:48 you to make. If you don't make that change, you're now blind, you're off the path you're going down and it doesn't matter if you've previously gone up or how many times you have. So what's this judgment he came into the world for? If, if the father doesn't judge you and he doesn't judge you. Where's 2:29:48 - 2:30:14 the judgment coming from? It's your life itself that judges you. It's how you react to the situations you're placed in because it's, it's a ramp up or down. Uh more accurately, it's a ladder up and then you can jump off if you want. That's what it is. All right. Well, this is super long and if you've 2:30:14 - 2:30:32 made it this far for like the two people who might, uh I hope this was helpful. I felt like now is the time and, and now maybe you see why I haven't jumped into this. This is, imagine how long it would take to go through the whole book of John and we're still just scratching the surface. So hopefully 0:00:00 - 0:00:23 Uh to be presenting some of these ideas today. Um It's probably a year ago I was reading the Gospel of John and I asked the Lord if I could go through the whole book publicly and he said, no, not yet, you got other things you need to do. Um But now I can do chapter nine. So this is good. Who knows about 0:00:23 - 0:00:47 the rest? Who knows if I'll ever get time? But it turns out that John nine is a wonderful um wonderful chapter to just take one chapter and say, OK, what's the list of gospel principles that are in this chapter? And so we can't in this presentation, we can't give a full exposition on any one principle 0:00:47 - 0:01:05 , not that anyone ever could, but that's, that's not our purpose. We're just gonna go through the chapter and read each section and say, OK, what's the principle that this is an example of? And even that is not exhaustive, you might come up with a very different list. If you were to go through it. If 0:01:05 - 0:01:23 I go through it tomorrow, I might come up with a different list or at least some changes I'd hope that most of it would be consistent. But that's the, that's the approach here. So without further ado, let's, let's jump right in. So start verse one. And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind 0:01:23 - 0:01:51 from his birth and his disciples asked him saying, master who did sin this man or his parents that he was born blind. Jesus answered neither has this man sinned nor his parents. But that the works of God should be made manifest in Him. The gospel principle in this passage or a gospel principle is that 0:01:50 - 0:02:20 we are meant to show more of God's goodness, they're doing what he would do. No, there are layers of this in this case so we can have to parse through. Um but I will just begin this by telling you, there are people who are watching this, who have are or will experience who have experienced are experiencing 0:02:20 - 0:02:56 or will experience this very thing that there are challenges that you have faced, are facing or will face that God has purposefully put into your life designed for you to show more of God's goodness to others through how you react, through how you react to those prompts. In this case, God was glorified 0:02:55 - 0:03:31 . In other words, His goodness was made more apparent through what Jesus did and through what this man did. And we'll see that as we read the chapter. It's not a, a an overstatement to summarize the, the purpose of the mortal life of God's servants as taking advantage of opportunities to manifest God's 0:03:30 - 0:04:10 character by doing things that would not otherwise happen. That's not their only purpose. They're also here to progress themselves. But their principal purpose for being here is to show others what God is like beyond what they would otherwise know by doing what would not otherwise be done. That is the 0:04:10 - 0:04:43 call that's extended to all of us. So the label servant, it's a description and anyone that fills it fits it. So later in the chapter, what we'll read is this man says, since the world began, was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind. If this man were not of God, he could 0:04:42 - 0:05:11 do nothing. So what we'll see later is that this man, he's healed by Jesus. He knows that this has never happened before that they know of the cultural history does not include anyone being miraculously healed who had been born blind and he testifies of Christ. And he says, because he did what has never 0:05:11 - 0:05:44 been done. He went beyond the bounds of the limits. We knew he is obviously a man of God. And so he glorified God. In this case through glorifying Jesus, he did not glorify him as we'll see later at this time, verse 32 and 33 as the son of God because he did not yet know he was the son of God. This statement 0:05:43 - 0:06:13 was just based on the fact that he had been miraculously healed. And as we'll see later, he called Jesus a prophet as a result. He said, this guy is at least a prophet. Then he said it to other people. And um here I have to mention a little bit about God's justice. So this man obviously suffered his 0:06:13 - 0:06:31 whole life until now. And we, I don't know how old he was, but he was old enough that his parents referred to the Pharisees to him to find out what had happened. He he said, they said, well, he's old enough. You ask him. Um but how and he was young enough that his parents were still alive. So that gives 0:06:31 - 0:07:00 us a window. But obviously he had borne the weight of being blind his whole life and it it wasn't, he wasn't just one year old. And this is very important. There's a cost that you bear in order to glorify God and you could call it unmerited suffering. So that jesus' disciples right here in verse two 0:06:59 - 0:07:21 , they asked him, they said, what did he do or what did his parents do that? He had to carry this, excuse me, this weight of sin or uh of blindness. What sin did he commit that or his parents commit? Did he carry this weight of blindness? And Jesus said us for God's glory that, that this, that this happened 0:07:21 - 0:07:53 to him. And you say, well, dang, I mean, that seems kind of unfair why, I mean, not everyone has to do that. Well, that's true. That's true. But how much joy did this man have versus anyone else? So you cant squish all this down too? Just one single, absolute scale, right? It's, it's multifaceted like 0:07:52 - 0:08:19 a diamond. Ok? But if you, if you were born blind and then you lived your life this way for a long time and then God healed you, he gave you your sight. How much more would you appreciate that sight than anyone else? This is a real, it's a real mystery. It shouldn't be, but it's not really something 0:08:18 - 0:08:46 we take up and live every day. And that's a shame because we're the ones that lose, we, we lose out on so much joy from the things that are already around us because we don't realize the value of what we have typically until we lose it. But what, what treasure, great faith gives us to allow God to put 0:08:46 - 0:09:15 us in the circumstances that, that others might simplify and, and, and consider to be negative, even if, even if we're born into it and we stay in it our whole life because he's, he's pumping up our appreciation, our value for this thing that then we get to have forever. You see God's purpose is our 0:09:15 - 0:09:45 long term joy, our eternally enduring joy. That's what He's all about is increasing that and so often we ask him to do things or not to do things. And we, we choose actions ourselves that are not for that purpose, they're against that purpose. And we want him to increase our short term pleasure or decrease 0:09:43 - 0:10:13 our present suffering without any regard to our long term joy. And when you ask things like that, you're asking him to do something that contradicts his law, his character and his will. And when you act to that end, you are acting against God. You're fighting him because that's not what he wants. He 0:10:13 - 0:10:45 wants better things for you than you want for yourself. And as he heals your blindness to these things, you'll come to see this, you'll come to see a world that existed and you had no idea it was so much better than the darkness that you knew before. So those of you who feel like you're carrying crosses 0:10:45 - 0:11:21 and I don't diminish that you are actually doing. So there is a process whereby you come to see that cross that you're carrying is a gift and a treasure in the ladder towards Christ who was raised up on the same towards the father. And just as his being raised up on that cross in a public place in a 0:11:21 - 0:11:49 spot where a lot of people could see, expose them to greater witness of love, a greater degree of love than they could ever see before your suffering for the sake of Christ. How you react to that, you, you've gotta do it well, ok. It's not just like grit your teeth and bear it, your strength that you 0:11:49 - 0:12:27 get from God as you faithfully endure that. And the joy you show in the midst of suffering will be a light that, that shines like a beacon to those who hunger and thirst for more of God. And it will testify of Him in a way that goes far beyond what words can do. So when these things come, don't be so 0:12:27 - 0:13:04 hasty to ask God to take them away. In um in the book of Mormon, there's a story of, of this, this uh this prince named Ammon. He's, he's the heir to the throne of his father, a great kingdom. And he's overcome by a desire to, to love all people because of, of a conversion experience he had and, and 0:13:04 - 0:13:28 he was forgiven by God of his sins. And the first thing he wanted to do was find a way that, that he could do the greatest good for everyone. And so he thought that he would go to the rival kingdom where I mean, these were their, their sworn enemies and they wanted nothing more than to kill, not just 0:13:28 - 0:13:53 the kingdom, but he, he was the figurehead of the kingdom. He's the crown prince. And he said, no, I, I'm just gonna set aside the kingdom. I want to spend the rest of my life being a servant to my enemies. And he knew full well that the most likely outcome was that they would kill him and he didn't 0:13:53 - 0:14:17 care. And so he went over there and he became a servant to the king. And the first thing that happens to him is is he is in a place with other servants where they're guarding the, the king's flocks. And this, this uh band of marauders comes to steal the sheep. And his reaction wasn't like, oh dang, here 0:14:16 - 0:14:53 we go. Too bad. This is, I just have to bear this suffering for the sake of God. His reaction was oh goody. He says fantastic. Now I get to show these people how good my God is. And when you have trust in God like that, which, which seems like some major thing. But it's actually in a way, it's, it's 0:14:53 - 0:15:20 the most passive thing in the world. You know, as we're flooded by the smallest part of how good God is in our own experience. It's the easiest thing in the world to just let that flow through you. It's like, you know, I've, I've said this, I've used this, this, this uh analogy before. It's like judo 0:15:20 - 0:15:46 or tai chi. You know, you just let it flow through you. All you have to do is get out of the way. Basically. I mean, I'm not trying to minimize the necessity of using your, your heart might mind and strength, but whatever, whatever God gives you is so much greater than anything. You can give another 0:15:45 - 0:16:21 . So relatively speaking, it's, it's about as minimal as just getting out of the way and how amazing is it that no matter what could possibly happen to you in this world that, that God has overcome that, that Jesus came and he handled worse than that. And because he did that and he completed that we 0:16:20 - 0:17:01 can respond to anything in life with instantaneous trust in God, perfect confidence and no matter how much it hurts, no matter how hard it is, how alone you might feel, no matter how long it endures, no matter how impossible it might seem. We have the strength of a God who overcomes all things who so 0:17:01 - 0:17:44 freely makes us capable of rising up to what would crush us otherwise, in a second. And as we look to Him in all things all the time, we can't doubt we can't fear all of those things can only happen in as much as you've taken your sights off of Him. You've deviated from him in your purpose. Because as 0:17:43 - 0:18:09 you look to him, like like the the brass serpent that Moses put up on the, on the rod so that anyone who had been bitten by these poisonous serpents that were plaguing them would be healed. If we, if we focus our view on the Lord and all of our heart and all of our action, all of our motive, the deep 0:18:09 - 0:18:50 stuff, it's all on Him, you cannot help but be overwhelmingly full of his light. And that's what it means to have your eye single to the glory of God and your body will be full of light. This was what happened to Steven when he was stoned for the Lord's sake. His, his involuntary reaction. His heart 0:18:49 - 0:19:31 was so thoroughly focused on God that his involuntary reaction was to plead with the Lord that he would not hold this against them and imagine a peace and a power that surpasses any pain. And I think that you could probably only imagine that, I think a person could only imagine that to the extent that 0:19:31 - 0:20:05 they've experienced suffering. And and it's through experiencing that, that we can imagine the equal and opposite. And it's through imagining the equal and opposite that we can begin to find the motivation to obtain it because it carries a tremendous cost. So why was this man still blind? If it was the 0:20:05 - 0:20:33 will of the Lord that he not be blind? This is a great mystery. And it's an example of a, a larger question, which is something like why is there the opportunity to do miracles at all? Because if you, if you can only work in God's power according to God's will, how is it that whatever that is hasn't 0:20:32 - 0:21:12 already been done? The answer is the person matters, that man was still blind because as he said, no one had ever healed a man born blind and it wasn't until Jesus came that there was a way, this isn't something that, that I, I'm not sure how to phrase this correctly. But um well, ok, actually I addressed 0:21:12 - 0:21:39 this in a later slide, so we'll come back to that. Um But the slide is something like greater miracles indicate greater power and greater power, indi indicates greater godliness. And that might not be terribly clear. So we'll clear it up when we get there. But this is completely tied to the idea that 0:21:39 - 0:22:04 it's the purpose of servants to manifest the works of God. And so to the extent that you know Him, you can do that, we are to make earth more like heaven. Well, you can only do that to the extent that you are like God. There are some deep, deep. Um Let me rephrase that there are some, some incredibly 0:22:04 - 0:22:28 important ideas that are connected to that and I just don't have time to touch them. All right now. Ok. But what I, what I did want to say is I wanted to share this verse from Matthew 13. This is verse 17 where Jesus says for verily, I say unto you that many prophets and righteous men have desired to 0:22:28 - 0:22:55 see those things which he see and have not seen them and to hear those things which you hear and have not heard them. Well, why not? Because Jesus wasn't there. He was born and lived at one time and there were many things that could only happen while, uh during his mortal life and these people who desired 0:22:55 - 0:23:26 these things, they could only receive them if they happen to live. At the same time as Jesus up to that point, I, I, I'll rephrase that it was not yet possible for their desires to be fulfilled because Jesus had to be born first. Now Jesus made this promise that that is a mystery to people. He said greater 0:23:26 - 0:23:51 things. He said you'll do greater things than these because I'm here because I'm going to the father, you will do greater things than this. The full meaning of this is tied to what I'm trying to get at here. That uh well, there are several ideas here wrapped up and, and I don't, I don't think I can clearly 0:23:50 - 0:00:00 parse through them right now in this while getting to everything else we need to get to. But I'll, I'll just, I'll just leave those breadcrumbs there and maybe you can disentangle them somewhat. So you can ask me questions if you'd like. So let's keep moving. Um He said as long as I am in the world, 0:00:00 - 0:24:41 I am the light of the world that's in verse five of John chapter nine. Before we get into what it means to be the light of the world. Let me ask you this. Why did he qualify this by saying as long as I am in the world? So if you study this, you're going to hit scriptures like when he said um the night 0:24:41 - 0:25:05 cometh wherein no man worketh wherein no man can work. He says, work while it is still day. And that's another reference to what they could do while he was still there. Versus after he leaves, he says, where I'm going, you cannot come, you know the way. But basically, he says, you, you need to, to live 0:25:05 - 0:25:36 according to what I've already shown you through my example in order to come up to the place where I can meet you again and teach you more. He says, I'm, I'm going to prepare a place for you that you could be with me. What is this all about again? The person matters? So, so one reason that we, one of 0:25:36 - 0:26:01 the many reasons that we get so little out of the the bounty of stories about Jesus that we have is that we assume that far more of what he said only applies to him than what he attend intended. There are obviously things about Jesus that are unique to Jesus. But the question is how much of how he was 0:26:01 - 0:26:35 and what he said, are we meant to be able to do and say ourselves how much of who he is? Should we be as well? He said, what manner of man ought you to be? Even as I am, he said, be perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect. So shouldn't our assumption flip? The assumption is, so we we, we were 0:26:35 - 0:26:59 , I'm just gonna do an echo of, of another point here because it's, it sort of rhymes with this when we're suffering, we assume that God wants us to stop suffering. What if we flip that assumption around? And every time something unpleasant happened, we assumed it was so that we could show God, uh I'm 0:26:58 - 0:27:22 sorry, show God's glory to others through how we respond. You think that would make the world a worse place or a better place? You think that would give you more joy or less joy, you think that would bring more people to Jesus or fewer people and by how much more or less. And so here's another opportunity 0:27:22 - 0:27:50 to flip our default assumption. And instead of assuming that what Jesus said only applies to Him, maybe we should interpret it as a call to live so that it's true for us too. Wouldn't that be something right now? If, if, if someone has a basic, I should say a limited understanding of, of the scriptures 0:27:49 - 0:28:17 and who doesn't? Right? But uh if we're not too familiar with the scriptures, it might seem exceedingly blasphemous for someone to suggest that that quote unquote normal people like you and me should go around saying I am the light of the world. If, if I with no context with no uh preparation or disclaimer 0:28:16 - 0:28:44 , if I stood up and, and you know, I called, I, I said, I'm giving a talk at such and such a place on such and such a date and people showed up and I started that talk by saying, not quoting Jesus but saying, I, Rob Smith in the light of the world. What, what do you think the reaction would be? I don't 0:28:44 - 0:29:09 think it would be positive. Right? Everyone would say that's blasphemy. Who the heck does this guy think he is? This guy is nuts. That, that would probably be the nicest thing you'd hear, right? And yet doesn't Jesus say ye are the light of the world. He does look it up, it's there. He tells his disciples 0:29:08 - 0:29:31 that he's leaving. And he says, as long as I am in the world here, he says this as long as I am in the world, I'm the light of the world and in another place in John, he says, ye are the light of the world. He says, live your life so that when people see how you live, they glorify God. I think I quoted 0:29:30 - 0:29:59 this somewhere but I don't know where it is in this presentation. Maybe it's later. He says that is there a higher call than that, Jesus commanded us normal people to live. Such that when people see us that to the extent that people get to know you that they will know God better because you need to be 0:29:59 - 0:30:27 more like God than they are. And that's how that is true. That's the only way that could be true. Isn't that something? Ok. So now that you're completely overwhelmed, let me give you, let me chop a little chunk off of that corner to make it bite sized. One of the greatest ways that you can show God's 0:30:27 - 0:31:04 goodness is by trusting Him in your reactions to the demands of life. That's one of the greatest ways. So don't think of this as a charge to become high and mighty like God is, think of it as yielding to him in all things, getting out of his way and letting his goodness take the place of whatever it 0:31:04 - 0:31:49 was that was in you before. All right. So the underlying point here is that your presence matters on this planet, you matter, or at least you should, your presence should make a difference on the Godliness of the outcome of any situation. If you're involved in something, whatever that thing is, should 0:31:48 - 0:32:21 end up more like it would be if God himself were there, what a tremendous blessing we have. And then when everything's said and done and it's all wrapped up, you will have a catalog of experiences in your life where you know that you received and made use of the tremendous gift that God gave us to act 0:32:21 - 0:32:51 in his place. Not only that, but to actually make a difference because like the man born blind, he would have stayed blind if Jesus was not there. Now, this is kind of going off the script, but we read in another place of when Jesus sends out his disciples and they come back, there's the man whose son 0:32:50 - 0:33:13 had, had a lot of issues for a long time and he was throwing himself in a fire and tearing out himself. And, and the man asks Jesus why the disciples couldn't kill him or cast out the demon or however you want to spin. It doesn't matter how the disc for this purpose, it doesn't matter how the disciples 0:33:13 - 0:33:36 couldn't solve that problem. And Jesus said, why? But the point is his disciples couldn't handle it, but Jesus could. And so we see that there's a hierarchy of these things, there's a hierarchy of these things. And there's situations where more or less of God's will, will be manifest depending on how 0:33:36 - 0:34:09 much like or unlike God, the people are, this is, this is important. I think, I think that um the, the, the part of the Christian world that believes in something like priesthood or divine authority, they believe it's, it's sort of an all or nothing affair and it's not, it's by degrees, it's by degrees 0:34:08 - 0:34:49 and it's situational. And therefore it, it, it um one way to describe priesthood is simply as how much you know about God while fully living it. And so of course, that is also situational what we end up doing as we take these circumstances where God's power is given on limited basis. And that does tend 0:34:49 - 0:35:11 to be an all or nothing affair. You know, God, God telling someone you have power over water and whatever you tell water to do, water will do and we swap out the order of things and we think that that's the greater blessing. It's not, it's not because it's limited to whatever context the gift is bound 0:35:11 - 0:35:43 to. But if you have an understanding, you can apply that at all times in all places, principles are higher than rules. But we're broaching many topics that are probably not good to broach right now. Um So I'll ask you this, we're talking about a man who's born blind, who are the men born blind in your 0:35:43 - 0:36:11 life? Who are the people around you in circumstances that it's the Lord's will to change? And what kind of person would you have to be to have a, a role in that? Who are the men born blind within your own life? So not externally but within yourself. What are things in your life that are seeming burdens 0:36:10 - 0:36:43 that you can change your attitude towards? To turn into manifestations of God's goodness. It says it'll make weak things strong. What are your weaknesses? What are your challenges and how can you turn to God so that he can turn these things into demonstrations of His goodness. We all have seen stories 0:36:42 - 0:37:13 of drug addicts or someone struggling with some easily recognizable, externally measurable problem that's very useful for God's purposes and that's good sometimes the deeper issues mean so much more. And those who see those, you know, this is, this is like uh so I, I mentioned the hierarchy thing before 0:37:13 - 0:37:32 , I'll, I'll just dive a little bit more into that. Do you remember in the Exodus, the priests of Pharaoh? They were, they were, I always call this a miracle dance off like uh the priests did something, sorry, Moses would do something. The priest would match it. Moses would do something, the priest would 0:37:32 - 0:37:58 match it and this had to keep escalating until the priest ran out of firepower. Or you look at Elijah and the priests of ball and the priests of all could do things. But God believed in um I'm sorry, Elijah believed in a God who can do all things. And so he set up a test that he knew that they would 0:37:58 - 0:38:22 not be able to pass and he prepared the sacrifice and they dumped water all over the place. They even dug a ditch and filled it with water around it. And then he called down fire and God showed that he was superior that God was superior. So um this is the way it goes. But if you just have the entry level 0:38:21 - 0:38:45 understanding of God, it won't be sufficient to show the difference. So going back to the drug addicts, there are alcoholics and drug addicts and all other kinds of addictions that people turn to God and they, they are cured of. This is beautiful. It's wonderful. But what happens is people come out of 0:38:45 - 0:39:12 the woodwork and they say, well, sure. But there are plenty of people who have turned away from addictions without God. No, this is where we have to employ a little bit more specificity. The fact is that God is so good that, that he allows his patents to be used without license. What do I mean by that 0:39:12 - 0:39:38 ? There's a great deal of goodness that God has placed on this earth without marking it with his brand. All things testify of Christ, all good things come from God. However, he's so good that he's given a huge selection of good things we can do without explicitly believing in God. So you can go and get 0:39:38 - 0:40:06 married and have babies without believing in God. You can sow crops and harvest them and uh eat and have all the food you need. Without believing in God, you can build a house. You can, you can write novels uh leaning heavily on the creative quickening of the intellect, which comes through the spirit 0:40:06 - 0:40:34 exclusively and still not believe in God. He, he gives us tremendous power without needing, requiring us to, to, to explicitly see where it comes from and believe in Him. And that's ok. And there are tons of people that believe in Him and they have very incorrect views of Him and he still pours out his 0:40:33 - 0:41:09 power to an extent and useful information even in a cloud of uh limited understanding, but there comes a level of challenge where nothing less than an explicit God will. Do you have to explicitly believe Him and know what he is like in order to face those challenges? No, those challenges are not nearly 0:41:08 - 0:41:31 as rare as most people believe. I call this. Uh I don't know, you call this something like the cancer paradigm. So we all know people who have had cancer, right? And you probably know someone who's died of cancer. But if I were to ask you, what, what do you think the likelihood of you having to go through 0:41:31 - 0:41:56 something like that is, you'd probably give me a really low percentage. Why? Because when we're faced with really difficult things, the number one coping mechanism is to pretend it could never happen to you. You, you find a way to exclude yourself from the consideration. This happens with truth as well 0:41:56 - 0:42:18 . The, the number one response to new truth is to flee from it. And if you don't do that, you'll, you'll, you'll dedicate your efforts to finding a way to dismiss it out of hand without feeling guilty. That's human nature. Those two reactions. And if you can't do either of those, you might try to kill 0:42:18 - 0:42:43 the person, um either for real all the way or something approaching that by assassinating their character in ways that, you know, are not true again, you're just looking to escape instead of facing it. So we're all going to die. Right. That's death is a part of life. Well, that it's believed that we're 0:42:43 - 0:43:02 all going to die. I, I don't, uh, I don't think there's a long list of people who think that that's not true or think there'll be an exception to that. But who has faced their death. Very few, some have, but very few have acknowledged this and integrated it into the way they approach life. So if you 0:43:02 - 0:43:21 look across the sea of humanity, just the people you actually know and you assemble a list of every bad thing that could happen in life. It's a really long and terrible list, isn't it? You probably never thought about this. Did you know that in the space of possibilities in life, you could experience 0:43:20 - 0:43:41 basically all of those things. The only limitation is something that kills you precludes anything else from happening, right? So you look at job and people say, wow, well that you know, a lot of people don't even think that job was real, but even folks who do they say? Well, I mean that was he was just 0:43:40 - 0:44:11 an example, good thing. We don't have to go through anything like that. That is a data point on the path. It is, it is a step on the way Jesus is the way the truth and the life and a job like situation is on the way. So you need greater power with God. You have to find it because that's what's required 0:44:10 - 0:44:51 to contend with it all. And escaping is not the way overcoming is the way. So how do we prepare for these men born blind in our own life or in the lives of those we interact with? Well, you have to become more like God. The power of God is in living as he does so often. The consideration is, well, um 0:44:51 - 0:45:09 , God bestows his power upon people and there's this, this bucket called the commandments. And there's this bucket called this power. And there's separate buckets and different people have different theories on their relationship. But, but a lot of folks believe if you keep the commandments, God will 0:45:09 - 0:45:35 dump his power onto you. But here's a secret. They're the same bucket, they're the same bucket. Its a different way of looking at the same exact thing. God's power is in God's character. You wanna know what God's will is. It's to do what he would do in your place every time. That's the answer to the 0:45:35 - 0:45:56 question. Now, what he would do is a different question, but it's a lot easier to answer because there's a way to figure it out. If, if you are in the place where God's will is this amorphous ephemeral thing. And who knows? And it changes. It's willy nilly. It's arbitrary. Well, the only way you could 0:45:56 - 0:46:21 find out is to pray and you better hope he tells you. And most of the time he won't, the reason is because God doesn't repeat himself very often. And he's already told you because he's giving you a whole book full of what he does when and why and you don't use it, you might not even know what it says 0:46:21 - 0:46:50 . So how does the use the acquisition of and the use of God's power? How does that manifest His glory? Well, in 13 581, we read, there was not any man who could do a miracle in the name of Jesus, save he were cleansed every wit from his iniquity. And this is another dovetail into the idea, the greater 0:46:49 - 0:47:13 power equals greater godliness. And we'll come back to that if this sideshow were better organized, I would have coupled those things together. So let's transition now uh as we can continue reading, um let's, let's talk about this principle. The need to leave former paradigms for higher blessings. Now 0:47:13 - 0:47:38 we're still in John chapter nine. But for this one, I wanted to start with this principle for Mark chapter two. And then we're gonna read it in John nine. So uh in Mark 221 and 22 we read this very, very familiar uh couplet from Jesus. He says, no man also sew with a piece of new cloth on an old garment 0:47:37 - 0:47:59 . Else, the new piece that fille it up, taketh away from the old and the rent is made worse and no man put new wine into old bottles. Else, the new wine doth burst the bottles and the wine is spilled and the bottles will be marred, but new wine must be put into new bottles. And so you'll hear these phrases 0:47:59 - 0:48:26 all the time. New wine, new bottles, patching an old garment, whatever. But what was he actually talking about? One, one tool you can use in figuring out uh the meaning of things that Jesus said is read the context of the passage or the verse. So in here in Mark two, this is preceded by and followed 0:48:25 - 0:48:56 by examples of people questioning what Jesus was doing because they were comparing it to what they already believed. Comparison to what you already believe is a false test of truth. So um years ago I wrote about a book called uh The Glory of God is Intelligence. And in there, you'll find this phrase 0:48:55 - 0:49:23 replacement truth. What people seek tends to be information that corroborates what they already believe. And Christians are not exempt from this aspect of human nature. But the most valuable things are the things that are most different from what we believe, not just additional to, but that contradict 0:49:22 - 0:49:57 what we already believe, why the set of things that corroborate, what we already believe is very small. The greater portion lies in line with differences to what we currently believe. So, um how can I make a brief case for that? Well, what exactly is happening when God teaches you something? His goal 0:49:57 - 0:50:21 is your change right. Your improvement, improvement requires change and holiness means not just better but different, different and better. You can't be different if you're the same. It's, it's pretty simple. Right? And yet when we're looking around for additional light and truth, the tendency is to 0:50:21 - 0:50:46 say I want new and I, I want better without different and that doesn't happen, whatever fits that bill is extremely limited. It's just right next to what you already have. But growth from God is vertical, it's not lateral, it's not horizontal, it's vertical. And so to grow more towards God, you have 0:50:46 - 0:51:10 to get more vertical and vertical change. It's not just bolting things on to what you already have, it's replacing what you already have with something better. That's something that makes folks really uncomfortable because I should say religious folks very uncomfortable because 11 attribute of people 0:51:09 - 0:51:37 that are religious is they tend to be attracted to the promise of never changing security. They really like the idea of if I change in these specific ways, then I will always be good. And most of them, most religious people were born into their religion, which means they never had to change at all. Now 0:51:37 - 0:52:06 , that's a really sweet deal. See what God says is to come to me will cost you everything and you're never done. It's, you're always on the altar, the fire is gone. What churches say is change in these specific ways and you get to ignore all the other things about you that are wrong and imperfect and 0:52:06 - 0:52:28 whatever and what people born into churches say is because of what my parents or grandparents or great grandparents did. I don't have to change at all cause I'm raised in these traditions and I know you have to make the three changes they make us make good for me and I have AAA license to sin in all 0:52:28 - 0:52:59 other ways. That's the, that's the deal. So Jesus says in, in the parable of the true vine um John 15, I'll just read it to you. It's not on the slide. He says, I am the true vine and my father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit. He taketh away. So guess what happens to those 0:52:59 - 0:53:21 people born in their religion who never change? They get taken away and thrown in the fire and every branch that beareth fruit. He purchased it that it may bring forth more fruit. So guess what? For the people that make changes and join a religion and then stop making changes. They become a dead branch 0:53:20 - 0:53:44 and they're chucked into the fire to be a living branch requires continuous fruit. And it Jesus says right here, if you bear fruit, you're gonna get purged so you can bring forth more fruit. He that abideth in me and I in him the same bringeth forth much fruit for without me, you can do nothing in the 0:53:44 - 0:54:06 parable of the sower. He talks about this seed scattered everywhere and there are several types that don't even grow or, I mean, they don't even bear fruit at all. So, the stuff on the road doesn't even sprout their stuffs, uh their seeds on rocky soil and the, it sprouts but it won't grow roots. It's 0:54:05 - 0:54:33 burned up by the sun, et cetera. But the class that bears fruit, there's a massive difference in how much it bears. And so most people who are Christians don't realize that they do not bear fruit. And in the parable of the sower, they're not the ones bearing the fruit. And this is the reason because 0:54:32 - 0:55:02 they're stuck in their old garments and they're stuck in their old bottles. So let's read what the Pharisees did. How exactly they were evaluating Jesus based on their prior belief instead of the present evidence. So I will, I will go into what the alternative is. But let's just do this first verse seven 0:55:02 - 0:55:25 . Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies who can forgive sins? But God only that was their response to Jesus telling a man that his sins were forgiven. They said you can't do that. That's blasphemy. You can't act like God. That's bad. No, actually that is the point is for us to act like God. When you 0:55:25 - 0:55:54 see someone acting like God, it could be that they're lying or that they are uh hypocrites. But that ought to be what we expect a man of God or woman of God to do, to act like God. That's what we're called to do is act like God. That's not blasphemy. That's glorifying God. It's the opposite. Verse 16 0:55:54 - 0:56:19 . How is it that He eat and drink with publicans and sinners? So they thought that that was unrighteous. And unfortunately, many people continue misunderstanding this today and they say, well, if you're like God, you're gonna hang out with sinners because that's what Jesus did. No, that's not what Jesus 0:56:19 - 0:56:44 did. It says in another place, these were people who came to him, he was not, he was not dwelling with people that stayed in their sins after meeting him and receiving sufficient reason to change. There were people who draw drew near to him seeking to improve. So it would be more correct to say former 0:56:43 - 0:57:19 publicans and former sinners or Republicans and sinners who are really trying to change. So if the element becomes improvement, then all of a sudden the tables flip and um tables flip faster than Jesus clearing the temple. And um what we see is that the stagnant folks, if you wanna find somebody who's 0:57:19 - 0:57:40 not progressing with God, the best place to look is in a church because they're convinced that they already have everything they need. You pick a random person in the gutter. They probably know that they're all jacked up. And that's why the publicans and sinners and the sinners and the harlots will go 0:57:40 - 0:58:09 to heaven before the Pharisees and the scribes. So, the, the people judging Jesus here, they didn't bother to take a closer look at what was going on and actually use their brains. They just had reduced their whole belief system to clear buckets of good and evil and they'll never, ever change. They didn't 0:58:08 - 0:58:26 stop to say, well, why is he eating and drinking with publicans and sinners? Is it the same as it would be if any old person did it? Is it the same as it would be if I did it or is he doing things that are different? Are there publicans and sinners that are responding to him eating and drinking with 0:58:26 - 0:00:00 them by coming to God? But they didn't bother doing that. They just said, well, anyone that that that hangs out with publicans and sinners is obviously evil. So we're done here. No need to look any deeper. Verse 18. Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast? But thy disciples fast. Not. 0:00:00 - 0:59:15 Now. This one is particularly interesting to me because they lumped in John here even though they didn't believe in John. And so what you'll what you'll find with those that criticize those who are more righteous than them is they will nit pick those people according to standards. They do not themselves 0:59:15 - 0:59:48 keep the number of people that actually obeyed John were very few was very few and hardly anyone believed him when he said this is the son of God about Jesus. Jesus himself made a comment about this in another place where this is where he says um he, he basically says, we've lamented and you haven't 0:59:48 - 1:00:12 mourned, we've celebrated and you haven't danced. Um He's, he's saying, and he says, there, he says, John came uh to you and he fasted and he, he lived in the wilderness and he deprived himself of all these worldly uh goods and experiences. And you wouldn't believe in him because you said he was too 1:00:12 - 1:00:32 austere and I came doing all these things and you wouldn't believe in me because you said I wasn't austere enough. So which is it because you can't have it both ways unless you're a liar. So choose one and either way they were condemned because they didn't believe John, they didn't obey him and they 1:00:32 - 1:00:56 certainly didn't believe and obey Jesus. And this is how these people are. They, um their position is not justifiable. It's not consistent logically because they're not after the truth. They're just looking for a way to feel good without changing. Verse 24. Why do they on the Sabbath day? That which 1:00:56 - 1:01:18 is not lawful? And so here he was criticized because their understanding of the Sabbath Day was different than his, of course, his was more correct. And so this, this is, um, you know, people will look at what Jesus did during his ministry and they'll say, well, he kept the law of Moses. It's just that 1:01:18 - 1:01:39 the, the people at the time had a corrupted idea of the law of Moses. Ok. Fine. Let's roll with that. But how could they know that their idea of the law of Moses was corrupted. So they weren't lying when they criticized Jesus to say you can't do that on the Sabbath day, they really thought that you couldn't 1:01:39 - 1:02:04 . And so he pointed out in cases like this, there were several tactics. He used, one was to show the logical contradiction of their belief to, to say this can't possibly be what you think it means. And here's why or if this is actually what it means, you need to change these other things that you do 1:02:03 - 1:02:28 because that's inconsistent with what you're saying you believe. And there's a third thing he did, which I think I have a slide on. Oh, is it later? Yeah, this is the third thing he did was use miracles as evidence against their traditions. In other words to say, if God will show his power through what 1:02:28 - 1:02:52 I'm doing, then clearly, what I'm doing is not against his commandments or his will. And so if, if your understanding deviates from what I'm doing and God's showing his approval through his power, then you're the one who's wrong, not me. So we'll get to that. OK. So let's continue with this theme of 1:02:52 - 1:03:12 the need to leave former paradigms to receive higher blessings. That's what we're talking about. So now we get into John nine. We we preface this uh taking it from Mark two and now we're going to get to John Nine. It's the same theme verse six. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground and made 1:03:11 - 1:03:35 , made clay of the spittle. And he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay and said unto him, go wash in the pool of silo, which is by interpretation, scent. He went his way therefore, and washed and came seeing skipping down to verse 13, they brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was 1:03:35 - 1:03:52 blind. And it was the Sabbath day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes. Then again, the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. He said unto them, he put clay upon my eyes and I washed and do sea. Therefore said, some of the Pharisees, this man is not of God because he keepeth 1:03:52 - 1:04:20 not the Sabbath day. Others said, how can a man that is a sinner? Do such miracles? And there was a division among them, let's tackle this in reverse. There was a division among them. So every time God manifests something new, it creates a split every single time. That's intentional because you can't 1:04:20 - 1:04:50 have an upward path without creating an equal and opposite downward path that you can't avoid that. It's just reality. So there's no such thing as staying the same when you're presented with a reaction point to stay, the same is to go down. So um when these manifestations occur, they do create a split 1:04:50 - 0:00:00 . And even amongst the Pharisees, these these hardcore blind folks, there were people that responded correctly or in the correct direction to the manifestations that Jesus provided. We see this obviously in in John three, when Nicodemus goes to Jesus, but there were others in his trial, for example, 0:00:00 - 1:05:32 at the end of his life, there were Pharisees that said this is illegal. We can't do this because it was night. The law said that there had to be a public trial. The law also said that people that bore false witness needed to carry the the penalty of the crime. They were accusing someone of and there 1:05:32 - 1:05:56 were many false witnesses where they, they couldn't produce a second or third to corroborate the story. And by the law, they should have been killed and they weren't. So there's that anyway. Um So the need to leave former paradigms for higher blessings. Let me ask you some questions. Why did Jesus take 1:05:56 - 1:06:23 up nasty filth from the ground in the city of Jerusalem? Spit in it, which that was also an unclean thing and then smear this stuff into the eyes of the blind man. What did that represent? And why was that important? And then he told him now leave and find your way as a blind man, find your way to this 1:06:23 - 1:06:53 pool. That's, that's kind of far away, especially if you're blind outside of the city. And by the way, it's called One Cent and wash your eyes in that water in that pool and he did and he was healed. What do you think that represents? So why didn't Jesus heal him on the spot? Why didn't he give him his 1:06:53 - 1:07:21 sight within the city? Why did he need to smear the poop dust? Pee nasty city streets of ancient time into the guy's eyes within the city of Jerusalem. Why did John the Baptist preach outside of Jerusalem in the wilderness? Why did he preach at the exact spot that the Israelites entered into the promised 1:07:21 - 1:07:57 land and the exact spot that Elijah was taken up? They're the same place. Why was Jesus baptized in that same place? These are important questions. So um I guess in an attempt to keep this somewhat focused, the imagery here, which again, you could go into very deeply, you could look up how the pool of 1:07:57 - 1:08:23 Siloam where that water came from. There's a lot here, but let's leave it at this. And uh by the way, we know that Jesus did not lead him to that pool. Jesus caused his eyes to get caked with the nasty and then he sent him packing. The man had to find a way to the pool. How do we know this? Because later 1:08:23 - 1:08:40 on when the Pharisees asked who, who did this? He says, I don't know he would have known if Jesus had led him because Jesus would have been there when the guy could see. And you could say maybe he led him there and then just disappeared because Jesus did have this ninja Vanish thing that he could do 1:08:39 - 1:09:14 . Um But that's not what happened. Ok. So um he was led out of the city, he washed his eyes so he had to leave the paradigm of Jerusalem. So he, he was there as a beggar. He was there every day begging and you know, who came by every day and knew about him, the priests, the Pharisees, did they heal him 1:09:13 - 1:09:40 ? No, they couldn't. No one ever had done anything like that. His problem persisted. His problem was not solved. And Jesus said, you want a solution to your problem. Go somewhere else. You've already tried everything available here, go somewhere else. And what was part of that process explicitly demonstrating 1:09:39 - 1:10:03 the connection between his blindness and the filth of the city streets. Now the washing your feet, you might not know this, but it's connected to symbolically the, when you're walking in the streets, you're walking through the bodily refuse of all the people and animals. It's the sins of the world. It's 1:10:03 - 1:10:36 the sin from the fall of Adam. It's a fallen world. It's all around you. OK? He picked this stuff up and he put it right in the guy's eyes. So, um and then he told me, wash it off. So he made the, the problem more obvious and that was part of helping the man find the solution. He did the same thing when 1:10:36 - 1:10:59 he was healing the man who said, uh Lord help mine unbelief. He basically said, so you're telling me that your son has had this issue his whole life and you're only now doing something about it. That's pretty pathetic. And the guy's like, yeah, I know, but now I'm trying to be better and so you have 1:10:58 - 1:11:19 to call attention to the problem as part of helping people find it the, the motivation to make the necessary sacrifice to fix it. Maybe if he hadn't smeared poop in his eyes, the guy wouldn't have said uh, yeah, I'll walk to this pool. Maybe his faith was just enough to let Jesus smear poop in his eyes 1:11:19 - 1:11:46 . Poop dirt. And then after that, he's like, oh, well, now I'm in it. I better better walk to the lake. I wouldn't have done that or pool. I wouldn't have done that before. But now I've got a good reason. You see, sin is nothing more than choosing something that is less than what is best. And so part 1:11:46 - 1:12:08 of the solution to the problem is coming to see that it's less than what is best. Uh John says that when we love God, we don't find his commandments grievous. Why? Because they're what's best and why wouldn't you want that? And if you don't want it, it's because you don't believe it's what's best. And 1:12:08 - 1:12:27 that means you don't believe that God is good or you don't believe that what you're exposed to is coming from him as sort of a different problem. All right. But that, that question of who, who it's coming from, that's very important. And we'll get to that in a moment later in this chapter. It's also 1:12:27 - 1:12:55 a great example of that. Um OK. So I think I accidentally left this portion on here when I moved the rest to a different slide. But this is a great transition to the fact that um Jesus did this on a Sunday or I'm sorry, Saturday on the Sabbath, uh which is a Saturday back then. So the, the, the laws 1:12:55 - 1:13:18 had restrictions on what could be done on the Sabbath day and the Pharisees interpreted those to include miracles. This was something Jesus was always getting in trouble for and he went out of his way to do it. This is an important thing. So when, when most people see a purported messenger of God doing 1:13:18 - 1:13:50 things that directly contradict their belief of what's righteous, they immediately tend to dismiss out of hand that person no matter what else they're doing or why they're doing it when they ought to expect this to happen, they ought to expect this to happen. Jesus went out of his way to do miracles 1:13:49 - 1:14:13 that proved that their traditions were false and I, I explained a little bit about the mechanism of that before. But he could have taught everything he taught without touching their sacred cow of the Sabbath. He, he, he didn't have to have his disciples eat wheat as they were walking through the fields 1:14:13 - 1:14:34 on a, on a Sabbath. He didn't have to heal this guy on a Sabbath. He could have done it on a different day. He did other healings on the Sabbath uh which we're about to read one. Why did he choose to directly confront that? This is a, a question. I don't know that I can give a good answer to without 1:14:33 - 1:14:59 appealing to ideas that, that I'd have to teach you first about machine learning. Actually, I think is the easiest way to describe this. But may, maybe there's a way let's read this and we'll see if I can do it. Uh Mark 25 through 11. Uh This is when the, the, the sick man's friends drop him through 1:14:59 - 1:15:17 a roof because they can't get to Jesus. They, they punch him right through the roof. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, son, thy sins be forgiven thee. And we could talk about that in greater detail, but we won't. But there were certain of the scribes sitting there and 1:15:17 - 1:15:38 reasoning in their hearts. Why Doth this man thus speak blasphemies who can forgive sins. But God only. So that's actually the same thing we just read about from John. And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, why reason you these things 1:15:37 - 1:16:03 in your hearts, it would be a good thing to pause here and discuss exactly what they did wrong, but suffice it to say that they were showing that their motives were not like God and they should have known better. But they, they thought they were using this gift of reason for evil purposes. Verse nine 1:16:02 - 1:16:23 , whether it is easier to say to the sick of the palsy, thy sins be forgiven thee or to say, arise and take up thy bed and walk. But that ye may know that the son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, he saith to the sick of the palsy. I say unto thee arise and take up thy bed and go thy way into 1:16:22 - 1:16:50 thine house. So he says here explicitly that he he's doing this is the conditions did not exist to heal the man, even though the people had faith, the best he could do would say your sins are forgiven you, which by the way is the greater of the two blessings. But because these scribes were sitting there 1:16:50 - 1:17:20 judging him un righteously, he decided that um now they had pushed him over the line and given him a reason to heal this guy so that he could prove them wrong. So here's um oh yeah, I did put that on this slide. Sorry about that. So here from Luke 14 is the same idea. First one and it came to pass as 1:17:20 - 1:17:38 he went into the house of one of the Chief Pharisees to eat bread on the Sabbath day that they watched him and behold, there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy and Jesus answering spake unto the lawyers and Pharisees saying, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day? And they held their 1:17:38 - 1:18:08 peace and he took him and healed him and let him go. Now there's a few things we need to zoom in on here and one of them will get to again later, they watched him, we read elsewhere. They, they watched him for the purpose of finding something that was sufficient for them to dismiss him out of hand. That's 1:18:07 - 1:18:36 why many of the people that, that follow Jesus, they did it only because they were looking for a reason to deny him and we'll get back to that. But now let's talk about the fact that he asked them. Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Why wouldn't they answer him if it's what they believed? Why wouldn't 1:18:36 - 1:19:05 they just be open about it because they knew that he had stronger reasons than they did. They knew they had followed him, right? They, they were familiar with the, the way he worked and the things he knew, they knew that they could not justify their belief in the face of his reasons. And so they just 1:19:05 - 1:19:28 stayed quiet. Do we see this today? Absolutely, we do. In fact, I'd say in modern times it's more profound, uh prolific than at any other time because the internet provides so many opportunities for anonymity. And so you do find situations where people stay quiet, they won't ask you questions if they 1:19:28 - 1:19:55 have questions and they won't make comments if they have comments because they know that you will deprive them of their sufficient reasons to believe even more than you have already. And so they will hold their peace, but they will also snipe at you in forums where they don't have to put their name or 1:19:54 - 1:20:24 where you don't have an opportunity to reply and they do this because they know that if they did this to your face, you would crush them with logic and they don't want that. So now I want to say that till now we've been talking about miracles. Everything that I've said about miracles here being evidence 1:20:24 - 1:20:53 against what, what people thought was righteous. It's true for wisdom. Well, I don't know why I had inflection like that for wisdom. That's the end of the sentence. It's all equally true. One thing that you can fall prey to in reading the gospels is thinking that miracles are the best evidence. They're 1:20:53 - 1:21:27 not, miracles are down the chain in what is best, the best evidence is wisdom. It's reasoning because greater blessings result from that everything God does. It comes through faith. The greatest faith process is via reason. Once, once your evidence is so strong that it qualifies as a miracle, the blessings 1:21:26 - 1:21:45 you receive through that channel have to diminish because all things come through faith and you have less faith. If you have to be shown a miracle to believe than you do, if you can believe it through reason. And Jesus said this in one place, he says, blessed are you? He's talking to the apostles. Blessed 1:21:45 - 1:22:09 . Are you because you've seen me after his resurrection? But more blessed are those who believe on your words. He says that why? Because it's greater faith. Now, here is the chain and I'm, I've told you this before. I'll keep telling you it's wisdom then miracles and calamities and, and these are overlapping 1:22:08 - 1:22:33 gradients. This is very important. So by the time Jesus did miracles, there was already an awful lot of wisdom that he had shown and we read things like Jesus did. Well, the the man born blind is an example of this, but we read things that he had done things no one else had done as far as miracles. But 1:22:33 - 0:00:00 we also read that he taught with greater wisdom than anyone had ever heard. So the wisdom is also evidence against what people thought was righteous. And do we see this in Jesus's teaching? He does, he does use reason all the time when, when people so uh I didn't include it in here because goodness, 0:00:00 - 1:23:24 this is already long enough. Look this one up in Mark two. He responds with reasoning to these contentions. They say, well, what about this? What about that? And he gives a rock solid bomb proof explanation of why they're wrong. He's, he's basically says that can't be true and here's why and it's sufficient 1:23:23 - 1:23:51 every time. So wisdom comes first, miracles come second. And by the time you see the miracles, you can rest assured that there are fewer blessings to be had. But it's on a gradient. It's not one then two, then three. there's a a big old overlap here between the three, but the one follows the other, the 1:23:50 - 1:24:21 apex follows. So one reason that miracles are a lot more limited than folks realize is um that people don't react to them. The thing the way you expect that they would and you wouldn't either. So John 98, the neighbors, therefore, and they so this is the the man was, was given his sight, the neighbors 1:24:20 - 1:24:42 . Therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind said is not this, he that sat and begged. They obviously knew him. He had been there his whole life and the people that live right there with him his whole life, they're like, this is the same guy like this guy can see, but he's obviously 1:24:41 - 1:25:08 he's the same guy as before in verse nine. Some said this is he others said he is like him but he said I am here. Therefore, they said unto him, how were thine eyes open? OK, fair question. But can we just stop for a second and try to figure out how is it the people that had known him his whole freaking 1:25:08 - 1:25:37 life all of a sudden pretended like but I'm not sure if this is the same guy. He was, he was wearing the same clothes as before in the he was there just a few hours before. How could they not think it was the same guy? He didn't magically look any different. He just, he could see this is an example of 1:25:37 - 1:26:04 how delusional people become and how easily they do so to contort and twist so that they don't have to confront, they don't have to deal with and process a miracle when it happens. Look at Egypt, look at how long it took the Pharaoh to figure things out if he ever did. It is debatable. That's what it 1:26:04 - 1:26:28 took. So so on the one hand, don't think, oh God, please send miracles because then everything will be so much more obvious. No, it won't actually not really. But two, open your eyes and see the miracles they've already happened in three. Look even further and see the wisdom because there's a lot more 1:26:27 - 1:27:00 of that. It is almost never the case that anyone responds how they should to miracles and it doesn't matter how tremendous they are. All right. Next principle, the importance of testifying of the truth. You might think that that means some marvelous tremendous thing. You gotta stand there shirtless with 1:27:00 - 1:27:27 chains on your arms like a bendy and the painting. Um No. Right. It's, it's almost always so much simpler than that. Just say the facts. That's all you gotta do. Just say the facts. You don't have to deliver some, you know, be all, end all exposition on some doctrinal topic to testify of the truth. Just 1:27:27 - 1:27:53 say men can't be women and women can't be men. Just say, I find it hard to believe that the the fastest successful vaccine ever created took something like four years and you've done it in four months. I find that hard to believe. Just say the facts, right? If someone has answered, here's a wisdom thing 1:27:53 - 1:28:14 . If someone has answered questions that you've had your whole entire life about the gospel and yet have never found the answer to in spite of being a member of a church for your whole life, maybe you should say, hey, this person had answers to questions that I had my whole life. That is a truthful statement 1:28:13 - 1:28:43 . If some dude heals you and you're blind, you ought to say some dude healed me and I was blind. Now in all of that, you're, you're going far enough and you're not going too far and you can go too far if this man when he was asked, maybe we should read that. Now, John 910 therefore said, they unto him 1:28:43 - 1:29:04 , how were thine eyes opened? He said, he answered and said, a man that is called Jesus made clay and anointed mine eyes and said unto me, go to the pool of silo and wash and I went and washed and I received sight. They said, they then said, they unto him. Where is he? He said, I know not. They say unto 1:29:04 - 1:29:26 the blind man again, what sayest thou of him that he hath opened thine eyes. He said, he is a prophet. So look at what they asked and look at what the guy said. How were your eyes opened? A man called Jesus made clay, smeared it on my eyes. And he told me go to the pool Siloam and wash. I did it. And 1:29:26 - 1:29:54 then I could see that's as to the point as you can get. It's literally just what happened. He didn't say a holy man performed a miracle and cured me of my blindness. And he's the best thing that ever happened in the world and everybody should drop everything and follow him. He said, a man called Jesus 1:29:54 - 1:30:17 because he knew that was his name. He made clay, he smeared on my eyes. I told me go wash, I did and now I can see just the facts man. And they said, where is he? He said, I don't know because he didn't know right. Just, and then, and then they asked him again. Well, well, what do you think of him? And 1:30:17 - 1:30:38 the man said, he's prophet again, that's four words. He didn't launch into this 10 paragraph. He is the fulfillment of every prophecy. He is the son of God. He is the Messiah. Let me tell you all about it. He didn't say that. He just said, basically, well, he's at least a prophet. Obviously, he healed 1:30:37 - 0:00:00 me miraculously, he's a prophet. No, there are many people who could do something like this and who have not done something like this and we need to fix that. I will get to that more about that later. Well, later now, I guess. Let's see. Sorry, there's a lot here. I don't exactly remember the order, 0:00:00 - 1:31:29 but this is not what I was thinking was next. We'll get to more about it. Here's another principle. Praising God requires you to factually acknowledge the work of his servants, including yourself, including yourself. So calling good, good and calling evil evil. You start on you. You don't make excuses 1:31:28 - 1:31:55 for the jacked up things. You do, you own it and you fix it and you don't, you don't uh half step on the good things that you do, you call it like it is when you do good things, even if you're not blaring a trumpet before men for the alms, you do. You still need to say those things are good because remember 1:31:54 - 1:32:19 you're demonstrating God, you have to show people how good God is. And if you downplay what good means, how are you doing that? You're supposed to be doing the opposite, not, not artificially amplifying it, but really demonstrating how good it is. And so, um here's, here's a real life example of this 1:32:18 - 1:32:41 . I know a gentleman who he decided it wasn't um the best use of his time to keep going to church on Sundays. But he really liked the idea of having a dedicated time where he was focused completely on God. And so he goes to homeless shelter during that same time every week and he volunteers and when 1:32:41 - 1:33:09 they don't have anything for him to do, he just talks to people. And I, I think that's a beautiful thing. So that's, that's how you, you, you have to factually acknowledge good wherever you find it and evil. So um if, if, if this guy, if they said, well, where were you on Sunday? And he's like, uh I 1:33:09 - 1:33:38 , I just was doing stuff, you know, the facts state. I was in a homeless shelter. I was chatting to a guy or I was helping them feed folks or clean or whatever you do. And that's very different than saying, oh, I go every Sunday, I go to a homeless shelter. Everybody look at me there, there are differences 1:33:38 - 1:34:06 here. So in John 924 this is how the Pharisees reacted to this guy. They said give God the praise. We know that this man is a sinner. Now, there are two parts to this one. They were saying that in factually describing what Jesus had done for Him, that the man was not giving God the praise that He was 1:34:06 - 1:34:37 giving Jesus, the praise. Well, can you bear witness to the things that God does without explaining how he did them? Would it be to the detriment of the people there to have the story of the man gaining his sight without Jesus? If he cut that part of the story out, would it help or hurt the people? It 1:34:37 - 1:35:00 would hurt them because the path through which he received that blessing was also available to everyone else because they also could go to Jesus and learn more about the father and experience more of the father. This comes back to what I said in the beginning about. There's an awful lot that Jesus said 1:35:00 - 1:35:24 about himself that we're supposed to be able to say about ourselves too if we're doing it right. Jesus knew more about the father and lived more like him. And so he could do this miracle that no one else could do if there were a person like that on the earth. Don't you think that people should know now 1:35:24 - 1:35:57 , should it ever get out in front of the relationship between the father and the son and everybody else? No, the the the entire New Testament is full of Jesus testifying of the father, he would not be quiet about it. And yet in order to lead other people to the father, this blind man had to state Jesus's 1:35:56 - 1:36:20 role in transmitting that. Jesus said, Matthew 516, I said, I would tell you this earlier. This is the verse I was referring to let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, which is in heaven. No, no one reads that and thinks what they should when they 1:36:20 - 1:36:50 read it, he's saying be so much like the father that when people interact with you, they will come away from that knowing him better. That's what that says Jesus did this and, and he got in a lot of trouble for it as will all people who do this, John 10 30 through 33. He says I and my father are one 1:36:49 - 1:37:12 . Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them many good works. Have I showed you from my father? For which of those works do you stone me? The Jews answered him saying for good work, we stone thee not but for blasphemy. And because that thou being a man maketh thyself, God, the 1:37:12 - 1:37:40 Jews by their own admission had not seen anything he had done. That was not true to what the father would have done in his place except for the fact that he said I and my father are one now isn't this interesting that Jesus could do all the things that demonstrated that they were one and, and they didn't 1:37:40 - 1:38:04 stone him for that. But then when he made the connection to say it, they said, well, no, that's wrong. That's wrong. But it was true. Just like when he got in trouble for saying the temple would be taken apart. So that one stone didn't lay on another, he was telling the truth. They didn't like it. If 1:38:03 - 1:38:28 it's not true, then show that it's not true. But if what's being said is true, then deal with it. Those who take fault with the truth are the ones who are in error. If they want to remedy the situation, they need to change themselves. Now, they called this blasphemy and that's interesting. If you look 1:38:28 - 1:38:54 up the word, what it means is to degrade God. And this is, it's, it's, it's tied to Jesus claiming that he is the same as the father or like the father. And they said that that's blasphemy because you're a man and he's God. But they couldn't tell the difference between bringing God down to man and bringing 1:38:54 - 1:39:18 man up to God. And they are very, two very different things, two very different things. Um I'm gonna skip over the rest of these scriptures, but um even this is a very small subset of those that ought to be reviewed under this topic, but we just gotta keep it tight because this is already gonna be very 1:39:18 - 1:39:42 long. Maybe we'll read the last one, Matthew 1040. He that receive you, receive me and he that receive me, receive him that sent me. And there's a piece of proof that supports the idea that this is one of those things that we are all meant to be able to say. He even prays that we can say this in John 1:39:42 - 1:40:09 17. It's his will that we are able to say I am one with the sun and he is in me just as he is one in the father and the father is in him, we are meant to be able to say that. He said, I and my father are one you and I should be able to say that too. And that is the purpose for which we work is so that 1:40:09 - 1:40:36 all can be one in him. That's the goal. So you can't do that without factually acknowledging the work of his servants, including yourself. That's this business. And there are other verses about this, how we respond to God's servants is how we would respond to him. And if we're transmitting uh elements 1:40:35 - 1:41:02 of how he is to others that don't know Him as well, we have to be a part of that chain. And so people who would, who would get offended at this, they really don't know and understand how things work because they, they criticize what absolutely has to be the way this is done. OK. So this is an idea that 1:41:01 - 1:41:37 keeps coming up back, test your models. Um Any time you want to judge punitive truth, one thing that you should do is look at all the people you accept as righteous from the past and um test your metrics against them. So the first and foremost, make sure that your test that you're applying to whatever 1:41:37 - 1:42:09 idea person, whatever, make sure that it would not result in condemning Jesus. That's first and foremost, almost every false judgment would fail against Jesus. So in applying your metric for judgment, you'll find that uh that would result in condemning Jesus. And if if whatever you're using to test truth 1:42:09 - 1:42:33 would condemn Jesus, your metric is incorrect because he is the truth. So whatever you design to find and test truth, it, it better pass against Jesus and if it doesn't, you can throw it away, but there are others and they all help us better understand Christ. So here are a few from the New Testament 1:42:33 - 1:43:00 , namely Moses and uh John the Baptist. I don't think I told any about him and Abraham. So let's read through just a subset of these, but you could go and find more. And John 928 and 29 the Pharisees reviled against the man born blind and they said thou art his meaning, jesus' disciple, but we are moses' 1:42:59 - 1:43:26 disciples. We know that God spake unto Moses. As for this fellow, we know not from whence he is in, in John five. Jesus said to the Pharisees do not think that I will accuse you to the father. There is one that accuse you even Moses in whom ye trust for had you believed Moses, you would have believed 1:43:26 - 1:43:53 me for he wrote of me, but you believe not his writings. If you believe not his writings, how shall you believe my words? So they said that they believed in Moses, but they didn't live according to what Moses taught. And unfortunately, this is a common pattern and it doesn't really make sense why, except 1:43:52 - 1:44:19 for the fact that humans are despicable creatures. Um in actuality, they have divine potential and despicable um actuality. So you see this pattern repeating over and over again where folks point to some authority from the past and maybe it's a person, maybe it's the Bible itself, maybe it's whatever 1:44:19 - 1:44:45 and they say no, no, I believe this, but they don't live it. And then they judge things that do the judge against them, whether that's people or ideas or anything else. Again, in John five, Jesus spoke about this, this practice of setting up the Bible as, as this idol because you, you claim that that's 1:44:45 - 1:45:03 the source of truth. And yet you don't, you don't live by everything it says, you selectively choose things and then you practice a whole bunch of things that aren't in there. But you claim that they are same thing with Moses and the Pharisees John 539 and 40 search the scriptures for in them. You think 1:45:02 - 1:45:24 you have eternal life and there they would testify of me and you will not come to me that you might have life. So he's saying actually eternal life doesn't come from the Bible, it comes from me. But the Bible testifies of me. Not that there was a Bible when John, when Jesus said this but you know the 1:45:24 - 1:45:44 scrolls, the scripture, it all of this testifies of me. But you say you believe it but you're not following what you would have to if you did, which is to believe in me because it testifies of me. And he says, if you come to me, you'll have life, you'll have what you think you already have. But don't 1:45:44 - 1:46:02 , you'll find it. And that's really important. And then finally, John 840 they did this trick with Moses too. Jesus said, but now ye seek because they claim to be the Children of Moses. He said, you're the Children of the devil. He said, I'm I'm sorry. I keep saying Moses Abraham, you're the Children 1:46:01 - 1:46:20 of the devil. He said, they said, no, we're the Children of Abraham. And he said, ye seek to kill me a man that had told you the truth, which I have heard of God. This did not Abraham. Uh In other words, you might be his genetic descendants, but you do not believe what he believed and you don't act the 1:46:19 - 1:46:47 way he did either. This happens all the time. So what are modern uh examples of this? Well, you have Catholics who don't actually believe what the Bible says, even though they claim authority from Peter, you've got Mormons who don't actually believe what the book of Mormon says, even though they claim 1:46:47 - 0:00:00 that they do, they don't live. Um according to the example of Joseph Smith or the teachings of Joseph Smith, even though they claim that as a source of their authority, you've got the um Protestant branches and they claim the scriptures as their source of authority and the content of their religion. 0:00:00 - 1:47:28 But they don't live according to them, they skip over most of them and say this doesn't apply to us. And I'm not talking just about the Old Testament. They, they wanton break commandments given in the New Testament and they say that's OK and they teach the opposite of what Jesus taught in many instances 1:47:27 - 1:47:52 . So what is up with that? The problem is they're not back testing their models. This is so simple. A kid should understand it. A kid wouldn't use these words, but a child should look at that and say, hey, if what you're saying is true, then you guys should be acting a heck of a lot differently than 1:47:52 - 1:48:17 you do. So ex exercise extreme caution when your tests for truth would condemn Jesus not just that like obviously abandon those tests. They are wrong. Even if you don't have something to put in their place, get rid of them. If you would condemn Jesus, you are wrong. That is not an appropriate test of 1:48:17 - 1:48:47 truth. One more thing here, going back to John nine, see, these Pharisees thought that they had everything they needed to judge Jesus. Uh but as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 23 they claimed their authority from Moses, but they didn't live any of the things he taught, what they lived was very different 1:48:47 - 1:49:15 . And so it's quite something to have someone come along demonstrating the fruits of Moses or better and then to condemn him as contrary to Moses. And that was their problem that happens all the time today as well. So if someone were to stroll into any Christian religion being more like Jesus than the 1:49:15 - 1:49:50 people there, they would throw that person out in short order. Next principle, God will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of him. This gets back to what we've already touched upon about telling the truth, including who was involved in what happened. So John 918, but the Jews did not believe concerning 1:49:49 - 1:50:11 him that he had been blind and received his sight until they called the parents of him that had received his sight. So here they had the people who grew up around him, the man himself and they had all of these testimonies which the law said they only needed two or three that corroborated and that was 1:50:11 - 1:50:33 sufficient to tell the truth. They just kept looking for witnesses until they found what they were looking for. Which is the same thing they did when they had the mock trial of Jesus, the, the pretend trial show trial verse 19. And they asked them saying, is this your son who ye say was born blind? That 1:50:32 - 1:50:49 , that right there like pause right there. What you'll find is with crazy narcissistic kind of people. They choose their language very carefully to try to control every facet of the conversation from start to finish and preserve their little delusion of the world. That's what these people are doing right 1:50:49 - 1:51:11 here. Who ye say was born blind. It wasn't just the parents who said this. The guy said it and everyone who knew him said it. And I guess there were some exceptions of the people like we already went over who did know him and somehow it's like, no, this has to be a different guy. This can't possibly 1:51:11 - 1:51:32 be Ted. I mean, Ted was blind. This can't be Ted, he looks like Ted, he talks like Ted, he knows all the stuff about us that Ted would know but it can't be Ted because Ted was blind. That was, that, that was the, the counter witnesses that they had in any cross examination should have, should have revealed 1:51:31 - 1:51:53 this in, in two seconds. Does he look like the guy that was born blind? Yes. Does he speak? Like the guy that was born blind? Yes. Is he wearing the same clothes as the guy that was born blind, like three hours ago was wearing? Yes. Does he know all the stuff that that guy would know? You know, having 1:51:52 - 1:52:12 known you his whole life? Yes. And on and on. Right. Anyway, continuing how then Doth He, now, see, again, it's like it couldn't possibly be the thing we're hearing from every single person we've interviewed, couldn't possibly be that because it was on the Sabbath. It's God can't work on the Sabbath 1:52:11 - 1:52:30 . This is obviously not. That verse 20. His parents answered them and said, we know that this is our son and that he was born blind and you hear this and you're like, wow, great. Ok. They're gonna tell the truth. Cool parents should I mean, wouldn't you be rejoicing and be so glad that God blessed your 1:52:30 - 0:00:00 son that you love so much that now you do anything for God, like a Hannah and Samuel situation, you know, and then verse 21 the bubble pops. But by what means he now seeth. We know not or who hath opened his eyes. We know not. He is of age. Ask him he shall speak for himself. And you might say well, 0:00:00 - 1:53:15 ok, but they weren't there. How would they know? That's a truthful thing to say yet? Except they knew this guy his whole life. He was their son. They'd know his character and whether he was prone to lie or not, especially about such tremendous things because he in fact, had learned to see, somehow come 1:53:15 - 1:53:40 to see, not learned to see. And this, this is one of the things about miracles that will surprise you or wisdom, any evidence of God, you will find people that know you well, will suddenly ignore everything they know about you. If that's what it takes to not fully acknowledge the evidence that's put 1:53:40 - 1:54:00 before them, they don't know what to do with it, but they know enough of what would happen if they tried to do something with it that they stay as far away from it as they can. And we don't have to guess that this is the case. Let's read on in verse 22 these words spake his parents because they feared 1:54:00 - 1:54:29 the Jews for the Jews had agreed already that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. They treasure their church so much that they absolutely wouldn't go anywhere near anything that threatened that even if it was their son that was at stake, you know, many people 1:54:28 - 1:54:52 like that, you might be one of them. So how many spouses throw their marriage under the bus when one of the spouse says, spouses say, hey, I'm not so sure about the things I used to believe. And here's the reasons and I want to involve you in this, I'm not keeping any secrets and the reaction of the 1:54:52 - 1:55:22 spouse is I'm gonna divorce you. Why? Because I value the church more than my marriage to you. And I know where this goes. That's not the only example. Um, any treasured sacred cow can lead to this behavior and it seems like everybody has them. So I've had interactions with family members and close friends 1:55:21 - 1:55:47 who've known me my whole life kind of people and they see something I do like, hey, I wrote six books or whatever. Um, and they think, uh, yeah, I'm not gonna go there because I'm afraid of what I'll find because they know me to be a, um, a sensible person who always does what he thinks is right, who 1:55:46 - 1:56:08 goes all in on things and doesn't believe in stupid things and turns away from things that obviously aren't good and doesn't care what other people think and on and on and on and whatever is attached to me. They will have to parse that out and they are afraid of what they'll find. This is just some people 1:56:08 - 1:56:28 , not all, but that's what happens. I remember. So when I turned 18 I joined the L DS church and I decided to go on a mission and my friends who I had grown up with, who were not particularly religious in any way, but definitely not L DS. They really struggled with that because they didn't know how to 1:56:28 - 1:56:46 fit that in with the person that they knew in terms of what it would imply for them, they had to let go of something and instead of being open to maybe letting go something about themselves, they chose to deny what they already knew about me, even though that was just as true as ever. And they had a 1:56:46 - 1:57:15 whole lifetime to back it up. This is what happens. But the churchy thing, that's a big one. So they take this cop out and they say he is of age, ask him. Um So in mark 838 we read whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him also, shall the 1:57:15 - 1:57:39 son of man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of his father with the holy angels. Now ashamed is one of these words that mean something more than what it seems. So I'm going to um look that up very quickly so I can reproduce this idea for you. But in the meantime, we have to recall that this is one 1:57:39 - 1:58:04 of many uses of the word words or word in the New Testament that means much more than it seems. So what do you think it means to be ashamed of him? And his words specifically the of his words part because um most people would just think li literally, it means um you know, quotes from the Bible and that's 1:58:03 - 1:58:50 not the limit of it. Or even really the smallest part. So let's start on ashamed here and that'll help us see more of the words. Um So to be ashamed in Greek, uh it means, um, obviously to feel shame for something. Uh, but it, it's a sense of uh, unfortunate surprise. It's a sense of unfortunate surprise 1:58:49 - 1:59:12 . So when people, um, partake of the fruit of the tree of life and they're ashamed, it doesn't mean that, that, um, you know, all of a sudden out of nowhere, the people who have been mocking them all along suddenly get through and now they're, they're concerned about what other people think when they 1:59:12 - 1:59:30 didn't care at all before they had to fight against that the whole way to get there. It's not that they suddenly start caring about what other people think. It's, that it does not match what they thought it would be. And for that reason, they begin to believe the people that have been mocking them the 1:59:30 - 1:59:58 whole time. And so to be ashamed of him and his words, this is very important. His words are his character. It's his, his, what he would do in your place, how he would feel in your place and what he would say in your place. And so you find out that you thought it would be one way and it turns out it's 1:59:58 - 2:00:21 very different than what you thought. Well, of course, it's very different than what you thought. That's the whole point. If it were the same, your experience would be the same, it would not be improvement. It'd be the same. But in this adulterous and sinful generation or in other words, in this, in 2:00:21 - 2:00:45 this time where people desire things that are not what is best and believe, things that do not accord with reality. It's make believe, you know, I wish I lived in a room full of, uh, cotton candy and puppies all the time. Puppies who never grew old and died of diseases or got hit by cars. Well, that 2:00:45 - 2:01:11 doesn't exist, you know, and you can eat candy all day long and not gain weight. Um It's what that big big rock candy Mountain song, you know. No, it doesn't work that way. That's, that's adulterous and sinful. So don't be surprised when God's ways are higher than your ways. He literally told you it 2:01:11 - 2:01:34 was like that in Isaiah and not even close. He says as far as the heavens are from the earth. And so what does it mean for the son of man to be ashamed of those people? What means? He won't find what he is expecting and hoping for. Isn't that funny? This scripture means so much uh more indifferent than 2:01:34 - 2:01:53 what people think when they read it. It's a wonderful example of why you should not just blow through the scriptures. You should stop and ask, what does this mean? What does this mean? Why did he say this? Why didn't he say that and look things up. We have all these resources and uh you know, God didn't 2:01:52 - 2:02:18 do all this so that you can just uh access your phone scriptures on your phone and have even less effort. It was so that with the, the effort that you apply, you can get more out of it. So um we should live so that we're worth saving. So that when Jesus comes back, we're still here to meet him and he 2:02:18 - 2:02:47 feels joy that what he sees was accomplished by the price he pays. And it's not that hard to think about that. If you have kids, we just need to do for God. What we wish our chi Children would do for us, which isn't to, to, to bow down and worship us is, is um you know, mindless automaton slaves. It's 2:02:47 - 2:03:08 that they do the absolute best things in their lives for themselves and others so that they can feel the greatest joy if we're living our lives the right way that we can say follow our example in this until you do better and by all means, go for it, please surpass me if you can, but at least follow the 2:03:08 - 2:03:41 example until then. So don't be ashamed of, of God. Don't be, you're, you're going to be surprised, but don't be disappointed. You're gonna be surprised at what He reveals, but don't be disappointed, realize that he knows the way and he knows what we should want, he knows what is best and you have to 2:03:41 - 2:04:04 trust him. So these parents, they assumed that their synagogue attendance was worth more than telling the truth about their child, confidently, courageously telling the truth. And they threw him right under the bus. It's bad enough that this guy was blind his whole life. Now he got his sight, but then 2:04:04 - 2:04:35 his parents run him over with the bus just like that. But here's the thing, what's better the synagogue or the one worshiped there? What's more important? Your church or the being you say you go to church for the the entity that makes the church anything different than any other place. Obviously, that 2:04:35 - 2:05:04 should trump everything else, right? In John 16 2, Jesus says that they shall put you out of the synagogues. It's a foregone conclusion. If you worship God, they will throw you out of your church. Yeah, the time cometh that whosoever kille you will think that He doeth God's service. They'll toss you 2:05:04 - 2:05:35 out of their church and they'll think that they're doing God a favor that they're doing his will by doing so. And tell me that's not the case today. So the point is don't be ashamed, don't be negatively surprised when God reveals changes to you ideas, whatever changes in your life that you have to make 2:05:35 - 2:06:03 to draw nearer to Him that require you to give up something that you thought was important. And always remember that he is what is important. Everything else has to be a lower rank than that. And he told us up front everything's on the list of what is subject to change and what needs to be sacrificed 2:06:02 - 2:06:32 . Ok? Um We've just got a few more. Don't feed those who look for fault instead of truth. So in verses 26 and 27 of John nine then said they to him again, what did he to thee? How opened he thine eyes? So they're, they're just continuously interrogating his poor guy. He already told them what had happened 2:06:31 - 2:06:55 . He already told them what he what he thought. Um and they said, well, ok, well, tell us how he did it. Do you know why they asked this question? It's really obvious they were still trolling him to find something where they could just dismiss everything else. It didn't matter that with every attempt 2:06:55 - 2:07:22 to find that thing, these guys heaped up more evidence that he was, he was righteous. They were still, they were parsing for that one thing they could use to say. See, we knew it all along goes wicked because it wasn't enough to say he did it on the Sabbath anymore. They, they needed that the evidence 2:07:22 - 2:07:43 was great enough that they needed some other reason to toss him aside and they looked to try to find it. They didn't dare think maybe our understanding of the Sabbath is wrong because here's a demonstration of great power from God. Hm. That we don't have. And we have to admit that. So maybe this guy 2:07:43 - 2:08:06 knows God better than we do. No, it couldn't be, that couldn't be that we're Pharisees after all. We're the ones that, that have the authority. So, this, this guy, I like him. He's cheeky and he says, I've already told you and you didn't hear, why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to be his disciples 2:08:05 - 2:08:27 ? And they didn't like that at all? And so that's when they bounced him out of the synagogue. But here we read in Luke 67, this is the contemporary English version. Some Pharisees and teachers of the law of Moses kept watching Jesus to see if he would heal the man. They did this because they wanted to 2:08:27 - 2:08:57 accuse Jesus of doing something wrong. It's always a marvel to me to watch people, um watch hours and hours and hours of things that I of videos I make and read thousands of pages of what I write when they clearly do. Not like it. And you wonder, well, why on earth would someone do that? I mean, surely 2:08:56 - 2:09:28 there's a better way to spend your time. And the answer is they feel convicted because of the things that I've said and they continue on trying to find something, anything I say or do or don't say or don't do that's sufficient for them to dismiss everything else out of hand without feeling guilty. That 2:09:28 - 2:09:54 is their motive, period. And that shows you how deranged we are as humans has fallen creatures that you'd waste that much time when you really feel that, that you say that there's no value in this. It's a total waste of time. Why would anybody bother? And, and really all you're doing is trolling for 2:09:54 - 2:10:18 this, this, this uh one thing that's sufficient to toss out everything else. It's not justified But, but emotionally, it's enough, it's emotionally enough to not feel guilty anymore, even if it's not rationally enough. Because for example, someone, someone can, can be spot on about X and be completely 2:10:18 - 2:10:43 wrong about Y and you're still guilty on X, you gotta fix X. But they're just looking for some, some excuse to throw it all away and you can't do that. And the same thing was true with Jesus in his mortal ministry. You've got to contend with the fact that he caused a man born blind to see and no one 2:10:43 - 2:11:10 had ever done that. You have to find a way to explain that. The only way to explain it in this case is that he had greater power from God than anyone else did. And that says something about contradictions between things he might say and do and things that people with way less power, no power think is 2:11:10 - 2:11:29 right. What it says is when there's a contradiction, the guy doing things that no one's ever done before is right. That's what it means. And if it's something different, you better come up with a reason to justify it. And you're not going to, the only thing you could do is do something greater than he 2:11:29 - 2:11:54 did. That's the only sufficient counter argument to that. So, and this was the man's reply. The man born blind. He said, now we know again, I love that how cheeky this guy is. Now, we know that God heareth not sinners. But if any man be a worshiper of God and doeth his will, him, he heareth since the 2:11:54 - 2:12:23 world began. Was it not heard that any man open the eyes of one that was born blind? If this man were not of God, he could do nothing. Now to remind you miracles are an evidence of God and so is wisdom. So is endurance under suffering by the way. But I want to call attention to the escalation of this 2:12:23 - 2:12:46 man's defense of Jesus. At first all he said was I was blind. A guy put poop dirt in my eyes and told me to wash my, my face in this pool. And now I see. And then he said, well, he's a prophet and now he's coming out swinging against these Pharisees. And he's saying, look, if you're gonna take a position 2:12:46 - 2:13:07 , that's so absurd against this guy. This, this can only mean one thing you're not dealing with the fact that he has done something that no one else has done and you're being ridiculous about this and he's calling them out on their motives by saying, well, why do you wanna know? Are you gonna be his 2:13:07 - 2:13:45 disciple? Clearly not get with it. So their response to this was thou was altogether born in sins and dost thou teach us and they cast him out. No. Um, you could make a logical argument for what Jesus had already said because you can't hold the Pharisees to going by the teachings of Jesus, right? So 2:13:45 - 2:14:08 you can only hold them to what they could be expected to understand logically. Um And the, the evidence that they were shown. So you can't say, well, the chapter starts by Jesus saying that they weren't born in sin and you can see even his disciples thought that before he corrected them. But in another 2:14:08 - 2:14:30 place, he talks about this tower that fell and how a bunch of people died. And it is the same topic of, of whether affliction means that someone's in sin. And that, that's something that uh job's friends believe too that, that a person's present state of worldly prosperity, including presence or absence 2:14:29 - 2:14:49 of pain. That that was an indi indication of their relationship with God. And we know that that's not true. But Jesus said, well, you, you heard about that tower that fell and it killed all those people. Do you think that they were greater sinners than anyone else? And then he made an interesting statement 2:14:48 - 2:15:22 which uh suggested that all people would come to face all uh all trials, very interesting statement. So these people, these Pharisees um they also believed that someone born with a handicap was, was uh a sinful person. But they did not have logical reasons to believe this. This was a kind of a naked 2:15:21 - 2:15:44 tradition, you know, widespread and so they cite this and, and the reason I'm focusing on this so much to them, this would have been like quoting one of the 10 commandments. It's so obvious that this guy is in sin, but it wasn't obvious and it wasn't true, but to them, it seemed that true. And this is 2:15:44 - 2:16:04 where we all have to be super careful because what's clear cut and obvious to us might be dead wrong actually. And how's God gonna correct it? Most likely he's gonna put you in a situation where the limits of that understanding are revealed? There might be a problem that's too great for it to overcome 2:16:03 - 2:16:27 your current belief or might be crossing paths with someone who knows something better can show something better and can defend it against your position. And if you dismiss that person out of hand, you might be cutting off a life uh jacket that is thrown to you while you're drowning. Even if you don't 2:16:27 - 2:16:48 know you're drowning yet, does these situations come at precise times according to God's Foreknowledge and wisdom and love? And when you dismiss them out of hand, which is never appropriate. You have to have reasons, the reasons have to be sufficient. Given the evidence you're shown when you dismiss 2:16:47 - 2:17:14 them out of hand, you cut yourself off, you limit what else he can do to help you. So that's the first chunk. And then he says, dost thou teach us like a sinner couldn't teach us well, whether the person is a sinner or not, does not indicate that what they say is false. A person's historic righteousness 2:17:13 - 2:17:43 is evidence that suggests future righteousness. It does not guarantee because all can turn away. But it's something you have to contend with a person's prior wickedness does not preclude them doing something good or saying something good. All people are capable of repentance and also God is so gracious 2:17:42 - 2:18:04 . You know, we read about the story of the high priest correctly prophesying that it's better for one man to die than for the entire nation to perish. It says that right there in John. So and it says that he said that in his office as high priest that God gave him this wisdom, but he was wicked. I mean 2:18:04 - 2:18:37 he sentenced Jesus to death illegally and un righteously. So how's that? But he still told the truth. So this is a double, no, no. And then you get to the triplicate because they cast him out. And here's the principle, the wicked can only respond to superior evidence with name, calling fleeing or violence 2:18:36 - 2:19:00 . I guess the lying is on there too. They can lie, they can call you names. They can run away or they can use force against you. These Pharisees controlled who was in the synagogue. They could not argue with this man. They tried and they failed miserably and obvious. I mean, he was born blind. He was 2:19:00 - 2:19:21 not an educated man in those times. There was no way for that to happen and he wiped the dirt with them. Jesus wiped the dirt on him and then he wiped the dirt with the Pharisees and they couldn't deal with it. They tried every tactic they knew. And so they said, ah, you're a sinner, you can't teach 2:19:21 - 2:19:40 us anything. And then they threw him out of the synagogue. That's the exact attitude you'll see with the modern version of these clowns and they're everywhere. Bring in the clowns. All right. So don't get scared at this huge. We're almost done this two, this one and one more. Uh I'm just putting this 2:19:40 - 2:20:06 here for context. So right after he gets cast out, Jesus heard that they had cast him out and when he had found him, he said unto him, dost thou believe on the Son of God, he answered and said, this is very important. Who is he Lord that I might believe on him? No, this is the latest iteration of this 2:20:06 - 2:20:30 man incrementally responding with perfect appropriateness to the expanding evidence he had of jesus' value. So how did this start? The man born blind had nothing to lose. He was born blind. He was begging all day long. He was, he was not a little kid. He'd been in this for a while. There's no hope he 2:20:29 - 2:20:52 had explored every opportunity he had available to him to, to uh if not fixed then make the most out of his problem. And he was still in, in, in a bad way. So some random guy comes along and says, hey, do you wanna be healed? And the guy says, yes. And so he wipes poop dirt in his eyes and the guy tolerates 2:20:51 - 2:21:13 it and then sends him packing and the guy goes. Now, what degree of faith was exercised here? Would you allow a random person to put poop dirt in your eyes? I don't think so. But let's say that you were out of work and your unemployment had expired and you still couldn't find a job and you tried everything 2:21:13 - 2:21:32 you knew. And some random person said, hey, I'll give you a job and the pay, I mean, it pays more than a dollar an hour and, and, uh, it's something and it's in a field you've never tried before, but I think you could do. All right. Would you take the opportunity? Well, why wouldn't you like, what else 2:21:32 - 2:21:52 do you have that could possibly compete with that? And, and now change the situation, you have a job, you're making money and someone comes along and says, I think something better is available for you. Why don't you spruce up your resume and send it out? And now here come the excuses. Oh, I don't think 2:21:52 - 2:22:16 that could happen. And I tried this four years ago and I think that this and II I can make do with what I've got. I don't think anybody would hire me if the threshold of action is sprucing up your resume and sending it to a place you're still faithless. That is almost nothing of a cost in exchange for 2:22:16 - 2:22:38 a tremendous benefit if happens to be true. So why wouldn't you do it? It's a tiny little cost. It could mean the world now consider a different thing where you have a job and it's a good job and some crazy guy comes along. You don't know this person and say, oh, quit your job today and there's no other 2:22:38 - 2:23:01 job. Just quit your job. Trust me. You say take a hike buddy and that would be the right thing to say right now. What if, what if you had a dream the night before and as an inspired dream? And God said tomorrow a um let's say, uh a woman, a young woman is gonna come to your door and she's gonna have 2:23:01 - 2:23:23 a ponytail on one side and she's gonna be wearing a green vest and she's gonna tell you, God sent me here and you don't have any way of knowing this, but next week something terrible is gonna happen at work. And if you're there, you're gonna die. You need to quit your job. And what happens next is up 2:23:23 - 2:23:47 to the Lord. But trust him and walked away and that was the dream. And then the exact thing happened that morning. This is completely contrived this, this dream thing, but I have seen this happen to people. This happens. God does stuff like this. What would you do? Is there enough evidence there to act 2:23:46 - 2:24:10 on that? I sure as heck would quit my job. I'll tell you that's what I would do. Now, there's stuff all between this. It's a, it's, it's a these things happen. So, but God always provides a ramp with sufficient evidence for the challenge at hand. He always does. We don't go wrong because there's not 2:24:10 - 2:24:41 enough, we go wrong because we don't acknowledge what's there. If some dude miraculously gave you sight and you were blind from birth and then he came and he said, um do you believe on the Son of God? This is exactly what you should say and do. It's exactly what's rational. The man born blind is stone 2:24:40 - 2:25:07 cold, rational guy. He does exactly what you should do given the situation in every case textbook at this point, Jesus has provided this man with sufficient experiences. This is very much like the woman at the Well, by the way, you can read that story, it's very similar where all he has to do is say 2:25:06 - 2:25:50 it's me and the man said, Lord, I believe and he worshiped him, right? This is so important to understand final slide. Your response to sufficient evidence will either exalt or obese. You, you're going to go up or down, you can't remain the same. Now, you could go up by a little or a lot. So it's not 2:25:50 - 2:26:13 a binary thing. It's a two stage reaction. There's one is the binary. Are you going up or down? The second one down is down by the way, you're, you're on the path or off. That's another mistake that we make people think their gradations are going down. There's one way and when you do something that deviates 2:26:13 - 2:26:36 from it, you are out, the only way to get back on is through the gate. So this would be like a game where you had to start over at the beginning of the path. Now you can progress through a lot faster than the first time because you already know what comes after. But one thing and you're out, that's the 2:26:36 - 2:27:01 way it works, but up, up is by degrees. And so what I've just explained to you is the difference between justification and sanctification. Any who you should look in the story at the, the difference in magnitude of uh direction and magnitude of the reactions of the various characters. You've got the 2:27:01 - 2:27:23 man born blind, you've got his companions, you've got his parents, you've got the Pharisees and um with the man and the Pharisees, there's a progression path. The Pharisees become more and more darkened because every single time you turn away, you go down and the man goes up and up and up because he 2:27:23 - 2:27:47 responds correctly to each prompting to every fork in the road. And so this is how the chapter ends. Jesus said for judgment, I am come into this world. Let's pause there. He says in another place, the father judges no one because he's given all judgment to me. And then in another place he says, I judge 2:27:47 - 2:28:11 no one. This is very interesting and something people don't have the answer to, but there is an answer to it. How are people judged in this story? Judgment means that wedge, it means you get hit with a wedge and it's how you end up on the other side. There are other definitions of the word, but that's 2:28:10 - 2:28:37 what this means here. It says that they which see might not see and that they would see might be made blind. It change your reaction, changes your relationship with God. It changes what you see. When you turn away from God, you literally do not feel or think as well as you could before. I don't mean 2:28:37 - 2:29:05 you don't feel well, I mean, you the range of emotion that you can feel reduces and it moves down. It's less pleasant. The opposite happens when you go up the range increases and you feel more uh you feel better as a whole. And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words and said unto 2:29:04 - 2:29:26 Him, are we blind? Also? Jesus said unto them, if you were blind, you should have no sin. Why? Because we're not responsible for what we don't know about yet. What's beyond our capacity. But now ye say we see therefore your sin remain. Once you're shown sufficient evidence for a change that God wants 2:29:26 - 2:29:48 you to make. If you don't make that change, you're now blind, you're off the path you're going down and it doesn't matter if you've previously gone up or how many times you have. So what's this judgment he came into the world for? If, if the father doesn't judge you and he doesn't judge you. Where's 2:29:48 - 2:30:14 the judgment coming from? It's your life itself that judges you. It's how you react to the situations you're placed in because it's, it's a ramp up or down. Uh more accurately, it's a ladder up and then you can jump off if you want. That's what it is. All right. Well, this is super long and if you've 2:30:14 - 2:30:32 made it this far for like the two people who might, uh I hope this was helpful. I felt like now is the time and, and now maybe you see why I haven't jumped into this. This is, imagine how long it would take to go through the whole book of John and we're still just scratching the surface. So hopefully