Regarding the reaction of the Jews to Jesus in St. John 8:
My concern this morning is that we do not make the mistake of thinking that these Jewish people behaved so badly because that’s what Jews do. That’s absurd. They lied to themselves, they refused to face the truth about who they really were before God, because they were men. We all have had this tendency ever since the garden of Eden, when Adam refused to face up to the truth about his ultimate responsibility for his and his wife’s disobedience.
This temptation to prefer falsehoods that build up our pride over truths that humble us follows us even into our Christian lives. We who have believed in Jesus are now the children of God. By God’s grace, we have received the truth of Jesus and we have been set free by it. We are no longer slaves of sin. Our minds are no longer under the dominion of the lies of this world and the devil. We have begun to experience a taste of the liberty that belongs to the sons of God. But being the sons of God, the Holy spirit is molding us into the likeness of the Son of God and we are not yet what we will be.
When the Son of God Himself returns, we will be instantly changed and what we really are as the sons of God will be fully manifest to the universe. In the meantime, we are undergoing a gradual process of transformation into the likeness of sons of God. Therefore, in order for this change to take place, we have to face what is still there is our lives of our old slavery. Jesus confronts us about what is true about ourselves in places where we have either not realized the truth or where we are tempted to tell ourselves something about ourselves that is not true.
Sometimes we are glad the light has shone on our dark places, but then there are times when we are not glad. It is painful for several reasons. For one, we want to have lives that please God. It is our nature to want to please our Father in heaven. When we are faced with the possibility that there may be something in our lives that is not pleasing to him, we can feel a great reluctance to face it because the disappointment with ourselves for displeasing him would be so painful. But to not face it is to do precisely what we do not want to do. To refuse to face the truth about ourselves displeases the God we want to please. God is not displeased that we are ignorant about ourselves in many ways. He is displeased when his attempts to help us learn the truth about ourselves are avoided or even rebelled against.
Jesus wants us to have the light of life. To have the light of life, we must be willing for that light to shine in our darkness. To hold on to darkness is to shun the light of life and to chose death. That is not a very spiritually healthy thing to do.
We learn from this how important some amount of self-examination in our lives can be. If God wants us to recognize where we need to change, then to not take time ourselves to see if there is anything that needs changing cannot be right. We must ask ourselves: Is there anything in my life that I know is wrong but my pride is preventing me from admitting it? Is there anything that is wrong, but I am afraid to do anything about it for some reason? We must ask ourselves these questions. Usually, if God is indeed trying to get our attention about something, we will know right away the answer. We have just needed the time to be still long enough for the voice of our conscience to be fully heard and to do business with God over the issue.
We have to be careful, though, because our hearts can deceive us, and we are not capable of fully understanding ourselves – only God does that. We should think of self-examination as not so much our attempt to figure ourselves out as it is our giving time for God to show us things about ourselves and for us to face up to them. We do this by prayerfully reading and studying the Word with a humility that is willing to admit the truth of what we find there.
We also learn here the importance of Christian fellowship. Since our own hearts can deceive us, and because of our human limitations, it also helps to allow other saints to get to know us well enough so that God can speak to us through them on occasion – and that especially includes our spouse, if we have one. If we are married and we have never had the experience of God bringing us to the admission of something wrong in our lives through our wife or through our husband, then there is probably something wrong somewhere and it needs to be dealt with.
My concern this morning is that we do not make the mistake of thinking that these Jewish people behaved so badly because that’s what Jews do. That’s absurd. They lied to themselves, they refused to face the truth about who they really were before God, because they were men. We all have had this tendency ever since the garden of Eden, when Adam refused to face up to the truth about his ultimate responsibility for his and his wife’s disobedience.
This temptation to prefer falsehoods that build up our pride over truths that humble us follows us even into our Christian lives. We who have believed in Jesus are now the children of God. By God’s grace, we have received the truth of Jesus and we have been set free by it. We are no longer slaves of sin. Our minds are no longer under the dominion of the lies of this world and the devil. We have begun to experience a taste of the liberty that belongs to the sons of God. But being the sons of God, the Holy spirit is molding us into the likeness of the Son of God and we are not yet what we will be.
When the Son of God Himself returns, we will be instantly changed and what we really are as the sons of God will be fully manifest to the universe. In the meantime, we are undergoing a gradual process of transformation into the likeness of sons of God. Therefore, in order for this change to take place, we have to face what is still there is our lives of our old slavery. Jesus confronts us about what is true about ourselves in places where we have either not realized the truth or where we are tempted to tell ourselves something about ourselves that is not true.
Sometimes we are glad the light has shone on our dark places, but then there are times when we are not glad. It is painful for several reasons. For one, we want to have lives that please God. It is our nature to want to please our Father in heaven. When we are faced with the possibility that there may be something in our lives that is not pleasing to him, we can feel a great reluctance to face it because the disappointment with ourselves for displeasing him would be so painful. But to not face it is to do precisely what we do not want to do. To refuse to face the truth about ourselves displeases the God we want to please. God is not displeased that we are ignorant about ourselves in many ways. He is displeased when his attempts to help us learn the truth about ourselves are avoided or even rebelled against.
Jesus wants us to have the light of life. To have the light of life, we must be willing for that light to shine in our darkness. To hold on to darkness is to shun the light of life and to chose death. That is not a very spiritually healthy thing to do.
We learn from this how important some amount of self-examination in our lives can be. If God wants us to recognize where we need to change, then to not take time ourselves to see if there is anything that needs changing cannot be right. We must ask ourselves: Is there anything in my life that I know is wrong but my pride is preventing me from admitting it? Is there anything that is wrong, but I am afraid to do anything about it for some reason? We must ask ourselves these questions. Usually, if God is indeed trying to get our attention about something, we will know right away the answer. We have just needed the time to be still long enough for the voice of our conscience to be fully heard and to do business with God over the issue.
We have to be careful, though, because our hearts can deceive us, and we are not capable of fully understanding ourselves – only God does that. We should think of self-examination as not so much our attempt to figure ourselves out as it is our giving time for God to show us things about ourselves and for us to face up to them. We do this by prayerfully reading and studying the Word with a humility that is willing to admit the truth of what we find there.
We also learn here the importance of Christian fellowship. Since our own hearts can deceive us, and because of our human limitations, it also helps to allow other saints to get to know us well enough so that God can speak to us through them on occasion – and that especially includes our spouse, if we have one. If we are married and we have never had the experience of God bringing us to the admission of something wrong in our lives through our wife or through our husband, then there is probably something wrong somewhere and it needs to be dealt with.
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