Seeking to make the Lord God Jesus Christ visible in our midst… "Where two or three are gathered together in My name there am I in the midst of them." (Matt. 18:20)
Sermons on John (Page 4)
http://logopraxis.online/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Jn2c-Journey-from-Cana-to-Capernaum.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.7MB)John Chapter 2:12-17 After this He went down to Capernaum, He and His mother and His brothers and His disciples. And He remained there not many days. (13) And the Passover of the Jews was near. And Jesus went up to Jerusalem. (14) And He found those selling…
http://logopraxis.online/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Jn2b-Water-to-Wine-Part-2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.0MB)John Chapter 2:1-11 And on the third day a marriage took place in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. (2) And Jesus and His disciples also were invited to the marriage. (3) And being short of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him,…
http://logopraxis.online/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Jn2a-Water-to-Wine-Part-1.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.9MB)John Chapter 2:1-11 And on the third day a marriage took place in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. (2) And Jesus and His disciples also were invited to the marriage. (3) And being short of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him,…
The disciples or disciplines of John who represents our natural understanding of the Word, are centred on repentance in terms of our external life, but these disciplines must make a shift to serve repentance as to our inner life so that our focus is not just on how we act, but includes what we will and think, and so opening up the opportunity for the Lord to begin to order our affections, their thoughts and our actions. This internal application of the internal sense of the Word sees a shift in the states of our mind, with the focus of the Word moving from the reformation of our thinking concerning spiritual matters to our actual rebirth or regeneration.
We all begin our spiritual encounter with the Lord through a natural understanding of the Word. John represents this and it is as we are faithful in following John the Baptist by working with the Word and using it as a means of cleansing our outer life through repentance, so the ground is prepared for coming to see its deeper things and in these things come to experience the power of the Lord, or Word, to save us from the life that is our selfishness.
To love the Lord is to be in the effort to live from our understanding of the Word for the Lord is the Word, and when we live from the Word, then we love the Lord, and it is in living from the Word that we learn how we are to love each other. These loves are from heaven, for anything of spiritual substance produced in us by means of the Word must be heavenly, and if heavenly then it must contain the Lord because the Lord Himself makes heaven, heaven.
When John says he is not the light we are being taught that the literal sense or the historical context in which the Word is clothed doesn’t constitute the divine truth, which is the true light. But the relationship the historical garments represented by John, and of which the literal sense Word is made up is absolutely essential if we are to come to believe in the Lord.
It’s not a question of morality but of spirituality. Morality focuses on external behaviour; genuine spirituality focuses on the inner motivations and thoughts that underlie the behaviour. So a person may live an external life that is morally perfect, be an upright citizen of their community and never put a foot wrong, but spiritually they may still be missing the mark. They miss the mark when they give no thought to the motives from which their behaviour flows.
The condition of our mind prior to our regeneration in regard to spiritual things is nothing but gross darkness; we actually have no capacity of ourselves to grasp anything pertaining to spiritual realities. Any genuine comprehension we have of such things is from the Lord alone or from the truths of the Word which is really the Lord with us. We should never be tempted to attribute our understanding of spiritual things to our own intellectual ability, all power in this regard is from the Lord, who gives us the ability to reason about truths but more importantly grants us the ability to love them by responding to the challenges they make on our life in freedom.
To understand the message of John’s gospel we need to have a clear understanding of the teaching set forth here in its opening verses. These opening few verses of John set the framework and reference point for understanding everything else in the gospel, and so what we take from here will have a direct bearing on how we perceive the things that are to come.