John 4:46-5:18 • He Too Takes All Kinds
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Transcript
(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
I will tell you a little bit later while we sang that song and particularly the last verse. For now, let's look at John chapter 4. John chapter 4 as we'll be looking at verses 46 and following.
Last week during the 830 service, just in the course of recognizing the message itself was about praying for the power of God and the lives of others, we just stopped right in the middle of the sermon and we prayed for campus outreach. And Mike Jackson's ministry in St. Louis because we knew he was speaking that morning to a large gathering of college students, many who understood very clearly what he would be talking about, others who would be just gaining a knowledge of the gospel.
And since it was right in the middle of the sermon, people thought that was unusual. So a number of people just by instinct after the service said to me, "All right, now you need to go to Mike and you need to check what was he doing just right at that moment in St. Louis that you were praying right here in Peoria right then." And what that instinct was saying was, "You recognize the power of God can work across time and space."
And if you have an instinct for that, you're going to understand very much what's happening in this portion of John's gospel because there's a man who comes and asks Jesus for help.
And later he discovers that the Son that Jesus has blessed has been healed, but the Son's in another place. And so the Father asked a question, "When did the healing begin?" Because he wants to check it against the time that Jesus said to the Father in another time, in another place, the Son's healing would occur.
That's what's happening here. Let's ask for the Lord to bless again as we stand and look at His word. And I'll tell you just a little more as you're standing. I asked Mike later how the time went in St. Louis. You know what he said? After the very first talk that weekend, he lost his voice.
So he said he needed people to pray for him. So he had the strength to continue. What did we do? We prayed that he would have the strength to continue. And the Lord blessed. Let's ask the Lord bless again as we look at His word and the power that is expressed through it. John 4 and verse 46.
Speaking of Jesus, John says this. So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine.
And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.
So Jesus said to him, "Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe."
The official said to him, "Sir, come down before my child dies."
Jesus said to him, "Go, your son will live."
The man believed the word. Jesus spoke to him and went on his way. As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering. So he asked them the hour when he began to get better.
And they said to him, "Yesterday at the seventh hour, that's when the fever left him." The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, "Your son will live." And he himself believed in all his household.
This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee. Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, what you are showing us in this passage of the Bible is that the Word of Jesus is powerful.
It transcends time and space and human difficulty.
It transcends person's sin. It transcends personal difference.
It can even reach into our hearts here and now. And that is why we pray that the Holy Spirit would take the Word of Jesus and send it into our hearts to do your will for Christ's sake.
For this reason we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Please be seated.
It's just a very simple story.
Some time ago a visiting pastor went to a church and in the course of his preaching noticed a young woman who, through the course of the sermon, just by the look of her eyes,
showed deep guilt and deep pain.
Being sensitive, the pastor went to her after the service and asked a question.
Would you like to know what it means to be forgiven and to have a life with Jesus Christ?
And the eyes that had pain and guilt behind them looked down, filled with tears that hit the floor, and she said, "I am not worthy."
Said the preacher, "The issue is not whether you are worthy, but whether you are welcome."
What Jesus is doing in this passage of Scripture is making it very clear that His gospel, His good news, His forgiveness, His offer of a new life is not for those who are worthy, but for those who are welcomed by an amazing grace that is His own love, for those who are truly unworthy. If we don't know that, if something in us doesn't recognize that this gospel, this good news that we have is for those who are unworthy, then not only will we reach a point in our lives where we will wonder if we are welcome, but the message that we have from Christ will wither within us so that those we love the most will not know the welcome either.
If the issue is not our worthiness but our welcome, you have to recognize Jesus must make it very clear.
And the way He does so in this passage is just by dealing with a particular man in a particularly difficult circumstance. His son is dying. Now other people's sons have died. Other people have children, they get sick. But why this man? Why does he get such attention? And what Jesus is doing is saying, "I want to show you how wide the door of welcome truly is."
Now all we know about this man, if you're saying, "Why is he in the Bible?" is what we're told in verse 46. Jesus came again to Canaan in Galilee where He made the water wine.
And at Capernaum, there was an official whose son was ill. That's all we know. He's an official whose son was ill. Now if you look at that word official, in some of your Bibles it will say something like nobleman.
Those will say a royal official because the language there simply says the king's man.
He is one who represented the king of the nation at that time. Now that's something you need to know. What you know is the commentators now debate. Was this a Jew or was this a Gentile? Because you may remember while Jesus is at Cana performing this miracle, the official came from Capernaum, another city. The other city was a much more major city.
Capernaum was on the Sea of Galilee. It was the place where militaries and the markets of that ancient world crisscrossed. It was a place of commerce and communication. It was the intersection of major highways of the ancient world. This official comes from Capernaum, but the other thing you should know about Capernaum is even though it's in Israel, it is under Roman occupation.
For this official to come to Jesus from Capernaum means that he's a collaborator. The Romans who have oppressed the Jews now have control and whoever this man is, whether he's Jew or Gentile, he has the status of a Gentile according to Jewish law because he's collaborating with the enemy, with Gentiles. He is now oppressing his own people or else perhaps at the behest of the Romans he's a mercenary of another nation oppressing the people. Whatever reason, if Jesus shows him mercy, the news will spread.
He is an official, a royal from Capernaum.
Why do we need to know that?
Because of those to whom Jesus has spoken so far. I mean if you've been here a few weeks and you kind of recognize where we've been in these conversations introducing us to Jesus in the book of John, you recognize Jesus started with his mom, the wedding feast at Cana. The next conversations of course are with his cousin, John the Baptist on both sides of the Jordan River. Then the next conversation is with a religious rabbi from his own faith, Nicodemus. So far we've had family and faith.
Next the conversation with a Samaritan woman, if you will, a half Jew, one not without knowledge of Jewish heritage, but not fully Jewish yet. So so far we've dealt with family and cousin and faith leader and one of his faith heritage.
But you may remember something else. When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, he said, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." The question is, how wide is whoever?
Remember in the first chapter of the book of John it says, "He came into the world, but the world did not know him. Yet God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes." Well, out of the world, is that just meant to be family, faith leaders, people of the same heritage, or could it be wider than that? And when Jesus is now dealing with this Gentile status official from Capernaum, what you see is the door opening wide, particularly important for us in this day and age. While we may not always recognize it, we live in the age of the most rapid expansion of Christianity in the history of the world.
People from Nigeria that was mentioned in the prayer earlier, people from South America, Africa, Asia are coming to the Lord in unprecedented numbers, but they're also coming to our shores and our town in unprecedented numbers from different parts of the world. And if we are just going to extend the gospel to those of our own family and faith and heritage,
we are forgetting how wide is the door and the welcome mat that is intended to be there. If we really understand the welcome that is intended, we have to ask ourselves not only why this man, but why this miracle.
After all, this man comes and he just asks, "My son is dying. Will you help?" And Jesus helps him. I mean, there were other people to help. There are other parts of the world that he could have helped people, other towns. But this man and this place, why? Why this miracle now?
To answer the question, maybe you have to simply ask the question, why any miracle?
Why do miracles occur in the Bible? And to answer, you have to look at when they occur. Now, you probably think because in our Bibles, it's a book that covers, you know, over 2,000 years of history and there are lots of miracles in there. You get the sense that, since there's such concentration here, miracles must just be happening all the time, you know, one after another in those Bible times.
But it's not actually that way. If you were to look in the Old Testament, you have a time from Abraham to Jesus of about 2,000 years and 70 miracles approximately recorded. Now if you do the math, you're engineers, you'll do the math.
That's about one miracle per generation.
And even that's not the full picture because the miracles are happening in clusters at particular times as though when there's a new message, a new era of the gospel breaking out, that's when you get the fireworks going off and you get this whole cluster of miracles at a time. The first major cluster of miracles is around the time of Abraham and the early patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As God gave the promise to Abraham that he would make him a father of many what?
Many nations. Abraham, you're the start of something big. And when God makes the promise that Abraham will be the start of something big, there's a whole series of miracles that occur around him and his children and grandchildren. But then there's a long period from the time of 2000 until 1400 BC that there's virtually no miracle recorded at all.
And then what happens at that time is the Exodus.
As God's people are in slavery in Egypt and Moses comes to release them, suddenly we get the fireworks going off again, another cluster of miracles as God is saying, "Not only have given you promise, but I am going to release you from bondage to get you into the promised land."
And now that next series of miracles occur, but then there's nothing that happens again, basically until the time of David. Now what we have is the rule of God being established through a Davidic king to whom God makes a promise. "David, through you, I will establish an eternal kingdom." And the rule of God that's being promised from the time of David forward begins to have, again, the cluster of miracles around it as God is saying, "Under my rule is my power to be established." And yet despite that great expression of the reign and the rule of God, the people turn away from God.
And when they do, they are put in slavery into exile again until the time of Daniel and the prophets that follow him from the year 600 forward, and suddenly we get the great cluster of miracles again.
The miracles happen and these fireworks displays roughly every four to six hundred years. Roughly half a millennia goes by between each of the clusters of miracles. And what's happening if you can put it all back together? If you say miracles occurring to make some great impression of the next in-breaking of the kingdom, the next, the great message of the gospel coming forward, what has unfolded?
First God says, "Here's my promise." Then he says, "Here is release from bondage, and as you are released from bondage, you can know the reign and rule of the word of God over you. And when you turn away, I will still redeem my people and give them the land again."
Promise to release, to rule, to redemption. If you follow the pattern, what the miracles in the Old Testament are doing, each major fireworks display is saying, "This is the gospel being pointed to. The God of promise is the God who will release you from your bondage, and he will provide rule for your lives, and though you would turn away from him, he will not turn away from you. He is the redeeming God." But now we are to the New Testament. And now the questions are going to be, if he is the redeeming God, who's going to do the redemption?
And for whom?
And now John is on the scene. And he's already told us, right?
At Cana, Jesus did his first sign.
What did he do?
He turned the water into wine to make the wedding go well.
He's a God who has power over material things to help everybody who needs help and will turn to him.
If the question is, by whom will this redemption occur? The first sign at Cana said this one.
But now this is the second sign at Cana. Do you remember that? John makes the point. He says it very specifically in verse 54.
This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee. Now it's not the second of all signs that Jesus had done. Remember he'd been in Jerusalem, and even in Jerusalem Nicodemus came to him saying, "You must be from God, because no one could do the signs that you are doing except he come from God." And yet here we are back at Cana, the city of messages.
And at Cana again, we are told by John, this is the second sign, not by whom the redemption will come, but for whom the redemption will come.
And for whom does this redemption, this glory, this goodness, this grace ultimately come?
The king's man.
A man whose son is dying and he comes to Jesus asking for help. And we can just read right past those words and not ask the really serious question. Wait, king's man.
What king?
I mean, who's in charge of this official? Who's he really serving? You know the town of Capernaum is under Roman occupation, but remember the Romans kind of put their vassal kings in place.
So if this is the king's man, what king does he serve?
The answer is Herod.
Herod whose father also of the same name in order to murder Jesus as a two-year-old killed the babes of Bethlehem.
But this Herod, not his father, this Herod had a mistress who maneuvered for the head of John the Baptist, Jesus' cousin.
And it will be this same Herod that turns this same Jesus over to Pilate to be crucified.
This king's man is an enemy of the king of heaven.
But he comes to Jesus and he says, "Will you help me?
My son is dying."
And despite all the betrayals and the enemy action that this man has participated in,
Jesus says, "The door's open.
I'll help you."
It's an amazing statement of the gospel that this redemption that God is offering is not just for the people of family, it's not just for the people of faith, it's not just for the people of heritage, it is for those who have walked away, turned against, fought against the purposes of the Savior. And it's a message for us yet today as we would first think, "Who's the gospel for?"
Pastor Kerry already prayed earlier in the service for persecuted Christians around the world, and you think, "What would it mean if you were one of those people, if you were one of those four Muslim converts in Iran who just this last week, because you partook of communion as an Islamic convert?" Now, listen, the Christians were not flogged, but those Muslims who had become Christians were taken by their own countrymen, taken out, and received 80 lashes for taking communion with Christians, though they were born Muslims.
Would you pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute you? Would you do that?
Or what if you were in Eritrea right now, and some of you will be aware that for much of this last month, the Christian world as a whole has been paying, praying for a particular Christian woman imprisoned in Eritrea, not for being a convert, just for being a Christian.
And this week, she died of pneumonia.
In prison with her were 3,000 other Christians who are still there.
Or what about last month at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where the terrorists came in and asked who were Muslims, and they separated out those who were Muslims, and then killed those Christians and others who were not Muslims.
Is the gospel you believe wide enough for such as they?
Because it was wide enough in Jesus to receive even those who had done that kind of evil to his family and would do it to him.
It is a wide gospel. We need to know it too. We need to know it when we recognize we are the people who maybe have been people of faith for a while but have turned our back on Jesus. Maybe it was in our teen years. Maybe it was in just an action of a night. Maybe it was just in the action of a youth or against a youth or at a moment of anger, or maybe it's been a long time anger at God and we have called him our enemy and we have treated him as the same. And we think there is no way that we would be worthy to come to God again. And he says the issue is not whether you are worthy, it is whether I am going to welcome you. And what he is making clear through this man in John chapter 4 is that he will welcome those who turn to him and come to help. And that's the message of the open door that's here. If the question is are you welcome, Jesus says if you come to me you are welcome even despite the hard things in your past, the hard things you know about yourself, he knows it too and still puts the welcome mat down.
But of course the welcome mat is not just for people who recognize that they may be the enemies, it may be for some of us who have been hurt by those who now need the Savior.
And what Jesus is teaching us is surely one side of an open door is a worn sofa that we invite in all kinds of people all the time.
But another side of an open door is a forgiving heart.
That even when you and your family have been hurt by someone, you say for the sake of the gospel in the ministry of Jesus, I want you to know that he welcomes enemies. Not just the people of family and faith. He even welcomes enemies who will come to him.
Why is this man here? Why is this miracle here?
So that we will know how wide is the door of Jesus welcome.
There is another reason this man and miracle are here. It is so that we will work past closed windows.
Sometimes you see when you reach out to people who are kind of at the periphery of faith and family, they don't know much about the gospel. And our tendency is to reach to those who already have their lives straightened up, already have understanding of what the gospel is, already know about the church and the things expected here.
But what Jesus does even with this man is saying, even if you don't have much light to the gospel, even if there's not a lot of window in your understanding yet, he is still willing to extend the welcome.
That message, I suppose, is most clear in verse 48.
Jesus is speaking to this man who's asking for help with his son. And Jesus says in verse 48, "Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe."
Now, listen, this is not a compliment.
You should believe. But I understand you are not going to believe until something special and great and miraculous happens.
And the amazing thing is that Jesus is saying, "You're not going to believe until something special happens."
That Jesus is willing to help the man anyway.
I mean, he doesn't have much gospel understanding. I would guess if you quizzed him and tested him, he would not get many answers correct. He's not living that way. And yet Jesus is willing to come to this man at his point of weakness and lack of understanding and provide some help. The man just says, "I want my son to get better.
And I understand you can do it, would you?" Now, listen, I've already said to you, miracles don't just happen every day, even in the Bible.
But when it's time for the message to go out, it seems that Jesus is willing to do what's needed for that message burst. And so what he does with this man is he heals his son. Now the reason I say that to you, that Jesus is willing to work with a man who doesn't understand much, is because I recognize that's true of almost everybody who becomes a follower of Jesus Christ in their adulthood. That they don't have much understanding. They may have walked away from Jesus a long time ago. They may not have sat in a church for a long time. And so they don't have wide understanding. But if they're just coming to say, "Can you help me?"
That's when the welcome mat of the heart of Jesus gets expanded. If you will, I think of it this way. I have a pastor friend who has a church that just amazes me because so many of the people in the church are adult converts. They are people who decided in their adulthood that they would come to Christ, that there was some reason to follow him. And yet, if you ask my pastor friend, "Why did these people in their adult years decide to follow Christ?" He would say, "Actually, there is one story that is the common denominator of all of them." He said, "For those who become believers in Jesus Christ as an adult, they all tell the same story." Here's the story.
"I was going along in life, and everything was going pretty well.
And then this big rock came and fell on me."
Now the rock varies in dimension and kind, right?
My marriage came undone.
My job came undone.
My kids got sick. Something happened that I recognized I wasn't in charge. I needed some help. And I recognized that help wasn't going to be on this earth and wasn't going to be in a doctor's cloak or a stock analyst computer. I needed some help from heaven.
And for those persons who may have been the enemies of God, who may have been walking in another direction, who may have been working against his people, who may have been ridiculing his people at work, who may have been the abusers of his children, that those people,
when the big rock comes and fall on them and they say, "God, will you help me?" They begin to understand the God of the Bible is saying, "I will."
That the very reason he sent Jesus to people who were not just family and faith and heritage kin, but were the enemies of God was because we can be the enemies of God and need to know that he will welcome such people. And that's why this man is here for people who wonder, "Am I worthy?" Jesus is saying, "That's not the issue.
You happen to be not worthy at all.
That's not the issue. The issue is whether you're welcome."
And Jesus is saying for those who say, "Jesus, will you help me?"
The answer is, "You are welcome to come into his heart and to know that he will care for you. I'm not promising a miracle every time. What am I promising?
That all things will work together for good. That ultimately you enter a life that is eternal. And in that eternity, God says, "Things will be made right and set right and you will be made whole." Will it happen today or tomorrow? That's in God's timing, not mine. But this is what God is promising. You can have peace with him, forgiveness of the past, forgiveness of your enemy action against God, and the presence of God to walk with you through whatever you have to walk with. I'm not even saying there won't be miracles. I believe there can be such things. I just don't believe they happen every day. You know, in the first hour here, you know, I gave this sermon and after it even Kathy came to me, my wife, you know. She said, "Listen, I know what you're talking about." She said, you know, just a few years ago when my father died, my mom, her mom, said, "I can't keep his chair in my living room anymore. It hurts too much. Get the chair out of my house. I can't take it."
And so Kathy said she was driving home with the reclining chair that was on the swivel, you know, as the chair is just rocking back and forth in the van as she's going. Kathy says she was just crying. And she was saying, "Lord, as I see the chair rocking, I think of my dad. I don't want the chair in my house either."
You know, and she said, "God, this doesn't seem right. My dad gone at such a young age. I just need to somehow that you're here to help me."
And because she didn't want the chair in her house, she called one of her friends and said, "Do you know anybody that needs a chair, a recliner? Do you know what the friend on the other end of the phone said?
My teenage boys just broke my chair and I was just in prayer asking God for a chair.
I'm not saying that will always happen.
I am saying that if you've turned from God, if you wonder where He is, that God is saying the question is not whether you're worthy.
The issue is that you are welcome when you turn to Him, confess your sin and ask His help. That God is here and He's working and His welcome mat is wide and here for you."
You want to see how true it is? I want you to remember what John is doing here. Would you just track in your Bibles with me if you still got them open? And we're just going to follow a gospel train and see what God is doing in His Word to invite friends and enemies and you to Himself.
This gospel train begins in John 2 and verse 11. Why are these miracles here in John?
In John chapter 2 and verse 11, we read these words, "This the first of His signs, Jesus did it, Cana in Galilee and manifested His glory and His disciples believed in Him."
What was the first sign for? So His disciples would believe. But is that all the gospel is for, just for His disciples? If you will, look at verse 23 of the same chapter.
Now when He that is Jesus was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs that He was doing. Now not just the disciples, but many Jews believe. Well is it only for the Jews? You know the answer to that. What did Jesus say to Nicodemus? For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes. Well how wide is the whoever? Look at John 4 and verse 39.
John 4 and verse 39, Jesus has just had the conversation with the woman at the well. And in John 4 and verse 39 it says, "Many Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman's testimony. He told me all that I ever did."
Now it's not just disciples, it's not just Jews, it's half Jews.
Many Samaritans believed. Well is it just for those of Jewish heritage, even if it's not full heritage? What do you know? John 4 and verse 53.
John 4 and verse 53, "The Father," this official of the king, "knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, "Your Son will live, and He Himself believed and all His household."
Now not just half Jews, but enemies and their households, even if they have no Jewish status whatsoever.
Is that the end of the story?
One more place. All the way to the end of John, John chapter 20, John 20 and verse 30.
What was the purpose of all these signs?
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.
What's the great purpose? So that you would recognize the circle is wide enough to include you. The door is wide enough for you to get in, though you have turned away, walked away, been an enemy, sinned your worst.
This God says, "Though you have put your sin upon my son that resulted in his crucifixion on your behalf, though it be that bad."
The door is wide and the welcome mat is down if you will follow Him.
Believe in Him.
The question is not whether you're worthy, but whether you know you're welcome.
And all these signs are for one purpose.
Say if you believe in Him, you're welcome, even if you're not worthy.
I ask you to sing with me at the very beginning of this message, the love of God. If you were to look it up in your hymnal, you would find that the person attributed to have written the lyrics for that particular hymn is Frederick Lehman.
Frederick Lehman wrote all the verses but the third.
Let me read to you the third verse. You sang it earlier.
"Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth aquill and every man ascribed by trade, to write the love of God above, would drain the ocean dry, nor could the scroll contain the whole, those stretched from sky to sky."
Frederick Lehman did not write those words.
He found them, scratched on the walls of a cell in an insane asylum by a man who had just been taken out to be buried.
And Frederick Lehman, recognizing the wonder that this man who only had fleeting moments of sanity could nonetheless be so welcomed by God that he would know even in those moments of sanity the love of God above was as big as the sky enough even to include him and all of his brokenness, hurt, and disability. If God's love was that great, Lehman said, "People have to know this." And he wrote in his own account, he sat down on a wooden crate of lemons and wrote the first two verses so that the world would have the last verse of a man who said, "If the question is whether you are worthy, the answer is you're not.
But that's not the issue.
The issue is not whether you're worthy, it's whether you're welcome.
And Jesus says, "You are."
Father, for the hearts that need to know it, who have wondered if they are worthy enough to be welcomed by you, and for the hearts of some of us who have been hardened against those who have not just made you their enemy but us, would you again open our hearts to the reality of the gospel so that others would know how wide is the welcome of Jesus
by how open is the door of our hearts to them?
Open our hearts as you open our eyes to the goodness of the love of God we pray. In Jesus' name, amen.