Our passage in John 7 is, to me, a call to make a decision about who Jesus is.
People have so many different reactions to Jesus. They called him a good man (John 7:12), a deceiver (7:12), demon possessed (7:20), a Prophet (7:40) and wondered if He was the Christ (7:26).
I believe CS Lewis had it right, however, when he said that there are really only three options for us to conclude about Jesus - either He was who He said He was (the Son of God, the Son of Man), or he was a lunatic, or he was an evil liar. But He would not be a good man.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. CS Lewis
God has set eternity in our hearts (Ecc 3:11) and people search to fill that thirst in many different ways. It is only when we recognize that our hearts thirst for Jesus, that He is the I Am, and that we drink him in, that we will be filled and overflow with love.
In his sermon Rivers From the Heart, John Piper says
We meet the life-giving Jesus today in his Word, and when he calls us to come and drink, it is his words to which we come. They carry the living water. Then when our gaze is fixed on his Word, we say, "Yes," to all that it is. We do not dispute its beauty or call it unreal. We affirm its worth, and we give ourselves to it unreservedly to be affected by it because we trust its beauty, not to corrupt but to purify. We rest in the certainty that here is truth that will not leave us empty.
What Jesus means by drinking is the same thing he means by believing or trusting. After he says, "Come to me and drink," in verse 37, he immediately says, "He who believes in me." He could have said, "He who drinks from me." The clearest evidence for this is found in John 6:35, where Jesus says, "He who believes in me shall never thirst." Therefore, the essence of drinking the Word of Jesus is trusting it, banking on it. But the reverse is true, too. The essence of believing in Jesus is finding in him the satisfaction of our deepest soul-thirst. Drinking is believing; believing is drinking.....
drink in Christ by faith, pour Christ out in praise and love, and never thirst again....
Do not think that what you receive from Christ by faith and give to others in love is just an emotional experience. It is objective and real and very distinct from yourself. It is God the Holy Spirit. It is he that flows in through faith (Galations 3:2, 5) and flows out through love (Galatians 5:22)......
My prayer for us all is that God the Spirit might make us thirsty for Jesus Christ, that he might remove the calluses from the taste buds of our heart, and cause us to drink deep and savor the magnificence of Jesus who fulfills all of history past and embodies all the glorious hopes of the future. Because if the Spirit will do this for us, we have it on the word of Jesus that "out of our hearts will flow rivers of living water." And that is what we crave above all. (emphasis mine)
1 comment:
Really great post, Tammy. I've never thought of Jesus being called a moral teacher or good man as being inapplicable before. Love the quote from C. S. Lewis, and the part about the Spirit flowing in through faith and flowing out through love. My Bible study group is about to start reading "Come Thirsty" by Max Lucado. Seems like it will tie in nicely with what we're learning now in the New Testament.
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