Exodus 33:18-23
Psalm 27:1-5; 8; 13-14
Ephesians 1:3-6
John 14:1-11
We heard, don't let your hearts be troubled. If you see Jesus, you see the Father. This weekend we've been trying to untrouble our hearts, so to speak, by fixing our eyes on the risen Jesus. So we're going to continue to do that this morning, but from a different angle. And I just want to say, yeah, this has been an awesome weekend. Unlike Ryan, I'm an extrovert, so I'm just getting ready to go.
But I love being in God's creation with God's people gathering around the table, especially fixing our eyes on the Lord. And it's a beautiful time. I actually got a sweet spot, Kate. I don't know if she's here, but she told me about the lifeguard tower down there by the water. I was just walking through there this morning, and I got up there and just saw the sun breaking and over the trees, onto the water glistening. I could be here all week, easy. But we've got to go home, and we've got to get back to the sermon.
So, where are we? Don't let your hearts be troubled. If you see me, you see the Father. This is from our Gospel of John reading, and these words are meant to assure us that when we see Jesus healing, forgiving, raising people from the dead, telling them good news, how to live the good life, we are in fact seeing and hearing the invisible God.
Today, we're going to explore this truth through three essential items that are going to guide our journey, not just for the sermon, but for our lives. I don't know if any of you have ever seen the reality TV show Alone. Does anybody seen that in here? It's a good show. Our family loves this show. In this show, there's ten people who have to choose amongst a number of items, ten essential items they think is going to help them as they go out to endure isolation, each of them is alone, in some very difficult wilderness situation. And the goal is to be the last one remaining, standing, living out there.
Well, this morning, we're just going to get three essential items. But as we see, I think they're going to be more than enough.
The first one, the first item is light. Light for the journey. And this is a unique light. It's Jesus Himself. As the creed puts it, He is light from light, who reveals the Father, who makes...who much like visible light helps us see the invisible light of the Son that comes from the Son.
The second essential item is our ultimate destination, the house of the Father. So we're going to see how Jesus offers us a glimpse of our future home with Him and the Father, showing us our ultimate destination is the Father He reveals.
Our third essential item is the way to this ultimate destination. So we're going to see how Jesus responds to Thomas and to Philip and invites us to know Him and trust Him as the way to the Father, as in fact the truth and the life of the Father in our flesh and blood.
That's where we're going. First light.
So I'm about to use some physics to illustrate some...Pete got his arms up back there...some physics to illustrate some dense theology. And I checked actually with John Zuhone, our own John Zuhone who's an astrophysicist, and asked him, hey, is anything off in this illustration physics-wise? And he said, nope, not at all. So I feel pretty pleased. I got my physics down.
So think of it like this. If you see light, you're seeing the sun. That's simple enough. So light shining through a window like we have around here, especially in the back, and it's casting itself in on the floor, or we see light coming in over the trees and hitting the water and glistening. We are seeing the sun. And that's simple enough. But did you know that there are parts of the light of the sun that we can't see that are invisible to humans?
So deep at the core in the sun of the sun, light begins with these incredibly powerful gamma rays. And you know this. And these rays carry immense energy, but they're invisible to us. And they're so powerful, they're so intense that we can't withstand them. They're actually...they would destroy us. So we can't see them and live. Someone to our Old Testament reading.
So these rays, they take a long journey. This is really fascinating. Sometimes thousands of years for these rays to get out, they start bouncing around inside the sun, being absorbed and re-emitted, countless times being transformed until they eventually escape the surface of the sun, being transformed. And when they do that and they finally get here, they come to us in a visible form, invisible light, that we can see.
So here's the key. Whether it's visible or invisible light, light is of the same essence in its core. And justingly enough. And in the Bible, God is called light. God is light. And the Nicene Creed, as we heard, calls Jesus, God from God, light from light. So maybe you're seeing the connections here.
So just as visible light reveals the same essence as the powerful light that began at the sun's core, Jesus reveals the same essence as the Father. They share the same essence. And the Father is always like those immense, intense, powerful gamma rays of the sun's core that we can't see. And Jesus is like the light that has journeyed to us, right? After thousands of years of promises and has transformed into our own flesh and the rest to see and behold.
Now, of course, like all analogies, this one's eventually going to break down somewhere. And I haven't really figured that out yet, but maybe some of you can, but it does help us to understand that when we're looking at Jesus, we're not looking at a different God. Same God. We're seeing the same divine light that originates with the Father, but in a way that we can grasp and live by and receive.
In the words of John, the beginning of the gospel of his gospel, he says, no one has ever seen God. It's the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. And our own flesh and blood, God from God, light from light. So don't let your hearts be troubled. If you see the light of the Son, you see the Father.
So this is part of what we're exploring today in our first things, first Sunday's series that Ryan mentioned earlier. We're looking at these Bible passages that underpin, relate to these different phrases of the Nicene Creed, this declaration of Christian faith that summarizes the good news of who God is, what he's done, what he's doing, and what he will do. It's all good news. Today we're focusing on that phrase, we believe in the Father Almighty. That's today's focus. And to do that, we're going to be diving into John 14, what we heard this morning that shows, or that we see Jesus revealing the very heart of the Father in himself.
We can go to the next screen. There we go. Last time Ryan showed us this helpful format of the Nicene Creed. So you can see there at the top, we believe in one God in three persons. So on the left column you have the Father, in the middle column you have things about Jesus, in the far right column you have the Holy Spirit, one God, three persons. What you also notice here is the Father only gets a few lines. And that's because what we see in the middle column of Jesus, what's revealed there of Jesus is in fact a revelation of the Father on the left column. Jesus is God from God, light from light. Everything we're seeing there in the middle is describing also the Father.
We can go to the next screen. We can stay there for the rest for a time. So let's just address something right off the bat with this word, Father. It's a loaded term for many of us, right? As thinkers like Froerbach and people like Freud have helped us to see what we do is we tend to project the deficiencies of our earthly fathers onto that name. Also, it's true that the name Father doesn't mean God the Father is a male. And so some people have suggested or are calling us to replace the word Father with a more neutral term like Creator or Source.
I would say before we do that, why don't we look at what did Jesus mean by that word? I think this is difficult for those of us who have had really painfully deficient, defective fathers, but I think just because of that, this part, this thing that Jesus can do for us can make the gospel so much special, so much more meaningful in this area. Holy Spirit can heal us here. Holy Spirit can take us from what we mean and feel and think about that word to what Jesus means and thinks and feels about that word.
And I think when we do that with not just this passage in the gospels, but when we do that throughout the gospels, we're going to understand why the hymn writer Faber said this, Father, the sweetest dearest name that men or angels know. And when we do that, we're going to want to affirm the creed even more when we come to, I believe, in the Father Almighty.
So let's look at the passage a little more closely. And it starts with a command. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Recently I've been focusing on the commandments in the gospels. I've been trying to circle them all, memorize them, give myself to following each of them, based on what Jesus says in the Great Commission. What we were looking at yesterday, go and make people, disciples, my apprentices, teaching them to obey all my commandments. So I come to this passage and I circle, where's the commandment? There's really only one. It's right at the beginning. Don't let your hearts be troubled.
That's a hard one. Our hearts are so easily troubled by so many things Jesus himself said, in this world you will have trouble. Of course he has a lot to say after that too. But he says, don't worry about your life. It's a hard one. He says, do not fear. We heard yesterday, we looked at yesterday. These are hard ones to follow. We need a lot of grace, a lot of revelation to help us do that.
Now in the context of this passage, Jesus had just started talking about his departure in the previous passage, which confused the disciples and also understand, got them anxious and nervous. And so he is of course addressing that anxiety about his departure. But I think he's addressing more than that particular anxiety, which becomes clear as we look at the rest of the passage.
The fuller commandment is this, don't let your hearts be troubled. Believe God. Believe also in me. This is the crux of the passage. The way to an untroubled heart is to trust God by trusting Jesus. More specifically by trusting what Jesus said, if you see me, you're seeing the Father.
So we're coming now to the second essential item, our ultimate destination, the Father's house. As we continue in the passage, Jesus offers his disciples a glimpse of what this truth, if you see me, you see the Father, looks like for their future.
So yesterday we talked about how anxiety is looking into the future and anticipating something terrible. Hope is looking into the future and anticipating something joyful. Even anticipating something joyful out of the terrible things that are still going to come.
In what Jesus says here is definitely on the hope end of things. He says in his Father's house that very place that saturated with the Father's presence, that he says there there are many dwellings. And he's going there to prepare a place for his disciples, for you and me. So that when we look into the future, we again see Jesus. And what is he doing? He's preparing a place. He's preparing our eternal home in the home of his Father, in his home too, so that what we would be with him. And he would be with us.
And he doesn't leave us, leave it up to us to try and figure it out how to get there. He promises to come and get us and bring him there himself. So he's got the place, he's got the journey and the way to get there all worked out. Nothing to worry about for us. But the thing that should come and assure our hearts most of all is that our ultimate destination is the place, is the house of the one Jesus so beautifully reveals. That should come as assure us. Settle our hearts. If you see the light of Jesus, you see your ultimate destination.
Now we come to the third and final essential item, the way, to our ultimate destination. Jesus says to them, he says, you know the way. And Thomas is like, we don't even know where you're going. How do we know the way?
And Jesus responds with one of the most evocative statements in Scripture. I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Implicitly, Jesus is saying that in knowing Jesus, we are already being drawn into the Father's very heart and presence. That everything we're searching for in the Father is already found in Him. It's not somewhere far away. It's not some long journey right there in Him.
When Jesus adds, if you know me, you will know my Father also. And from now on, you do know Him and have seen Him. He's showing that He's not just pointing the way, right? He is the living, breathing way into the Father's presence. If you see Jesus, you see the way to the Father. You see the truth and the life of the Father in Him, in our flesh and blood.
But Philip isn't quite getting it. So he says, Lord, how about you just show us the Father and that will be enough. We'll be satisfied and then we can go home and call it a day.
And in some ways, on the one hand, Philip was right. If we see the Father, that will be enough. We will be satisfied. He just didn't get, he just didn't know that that was what Jesus was doing the whole time with them. From the first day until this day, every word of forgiveness, every healing, every look, every touch was a revelation of the one He called the Father.
That needs to sink down deep inside of us and calm our hearts, assure our hearts, our trembling hearts. So Jesus responds with a gentle rebuke to Philip. He says, Philip, have I been with you all this time? Still you don't know me. You know me. And here it is. If you see me, you see the Father.
Philip hasn't realized everything he's been searching for in the Father isn't again somewhere way out there. It's standing there right before Him. There's no unknown God way behind the back of Jesus. Everything about the Father is revealed through Him.
Well then Jesus goes further and He says, I am in the Father and the Father is in me, which is more than some close connection. This is mutual indwelling, the Father and the Son. So every word that Jesus speaks, every act of healing, every sign and miracle, it's the Father's love and compassion and power flowing in and through Him.
Jesus says the words that I say to you, I don't speak on my own. But what the Father who dwells in me, it's Him who's doing the work, this work. So it's here that phrase, like Father like Son, comes to life in the fullest way.
This whole passage, Jesus, He's just drawing His disciples into deeper and deeper trust to Him. Answering their hearts, urging to show them everything they need to know about the Father is right there in Him. The Father's hearts, His heart, His words, His works are all alive and visible in Jesus.
So Philip's longing to see the Father is met with the answer. Look at me, Philip, and see the Father and be satisfied.
I'm going to illustrate or finish with one story from Thomas Torrance, one of the greatest theologians of the last century. Johnson Rutledge studied under one of the torrents. There's a whole torrents family and dynasty of theologians. It's amazing.
Back in the day when he was younger, he was a chaplain during World War II. And he shares this story in this book, Preaching Christ. It's one of his more accessible books. This book has really shaped me and formed me in many ways. And there's a story in here that has stayed with me for a long time.
And in this story, he shares about when he was this chaplain. And in certain contexts and geographies, chaplains are called Padres, which is important for this story.
So this is what he writes. During those years, what imprinted itself upon my mind above all was the discovery of the deepest cry of the human heart. Is God really like Jesus? Maybe that's our question. Good morning.
He goes on, he says, this came home to me very sharply one day. On a battlefield in Italy. When a fearfully wounded young... Sorry, I didn't know it was going to move me so much. When a young man, he was only 19, he had about half an hour to live. So I'm just thinking of all the people in war right now. And he said to me, Padre, is God really like Jesus?
And I assured him, as he lay there on the ground with his life, ebbing away, that God is indeed really like Jesus. And that there's no unknown God behind the back of Jesus for us to fear, to see the Lord Jesus is to see the face of God himself.
So don't let your hearts be troubled. If you see Jesus, you see the Father, and you will be satisfied. May it be so.