Charlie Loften: Hello, and welcome to The Grove Church podcast. I'm Charlie Lofton, the lead pastor there, and we are so glad that you're joining us. Whether you are a member and you're just catching up on a sermon that you missed or you're someone who's brand new, we are really glad that you are joining us. And if you are new in some way, and I know that a lot of people will do that, we'll listen to sermons first before they visit. I want you to know that we would love to meet you at any point.
You can join us live in our services on Sunday, nine and 10:30 or our streaming service at 10:30. Either way, we would love to be able to get to know you. And regardless of why you are here listening to this sermon today, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, good morning and happy Easter. And Christ is risen.
He is risen to you. Yes, awesome. It's so great to be here with all of you. And if you are new, if you're visiting, or you're here from out of town, I'm Charlie, lead pastor here. And really, really glad that you are here worshiping with us.
And I would love to meet you in the back if we've never had an opportunity to meet. We have a gift that we can give you. If we can help you get better connected or take next steps here at our church, meet some people, we'd love to be able to do that for you. But at a minimum, would just love to meet you and say hi, and just so glad that all of you are here worshiping with us, people who are joining us online this service, really excited that you are here with us as well. Just a little bit about me, I grew up in South Arkansas, a little town called El Dorado, and by coincidence, I guess we somebody here first service that was from El Dorado, so we're at least two, we're too strong here in El Dorado.
And I grew up very conservative town, very traditional town. I grew up in a very, very traditional kind of church. We were attenders, frequent attenders, doesn't even begin to describe it. I can count on one finger the number of times we just willingly decided we weren't going to go to church that day. I mean like we were there eight to ten hours a week.
I was a teenager. I had a key to the church. Mean, all these sorts of things. I had jobs. I had jobs.
I needed a key. So anyways, and there's a lot of things about my church I really liked. I would say that by and large, there are very few things when they taught about who Jesus was and what the Bible said, they were very almost always true, but there was just always some little quirks and things about the way things were done, about the way people talked, the way people behaved. They just kind of like, I think, created a lot of misconceptions about who Jesus is, about what it means to be a follower of Christ. And some of you may share this, came from a church similar to mine, or you may came to a church that was very, very different than mine, but then also kind of brings up some different sorts of misconceptions.
Maybe you didn't grow up at church at all, and you're just kind of are just from us, from the people who were. You've got these different ideas. Let me just give you some examples from me growing up. So there was this thing we did on Wednesday nights, and I'm old and from a very particular church, so no one of you may know what this is. But it was a thing called RAs on Wednesday night.
Anybody? Anybody? RA? Anybody? Nope.
There were two in the first service, and now two for the whole thing. It was essentially a Wednesday night curriculum that our church denomination did on Wednesdays, and it was pretty typical what we did. But one time we had a guest. We had a guest speaker or a teacher or whatever, and she was in there, and she's like, I'm going to teach you all about the Bible today. And I was like, this is great.
I really like learning about the Bible. I would love to hear what you have to say. And she went on a rant that I mean, I don't know if I've ever seen one like this before. This is someone who I consider myself a professional ranter. And she was I mean, it was watching.
If you put your Bible on the ground, sin. If you put another book on top of it, it's sin. If you carry your Bible like this and put something else on top of it, that's sin. If you flip the pages too quickly, that's sin. If you get dirt on your Bible, that's sin.
And I was just like, I don't know what you were like at 11 or 12, but I had a pretty good nose for this. I'm like, this is nonsense. I can't this is just ridiculous. And like, we go play now? I mean, like what on earth?
And that's going to give you a different impression about who Jesus is. Fast forward a few years, and there was this our church, it was a really old building, had a lot of little weird quirks too, but there was this little place that you walked down these steps outside, it took you to this basement level, and there were a lot of places around there that were great to hide. So on a Wednesday night of the four or five different activities I was supposed to be at, if you wanted to skip one or be a little bit late to it, there were some great places to hide down there. So our friends and I, we would hide down there, and every now and then, there'd be somebody else there. Not a kid like us, not a teenager, but an adult who was down there smoking.
Now I don't know what church you grew up to, but that would have been a bit of a scandal. But we mutual had assured destruction pact with each other. He would not tell our parents that we were down there hiding, and we would not tell his wife that he was down there smoking. His wife who was in fact, plot twist, the woman who gave us the big rant several years earlier. I'm not going to connect any of those dots.
You can just decide whatever you want to about all of that. Anyways, it was just a weird experience. And I think a lot of us are recovering just from unusual experiences, some less than ideal teaching, some bad encounters we've had with people who have talked about Jesus. Or maybe, like I said, you didn't grow up at church at all, and really, pun intended, I guess, you have secondhand smoke infection from just a lot of misconceptions and bad ideas about who Jesus is. And then what is the significance of this?
Why do we celebrate the crucifixion and resurrection? What is its real significance? Why are we here today? And in the weeks leading up to this Sunday, we've been working our way through a passage in the scripture called the upper room discourse, which is Jesus talking to His disciples, preparing them for what is about to happen, that He's about to leave, He is about to be rested, tortured, executed, and they're struggling. And so He's preparing them for that and for what life is going to be like after he is physically gone.
Now we're transitioning to John chapter 17, and he's done talking to them, and he's transitioning in his own heart. He's been spending some time preparing them for what's to come, and now He's talking to the Father. He's praying to God the Father and preparing His own heart for what is about to happen. And I believe in this passage, we're going to see some really cool bits of theology from Jesus that can help us undo some of these things that maybe we've learned, and then also give us the real power behind what it is that we're celebrating this weekend. So John chapter 17, starting with verse one.
And Jesus said this. After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed, father, the hour has come. Glorify your son that your son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. So he's sitting here, he's just poured out his heart to God. You can just kind of you can feel it here. He's been processing all these emotions that the disciples are having, and now he's talking to God.
He's talking to the Father. He's like, I'm trying I've got this big thing that's coming, and I know this is about to be big, and it's going to be a big transition for me. And he's pointing out, this is what I want. This is what I want. This is what's happened.
This is what I want. And as he's describing his relationship with God, as he's describing what is about to happen, one of the most significant things that I want us to be able to take away from that is this, is that Jesus is so much more. Jesus is much more than just a good teacher. I'm not saying that He is not a good teacher, I'm saying He is so much more than that. And there's phrase that He uses both at the front and the end of this passage.
He's talking to the Father and says, glorify me. Glorify your Son, that your Son can glorify you. And then in verse five, he comes back again and says, and now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. So this word glorify is used really a couple of different ways just in this passage, one in a more traditional way in which we understand glorify. So you're glorifying something, you're taking something maybe ordinary and giving it honor, or you're giving something a lot of honor, you're kind of setting it on a pedestal, you're taking something and kind of lifting it up and look to everyone and say, look how great this is.
And so He is looking to the Father and saying, hey, I've done this for you. I've come down here to show everyone how important you are and to show and to describe to the world how much worthy you are of honor and praise. I've glorified you. Do the same thing for me. I need to be lifted up.
But there's something deeper that he says, and we notice this at the very end in verse five where he says, and and now glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. Basically what he's saying here, this idea of glory, like I want you to take me when you glorify me. I want you to bring me back to the level that I had when I was with you in heaven before, and so I want that level of glory. So glorify in this sense really is an elevation not just of honor, but to the level of what it would be like to be in the presence of God Himself. And if I were to ask you, what do you think it would be like if you became face to face with God?
You probably would feel overwhelmed. It probably is like, might be blinding. It would be overwhelming. It would just be so much. And God says this all throughout the Old Testament to a guy named Moses that you may know from the Exodus and the 10 Commandments and those sorts of things.
He asked to see God face to face. He you can do it. You would die. It would be too much for you. But here's what I'll do.
I'll hide you under this rock, and I'll go past you, and you can catch the very end of the end of my garment, and maybe you'll be Okay, and you'll catch a glimpse of it. And the scriptures describe that every time that he was anywhere having conversations with God, He would come out and his face would just be glowing. So just even one off, two off glimpses of God is overwhelming to the point where his face would shine, and he says if you catch it face on, it would kill you. I mean, we're talking about this the power and the goodness and the, again, the glory of God. And what Jesus is saying here, I had this with you before, then I came hand down here to do this thing, and and and now I'm ready to come back.
I want you to lift me back up to this place where you and I shared the same level of glory. Exactly who God the Father is in His essence is who Jesus Christ is. He is fully God. I don't necessarily want to spend a whole lot of time in Trinitarian theology here today. They are different people, but both fully God, and there is just one God.
That is who Jesus is. He is not just some good teacher. He is not someone like, I don't know, Gandhi or Confucius or Aristotle or Martin Luther King Junior, these people that people look to for good teaching and morals or philosophy or whatever. He's not some person who had some particular insight into God and some religion founder, like Muhammad or the Buddha or somebody like that. Or he's not even one of these Old Testament prophets who was delivering messages directly from God.
This is God himself, the Son of God come here to show us and to teach us who God is. And when we reduce him, and so often people will do this, reduce him to just someone who has some good ideas, we minimize the depth of his character and his person. And I'll see this a lot, and if you've been around me long enough, you'll know this, that I'm not a big fan of what we'll just call modern day internet discourse. I don't like the way that we talk to each other. I don't like the rudeness.
I don't like the anger. I don't like the hate. But one of the things I really don't like is mediocre Bible quoting. When you just take a verse out of context and you feel like, I'm going to win this argument. I'm going to pull this verse, and boom, I'm just going to drop it on you, especially when it's really only half the verse and it's really out of context.
But you think that somehow, if I can just find four words that Jesus said, then boom, I can win. And the most popular one of these was that Jesus said, don't judge. I just won the argument, which you didn't win the argument. In fact, you made yourself look dumb. So don't do it.
Just don't do it. If you think, no, man, that's actually a really good verse. It is a really good verse and a really good passage and a really good context of everything that Jesus said and a really big context of who Jesus is, that's actually very significant. But when we take these little snippets as if they're just these little aphorisms or little quotes, we're minimizing the whole of who Jesus is. There's another one I saw this weekend, actually, that was funny, and it just got a lot of traction.
Somebody was talking about any number of nonsensical things that are happening in our world right now, And this person responded by saying, if Jesus were alive today, what do you think He would think about this? To which then many people responded back, man, have I got news for you. But again, that's what happens. You begin to think of him as just a person, and if he were here, what would he say? Like he's just like, we need that teacher to come back here to say things as if he's just some person, and he is not.
He is the God of the universe. And he continues on in verse two where he says this, for you granted him, talking about himself, authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. So I want you to glorify me the way and because I because so that I because I can glorify you, and and and I this thing that's happened, you've given me authority to to give eternal life to the people who choose to follow me and understand who I am. And then he defines it.
He says, and this is what eternal life is. Eternal life is this, is that people can know you and that people can know me. And what I want us to understand is this, not only is Jesus much more than a good teacher, that life, eternal life, is found in him. I think I got the impression growing up, and I don't know that this I don't know how I think it's probably pretty common. I think there's plenty of people here who think this even still today.
There may be some of you who are kind of still in this, that heaven is a reward that you get after you die if you do all the right things. It is something that you earn through a good life. If I live a good life, in the end when I die, I will get to go to heaven. And when we talk about eternal life, that's what eternal life is. Eternal life is a reward for a good life that happens after you die.
I do all the right things. I say all the right things. I come to His meeting on Sunday. I do more good things than bad things. I've got enough Jesus points in my notebook where it's like at the end, I lose points for this.
I gain points for this. I got enough points. Boom, I get to go to heaven, and then I will have eternal life. Now Jesus turns this on its head. Well, actually, that's not right.
Jesus said it is very clearly here what eternal life is, and at some point along the way, we turned it on its head and turned it into something very different. When he talks about eternal life, he is not talking about some future reward for a good life that happens at some point after you die. He is describing eternal life right now as a reality that we could all experience right now. You have the ability to know God, not just to learn about Him from some good teacher, not to understand a little bit more about the way the universe works, not simply to gain a set of moral codes that allow me to live my life well. You can know God.
Not know about him, know him. And the word for most of the Old and New Testament, when you hear this word know, we tend to think of knowing in terms of intellectual understanding, but it really is about deep relational connection. It is a word all the way from Genesis two that is often used to talk about sex between a man and a woman, a deep intimate knowledge of one another. And when it says that we can know God, it is not sexual, but it is emotional, spiritual, a deep personal connection with. You can know him, which is so much deeper and greater and better than getting some advice on how to live.
We are settling so much for just, I'm going to follow his rules. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to try to do the right things and be a good person and hope in the end that it is enough when a deep relational, spiritual, emotional connection with the God of the universe is what is being offered to all of us. And you may go, well, hold up. If you're talking about Jesus and God the Father and the glory that they have and how big they are and powerful they are and how perfect they are and to see them would kill you and it's so bright and the glory is too much, And now you're saying that no, there's no way that God would want to or would want to have a relationship with me.
You don't understand. You don't understand the gap. There is a huge gap between what I am and being able to do that. Like I don't even know what I would have to do. I don't know how much work it would take on my part to get myself right to be able to do that.
I don't think I can't put my mind around what it is. And even if I did, I don't think that I'm capable of it. Well, I've got good news for you. Verse four, I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. Eternal life is knowing, knowing God and to know Jesus.
And then he says this, one of the ways God's Father, I've brought you glory is I finished the work that you've called me to do. So as we are kind of dispelling ourselves of all these mis misconceptions we have, reject this idea that Jesus is just a good teacher. He's more than a good teacher. And heaven is eternal life is not something that is waiting for you, it is being offered to you right now. And all the work that is necessary to give you eternal life, to give you this intimate relationship with the God of the universe, all the work has been done.
All the work that's necessary. I I can't even imagine what I would have to do to be able to get to where I could have a relationship with God. Good news. All the work has been done. And Jesus is talking to the Father here.
He's like, the work that you've called me to do, I've done it. And so what he there's a couple of things he's talking about here. The first is what he's done up to this point. He's taught people about who God is. He's got these disciples.
He's been encouraging them, leading them, preparing them, set them on this mission. But that is not all the work that He's got to do. It's an interesting thing for him to say, all the work I've done is done right before what is about to be a gruesome, hard twenty four hours for him. He's on the verge of arrest. He's about to be tortured.
He's about to be executed. And it is the most significant of all the work that he does. So why would he say it's done? Well, it's little pregame speechy here. I mean, this is not a perfect analogy.
Imagine a coach, and you're right there. You've made it to the state championship, and it's a pregame speech. Guys, we did it. We made it. We're here.
We set out to do this, and here we are, we've done it. And that is kind of an aspirational, kind of a manifesting from the coach of like I I know we're here to the finish line, and guys, we are going to do it. Jesus, on the other hand, He's at the finish line. He's not manifesting. He's like, I hope it works out.
He knows He's there. He's done it. And now we're here at the end. And it really is Jesus says this when He's dying on the cross. He says, God, into your hands, Father, I commit my spirit.
He's now handing it back to the Father. It's now the time for the Father to do what he needs to do, which is to reconcile the world to himself through the sacrifice of his son Jesus Christ. All the work that needs to be done in order to deal with your sin is the sin, this gap that you feel. That's your sin, and it's real. But that's the bad news.
The bad news is that sin has separated us. The good news is all of that what we feel, the work that has to be done to fix that, All of that work has been done by Jesus. He sacrificed himself on the cross as payment for your sin. He conquered sin. And if that wasn't enough, then he conquered death through his Resurrection.
And that is why we are here celebrating. Jesus has been victorious over sin through his death and victorious over death through his resurrection. In case there was any doubt in anyone's mind whether or not Jesus was simply just a good teacher, another rabbi with a different perspective on how to connect with God, His resurrection demonstrates that, and it demonstrates his power over death. And so you may be sitting here and feeling in some way, I don't feel right with God. I feel disconnected from him.
I feel like there's this huge gap. I don't feel like I'm good enough. I don't feel like God would accept me. There feels like that there's something that would need to happen. Again, I want to affirm all of that, but then tell you it has already been done.
Jesus' sacrifice was to pay the cost for what your sin has done to your relationship with with God. And really the only question the question isn't what do you need to do? Because what needs to be done has already been done. It is not what you need to do, but it is how will you respond to this. Will I reject this idea that is very popular in so many circles that Jesus was just a good teacher?
Will reject that and recognize he is so much more than that? He is the Son of God, the God of the universe, with the same glory as God the Father. Will I reject this idea that heaven is that eternal life is heaven, and life is going to be found in the future if I do enough of the right things? Will I reject that idea and embrace the idea that life is found in Jesus right now. And I reject the idea that I've got to earn my way back into his favor.
That I've got to follow the rules, earn the points, and to do all of these things in order to have life with him. But instead, I will accept by faith in the work that he has already done for me. Let me pray. God, I pray that God that we would receive you, that we would just believe in what your son Jesus Christ has already done for us, that we would stop striving, stop working trying to earn your favor. But God, that we will put our faith in who your son, Jesus Christ, is and the work that he has already done on our behalf.
I pray that your son would be more than a device giver, and that, God, that we would not wait for eternal life, but embrace it with you right now. God, we are so thankful for your son Jesus, for the death that he died to forgive our sins and his conquering of death through his resurrection. God, we celebrate that today. We worship you and thank you for that today. And it is in his name, your son Jesus Christ, that we pray.
Thanks again for joining us on our sermon podcast and you can learn more about us at thegrovechurch.org. If you go to thegrovechurch.org/connect, there's a form you could fill out. Just let us know that you've been listening. And if you wanna dig deeper on some of these topics that we cover in our sermon podcast or just another issues of dealing with culture or theology, those kinds of things, you can check out our cultivate podcast. It's on the same feed, however you found this particular podcast.
So again, this is Charlie, the lead pastor at The Grove, and thank you so much for joining us.