Feast and Follow with Knollwood

Jesus For You

Good Friday is a reminder of the greatest exchange that has ever been made. Jesus was substituted for you and me. It is in this moment that our sin was paid for, and we could go freely to heaven. While there are some who dislike the church calendar, I think setting aside some time to contemplate Christ’s sufferings is helpful. 
  
We tend to avoid thinking about pain and sadness because they are unpleasant, but it is exactly this pain that we need to focus on here. In our lives as Christians, we can spend far more time thinking about the positive moments in Jesus’ life, His teachings, His miracles, and His resurrection. All of these are important, but we mustn't skip over Jesus’ suffering and death. After all, that is a major part of why Jesus came to Earth in the first place and one of the main reasons Jesus was born in a physical body. Think about it. What is the one thing that Jesus needed a body for? He could have healed without a body. He could have done miracles without a body. God did that all the time in the Old Testament. But Jesus couldn’t die without a body. God, having a divine nature, cannot die, but when He takes on humanity, now it is possible to experience pain and death in His humanity. 

Rejoice! God Loves Himself

What is Maundy-Thursday? This is the day of Holy Week in which we come together to remember the Last Supper Jesus had with His disciples. It isn't the Last Supper in the sense that this is the last time that Jesus will eat with His disciples, as He will after His resurrection. It is the Last Supper because this is the Last Passover meal that will ever be observed in the Old Testament way. This is the moment where Redemptive History reaches a tipping point. Everything is going to be new. Elements that used to represent freedom from Egypt for over a  thousand of years, are, in a single meal, going to be redefined, given their true meaning.  Bread and wine are now going to represent the body and blood of Jesus poured out for them in the ultimate expression of love ever demonstrated. They will become the new signs, sacraments, of the New Covenant, a source of blessing and spiritual nourishment for Christians in the coming millennia. 

So what does Jesus do after that? Jesus changed the Passover and is about to go to the cross. What is he going to say to His disciples? What does He want them to know before He dies? Here we come to John chapter 15. It is an immensely popular passage for a reason. Doubtless you've all heard sermons out of it and maybe even have portions of it memorized. I'm willing to bet, though, if you are anything like me, you probably don't rejoice in it as much as you should. So I am going to lead you through this passage as we look together at some of the wonderfully comforting and challenging chapters in John's Gospel. We are going to look at How we are connected to God and How we grow in our connection with Christ.

What Fig Leaves Won't Cover

Do certain passages in the Bible make you scratch your head? The temptation is to go, "Well, I'm just going to chalk that up to divine mystery and move on." The other temptation is to ask different questions than the text wants you to ask. We could look at a passage like this and spend more time wondering why this happens in a different order than Mark has it. It's fine to ask those questions, but only as long as we are asking what this text wants us to ask: "Why is this here?" 

So that is the question that we are going to ask today! As we dive into Holy Week this week, we are going to be looking at some of the little details on our way down the road to the cross. Since we have taken in the forest on our past journeys through Holy Week, I thought we would look at the trees, in this case, literally. Jesus makes important points about the Christian life, often using imagery of plants to help us see the point clearly if we take the time to see it. So today, we are going to look at our main point of this passage: Religious actions are no substitute for real faith in Christ.

Long Obedience in the Same Direction

Do you journal? If you don't you probably should. It is impossible to keep up with all the ways that God moves in your life unless you write them down. In my own practice, I try to sum up the major points of the day into a small, single page. Flipping through the journal shows me how I thought about a particular problem. Something that seemed absolutely *dominating* at the time, upon flipping through it, was only relevant for a couple weeks. It started, resolved, and now I've moved on. Some problems seemed to be the theme of life for a year or two, but again, those things resolved firmly and are behind me. It didn't seem like that at the time, though. 

The Bible, and our passage here before us, is like decades worth of journal entries summarized in a line or two. As we will see, vast stretches of time were spent between chapters, or even between sentences! Because you can read Abraham's life from start to finish in thirty minutes or so, we lose that sense of daily obedience that Abraham offers when it seems like nothing is happening. The majority of journal entries for me start with "Today was a long day," which once you've flipped through ten or fifteen straight pages of that, can feel discouraging. But looking back on the course of years, one can see what the Lord was doing all that time. That is what we are going to see with Abram. God is working in his life, but that does not mean that Abram sits back and does nothing. As we will see, in our single point today, God's authority and control does not eliminate your responsibility to obey.

The Abrahamic Covenant, Part 2

Can you imagine a world in which the Jews didn't exist? It's impossible for us to do so as Western people. The default religion from a human population standpoint is polytheism or some faceless, person-less Law that governs the universe for no apparent reason. For us to walk around as even secular Americans assuming "a" God who runs the world is due to God making His promise to Abraham. We as Gentiles would have no idea at all that such a concept even exists. We couldn't form a category for this without God revealing Himself to Abram through words and demonstrations of His character. Even more than that, can you imagine a world without the Ten Commandments? It forms the basis of nearly all of our laws, including the principle of the punishment fitting the crime! 

But God has done far more than give us some new way of thinking or governing; God has also saved us from our old way of living. Both have been achieved through this promise to Abram. True, without God's promise to Abram there is no concept of monotheism or modern law, but more importantly without this promise to Abram there is no Jesus. There is no assurance that God could fulfill any of His promises without a demonstration of God's faithfulness to Abram. 

He promises that He will make Abram a great nation and that all the nations of the world would be blessed through him. And as we can see today, we have been. Today, we are going to finish off point 2, God gives His people a Savior. 

The Abrahamic Covenant, Part1

What is the biggest promise you've ever made? Most of the time, we don't realize we are making such a promise at the front end. Most of the time, we realize just how big of a promise we've made when we are halfway into that commitment. It can be something small like a bake sale that gets out of control, or it can be something profoundly large like a marriage that needs deep forgiveness within it. When we make big promises, sometimes we can rise to the occasion, and other times we just can't. We often put God in that box. We assume that God may or may not be able to keep up with the promises that He has made. As we will see today, God absolutely fulfills His promises to us, in particular, His promises for our salvation. 

It is hard for us to imagine that our salvation is being worked out here with a little man with a funny name from a distant town, but they are. What is happening in these short few verses is nothing less than the shaping of history. This is the working out of one of the most important promise made in the Bible, the Abrahamic covenant. We are going to explore just how important this covenant is by looking at the fulfillment of the three separate promises God makes. God provides His people a place, God provides His people a Savior, and God provides His people a blessing. 

Condescend to Covenant

Have you ever stopped to think about how it is that you can have a relationship with God? I mean, we hear that a lot in church, but how does that actually work? How do you as a little human being standing on a rock that is floating in space that is 93 billion light years in diameter form a relationship with the God Who made all of that? How is that not an arrogant thing to assume? How are we able to do this? The answer to that lies in this passage in Genesis 12. It has been hinted at in Genesis 3, 6, and 9, but it is going to be spelled out for us in chapters 12, 15, 17, and 22. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the Abrahamic covenant. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that if you don't understand this covenant, you aren't going to understand any of the others, nor are you really going to understand the New Testament. The promise to Abraham and how it was done is going to provide the basis for Paul's argument for how we are saved by grace in Romans 4. It will form Paul's argument for predestination in Romans 9, and most relevantly for us, it will form Paul's argument for Gentile inclusion in the New Covenant in Galatians 3-4. 

And it isn't just the New Testament that finds this important, as it will come up a lot in the rest of the Old Testament as well. While it will be mentioned a lot in Genesis, I want to just draw your attention to Exodus. This covenant will be brought up in Ex 2:24-25 as the reason for why God is about to act. It will be brought back up when Israel needed comfort in Exodus 6 that He really was going to come and save them. Interestingly, it doesn't come up again until God is ready to consume Israel for their sin in Exodus 32, when Moses invokes that covenant as the mediator between God and the nation. What's fascinating is that he doesn't bring up the Mosaic covenant just made on Mountain, but rather he brings up the promise made to Abraham. God spared the entire nation based on the promise that He made to one man. 

That is how our God works. When He makes promises, He is going to uphold them. So let's see how God forms relationships and how that applies to us today by looking at our two points: God forms relationships through covenants and God advances His plans through covenants

God's Escape Hatch

Does anyone else feel like there's just too much going on? I saw a video of a man saying—well, screaming—that exact sentiment from his car. Life just has so much happening at any given time, and it can feel like there is just no way to keep up with everything. Part of this comes down to our inability to say no to things. We've created such a culture that looks down on people who aren't overworked that we assume being busy absolutely all the time is what is most honoring to God. This ignores the fourth commandment that explicitly commands rest, but that's another sermon. 

Perhaps another possibility for this crazy sense of busyness might be because there is a misquoting (and understanding) of the verse that we are looking at here this morning. I've heard this verse in many conversations over the years saying, "God doesn't give you more than you can handle." This idea that God doesn't overload us can give us permission (or threat) to just keep going with whatever life throws our way. Since God doesn't overload us, then whatever is on our plate must stay on our plate. Since God doesn't give me more than I can handle, then there is no need to ask for help. 

As we will see, today, that is not what that verse means—or even says. There is no verse that says that God won't give you more than you can handle. In fact, there is Biblical evidence to show the opposite! One scholar points to 2 Corinthians 1:8-9 "For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death." But then take a look at the rest of the verse:"But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." (Eric Bargerhuff). Do you see the point being made here? God gives you more than you can handle all the time! The very point in doing so is so that you see your true weakness and look to God for help. That is reality! So where do we get this idea from? Well, that likely is coming from 1 Cor. 10:13, which we look at now. 

What God does say in that verse is that He is not going to allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able (again, with His help) to escape. That is what we are going to be looking at today as we contemplate our two points today: The danger of falling into temptation is real and **Dependance on God and avoidance of sin is required.

Remember to Not Forget

Today, we dive into Psalm 103 to see how we are invited to remember God's blessings to feed our joy. 

The Freedom of Serving Only One Master

Join us as we listen to our guest preacher Gary Johnson preach at our Mission's Weekend out of Matthew 6!