John 5:1-23 - His Life Or Your Life

Main Idea: Love and honor Jesus through recognizing Him as Lord over your whole life.

• Jesus wants to give you God’s life.

• You must fight the desire to establish your own life.

• Know who Jesus is so you can embrace the life He gives.

Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

We're going to be in John 5 today, so if you've got your Bibles, or maybe if you've got a phone with a Bible app, or if you've got one of the Pew Bibles in front of you, you can turn over to John 5, and we're going to begin a new series in John 5 through 10 called Pick A Side, Pick A Side. Over the next three months, we're going to see Jesus' life and ministry be very clearly declared to those that he was around there in 1st century Judea and Israel and Palestine.

And as Jesus is there, he makes it very clear who he is, what he's claiming to be, the actions that he is calling the people that profess themselves to be people of God. He makes it very clear what he's about and what he's not about.

And in these chapters, we're going to see again and again the opposition that comes as Jesus makes clear, this is who I am and this is what I'm about. And in the same way, we're going to be encouraged to look at our relationship with the Lord.

And we're going to see God, what do you want from me? And as each week we're confronted with the same things that confronted people 2,000 years ago about Jesus, we're going to discover again and again that God doesn't really play by our rules.

He doesn't do all of the things that we want him to do. He does things that we don't want him to do.

But when we're confronted not with a Jesus of our own making or our own interpretation, when we come face to face with the one true God, we have a choice.

We can choose to be on his side, or we can choose to try and make our own path and find our own way. A brief summary of the Book of John, what kind of led us up to this point. The Gospel of John is written by one of Jesus' 12 disciples.

It was actually one of the ones that was closest in relationship with Jesus.

While he was here on this earth, John was part of the inner circle of John, his brother James, and then Peter, that Jesus spent time with the 12 apostles, but he especially spent some time praying and telling these three individuals, especially some

things about the coming kingdom of God, about who he was. They got to be there with him on the Mount of Transfiguration and to see Jesus in some of his glory as even the father sees him.

And John wrote his Gospel decades after, about four or five decades after Jesus had been on this earth and John had spent time with him. John would be one of the latest of the Gospels that was written.

And so John doesn't write all of the things that Matthew and Mark and Luke recorded in their accounts of Jesus' life. John almost kind of gives like a behind the scenes.

He says, okay, you guys have heard about the Sermon on the Mount a couple of times. And so I don't really have to go into that, but let me tell you about some of these conversations that he had with people.

Some of the things that were unique and have not been written yet. So John writes these for people. And he tells us in Chapter 20, the specific reason that he wrote his gospel account was not because he had nothing better to do with his time.

He says, I've written these things to you so that you would believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name. So that's why John writes his book.

And in the first four chapters, we saw over and over again, like who Jesus was from the very beginning. We saw that He was God. And we read that in John 1.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. And we looked at the fact that Jesus came.

John the Baptist proclaimed Jesus to be the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, that He would be our substitute, our sacrifice, that though we were the ones that sinned, and we'd done wrong, and we deserved punishment, God wanted to be

able to have a relationship with us, that we would not have to experience death and separation from God. And so Jesus, God the Son, came to be the sacrifice on our behalf. And that's certainly even what we'll be celebrating this Friday at 6 30 p.m.

at our Good Friday service. And then obviously next Sunday celebrating Jesus raising from the dead. But John proclaims this is who Jesus is going to be.

And then Jesus begins to have some conversations with people. He has a conversation with a couple of his disciples. And they discover very quickly that Jesus knows things that no one else knows.

That he is has wisdom beyond what anyone else does. He performs miracles that no one else can perform.

And yet as Jesus is explaining to people that though he is doing good and does some healing miracles, and though he turns the water into wine, and though he is kind and good in his dealings with people, he's not just about the here and now and the

physical. He's about our spiritual need. You see, though we all have physical bodies, it's not inherently who we are. We are spirits.

We are souls that have a body. We're not bodies that have a soul. And Jesus knew as God had created us to be in relationship with him, we were created to have, if you will, eternal souls and to be able to have a relationship with God.

In our sin and in our wickedness, we would be forever separated from God. But Jesus loved us so much. John 3.16 says, God so loved the world.

He loved the world in this way that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have everlasting life.

So as this is Jesus' goal, he'll sometimes use physical illustrations to try and tell them about spiritual truths.

The only problem is no one understands what the physical truth is, and so they get all bent out of shape and they don't understand what Jesus is trying to do.

So he's having a conversation with a Pharisee named Nicodemus in Chapter 3, and he's like, hey, Nicodemus comes, he says, listen, teacher, we know that you're from God because no one could do the miracles you're doing except if God was with him.

And Jesus responds to him with, I tell you, unless you are born again, you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. And he's like, how in the world am I supposed to like enter into my mother's womb a second time and be born again?

He says, this doesn't make any sense.

Or you have in John 4, when Jesus is talking to a Samaritan woman, someone that the Jewish people during that first century period loathed and hated with just racial animosity, as well as some religious animosity, the Samaritans, and Jesus was

talking with her. She was taken aback by it. She's like, whoa, you're talking to me? And he asked her, is he sitting at a well but doesn't have a bucket or anything to get some water from the well?

And he asks her, hey, would you draw me some water? And so she begins working, and then he tells her, like, hey, if you would ask me, I would give you living water that you would never have to thirst again.

And she thinks immediately, physically, she's not thinking spiritually. And she's like, listen, you don't even have a bucket. How in the world are you going to give me living water?

He's like, no, no, no, no. All right, let me back it up. Let me explain to you how this works.

And so in the first four chapters, it was a lot of those misunderstandings of Jesus trying to make the spiritual truth clear through using physical illustrations.

In John 5 through 10, it's more Jesus just straight up says, okay, here's who I am, here's what I'm about. And people did not like it. Some people did, and they followed him, and they worshiped him.

But as we're going to see, a lot of people disliked what Jesus had to say. We like a God of our own making, and we're not always comfortable seeing the one true God. Today's message is entitled His Life or Your Life.

You see, each of us choose the kind of life that we lead. Some people live a life that's totally dedicated to their physical wellness. And what time they wake up in the morning, it's determined by their physical wellness.

They go, okay, I got to work out. Their breakfast every day is determined by, okay, I need to replenish these electrolytes and these proteins and these things that I'm doing. My whole life is dedicated to that.

Their friendships are determined by who can put up with them talking about their fitness lifestyle. Their bedtime is determined by it. Their food and their drink, everything is determined by the kind of life that they have determined to lead.

And today, we're going to look at the choice that we have of determining whether we will live our kind of life or the kind of life that Jesus lived and that kind of life that he calls us to live as well.

Today, we need to love and honor Jesus through recognizing him as Lord over our whole life. Love and honor Jesus through recognizing him as Lord over your whole life. He is the one determining what you do and say and think.

Would you pray with me this morning? And we'll jump into the passage and hopefully briefly see this morning what God has for us. Dear Lord, we love you and we're so thankful for everything that we have heard and sung already this morning.

God, thank you that you work through, Lord, your people to accomplish your will. And God, though we certainly don't understand all of how that works.

And though we would not pick ourselves as the great way that God would make an impact in our family or in our neighborhood. Lord, that's what you've called us to.

And Lord, we ask today that as we look at your word, we would recognize the call that you have for us and that we would follow in obedience and in love for you.

Lord, I ask if there's anyone here today that does not yet know you as Savior, that today would be the day that they choose you. Lord, it is their Lord and their Savior. We love you, God, and we pray all of this in your name.

Amen. First thing that we're going to see today as we look at John 5, 1 through 23, is this truth that Jesus wants to give you God's life. Jesus wants to give you God's life.

In verse number one, scripture says this, after this, a Jewish festival took place and Jesus went up to Jerusalem by the sheep gate in Jerusalem. There is a pool called Bethesda in Aramaic, which has five colonnades.

This would be kind of at the north end of the temple there in Israel. And so if you were going to if you were shepherds and you were bringing sheep into the temple, it's, you know, early Israel. And so you have the sacrificial system.

You'd bring them through the sheep gate. So this is right by the hub of religiosity there in Jerusalem in the first century. It was a well-traveled place.

Within this pool of Bethesda, in this area with the five colonnades, there lay a large number of the disabled, of blind and lame and paralyzed. One man was there who had been disabled for 38 years. So a long time period.

And he had been in this location. It was very popular during that time.

One of the ways that you just like, prove to others how religious you were, is as there were beggars outside of the temple areas, you would make a big show of how many coins you were giving, or how generous you were to these people.

And so it was a place, nowadays even in Baltimore and in Essex, many times you'll see people at intersections that they're asking for needs. And right outside of the temple was back in first century Jerusalem where this took place.

And so this particular gentleman has been there for almost four decades. In verse number six, when Jesus saw him lying there and realized he knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, do you want to get well?

Do you want to get well? Now, we're going to look at the following verse and backtrack just a little bit. He says, sir, the disabled man answered, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up.

But while I'm coming, someone goes down ahead of me. So there was a particular superstition during this time period that there was an angel that he would come and at random intervals, he would touch the Pool of Bethesda.

And whoever was the first person into the water after the angel touched the water, that person could be healed. Now, this was not something that we read about even in the earliest copies of scripture that we have of this passage.

That's something that kind of came along after the fact that people that knew about this particular religious superstition, they were like, oh, okay, well, it might be helpful.

Let's let people know that they at least thought that there was this angel that was stirring up magical healing waters for one person at a time.

And so if you have perhaps the King James Version, the New King James Version, or the Modern English Version, you'll see that particular account in there of the angel that will heal one person at a time if you're fast enough to get in.

This was the particular belief that this disabled man had.

And he said, listen, I'm laying, I'm right here, the pool's right there, and I want to get in, but because of my inability to walk, as soon as the healing water starts, someone else is getting in, and over the course of 38 years, I've never been able

to receive the healing. Jesus tells him, get up, pick up your mat, and walk. Okay, I understand we're Christians, we know God's miracles.

On a just human level, if you're this guy for 38 years, and someone tells you, get up, pick up your mat and walk, I'm feeling a little insulted.

I'm like, listen, don't you think I would have done that already if that was the solution that I could have had? But when God speaks, it comes with his power and his ability.

When God says that we can be forgiven, and we don't think that we can ever forgive ourselves, or we don't understand how someone else could ever forgive us what we do, when God says something, we can believe that it will take place.

Now, just because of the 21st century America that we're in, this does not mean whatever someone else says that God says will take place. I could be like, listen, Laurie, you're going to grow seven inches in the morning and whatever.

Okay, none of that in the word of God. And so, anytime anyone tells you something, oh yes, God says this, even in scripture, it tells us, if someone says God says this and it doesn't come to pass, do not listen to that person.

That is a false prophet. So we rely on the word of God and what God has actually said. But when God speaks to us, when he's given us a mission, when he's given us hope and certainty, we can know whatever God tells us to do, he has enabled us to do.

You see that in verse 9, instantly, the man got well, picked up his mat and started to walk. Now that day was the Sabbath. Okay, gonna back up here just one second.

So Jesus sees the man and he'd been laying there for a long time and he asked him a question. Do you want to get well? Now this of course is a question of desire for the person.

If they're just like, oh no, I've been living comfy for about four decades then I'm not sure that Jesus would have been like, oh yeah, certainly, you know, I'll heal you even though you don't want to be healed.

For some of us, we live our lives in such a way that we don't want God's intervention or his work in our life. Like maybe we would want some really cool blessings, but we don't want the God-centered life that Jesus is offering.

So I wanna ask you today, do you want the life, the kind of life that Jesus offers to you? Now, I know we highlighted missions and stuff this morning. God may not have you to be like Pastor Ron and Ms.

Fern and go work with churches in a far off place. He might not call you to be an international missionary. He might have you to do the exact same job in the exact same house with the exact same people that you are currently operating.

But he's gonna give you a different way of living the life that he has given you. For this man, it wasn't that Jesus, he didn't transform him. It's not a, you know, Aladdin scenario where the genie makes him a prince, and then that's now who he is.

He's still the exact same person with the exact same history, with the exact same family relationships and the memories. And I can think over 38 years of being there, there were possibly many regrets that this man had.

Jesus didn't erase all of that, but he gave him new purpose in the new life that Jesus was giving. So Jesus asked him, do you want to get well? And the man's response is, oh, well, listen, I don't have any person to be able to put me in the water.

And can I tell you, when it comes to your relationship with God and him working and transforming you and giving you his life, it comes through a personal relationship with him.

You can't rely on, well, my mom was a big believer in Jesus or my grandpa was a strong Christian or he was a deacon at some church. That's not going to work for you. It's not going to work for your life.

As I heard one pastor put it, God doesn't have any grandkids. For you and I, we got to stop relying on other people for our spiritual walk. Every morning when we get up, you don't have a pastor, unless you're Samantha.

You're not waking up next to a pastor going like, okay, would you instruct me? Like, what does God want me to do today? No, you have to live the Christian life, the life that God has for you.

You got to take personal responsibility for it. That if anyone is going to have you walk with the Lord, it's going to be your submission to him and to his Holy Spirit's leading as he is motivating you to go.

You can't just say, oh, well, I used to have a friend that was a strong Christian, but they left, and so I haven't really been in it. No, take personal ownership and responsibility for your relationship with the Lord.

This man also thought, okay, well, the pool provides healing. He doesn't say anything about God or trust in the Lord for his healing. He just assumes this religious ritual will be what gives him the life that he is looking for.

And can I tell you, you can be as religious as the day is long. You can pray every single day. You can read through scripture every single year and read the entire Bible through, and yet without faith in Jesus, it will accomplish nothing for you.

As Paul would tell us in 1 Corinthians 13, without a love for the Lord and a love for people, he says, I can give away everything I own to feed the poor, and I can even give my own body as a martyr. He says, but without love, it's meaningless.

And for you and I today, are we trusting in religious rituals, or are we trusting in the person of Jesus Christ as the basis for our healing, for our life to go in the direction that God has for us?

Say one last thing and then we'll move on to another point. Jesus did all of this on the Sabbath day. Now, for us today doesn't mean a whole lot, unless you're perhaps from a Jewish background.

This was a huge no in that culture. You were not supposed to heal on the Sabbath, which in every single gospel account, you read Jesus loves, He cares for, He provides for, He provides miraculous healing for people on the Sabbath day.

And it infuriates the Pharisees and the religious because they were looking at the Ten Commandments and they saw the command, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. And they assumed that that meant you can't do anything.

You can't even do good on the Sabbath.

For the Jewish people during that time, you had what was called the Mishnah, which was additional writings that the Pharisees had made, where they said, okay, God gave us the law, He gave us the Old Testament, that's really cool.

We don't think He quite clarified enough stuff for us, and so we're going to write in some clarifiers. And so one of the rules that the Pharisees had added in the Mishnah was that you could not carry something from one place into another place.

So Jesus, in the eyes of the Pharisees and the religion of that time, He broke the Sabbath. He defied one of the Ten Commandments through healing this individual.

And then as He told the man to pick up his mat and walk with it, they said, man, this is evil. This is wrong. He has broken the Sabbath.

We'll get more to that in a second, but I did want to highlight so you know when we get to our next verses, people are not happy. This is not cool. This is not acceptable for these people in this day.

For us today, Jesus wants to give you God's life. The most central element of it is this. You and I, we are created by God.

He loves us. He made this world very good. And He gave mankind at the very beginning, just one instruction that they were not supposed to do.

Our ancestors, Adam and Eve, just as we do today, they took that one instruction from God on what they could not do, and they did that thing. As a result, all of humanity, since them, we have all chosen to walk away from God.

As a result, the Bible says that we all have sin, which is anything that we think, say or do that goes against the word and the character of God.

As a result of our sin, scripture tells us that the wages, the earnings, the results of our sin is death.

God's character is life and grace and love, and to reject his life in favor of our own path is to head straight towards death and eternal separation from God in a place that the Bible calls hell. But Jesus loves us.

He did not want us to suffer the consequences of the path and the actions that we voluntarily chose on our own. And so Jesus came 2,000 years ago and he lived a perfect sinless life.

He didn't always do what everyone thought he should do, but he lived a sinless life. He died on the cross for our sins, taking the punishment that we deserved.

He took it all on himself and he was buried for three days and rose again to prove that we have now had our sin debt totally erased. And the Bible tells us that if we accept what Jesus did on our behalf, that we can be reconciled to God.

Romans 6.23 says, The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. 2 Corinthians 5 says, God made Jesus, the one who knew no sin, to become sin for us.

So that we would be made the righteousness of God in him. And scripture tells us that anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. God doesn't care where you've been, how long you've ignored him.

God doesn't care all the ways that you have failed because Jesus died in your place. From the worst sinner to the person that thinks that they have lived the ideal perfect life. God died for you.

So that you would be able to have a relationship with him.

And scripture says that if we confess with our mouth what we believe in our heart, that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead when we accept the gift of eternal life that Jesus gives to us, that we are forever saved and made a child of

God. And when he makes us a child of God, when we believe in our heart and confess with our mouth what we believe about Jesus, scripture says that the Lord gives us his Holy Spirit, his own indwelling presence that lives within us and guides us from

day to day. He has given us his word, his love letter that we would know his thoughts and actions and intentions for us. We would be able to know, if you will, where the story ends and where the story began.

He gives all of that to us and he gives us brothers and sisters in the Lord that we are children of God together to be able to live the kind of life that Jesus wants for us.

The topic is way too vast to go any further into it, but I want you to know, just as with this man, Jesus wants to give you God's life. Secondly, today in verses 10 through 18, you must fight the desire to establish your own life.

So Jesus heals, it's on the Sabbath. This is a big religious no-no. The Jews said to the man who had been healed, this is the Sabbath.

The law prohibits you from picking up your mat. Okay, this person, they have walked by for 38 years. I don't even know if all of them were old enough to have initially seen this man.

Some of these people could have been for as long as they had been coming to the temple. This man had not been able to walk. And now he's walking.

And the only thing they're concerned about is the religious ritual. They say, you can't carry a mat. Their question was not, how are you walking?

How many times do we miss what God is doing? Because we're focused on the way that we think things should be.

For you and I, if God did a miraculous healing of someone, like in our church, in our neighborhoods, whatever, and we saw them walking past and, you know, maybe they're smoking a cigarette, they're doing this or that.

How many of us would have the presence of mind, the love of people, to be able to say, wow, like God's been working in you? Or would we be so fixated on like, hey, here's this religious expectation that I have.

May we, as Jesus, care about the person and the life that God has for them and not be as these individuals that missed the miracle because of their focus on what God had not said.

He replied, the man, the man who made me well told me, pick up your map and walk. If I'm gonna listen to someone in my religious life, I'm gonna listen to the miracle worker. I'm not gonna listen to people.

People never died for me. People never gave me the word of God. The Lord gave me the word of God.

The Lord gave me new life. The Lord saved me. And so like, I want to love and care for people and listen to people.

But when it comes right down to it, I have a final judge over my life that I have to listen to the Lord. And as this man says here, when you guys heal me of 38 years of disability, then I'll listen to you.

He says, the man who made me well told me, pick up your mat and walk. Who is this man who told you, pick up your mat and walk? They asked.

Again, there's a miracle happening, and they're missing it. But the man who was healed did not know who it was because Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

I love this about Jesus, that he has a humility even in his actions, especially in his miracles. As you read through the gospels, almost every time that he heals a person, he's like, hey, don't tell anyone that I did this.

If any of us were healing someone, we're going like, hey, look at me, I'm so great. And instead, Jesus, he heals a man and then just slips away quietly into the crowd.

Verse 14, after this, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, see, you are well, you're healed. He says, do not sin anymore so that something worse doesn't happen to you.

Here, Jesus is not inferring, the reason that you had this disability was because of your sin. He's saying this, there is something worse than physical ailments and hurt and disabilities.

And it's the, if you will, the disability of your soul, the detriment of your soul is far greater than any detriment to your body.

And here, Jesus is warning him, yes, you have been physically healed, but do not go and live your life for just the here and now. Realize that God loves you and God now has a claim on your life.

Live the life that God has for you, which is in the path and direction of life and wholeness. Don't now angle your life towards spiritual destruction just as you experienced physical destruction in your life.

Can I ask you, many of us are concerned about our physical health, as we should, but are we also concerned about our spiritual health? If you were hungry, you would probably get some food.

If you noticed, you know, you're bleeding out your ear, you would probably get that checked out. But many times in our life, when it comes to our anger, we just allow anger to run rampant and wild in our life.

And we don't go, hey, there's a big problem here. We struggle with temptations, and we just allow it to happen, and we don't think anything of it. God cares about your spiritual health.

There's something worse than just physical ailments. It's the ailments of the soul. And that is what Jesus came to heal and to guide us away from.

The man went, verse 15, and reported to the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Even as I've been reading over this the past week, I can't tell if this is like him tattling, like, hey, it was Jesus that told me to pick up the mat, or if this is like wonderful testimony, hey, it was Jesus who did it.

It's not totally clear from the passage, but verse 16 says this, therefore the Jews began persecuting Jesus because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. If you are stricter than God, you're doing something wrong.

Anything you're supposed to do or not do in relation to religion or church or anything like that is fully covered in the Word of God. God doesn't need you to make any bonus rules for people to begin following.

And here's the thing, all of us have ways in which we start adding on. This is not just something that the Pharisees did.

It's something that all of us do because all of us have our preferences and things that we care about that we're like, listen, like, yes, the Bible, but also this and this and this are really important. And you ought to follow this.

But let's take a clue from even this passage and go, okay, did Jesus do this or say this thing that I'm wanting everyone else to do? Okay, if Jesus didn't do it, then maybe I might be stacking on a few too many laws.

Jesus' response to their persecution is this. He says, my father is still working and I am working also. He says, God is still making the earth spin around.

God's still giving day and night and he's providing food and he's giving you breath in your lungs to be able to operate and to live. And he's keeping you alive. And he says, God is working on the Sabbath.

And so he says, and I'm working on the Sabbath too. Here, he makes a clear identification. I am with God.

What God is authorized to do and what he does, that is what I am doing. And the people around him completely understood what he said. This is why the Jews began trying all the more to kill him.

Not only was he breaking the Sabbath by their metrics, but he was even calling God his own father, making himself equal to God. Here is an emphatic declaration of the identity of Christ. Jesus is not a lesser God.

He is God himself. I got the somewhat privilege this week. My five-year-old was asking some questions that kind of bordered around the Trinity.

And so I got to explain the Trinity to a five-year-old. So if you hear any new heresy coming from Bryon, it's probably because of that. So, but I'm thankful for this.

Scripture, very brief, talks about it this way. We have one God. We do not have three gods.

We have one God. This one God expresses himself in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is not the Son.

The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. They're each distinct persons.

And Scripture talks about them as having mind, will, and emotions. Kind of how personhood was thought about there in first century Rome and kind of left over from Greek culture as well. So we have one God in three persons.

It is a mystery that has been around for 2000 years, but it's what God says in his word. And so we believe it. It's what makes us Christians.

It's why every time that a person is baptized, we say that we baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an essential element to the Christian faith. And here Jesus makes it very clear.

He says, what he'll say in chapter 10 that we'll find out at the end of the series is, I and my Father are one. We are one God. Obviously, there are two persons, but this is what Jesus says.

Could go on, but time is short. I'll just say this. You must fight the desire to establish your own life.

Here, the religious leaders, the Pharisees, they had their list of how they thought they should live and how everyone around them should live.

They were not looking at what does God's word clearly say, and how can I align myself with the life that God gives, because if they had, they would have recognized Jesus and who He was, and they would not have fought against the things that He was

saying if they were walking in God's path. But they, even using the Old Testament, even using the word of God, they sought to establish their own rule in their life. Can I ask you today, what is determining the direction of your life?

Is it your favorite religious practices? Is it whatever your grandparents said? Is it whatever your favorite pop culture icon is saying that you should do or think?

Don't look to people. Don't look to yourself. Don't look to tradition or the past in order to inform you about how you should live your life.

Look at the person of Jesus Christ and what He expresses in His word. Fight the desire to establish your own life and instead rely on the direction that God provides for you.

Then lastly today, know who Jesus is so you can embrace the life that He gives. Verse 19, Jesus replied, truly, I tell you, the son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the father doing.

For whatever the father does, the son likewise does these things. Here is what theologians call it the inseparability of operations. You guys, that's not on the test.

You guys don't have to worry about that. It's this, our one God is not working against himself in any way. Everything that our God does, he does in unison.

That our salvation is not like Jesus' idea that he was really for and the father was like, I don't know about that, no, no. Everything that the father does, the son likewise does. Jesus doesn't have his own will apart from the will of the father.

Instead, they have the same goal, the same desire. And so here he says, I'm not doing anything because I want to do it. I'm doing this because God wants this done.

How about for your life? Do you do what you do because the father tells you to do it? Do you do it because scripture instructs you?

Or do you do it because it feels good to you or that you like to do it? Let's be like Jesus who follows the example of the father. Verse 20, for the father loves the son and shows him everything he is doing.

And he will show him greater works than these so that you will be amazed. He says here, God the father loves Jesus Christ. And he is showing Jesus what he ought to do.

And he says, and I'm going to give, he says, the father is going to show me even greater works, greater miracles that will be accomplished. So that people will be amazed. And can I tell you this?

This isn't just true in Jesus' life. God wants to work a miracle in you so that those who see what the greater works that God is doing in you, they will glorify the Lord.

They will be amazed at what Jesus can do through seeing your life and the change, the new life that God is bringing in and through you.

Verse number 21, Just as the father raises the dead and gives them life, so the son also gives life to whom he wants. He says, the father is the source of life. And he says, and the son is no different.

The son gives life to whom he wants. Verse 22, the father, in fact, judges no one, but is given all judgment to the son, so that all people may honor the son just as they honor the father.

Anyone who does not honor the son does not honor the father who sent him. You see, as Jesus took our punishment on the cross for our sin, God has made him the judge over the whole earth.

And when you get to the end of your life, you're standing before the judge who died in your place, who loved you enough that he bled and died. He was rejected by his own people. He was abandoned by his apostles.

And he underwent incredible physical and spiritual cruelty for your sake and for mine. Scripture would tell us this.

Since we know that's the judge that we're going to at the end of our life, we can either receive him now as our Lord and Savior and experience the love and the life that he wants to give us, or else when we arrive before him and we say, no, I didn't

want to follow you. I didn't want to love you or to honor you with my life. I wanted to live my way. Spat in the face of the Son of God.

Can I ask you today, if you do not know Jesus as your Savior, don't put it off. He's the God who loves you, who made a way for you and who wants to be with you forever, who wants to give you his life. Receive his gift of salvation, even today.

Knowing who Jesus is, he's our judge, he's the source of life, he is the one that the Father loves. When we know who Jesus is, we can embrace the kind of life that he wants to give to us.

We can embrace the life lived in obedience to the Lord, in love of the Father, in walking in the Spirit.

Can I ask you, if you know that Jesus has been patient with you, as the only one that's actually authorized to judge you, are you going to be patient with others this week? As you realize that Jesus has loved you, will you choose to love others?

As you realize that Jesus is holy, that he was without sin, will you not embrace sin in your own life, but instead reject it, knowing the kind of life that Jesus wants to give? This week, today, you've got the choice, his life or your life.

Will you love and honor Jesus through recognizing him as your Lord? Galatians 5 talks about the difference in the kind of life that is lived in the flesh, that's just lived our own way, and the kind of life that is lived in the Spirit.

He says, now, the works of the flesh are obvious.

Sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar.

He says, that's what it looks like when we follow our way. He says, but the fruit of the Spirit, of God's presence, that Jesus life coming out of us, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The question for you and I is, Jesus wants to give us that kind of life, God's life. But we have to fight the desire to establish our own life with our own rules and expectations. We gotta live the Jesus way.

But the only way to do that is to know who Jesus is, so that we can embrace the life that He gives. Today the choice is clear. His life or your life?