Our Scripture Reading this morning comes from the gospel According to John 5:16-30. As we begin this reading the Lord Jesus has just finished healing a man who’d been sick for 38 years: So sick that he couldn’t walk. It was a wonderful healing and miracle! Except that the Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath, and the Jewish leaders hated Him for it…
John 5:16-30 [NLTse]
16 So the Jewish leaders began harassing Jesus for breaking the Sabbath rules. 17 But Jesus replied, “My Father is always working, and so am I.” 18 So the Jewish leaders tried all the harder to find a way to kill Him. For He not only broke the Sabbath, He called God His Father, thereby making Himself equal with God.
19 So Jesus explained, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by Himself. He does only what He sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows Him everything He is doing. In fact, the Father will show Him how to do even greater works than healing this man. Then you will truly be astonished. 21 For just as the Father gives life to those He raises from the dead, so the Son gives life to anyone He wants. 22 In addition, the Father judges no one. Instead, He has given the Son absolute authority to judge, 23 so that everyone will honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Anyone who does not honor the Son is certainly not honoring the Father Who sent Him.
24 “I tell you the truth, those who listen to My message and believe in God Who sent Me have eternal life. They will never be condemned for their sins, but they have already passed from death into life.
25 “And I assure you that the time is coming, indeed it’s here now, when the dead will hear My voice—the voice of the Son of God. And those who listen will live. 26 The Father has life in Himself, and He has granted that same life-giving power to His Son. 27 And He has given Him authority to judge everyone because He is the Son of Man. 28 Don’t be so surprised! Indeed, the time is coming when all the dead in their graves will hear the voice of God’s Son, 29 and they will rise again. Those who have done good will rise to experience eternal life, and those who have continued in evil will rise to experience judgment. 30 I can do nothing on My Own. I judge as God tells Me. Therefore, My judgment is just, because I carry out the will of the One Who sent Me, not My Own will.
Sermon – “Who’s Your Daddy?”
R.C. Sproul tells of a German scholar who was doing research in New Testament literature and discovered that in the entire history of Judaism—across the existing books of the Old Testament and all existing books of extra-biblical Jewish writings, dating from the beginning of Judaism until the tenth century A.D.—that there is not a single reference to a Jewish person addressing God directly in the first person as Father. The first Jewish rabbi to call God “Father” directly was Jesus of Nazareth. In every recorded prayer we have from the lips of Jesus save one, He calls God “Father.”
And that seems to me to be such a key. Because I think of other names of God: Fortress, Master, Refuge, Lord of Heaven’s Armies, King of glory, Most High, Holy One, Righteous Judge, Consuming Fire, … all describing God’s abilities and character and His relationship to others beings and powers in the universe. But what brings all that He is home to me, what connects all of that omniscience and omnipotence and omnipresence and majesty to me, is that Jesus tells me He’s my Father. He’s not just a great and powerful being; He’s not just the God above all gods and the Lord over all other lords; He’s my Father! He’s our Father! And it seems to me that that was such a key.
Because you have to look to others to know how to interact with a deity: How to worship; how to pray; what kinds of offerings and sacrifices to make. But every kid knows how to interact with their father. As you get older and relationships get more complicated we need help living out all our relationships, but nobody has to teach a child how to be in relationship with his or her daddy: You just are!
And so Jesus did the works it was foretold that Messiah would do, and the Holy Spirit empowered His teaching, and so He got the people’s attention. So that when He revealed God to them as a “Father” people either hated Him (like the Jewish officials: It was ludicrous, blasphemy!) or it provided the missing piece that made everything else make sense, the bridge to personally connect them to all of God’s fairly impersonal attributes and other titles.
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In our reading the Lord Jesus tells us that one of the things our Father does to show us His love for us is showing us what He does, what He’s done, what He’s going to do, so that we can do it too. This underlines to me our need to spend time reading the Bible. When we read the Scriptures we see God at work across history. And as we read about His character and His desires for human lifestyles and relationships we can become more aware of His hand at work around us even right here and now. And, of course, the Scriptures are filled with promises about what He’s committed to do in the future, and as we read we prepare ourselves to see Him at work in days to come.
So as we commit ourselves to read the Bible we literally see Him at work. And because the Lord Jesus has told us, “Since you’ve seen Me then you’ve seen the Father,” as we read the gospels and Acts and see Jesus at work, we are seeing the Father in Him at work, as well.
Even so, I think we get a little selfish when we read the Word and see what God is doing there. We see Jesus teach and we too often think: Oh, He wants to teach me. We see Him heal and we think: Oh, He wants to heal me. We see Him drive away fear and set people free and show mercy and kindness and we too often think: Oh, hooray, Jesus wants to do all those things for me! And perhaps He does. (As a matter of fact, I know He does.) But the point I’m making here is that Jesus tells us that when we see God at work in the Scriptures it’s not just there to tell us what He wants to do for us, it’s there to tell us what He wants us to be doing! He’s trying to get us on the move: Instead of always looking at what the Lord’s going to be doing for me I ought to instead be looking for what God wants me to do for Him and others. (I think about a fellow in our congregation who recently shared with me how his life turned upside down once he stopped asking God to do things for him and began offering himself to God for God’s work in the lives of others around him. Upside down!)
We need to be in God’s Word to see our Father working. After all, how do we know to pray for someone, visit someone, get involved in this work or that ministry, or trust our Father for this or that miracle if we’re not in His Word to see Him having done and doing these things?
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Anybody see the very first Spiderman movie with Tobey Maguire? Towards the end of the movie Peter Parker (who is Spiderman’s alter ego) is at the Daily Bugle newspaper selling some pictures he took of himself as Spiderman. The woman at the desk is paying him for the pictures, and he says, “I’m a photographer”. She gives him his payment, saying, “Yes you are.” I bring up that part of the flick because Peter Parker wasn’t a photographer because he had a camera. He was a photographer, and he knew he was a photographer!, when he was doing it, living it, taking pictures. In the same way, Jesus tells us that when we know the Almighty is our Father, and when we’re out there doing what we’ve seen Him doing, we’ll know that we’ve passed from death to life!
But I know too many times Christians say “no” to God when the Holy Spirit prompts us to do what we’ve seen Him doing. And as long as we keep saying “no” to God we’re not going to know if we’re truly His. Doubts will overwhelm us. We may want to be with the Lord, we may want to be for the Lord, we may think He’s our dad, but as long as we keep saying “no” to Him we’ll never gain that assurance He wants us to have that we are His and that He is ours, our Father; and that we have passed from death to everlasting life!
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J.I. Packer in his book Knowing God wrote, “If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all” (Intervarsity Press, p. 182).
To know God as our Father is to know life as He intended it to be.