Matt Chandler - That You May Marvel

Well, good morning! If you have your Bibles, please grab them. John chapter 5 is where we’re going to dig in today. This passage, in particular, places us right at the beginning of a section in John that is all about the authority of Jesus. That discussion started last week, and we saw that, by and large, people can accept Jesus’s authority up to a certain point. When it comes to the inclusion that Jesus promotes—people can rally around that idea. If you say that, in the power of the Gospel, socioeconomics, ethnicities, backgrounds, and current struggles don’t matter—that we’re all made one in Christ—most people can generally get on board with that. If you’re saying that it doesn’t matter what your background is or what your current struggles are, that Christ’s love, grace, and mercy are present, most people tend to resonate with that.

Then, when we’re talking about Jesus’s authority over human fragility—how Jesus can heal diseases and has authority over emotional and spiritual brokenness—people largely agree. They say, «Yes, I want that.» However, as we saw in the passage last week, when the authority of Jesus, which is necessary for those things to become a reality, collides with our own strongly held beliefs, suddenly there’s a problem with Jesus’s authority. When Jesus confronts our individual desires—when we think, «I know what I want, I know what my life should look like, I know what’s best for me"—and Jesus’s authority clashes with that, we discover what we actually believe and what we genuinely love. We find out in that moment whether we are using God to worship something else or if we truly love and follow Jesus.

Over time, you will be confronted repeatedly with this. As we’ve discussed, Jesus is the Son of God; He is co-eternal with the Father; He is not just a good teacher. If you are co-eternal with the Father and have always existed, you will see things differently than those who have just been here for a moment. For example, I see the world in a completely different way than my nine-year-old daughter does. The way she sees the world and the way I see the world are not even in the same universe. We are both breathing oxygen, we both need food to stay alive, and we both require sleep; that’s about the extent of our shared reality. I am nearly 45, and she is about to turn 10. Imagine if you’re approaching 55, standing alongside eternity—you’re going to collide, and how you handle that collision is significant.

Additionally, we see that people tend to have authority problems regarding Jesus’s divinity. People struggle with Jesus’s authority when He points out that this is the path to life and that they have strayed from it. We often respond, «No, no, no! I know the path to life; it’s what I want, when I want it, and how I want it.» That’s the air we’re breathing. We don’t like to spend much time, regardless of what we say, genuinely considering Jesus as God. If Jesus is God, then all of His sermons, the Gospel, and everything He teaches are far more significant than merely being moral philosophy, a good teacher, or a genie in a bottle that we can control.

Every year, you’ll notice when I return to reading C.S. Lewis—works like *The Weight of Glory* and *Mere Christianity*. I’m diving into those two again this season. Here’s a quote I came across this week; I know I quoted Lewis last week, but this is a different one: «Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.» That’s enormous for where we’re headed today. If Jesus is God, then that is infinitely important, and if He is not, then none of this matters. The only thing it can’t be is something we add on to the rest of our lives, alongside our gym membership and other hobbies—tacking on «a little Jesus» on Sundays. He cannot be that. It’s either all a lie and of no importance, or it’s true and of infinite significance.

So my hope today is to lift our eyes up and let us marvel at Jesus, the Son of God. If you remember, if you were with us last week, the Jews of that time were done with Jesus; they wanted to put Him to death. He was challenging their strongly held beliefs and calling Himself God. Jesus, in turn, addresses their concerns, and it’s always struck me that Jesus was never really seeker-sensitive. He’s not trying to deescalate this situation; in fact, He is doubling down. While the whole crowd was saying, «We hate you,» He responded, «You hate me now? Just wait for my next message!»