I am continuing the series ‘Jewels from John’ where I reflect on passages from the Gospel of John.
John 4:50 ‘The man took Jesus at his word and departed’. NIV
A government official in Capernaum had a son who was so sick that he was near death. He heard that Jesus was in Cana and set out to ask the Master to accompany him back to his home to heal his son. He begged Jesus to help him, but instead of agreeing to go to the boy, Jesus said “Go back home. Your son will live!” This was remarkable, but even more remarkable is that the man didn’t argue, plead, or burst into tears. He believed what the Lord said, turned around and walked the 40 kilometres back home.
It would have been a long walk home and we know from the biblical account that Jesus instructed him to go home at noon (The seventh hour). The next day when he was almost there, a servant met him on the road with the joyful news that the boy had been healed at exactly the time when Jesus spoke. Imagine the joy that father experienced!
What engages my mind and heart when I read this story is what it means to take Jesus at his word. Well, firstly, we need to ‘hear’ instructions from the Master. Some teach that we should simply claim the biblical account for ourselves. Then, they say, we need to act as though we have received the healing. However, this is just magical thinking and does not involve us ‘hearing’ anything from Jesus. True, we do need to exercise faith if we are to receive anything from God. What is the use of asking if we do not believe he will respond positively?
But here is the thing; to act, we need first to believe, and to believe, we need to hear directly from the Lord.
This involves reading the accounts and injunctions in scripture that bear on our problem and then praying, sometimes repeatedly, until we strongly sense that the Holy Spirit has spoken to us. ‘Spoken’ is another word, like ‘hear’, that we need to understand more from our hearts than our heads. To me, it means becoming conscious that God has placed into my spirit an assurance that I can ‘go’ and expect that he has undertaken for me. At this point, I step out on the road of faith and do what he has said I should.
John 5:23 “He who does not honour the Son does not honour the Father, who sent him”. NIV
Many Christians focus their theology and spiritual life almost exclusively on The Father. They relegate the Lord Jesus to a lesser place of honour as just the one the Father sent to die for our sins. I am not sure that too many have evaluated this impact on their theology. For instance, what does it imply regarding the Father and Son’s roles in humankind’s creation and redemption? What does it imply about the character of the Father who observes Jesus’ suffering, persecution, and horrific death from the safety of Heaven? We pray to the Father, but seldom to Jesus and often get irritated when some preachers and teachers make the second personage of the Godhead the centre of attention. I doubt if any thought is given to this. After all, we all live as Christians under the intricate theology of the Trinity even if we don’t know what divine tri-unity means.
But hang on a second! Jesus said that if we do not honour him, we do not honour the Father. He said that he and the Father are one. He also said that if we have seen him then we have seen the Father. Furthermore, Jesus declared that he is the only way to the Father.
And I mustn’t start in on giving proper attention to the person and role of the Holy Spirit, because that is the subject of other reflections.
John 5:39-40 “ You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” NIV
I know many people who revere the bible and spend a good part of their time studying it. The scriptures demand our respect because they are divinely inspired, trustworthy, and indeed the written Word of God. However, they are not the source of truth or life. Instead, they point to and help us perceive and embrace the true source, Jesus. I realise that the convention is to spell the word bible with a capital ‘B’, but I don’t. I thought long, hard, and prayerfully before breaking a time-honoured convention. By presenting the word without a capital I am making an important point.
We don’t worship the bible as though it were a little paper god carried into the sanctuary of our lives on a velvet cushion. We study it to find, understand, and promote the Word of Life who is the one who declared himself as the Way and the Truth and the Life.
All of this is worth deep reflection, but it leads on to an even deeper issue. In the second century a group of ‘Christians’ emerged who taught that knowledge was the secret to eternal life. Theologians refer to them as ‘gnostics’. The problem is that this thinking is still an issue in the church of our day. The problem isn’t with the Christian Scientists and the various esoteric groups around but with the millions of church-goers all around us who seem to have an unstated belief that bible study and theological study are a means of salvation. Knowers of the Word are more highly valued than doers of the Word, and the ‘Word’ is consistently regarded as the bible and not the Lord of the bible, Jesus. Enough of these gnostically inclined folk and whole churches and even denominations become dead monuments to intellectual pride instead of living temples in which God dwells by his Spirit.
It is worth thinking about, long and hard. One way looks like life but leads to death and the other looks narrow-focused but it leads to life.
John 6:28-29 “They asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.“ NIV
This may look like a repeat of the previous reflection, but it isn’t. Here I want to share some thoughts on the relationship between good, and even godly, works and belief in Jesus for life and eternity.
To the Jews of Jesus’ day, their religious works were proof of their faith. Moreover, they were the basis of their faith. If they did right then they were in right standing with God, and if they didn’t, then they were no better than the heathen around them. It must have been shocking for them to hear Jesus’ answer to their question. Paraphrased, they were saying, “So Lord, what are the rules and regulations of scripture that we need to perform to please God?” His answer was, “Just one thing; believe in me!” What the triune God wants from us, is that we believe in Jesus, follow his teaching and example, and rely on him for life and eternity.
Now I am sure we all understand this. Why is it then that I hear people saying or implying that they don’t have to verbalise their belief in Jesus because their ‘actions speak louder than words’? This makes no sense to me. We show kindness to a stranger and they are supposed to know that we are not just nice people, but actually witnesses to Jesus’ life within us? How does this help them to know the truth and find him who is the truth? This may be a little harsh, but in cases like this, do our good works point to Jesus or to ourselves? Obviously, if we can do good, fail to do so, and then attempt to ‘witness’ to them we are declaring ourselves to be hypocrites and our witness false. However, consider the logical chain that Paul sets out in Romans 10:13-15 “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” Surely this logical Progression must equally apply to our good works and words of witness?
The next set of reflections will be from John chapters 6,7,8 and 9. Between now and then, why don’t you collect your own little bag of Jewels from John? You will be blessed.