Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 01

Gems in the Gospel of JohnJohn 1:1 - Jesus is God
This is the first of what is likely to be many thoughts on John’s Gospel. The very first verse of this Gospel is this, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
That introduces two exceedingly powerful ideas in the two words ‘God’ and ‘Word’. So powerful that we need to take them one at a time, so ‘Word’ is left to next time.
What a way to start a Gospel! Matthew wanted to put Jesus in context so he gives us a genealogy going right back to Abraham. Mark was so excited by Jesus he plunges right in to what he did without bothering with an introduction. Luke wanted to be a very careful historian so to explain how Jesus fitted into his immediate surroundings he takes us back through a few months of family history. But John goes straight to telling us who Jesus is. He is GOD. That was some assertion in a world where pagans thought there were many gods but the Jewish people knew there was only one God. It is hard to say which is the more difficult idea to challenge head on, as John does. Of course it was the non-Jewish, the pagan, world that thought there were many gods. There were gods in the house, perhaps even one in every room; there were gods in the town, and the country. There was a god in Rome, called Caesar – and he was the most dangerous one of all since one could worship many gods, choose which ones to worship, but you could not choose to worship Caesar, or not to worship him - you had to worship him. No choice; if you were not prepared to say ‘Caesar is Lord’ you were an atheist, and you might die because of it. John was writing, probably about 60 years after Jesus died, for people he knew in the fellowship of which he was leader, and they were under threat. So it was important to say to them, ‘Jesus is Lord, Jesus is God’ very loudly, and very clearly.
And then there were the Jews, brought up to believe that there was only one God and to say every day, at least once, ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ John knew very well that Jesus was a man, he was human, but here he is saying he was God. Could he be both at the same time? The answer is yes – he was both man and God, but that is no easy thing to get your mind round so people have been struggling with the idea ever since. There is no point in me trying to argue in these brief notes how Jesus could be both God and man at one and the same time. What I am going to do is point out some of the main reasons the early Christians decided he was God as well as a man.
The first and probably main reason is that they found themselves having to worship him and you could not worship someone who was not God (the pagans did worship heroes who were human but that was not even a possibility for the many Jews who were in the early churches). Thus when he was healed the blind man said, ‘“Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.’ (Jn 9: 38). When they saw him go back to heaven it is said of the disciples, ‘they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy’. (Lk 24: 52). There are many praise statements scattered through the epistles such as 2 Pet 3: 18, ‘grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever’. There is plenty of evidence that this is what happened and continued to happen in the early church after the New Testament was complete.
The second reason was the many things that he did and said which could only be said or done by God. Thus when Jesus said to the paralyzed man in Mk 2: 5 “Son, your sins are forgiven,” religious people watching immediately started to think and say, “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus also had the ability to command the creation. When he and his disciples were caught in a storm on the Sea of Galilee Mark reports that , ‘He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm’. Only God had control over the created world.
The third reason is perhaps best expressed in the words of a famous writer who said ‘he was either mad, bad or God’. He was pointing to the fact that no one could say the things that Jesus said unless he was indeed God. Otherwise it was the most extraordinary show of pompous self-promotion and blasphemy imaginable. He said, ‘Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’ Really! Who could possibly say that of themselves? Jesus did.
Our God is that astonishing thing a Triune God: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit: three persons but only one God. We shall never get our minds round that completely but that is what Scripture presents us with. We shall see the remarkable results of that in our next study. What an amazing Lord and God we follow and worship.


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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 02

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 2 - John 1:1 - Jesus is God‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
So John starts his gospel. He chooses to use a surprising word to talk about Jesus. Jesus is the Word. Why did he do that? There is no clear answer to that question. Perhaps the most probable is that there are a huge number of places in the Old Testament which refer to ‘the Lord said’ or ‘this is the word of the Lord’ and so on. But if the reason he used the word is not clear its implications are.
First: it says something very important about the Triune God. They talk to each other! They are not just one God with no one else to communicate to at the same level. They are not just three untouchable and unknowable parts of God. They communicate. If they did not, or if they had not all existed, it would not have been possible for John in his letter to say “God is Love” (1 Jn 4: 16). It is impossible to love without someone who is the target of that love. In God the Son, God the Father had the necessary target for his love. So he could be called Love, without qualification or addition. And because, and only because, he was Love could he place his love upon us. We, unworthy, undeserving and unholy people, could be loved by God. John says in that letter of his, ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ Wow!
Second: this says something very important to this 21st century in which we live. Never, in all the history of mankind, has communication, information, words been so important. Words, words, words are everywhere. Previous centuries have been Ages of Agriculture, or Ages of Industrialization, but this is the Age of Information. Words now fly across the Internet at speeds previously unimagined; more and more of them every day. Many in positions of authority find they are in danger of drowning in words because they receive too many every day in emails. We now know that every new creature carries a coded set of information we call DNA from its parents; and that code is a form of words. Above it all unseen, unheard, unimagined, rejected by many or most, stands one who was called the Word, the Word who was God.
Let us hear again how John starts his Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’
Skipping over all that might be said about the role of the Word in Creation and the way he had a hand in everything that was and is created we read that the greatest thing he made, that was his handiwork, was life and the light that we enjoy so much. To call life ‘light’ must seem strange to anyone who lives in those parts of the world where people are terrorized by other people, where people struggle to keep alive everyday for lack of food, where the pollution caused by mankind threatens to destruct people. There are so many ways that talking of life and light, not sunlight but the light of good living, in the same sentence seems to be a mockery. But we are not finished yet. Paul said, ‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. … the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.’
John of Patmos (probably a different John) said, referring to the heavenly Jerusalem, ‘The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it. … The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.’
Have faith brothers and sisters. The Word has walked on this earth, has died and risen again, thus promising us that we will see the Light that shines in the darkness, Light which is so powerful that the darkness will never overcome it.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 03

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 3 - John 1:14 - Jesus is amongst usJohn 1: 9 – 14 ‘The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.’
Let’s start at the end. ‘The Word made his dwelling among us.’ More literally that reads ‘He pitched his tent among us’ or ‘he pitched his tabernacle among us’. This is clearly a reference to what we read in Numbers 2: 1, 2 where it says ‘The Lord said to Moses and Aaron: “The Israelites are to camp around the tent of meeting some distance from it, each of them under their standard and holding the banners of their family.’ Can you imagine the scene? Out there in the wilderness, on a level plain, the Israelites were to form a huge square, perhaps about a kilometre across, three tribes on each side, tent after tent, stretching away into the land on each side, their banners and flags fluttering in the wind. People sitting in the entrances to the tents; children playing all around. And in the very middle of the otherwise empty square a tabernacle, that is a sort of quite small hut made of curtains draped over a wooden frame. This was where God very particularly was – right in the middle of his people. Why? So that Moses could go to the tent and speak to God face to face and all the people could watch as Moses went over to the tent. We can imagine them sitting in careful rows just the right distance from the central tabernacle. Except for the children who, whatever their fathers and mothers did to try and restrain them, would keep breaking the line as they ran around and got nearer to God than they were supposed to be.
And this is where God is now – right in the middle of his people. No longer in a physically visible sense as it was then, but with us just as really. We might even stretch the picture and compare ourselves to those children who ran in and out amongst the tents and the banners. If we go back to what John said before we find ourselves described as the children of God. The people of God no longer draw up in square formation in one place but in the mercy of God are now scattered over many places, many nations, many continents. If your mental picture of the Numbers picture was like mine you will have thought of many children racing around between the different tribal encampments, full of fun and joy as young children always are (provided circumstances allow them to be like that). Now we are to be like that – children rejoicing in living, full of fun and excitement. Getting close to God, because Jesus has been close to human beings as he walked on this earth.
He may be invisible, where the tabernacle was very visible, but our Jesus is with us. He is the true light that was coming into the world. The world did not recognize him when he was there in front of them hanging on a Cross because they were looking for the wrong sort of person to be the light of the world. It is our joy that because we have Scripture, and particularly the New Testament, we do know what to look for and we have seen and recognized him.Click or Tap here to listen to or save this as an audio mp3 file~
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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 04

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 4 - John 1:14 - Jesus is amongst usJohn 1:14‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.’
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.’How can John possibly talk in one and the same breath about flesh and glory in relation to God the Word? Answer - because of the Incarnation – as we call it. My dictionary says incarnation is: the assuming of a human body by the Son of God; the presence of God on earth in the person of Jesus. Can you imagine yourself taking on the form of an ant and going to live in a vast woodland anthill? That is something like an equivalent of what Jesus did in leaving heaven and coming to live on this earth of ours; not in a big palace or grand house either, with all the nice luxuries that the fortunate folk of the world have these days, but to a working man’s small house in an occupied country long before all the things that we think make life comfortable existed. In our excitement over the great sacrifice Jesus made for us on the Cross and the way in which his Resurrection makes us sure that all he said and did was true we may forget the importance of the Incarnation that made those things possible. John did not forget the importance of this; indeed he emphasizes it much more than any of the other three Gospel writers as we shall see as we work through what he wrote.
John starts with ‘the Word was God’. He has now said ‘the Word became flesh’. What a wonderful contrast that is.
This is, in many ways, a rather awkward passage. It is often, and rightly, read in church at Christmastime – but it doesn’t quite fit! In many churches the children do a Christmas pageant. Two senior ones are Joseph and Mary with a doll as Jesus. Three older ones are the three wise men, suitably dressed in turbans and robes. Several are shepherds with walking sticks as shepherds crooks. The youngest and smallest children are sheep in woolly clothes. There may even be a donkey somewhere. All very nice and picturesque but where is the scene for the ‘WORD was with God’? Missing. It doesn’t fit. Yet it is the most important passage in any Gospel on the subject of the Incarnation. God became man.
That is so important. Behind all the fuss and glitz of Christmas: big meals, parties, family get-togethers, presents, commercialization and so on we must never forget the real thing. Many must think - if God has come down to earth we cannot be such a bad lot after all. Wrong! This Gospel is full of judgment and the need to follow Jesus.
One writer lets his imagination fly to get an image of what Jesus did. He points out that almost all the Western films in which someone rescues a town from the bad guys have the good guy, the hero, riding in from outside the town. He is greeted with ‘who are you stranger?’ So it is with our Saviour Jesus. He rides in to our rescue from outside the town, outside the human world. He is the good guy. He is the hero. We must love, honour and worship him. Particularly at Christmas.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 05

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 5 - John 1:6–8, 15, 19-28 - John was not Jesus

The other John, John the Baptist as we call him, though he is never called that in this Gospel, flits in and out of this chapter. Reading John 1: 6 – 8 and then 15 and 19 – 28.
First in the prologue, the introduction to the Gospel we read ‘There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.’ This introduces John as that most important person, a true witness giving testimony to Jesus. Those words ‘witness’ and ‘testimony’ are just about the same in the original Greek, both coming from the word ‘martyr’. John is important in his role as the first and most prominent witness to Jesus. He gets more space than Jesus does in the history of the time written by a guy called Josephus, probably because he acted much more like an Old Testament prophet than did Jesus and so was more easily understood by the Jews of those days. He is a good reminder to us that we too should be good witnesses to Jesus. As Peter said, ‘Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect’.
Second: later in the chapter we read that ‘(John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.“)’ and then there are several verses explaining how John testified. ‘Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”
They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?”
He said, “I am not.”
“Are you the Prophet?”
He answered, “No.”
Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”
John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord. ’”
Now the Pharisees who had been sent questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”
“I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

All of which is a sharp reminder that when we witness we should not do it to increase our own self-image to ourselves or to the Lord, but purely for the sake of our Savior Jesus. Such a caution is probably unnecessary if we are witnessing privately to one or two other people, but if we are up on a platform, or behind a microphone, then we may well fall into the trap of glorying in what we are doing. John did not do that.
The people sent down from Jerusalem were fairly sure he was someone very important: the Messiah, Elijah come to life again, or the promised prophet like Moses. No – says John. ‘I am just a voice in the wilderness preparing the way for a much more important person who is to come. Not even slaves were expected to take people’s sandals off but John was prepared to do even that for the one who was to come. You can’t get much lower, more humble than that. And that is the way we should be. Oof!


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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 06

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 6 - John 1:16–18 - The great gift of Jesus

These verses say: ‘Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.’
Great stuff, but what does it mean. The problem is that ‘grace’ is, in English anyway, a very difficult word to pin down. My dictionary lists 17 different meanings for it ranging from the way a good dancer moves, to a prayer before a meal and the way one is supposed to address an archbishop or a duke! However one of the meanings is ‘the free and unmerited favor of God shown to a human being’ and that is a reasonably good starting point for what it means in the Bible. The (different) words being translated in both Old and New Testaments both relate to what happens when a big guy helps a little guy through the goodness of his heart not expecting anything in return. So the gift given can be asked for, received without commitment, and even withdrawn but it cannot be demanded or bought. The giver may be honoured, thanked and even given a token thanksgiving in response but there is no possibility of buying or earning the favour.
All of which means, of course, that no one English word can convey all that is implied in the word ‘grace’. Different English versions have used ‘kindness’, ‘generous bounty’, even ‘love’ to try and get round the problem, but none of them are really satisfactory and we must stay with ‘free and unmerited favour’ clumsy though that is.
The new NIV has ‘grace in place of grace already given’, while other versions have ‘grace upon grace’, ‘grace after grace’, ‘one blessing after another’ or ‘grace for grace’. If from that you think that no one is quite sure what it means you might be right! One commentator says it ‘underscores the superabundance of the gifts available to the believer through the incarnate word’ and I think that is about right and says it all.
The problem is – what is the grace already given? The next verse makes it sound as though John is thinking about the grace given in Old Testament days, which the grace of Jesus now replaces, but I prefer to think of this more on a personal level. For each believer there is the grace given in conversion, when they turn, or rather are turned, from a life without Christ to one with him, their conversion, when they are born again. But we need to remember, and John here reminds us, that there is still more to come. The Lord does not leave any one of his people to struggle on alone. We will receive more grace, more generosity, more free gifts, more unmerited favour from him, through all the rest of our lives.
This is grace, rich grace, for each one of us. Who gets this grace, this richness, this incomparable gift? There is one little two letter word in this verse. ‘we’, ‘WE’ are the recipients of these good gifts from the Lord of Creation.
Sometimes it does not feel like it - things can go wrong. People can turn against us; we can struggle with illness and weakness, with things going wrong with our bodies or our minds. But whatever our current disaster or problem may be God is still our Father! Jesus is still at his side in heaven. In the wonderful words of Isaiah 43: ‘When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;’
He will be with us – He is with us! That is grace, super-abundant grace, and it is ours if we are His.
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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 07

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 7 - John 1:18Unseen – but known

What does God look like? We don’t know as this verse tells us very directly when it says: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” But that almost certainly won’t have stopped us from having some sort of mental image of God and of Jesus. The trouble is we are probably completely wrong!

I remember as a young boy seeing pictures of God or of Jesus on the walls of the room we had our Sunday School lessons in. God was always a very old, but big strong looking, man. Jesus was always a very good-looking young man with broad shoulders, blond hair and a small beard. He was usually surrounded by animals and children and had a lamb in his arms. You can tell from which part of the world I come from.
I want to share with you the moment when my mental picture of Jesus was turned upside-down. We were in Pakistan, near the bottom of a steep mountain path, when a Pakistani man went by. He was a medium small lithe fellow moving up hill with the easy grace of a mountain man. He wasn’t blonde; he wasn’t big; he wasn’t European. His clothes could have been cleaner, being covered with the dust of much walking. I suddenly realized that is what Jesus must have looked like.
Isaiah said (53: 2, 3), “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.”
Clearly there was something markedly different about Jesus: he was able to confront an angry crowd and walk away through it unharmed. He was strikingly different.
What is your image of Jesus like? Of course, it wont be accurate, but that does not matter. If you are American he will be American; if you are Pakistani he will look Pakistani; if you are Chinese he will definitely look Chinese; and so on. It does not matter how accurate you are. Jesus was everyone; he still is.
And, of course, I have swerved sideways from talking about what God is like to talking about what Jesus was like. That is deliberate. The most we know about God is Jesus. It is all too easy to have a mental picture of God in which he is basically a wrathful God full of judgement and reserve the idea of a concerned, gracious and loving person for Jesus. But that is not the way it is. Our God is the God of Love as well as of Judgement.
And so we come to the end of the Prologue, the Introduction, to John’s Gospel. We have come all the way from the Word who was with God to Jesus and the Father. God with us as Matthew says – Emmanuel.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 08

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 8 - John 1:29-31The Lamb of God

John 1:29–31, “ The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, “A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.” I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.’”
John, John the Baptist that is, must have used an expression that would be meaningful to those who heard him but we cannot be sure what that meaning was. Nowhere in the Old Testament is a lamb said to be ‘of God’. That John said a striking, important and memorable thing we cannot doubt – but what did he mean.
There seem to be 4 main possibilities. In Biblical order, but not necessarily order of importance, these are that he was thinking of:
the near sacrifice Abraham made of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. When Isaac asked, “where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham replied, God himself will provide the lamb.”
the lambs that were sacrificed on the night of the Passover at the exodus from Egypt. The Lord told Moses, “it is the Lord’s Passover” and Paul uses the same expression in 1 Corinthians 5:7 when he said, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”
the lambs that are frequently mentioned as sacrificial offerings in passages such as Exodus 29:38, 41 where we read, “This is what you are to offer on the altar regularly each day: two lambs a year old …a pleasing aroma, a food offering presented to the Lord.”
Isaiah 53, which clearly lies behind so much of what happened in the life of Jesus. It says, “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”
Which of these, or other possibilities, John had in mind as he called Jesus the Lamb of God – or all of them – we cannot tell. Rather amazingly these 4 possibilities point us to 4 distinctly different concepts. They are in order: obedience to the call of the Lord, determination to set out on a difficult journey, the forgiveness of sin and the complete provision made for us on the Cross.
They are not in sensible or logical order. What is that logical order? Stop for a moment and think it through for yourself before reading on. (This sentence is a simple place filler to ensure you don’t see what my answer is too quickly!)
I think: the last one must come first, Jesus is in all and through all that happens; then we have forgiveness of sins, the promise of new life as we embark on the journey of faith and finally we must learn to be obedient in all that happens.
What is really striking is what happened when he said the same thing the next day in the hearing of two of his (John’s) disciples. It is recorded that, “When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’
When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Jesus saw them following and asked, ‘What do you want?’ They said, ‘Rabbi’ (which means ‘Teacher’), ‘where are you staying?’ ‘Come,’ he replied, ‘and you will see.’”
Is it possible to do a really good job of explaining something you don’t fully understand yourself? The answer has to be yes – when you are driven by the Holy Spirit of God. Because that is what happened to John the Baptist. He must have done a wonderful job explaining the Old Testament passages promising a Messiah, even although we know he was not himself fully convinced about Jesus at this time (Matthew 11: 2,3).
We too will never have complete knowledge, nor will we ever be sure that we are completely obedient, but like John we can have the key that unlocks all the best things in life: here is the Lamb of God – follow Him.


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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 09

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 9 - John 1:40The Lamb of God

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 9 - John 1:40Following The Lamb of God

John 1:40 “Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.” John 1:43 we read “The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’” One or other of the ‘follow’ words appears more than 70 times in the Gospels, nearly always as ‘follow me’ or ‘follow him’. So following is a very important and significant word about our relationship to Jesus.
There has been a very distinct and valuable turn by many people towards talking in terms of ‘following’ rather than any of the possible alternatives recently. Not so long ago the common term was ‘deciding for Jesus’ and before that it was ‘born-again’. But the first of these is a very imprecise and somewhat wooly term to use while the second has been taken over by all sorts of people just to mean somebody taking up again a sport or an activity that they used to take part in but had not done so for some time.
Instead of those terms many people are talking about those who are converted (yet another old and Biblical term that is no longer much used) as having set out ‘to follow Jesus’ and those who are going to church but have made no profession of faith as those ‘who are not yet following Jesus’.
There is considerable merit in this. ‘Following Jesus’ indicates not only the starting point of making a profession of faith but the setting out on a journey which will last for a long time – in fact the rest of life – and will include a commitment, therefore a life-long commitment, to following Jesus.
But the obvious question is ‘what does following Jesus’ or following anyone actually mean. We use ‘following’ in much the same sense when we talk about following a team in some sport, such as football. (Apologies here to American friends who have the curious idea that a game in which foot is seldom applied to ball is football! I am talking about what you call ‘soccer’ where foot and ball often meet up.) Those who ‘follow’ a team such as Manchester United act in certain fairly well defined ways. They go to meet – well, watch – their team as often as possible; they worship – well, cheer them on – as vigorously as they can; they rejoice visibly and audibly when they do something good, like score a goal; they identify themselves with the team by wearing their colours in a scarf or a shirt; they spend considerable sums of money to support their team and in various ways assert that support to their friends and other people.
We can parallel all those things in what we should do as we ‘follow Jesus’. We should meet with him, at church, in small groups, in our private prayer as often as possible; we should worship Jesus and the Lord God in our singing etc. ; we should identify with Jesus in many subtle ways – the ways we behave, the things we say, perhaps too the words we do not use, where appropriate in the wearing of small emblems indicating our allegiance; we will be prepared to use our resources to support the Lord’s work in many different ways.
Certain words have sneaked into those last paragraphs, almost without me noticing. Words such as: cheering on, vigorously, identify, support, assert, allegiance, use of resources. All those words have a place in our thinking about how we are to follow Jesus.
Not all of them can be found in this passage in John 1, but many of them can. Andrew was quick to identify himself with Jesus, to support him, to give him his allegiance, and to use his resource of time. Philip did exactly the same things in his search for Nathaniel. It seems likely that Philip was a rather ordinary sort of guy with no great leadership qualities yet evident, whereas Nathaniel was probably the village wise man. That did not stop Philip sharing his discovery of Jesus with a man he probably looked up to as very much his superior.
I’m sure I don’t need to labour the lessons for us that are so clear in this passage. Follow Jesus – it is by far the best way to journey through life and arrive at a worthwhile destination.
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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 10

Gems in the Gospel of JohnPart 10 - John 1:29-51Names and guys

So far I have managed to keep each short study to one or two verses, but not this time. I hope you have a Bible handy in which you can read these verses. A many-coloured procession of different people come into contact with Jesus in these verses. And as they do we find the passage is full of a good many names and titles of Jesus. Counting in titles like ‘the Surpasser’ but not the equal names like Rabbi and Teacher I can find 13 of them. Here is the passage:
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me. ’ I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.” Then John gave this testimony:“I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. ’ I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.”
The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!” When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”
They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”
“Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”
So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ). And he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter).
The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, “Follow me.” Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote —Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”
“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked.
“Come and see,” said Philip.
When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”
“How do you know me?” Nathanael asked.
Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”
Then Nathanael declared, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.”
Jesus said, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.” He then added, “Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man.”
Have a go yourself. How many names and titles can you find? I put my list at the bottom of the page – don’t look until you have had a go yourself.
They range from the bottom of the pile, which is surely ‘son of Joseph’, son of his step-father, to ‘Son of God’ at the top of the pile. Some have deep Old Testament connections like ‘Messiah’ and ‘Son of Man’, while others are simply derived from what John the Baptist knew first hand.
The really interesting thing is what we see if we compare what is said here with what is said in the other Gospels at the call of the twelve disciples. Without exception the other Gospels are less detailed except they all say that the disciples were called to ‘fish for people’ or, in the older versions, to be ‘fishers of men’.
Why the difference? What does it mean?
The answer has to be that John is solely concerned with Jesus. The rest is incidental. As we shall find as we work through the rest of the Gospel John is completely Jesus centred, or Christo-centric as it is called. Because Jesus was, and is, God He could be all those things at one and the same time. He could meet each one of the men listed here: John, Andrew, Andrew’s companion, Simon Peter, Philip and Nathanael, and meet them at their point of need. That is what John is telling us. And he is going to go on and tell us that Jesus would meet many other people, all at their point of need, no matter how way out that might be. Before long we shall be in chapters 3 and 4 where Jesus meets at their points of need a senior professor in Jerusalem and a slightly dodgy woman in a country village. Rather different people. I wonder how successful any of us would be at being equally effective in conversation with such different people. Not many, I am sure. Certainly not me!
But turned round and looked at from the other direction this is enormously encouraging for us. It does not matter who we are, what our problems may be, what is our point of need, Jesus, because He is the Son of God can speak to us encourage us, forgive us, save us, for this life and the next. Hallelujah and hooray – many times over.
Names and titles: Lamb of God/the Surpasser/the One to be revealed/ the One on whom the Spirit had come/the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit/God’s Chosen One/Rabbi=teacher/ the Messiah=the Christ/Jesus of Nazareth/the son of Joseph/Son of God/king of Israel/the Son of Man.

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