Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
September 9, 2026 | JP Funk preaches from John 13:1-17 using the account of Jesus washing the disciples' feet to teach about humility, love, and the call to serve others. He contrasts spiritual humble bragging with Christ's example and emphasizes identity, purpose, and ongoing sanctification in the Christian life.
Bellevue Baptist Church | Young Adults | Memphis, TN
So, have y'all ever had a friend that humble brags a little bit? Maybe they flex a little bit, but it's cloaked in humility. You'll see on the screen in a moment a tweet from a celebrity crush from someone in the room, Cheyenne Hall. This is a tweet from Joe Jonas. We're going to give him a little bit of grace because it's from 2010. It says, totally walked down the wrong escalator at the airport from the flashes of the cameras. Go me. What's he really saying here? It's really a humble brag. He's basically like, hey, there's a lot of people taking pictures of me. It's so hard to do. I couldn't even go down the right escalator. He's flexing a little bit. You may have had friends in college. I know I had this all the time, where someone would just be like, I'm so tired, and you'd be like, what? And like, I got coffee with someone this morning, and then I got discipled, and then I went and served, and then I went to church, and you're kind of like, okay, I'm glad you have friends. You don't know what to say. They're kind of like flexing their time. Or maybe you're friends with a different friend group of people, and they just like to one up each other a little bit. You could go to the gym with some guys, and maybe you bench pressed 135 for the first time. You're really excited. And then one of your friends just looks at you, and they're kind of like, hey, I remember when I benched 135. Like, I'm benching 270 now, and you're just like, oh, man, like, that's tough. Or it could be something, even here in young adults, you could be talking about serving at Mission Memphis and how you love serving, but then someone else could come by and be like, hey, that's cool that you went to that apartment complex, but I went to Denver, Colorado on a mission trip. And then someone else comes over, and they're like, well, hey, that's cute. Denver's cute. I actually went to Honduras last fall break. So that's a silly example, but I want you to think about that a little bit and think about how the disciples were acting in our story here tonight. I actually think the disciples were a little bit like this. In the verse Luke 22, 24, it says, then they began to argue among themselves about who would be the greatest among them. So many scholars, they believe that this was the exact conversation, the disciples arguing with each other, before the account we're going to read tonight about Jesus washing the disciples' feet. So I just want you to keep, as we study the scriptures tonight, think about that in the backdrop. Think about it as the vibe, if you will, of what the disciples are going through. They're kind of flexing on each other. They're doing some spiritual humble bragging back and forth, and they're arguing about who is the best, and then we'll decide to see how Jesus reacts to that. So if you have your Bibles tonight, please turn to John 13. We have a lot of verses, 17 of them. We're going to go through verses 1 through 17 tonight. Let me pray for us, and then we will open God's Word. Lord, you are so good and kind. I thank you just for tonight that there are so many young adults gathered in a room that want to hear about you. They want to hear from your Word. They want to hear the truth of your Word. So God, I pray that you would just pour your Spirit out on this place tonight, that we would hear the truth of the gospel, and that we would leave changed as we leave this room to go share with our coworkers and friends, and that our own hearts would just overflow with your love. It's in Christ's name I pray, amen. Starting in John 13, verse 1. Before the Passover celebration, Jesus knew that his hour had come to leave this world and return to his Father. He had loved his disciples during his ministry on earth, and now he loved them to the very end. It was time for supper, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had given him authority over everything, that he had come from God and would return to God. If you need a review tonight, Passover was a festival celebrating the Israelites' deliverance from Egypt. That's the book of Exodus. The festival at this time would be a big deal in Jerusalem, so it would have been a very busy week for Jesus. He would have come in on Palm Sunday, you know, being in Jerusalem, people getting the palm branches and worshiping him. He would have on Monday pushed out the moneylenders and the merchants from the temple, and then on Tuesday he would have discussed with the Pharisees and debated with them what was right and what was wrong. Here we are Thursday night, and he's got to be tired at this point. This is his last meal with his close followers, with his disciples, and you're going to see what he chooses to do. He chooses to serve them. That's a very important piece of what's going on tonight. He also knows that his hour is coming, so he knows everything he's about to endure, and he still chooses to serve. What's really important for us to grasp on this first few verses is that love fuels everything else we're going to talk about tonight. So love, Christ's love is going to fuel the example we see him give when he washed the disciples' feet and the call that he gives us to serve later. Everything he does in this passage is fueled by his love for the disciples. Now we know in 1 John 4, 8 that God is love. He is the manifestation of love. God is love himself, so the question that, you know, I would ask us is, how do we then love like Christ? If Christ is love himself, how do we emulate that? How do we love other people? How do we serve other people? And I think he gives us a good example in verse number three. So there's three things that Jesus knows in this passage. He knows that the Father had given him authority over everything, that he had come from God, and that he would return to God. What does this mean? This means that he understands his relationship with the Father. He understands his origin, and he understands his future. And if we understand our relationship with the Father, our own origin, and our future, we're going to live totally different lives, filled up with God's love. For example, if we understand what Ephesians 2, 22 says, that we're a dwelling place with God, in which God lives by his Spirit inside of us, that we have access to him anytime, anywhere, and we can call out to him, we're going to start naturally loving and naturally living differently. It's not going to be so manual or a thought that you have to think of all the time. If you understand what Ben Taylor taught us two weeks ago, your origin, that we're God's creation, we're his workmanship, we're created by him and for him. We see that in Ephesians 2, 10. You're going to start to live differently. You're going to live with a little more purpose. If you understand your future, if you're excited about where you're going to spend eternity one day, and that you confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing in God's glory, if that is the attitude you have, like I said, love is going to start outflowing through you to where you can love other people like Jesus did. The key is to understand your purpose and your identity, and then that love's going to outflow a little more naturally. I would like to provide you all with a resource that was really meaningful to me. You'll see it on the next slide here. This is called, I Am a Child of the King. I got this, does anyone know, heard of Beach Week, it's like the high school summer camp we have here? Okay, we got a little love in the room, there we go. I served in high school for about six years with a life group, and I grew up here, so I've ended up going to this camp about 10 times, but this is probably the most meaningful thing I have picked up in my 10 years of being there. This isn't really a prayer, I would say, it's more of like an identity statement, but what it is, and I printed out about 100 of them, they're on the back table, so as you leave tonight, if you want to pick one up, please do, it'd be worth going through. But it has tons of scripture on there that you can look at, put in a more readable way together, to where you can kind of read about your identity, all based in truth of what God says, and I'll just read one for time's sake to you, that there was a time in my life where I would say this probably every morning, I had this kind of, you know, not stapled on my wall, but whatever, get taxed, yeah, and I had that on my wall, and I would read this over and over, once a day, I've been set free from the penalty of sin and from the power of sin. That was just something I needed to hear on repeat, and so there's a lot of truth about your identity that you can find in this resource tonight. It can be a powerful tool to reorient your identity around what the truth of what God says, and not what you feel like, so that is why I'd really encourage you to look at your identity in light of scripture, rather than how you may feel at certain times. Moving forward from that, I think, talking about identity, purpose, who we are, I want to ask three quick diagnostic questions, just for you to think about, you know, if we want love to outpour naturally, we have to understand more of the depth of us, more of the inner layer. So, question, who are you? And not necessarily, you know, what you'd say in like an elevator pitch or a resume or one minute, you know, this is what you want if you want to get a job, but just when you think about yourself, who do you think that you are? When you kind of rip away a little bit of the outer layers, is there any bit of the truth that's in a passage like this? Is there anything that's like depth? Do you believe that God's Spirit dwells inside you? When you think about your identity, do you think about the fact that there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus? Like, is there deep truth that you identify yourself with, or would it be more, you know, I work at AutoZone and I'm a category manager, or I work here and I do the, like, is there depth to your identity in Christ, or is it a little more surface level? It's good food for thought. Next question, what is your purpose? Anyone who's ever been good at anything knows why they do it. That's why you have passion about something, and so you have to understand what your purpose is. You could come up with a really long definition for this. You could come up with a short one. The one that's personally helped me in my life is to glorify God. That's why I'm here. I just narrow it down to a few words, and that helps me each day. If I need to think about, you know, why am I really here? Why am I putting up with this? Why am I doing this? What's going on? To glorify God. That's my purpose here, and that's helped me in times when I need to go back and see what I'm anchored in. Last question, how do you define success? This is one I worked through in college.
college, and I was just trying to figure out, like, what do I even want to do? I do not know what I want to do in life, really. And what would be successful? What is success for me? What can I look back on and be proud of? And the definition I came up with was to be a faithful steward of what God has given me. You could even shorten it a little more and just say to be faithful. And there may be different definitions that you want to write for yourself at different times in your life, but I just challenge you, think about those questions. Who you are, what your purpose is, and how you define success, because that's going to drive how you act, who you are, how you live for Christ. When you understand that your identity and purpose is in Christ, we will be able to love Christ like Christ loved the disciples in this passage. We'll go ahead and move on to the focus number two of this passage, which is Christ's example that he sets for us. So get ready for about eight verses here. So he got up from the table, took off his robe, and wrapped a towel around his waist, and he poured water into a basin. Then he began to wash the disciples' feet, drying them with the towel he had around him. When Jesus came to Simon Peter, Peter said to him, Lord, are you going to wash my feet? He just replied, you don't understand now what I'm doing, but someday you will. No, Peter protested, you will never, ever wash my feet. Jesus replied, unless I wash you, you won't belong to me. Simon Peter explained, then wash my hands and my head as well, Lord, not just my feet. Jesus replied, a person who has bathed all over does not need to wash except for the feet to be entirely clean. And you disciples are clean, but not all of you, for Jesus knew who would betray him. That is what he meant when he said, not all of you are clean. So starting in verse 4 and 5, when Jesus begins to wash the disciples' feet, this is going to be a little off-putting. They're like, hey, what's going on here? This would be a job reserved for a Gentile servant. So definitely not a Jewish rabbi. Definitely not someone who on Sunday when he entered Jerusalem, people got the palm branches and then were shouting, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, indeed, the King of Israel. They were worshiping him. So you can understand that Peter's predicament here, that he's sitting here, and based on the passage, it looks like he's probably not the first person to get his feet washed. So he's probably washing someone else, and they're getting their feet washed, and he's like, what am I going to say when it gets to me? I have no idea what to do. It's relatable. So he says, Lord, are you going to wash my feet? And then he protests. But what Peter doesn't understand yet is that it takes humility to be served. We have to let Christ sanctify us. As Christians, if you have a relationship with Christ, sanctification is a continual process. And that takes humility. You have to admit that you need help. Obviously, that applies with Christ sanctifying us, but that can also apply with a friend or someone else serving you. It also takes humility to be served. Then you see a huge pendulum swing, an overcorrection, if you will, by Peter. He says, well, then wash my hands and my head as well. Like, wash everything. And then Jesus makes a very interesting and clarifying point here in verse 10, and that's where I want to anchor down a little bit. Jesus replied, a person who has bathed all over does not need to wash, except for the feet, to be entirely clean. So you'll see on the slide here, I've underlined the word wash. We're talking about the word wash over and over and over again. There's about five or six times. But then Jesus responds with a different phrase, and that's bathed all over. What he's trying to communicate here is salvation or justification. Once you become a Christian, once you get saved, you're not getting saved again and again and again. Once you're justified, once Christ's righteousness has put over your sin, you're saved, and you can have confidence about that. You can have assurance about that. We'll talk about that in just a moment. What he says is you need to continually be washed. You need to continue to have your feet washed. And what that is alluding to is you're continually sanctified. When we live in a world that's sinful, we are going to continually need God's help to sanctify us each day. And so that is what Jesus is clarifying here versus bathed all over, getting saved, justification, versus washing, sanctification. There's a great example of this in the Old Testament. It's from Exodus chapter 29, and it's when the priests were originally consecrated to be priests in the Old Testament. So they're being ordained to become a priest. There's a lot of things they have to do if you've ever read some of the Old Testament law. There's a lot going on there. But one of the pieces is it says that the priest has to be washed. And it's very similar to this bathed all over. There is a singular moment where they are washed and they become the priest, and that is the one-time deal, and it happens. You go on about three chapters over in Exodus 31, and it's a little bit different. It's similar to this. It talks about the requirements needed for a wash basin. And the priest would put their hands in and put their feet in, and they had to clean themselves every time before they went into the tabernacle to make sacrifices to God. They had to make sure that they were clean. In the same way, that's the sanctification. That's the daily, every time we go before the Lord, every time we pray, we're asking God, Lord, make me more like you. Lord, soften my heart. Lord, I want to trust you more. Lord, clean me. That is a continual thing that we as Christians, we ask for because we want to be more like Christ. But there was only one moment where they became the priest. And so that's the difference we're getting here. And that is a clarification that the disciples would have been pretty familiar with, studying all this. So I just wanted to share two quick verses for those who may be wrestling with the assurance of salvation. That's a pretty common story for maybe many of you in the room. I know that was something I wrestled with greatly growing up, was how do I know that I'm saved? And there's probably a lot more of a conversation here than just these two verses, but I wanted to share them with you because I think they're powerful. The first one is 1 John 5, verse 13. I have written this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. You can have confidence in that. And then John 10, 28 through 29. I give them eternal life and they will never perish. No one can snatch them away from me for my Father has given them to me. And he is more powerful than all else. No one can snatch them from the Father's hand. And with that, we'll go on to the focus number three, which is Christ's call, the call he has of us to serve. Starting in verse 12. After washing their feet, he put on his robe again and sat down and asked, do you understand what I'm doing? You call me teacher and Lord, and you're right, because that's what I am. And since I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other's feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you. I tell you, slaves are not greater than their master, nor is the messenger more important than the one who sends the message. Now that you know these things, God will bless you for doing them. I don't know if y'all have ever been in a classroom and a teacher's asked a question and everyone in the classroom should probably know the answer, and then y'all just look at each other and then you're kind of like, ah, I don't know, and no one's brave enough to say anything. Like everyone probably understands that awkward moment. I'm kind of getting that feel here because I'm sure Peter had just tried to say like three things and none of them are exactly right. And so I feel like all the disciples are just being quiet and it's understandable. But what is Jesus doing? What is he getting at? He's trying to get them to reflect about what he just said. They're getting some things right. They're calling him Lord and teacher. So they, I mean, they have it right. They know who Jesus is. I mean, they're close to the end game. You know, this is Thursday. Good Friday's the next day. Like they're getting there. But what they haven't grasped yet is they don't understand that Jesus' title of Lord and teacher doesn't omit him from serving other people. In the hierarchy of God, what Jesus has is the more influence you have, that's a greater platform to serve other people. It's not about the higher you rise, the more people work for you. It's the more God gives you, the more you can give away. It's the more you can serve others. And that's just what they haven't grasped quite yet. And so in verse 15, he gives them the charge that he gives to all of us in this room. He says, I've given you an example to follow. Do as I've done to you. And that's what we're called to do. Not a literal foot washing. You don't have to go find your coworker and try to wash some feet or do anything weird. I was in the brainstorming mode, quick tidbit, but I was in brainstorming mode about me and Sydney's wedding. So we're just bouncing everything off the wall. Like, should we do this? Should we do this? Should we do this? And I, for some reason was like, well, maybe we could do foot washing as the thing. And she was like, absolutely not. That's the crazy. Like she was just so, I wish I'd never said it because she still brings it up. I'm like, I'm not weird. I don't like feet. Like, that's not a thing. So anyway, you don't have to do anything weird here. What the Lord is calling you to is he's calling you to that attitude of service. Not the action, but the attitude of it. And so moving on to the end here, this is probably my favorite verse in the passage for what it means, but it talks about God will bless you for doing them. When we serve, God will bless us. And so obviously that begs the question, what is blessing here? We probably know it's not material things. We know it's not money. We know it's not fame. We know it's not necessarily influence or anything like that. Some of those things can be a blessing from God, but this isn't what he's guaranteeing or promising. I've got a quote here that I think will help us go into it. It's a little bit hearty. So we'll take a second.
The blessedness that comes from doing what is right is not so much a gift bestowed as it is a state of well-being resulting from the conduct itself. To be blessed is not to receive some extrinsic reward for good behavior, but to enjoy the natural consequence of living harmony with truth revealed. To be blessed is to be more like Christ, to be with the Spirit, the natural result and the natural consequence of living in harmony with God, being obedient to Him, doing what He wants you to do. That is what it means to be blessed. Many of you are probably familiar with an organizational chart. So you might work for a large corporation or something like that. And so you kind of understand how it works. There's an image that will come up. But in my position at AutoZone, my old job, I had myself, I had a director, I had a VP, I had a senior vice president, I had an executive vice president, I had the CEO, it all flowed up. And the vibe that when someone asks you about your job or the weight that someone puts on how many people you manage or how many dollars or whatever it is, the world asks those kind of questions. How many people work for you? That is where the value is tied to a lot of times in the world's eyes. None of those things are bad, but that's where the value is tied, kind of how close are you to the top? Jesus kind of flips the question on His head. He's not saying how close to the top are you, but how many people can you serve? It doesn't matter where you are, but how can you pour out everything that God has given you to serve other people? It doesn't matter where you are on the org chart, but it matters how you can serve other people. And so, man, we saw a great example of service this past Sunday. We did a Mission Memphis send out if you were here, which basically means Tanya interviewed all of our Mission Memphis team. You know what Mission Memphis is? It's a week-long service project that we'll do in the summertime. We partner with some organizations and serve an apartment complex, share the gospel, minister to the community, all those things. And so we did all these interviews. Tanya was asking all these great questions. And I was just encouraged in the back of the room because every single person that spoke, if you think back to that quote we showed a little bit ago, they weren't excited that, oh, the weather was so great, or, oh, I have this funny memory, or there was no kind of material blessing, if you will, that they were excited about. What they shared about was, I felt like I was serving God. I knew that God wanted me to share this. I knew that I could make someone have a better experience. I knew that I could serve someone else. And that was why they loved their experience. My favorite part of the morning was when Doug shared a little bit. He said it was his birthday one of those nights. He didn't know if he was coming back. But he felt led to share with the lady about the gospel. And I believe that she came to know the Lord after he shared. And you could just tell Doug was so excited about that. And it was because he got to live in harmony with God. He got to be obedient to God. And that was the blessing that came. No material blessing, but blessing from God, from oneness with Him, from His Spirit being poured out. And so I know we spoke a little bit about this last week. I want to create a very practical opportunity for you to serve someone else. So you're going to see on the screen come up in just a moment a QR code. I am going to ask you to pull your phone out and open up the QR code. If you're here last week, you know we're doing something called Neighboring Night. I want to say it's in about three weeks at this point. The intention of this night is for you to grab a meal, ideally host if that's possible for you at your house or your apartment, someone that you would not normally spend time with, and just serve them, just get to know them, learn what they need. We're going to have a few more sermons after this to talk about what does my neighbor need. So we'll go a little bit more into detail on that. But go ahead. And it's a really simple Google sheet. You can put your name. If you already know who you're planning on eating with, you can put their name. And I tried to do something a little fun. Just put the food you're going to have. But this is a way that we can pray for each other and encourage each other and hold each other accountable to actually go out on September 30th and spend time with someone that we wouldn't normally, just an effort to serve them. And if you need this later, if it's not loading, or if I didn't make it editable or something like that, we're going to have this on the announcement board kind of running for the next few weeks. Or you can text me, and I'll get you this link. And so as we close tonight and get a little bit closer to the end of the sermon, I want to bring up, you may have noticed that I neglected to bring up one main character from this account. And his name is Judas. He was one of Jesus' 12 followers. And he was in the inner circle, if you will. He was there at almost everything. He was devoted. But he was around the things of God. And he wasn't changed by the power of God. If you remember last week, he was like the priest in the parable or the Levite in the parable that was outwardly religious but inwardly hollow. He was not, for all that we know, he was not changed by the Holy Spirit. And so there have been times in my own life when I've been following the Lord, and I felt like my heart has been hardened by sin. It has been harder for me to follow the Lord because I've been apathetic. And if that is in any way you tonight, if you are, if you will, a minister Judas, if you have parts of your heart that are hard, and I just encourage you as we sing this last worship song, would you just pray to God to soften your heart? As we're standing here, just pray for God to soften your heart and to have a hunger for him, to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Maybe it's not a hardened heart or a Judas-type feeling, but you're like someone we talked about at the beginning who really feels like they need to flex their spiritual muscles a little bit. They need to humble brag. You feel like you've really got to be doing all the spiritual things and let everyone know that that's what you're doing. And if so, my encouragement to you would just be focus on what we talked about earlier, the identity and the purpose. If you focus on loving like Christ did, living to the example that he gave us and then following his call that he gives us will become natural. And so focus on those things, and you won't feel like you have to humble brag anymore or spiritually flex. And then lastly, if you're someone in the room that isn't 100% sure about their relationship with Christ, you don't know with full confidence that Jesus Christ is your Lord, that you've submitted to him and his authority, or you don't know if you've trusted in him as your Savior. You don't know if you believe in his death, burial, and resurrection. And the fact that that will, if you believe in that, it atones for your sin, and it will reconcile you to God. If that is something that you have any doubt about whatsoever, I just encourage you, we'll have several leaders in the back. Every Wednesday night, we'll have some leaders in the back. Please come talk to one of us. Please just come pray with one of us. You will not regret having a spiritual conversation before you leave. So my encouragement to you, just be obedient. Do what God's telling you to do, and let me pray for us.