Tag Archives: testify

ONE LIKE US

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ONE LIKE US

“‘By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but only Him who sent me. If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who testifies in my favour and I know that His testimony about me is true. You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. Not that I accept human testimony but I mention it that you may be saved. John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.'” John 5:30-35 (NIV).

In a single sentence Jesus clears up a misunderstanding that many make about Him. “‘By myself I can do nothing.'” Although He was the Son of God and God in the flesh, He chose to lay aside all the privileges of deity and live on earth as an ordinary man with no power to do anything except through the power of the Holy Spirit. Why did He do that?

He came in the likeness of the first Adam, equipped with the same Holy Spirit who indwelt Adam and with the same potential to fail as Adam had. He faced the same temptations as Adam did and risked the same fate as Adam did, but where Adam sinned by choosing independence from God, Jesus did not.

He chose to live His earthly life in union with the Father and in submission and obedience to Him out of loving reverence for Him. It was not because He was God that He did the things He did; it was because He listened to the Father and did what He was commanded to do. On one occasion He was accused of casting out demons in the name of Beelzebub. His response was “If it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” Matthew 12:28 (NIV).

His union and fellowship with the Father was so close that the very works He did were a testimony to His origin. He was sent by the Father and it was His purpose to do everything the Father told Him in order to please Him and to fulfil His will.

John bore testimony to Jesus because God revealed to him that the One on whom the Spirit descended was the Messiah. Although his testimony was true and valid, it was the testimony of the Father spoken at His baptism, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,”(Mark 1:11b), together with the witness of His works that were the evidence of His true identity as the Son of God.

Truth in a Jewish court of law was established by the evidence of two or three witnesses whose testimony had to agree. Jesus had the undeniable truth from the evidence of the Father’s testimony about Him and the testimony of those who had been healed through His miracles, and yet the religious leaders refused to accept their testimony and believe the truth.

It was not the evidence that was lacking but the prejudice of those who refused to believe the evidence that produced the on-going conflict that eventually led to Jesus’ violent and untimely death. It was not Jesus who was put on trial but His accusers for refusing to weigh up the evidence honestly and arrive at the truth.

He was the Son of God and His power came from God in response to His obedience, which qualified him to be the representative of the human race and to die in the place of those who had failed to live in obedience to the Father. He was the perfect substitute and sacrifice for the whole human race and His death paid the debt we owed the Father for our disobedience and failure to live as sons and daughters of God.

The only way in which we can ever be reconciled to the Father and restored to our place in the family of God is to acknowledge that we owe Him a great debt for our rebellion and to accept the payment of our debt by our elder brother. Jesus took our place so that we can be received back into God’s family as beloved sons and daughters.

Although He paid the debt for the world’s sin, it is only those who respond in faith and obedience who can enjoy all the benefits of being in God’s family.

Acknowledgement

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

CHECK THE FRUIT!

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CHECK THE FRUIT!

“There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.” John 1:6-8 (NIV).

Don’t you love the way John puts John the Baptist into the correct perspective? If you have travelled with me through Luke’s gospel, you will have seen how Jesus struggled to teach His disciples to interpret what was going on from the perspective of the kingdom of God, but at that time they just didn’t get it. He promised them that things would be different after Pentecost — and they were! Once they had the Holy Spirit in them, they saw things from God’s point of view just like Jesus did.

Although he was a prophet, John the Baptist’s ministry was unique and special. Just in case anyone mistakenly thought that he was the Messiah, John, the writer, assured his readers that John the Baptist was only a witness albeit a powerful one.

How did John the Baptist bear witness to the light? His preaching on repentance had a twofold purpose — to call God’s people back to a life of generosity and service and to prepare them for the coming of the Messiah who would immerse them in the Holy Spirit.

The religious leaders had led the people away from what God wanted into what they thought God wanted, religious people who meticulously kept the minutest details of the law at the expense of loving God by being kind and generous to all people. John’s preaching was fiery and explicit. He called his curious congregation who went to hear what he had to say, “a brood of vipers, a bunch of bastards — fatherless people!”

“Return,” he urged them. “There is someone coming who is far greater than I. My baptism in water is only a preparation for His baptism of fire.” What Jesus was about to do would be like the fire that consumes the chaff that is beaten off the wheat — He would expose and get rid of everything in His people that was incompatible with God – greed, selfishness, unkindness, pride and arrogance. He was not interested in religious rigmarole. He wanted real people who would love God and love their neighbour.

John the Baptist had no desire to promote himself. His only mission was to prepare the way for the coming one by alerting the people to their need to get back to the simplicity of God’s way and to recognise the Messiah when He arrived because He would continue what John began.

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognise Him. He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent or a husband’s will but born of God.” John 1:9-13 (NIV).

There is a sad note in John’s story — in spite of what John the Baptist preached and testified to, neither the world at large nor God’s people recognised or acknowledged the Messiah when He came. His own people, who should have known Him because they had been taught His Word from their mother’s breast, refused to receive Him.

Since the day when they were taken into covenant relationship with God at Mount Sinai, they persisted in rebelling against God’s best way to live and going their own way with disastrous consequences; yet they never learned. Now, here they were, repeating history all over again.

Except for a few! In God’s story there are always those, few in number, yes, but true children of God who take what God says seriously, act on it and are welcomed into God’s family as dearly loved children. John hastens to add that this is not about natural birth. The Jews assumed that, because they were born Jews and had been circumcised — an external sign of their Jewishness, they were “in” and everybody else was “out”.

John made sure that he told them that it didn’t work like that. There had to be another “birth”, a supernatural one that brought them back into the family of God and reproduced the character of God in them.

How tragic that this erroneous thinking, (that being born into a Christian family makes them Christians), has crept into the church as well! Some branches of the church bring their babies into the family of God by “Christianising” them and “confirming” that ritual when they are of age and yet they have never been supernaturally “born” into God’s family by receiving Jesus as the Son of God and the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of sonship (Romans 8:14-16). 

Jesus said, “Check the fruit. That’s the real test.”

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

No Thumb-suck

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NO THUMB-SUCK

The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. (1 John 1: 2)

This was no thumb-suck. John was proclaiming to his readers what had actually happened. What if John were making it up as he went along? What if he were pulling off the greatest hoax in history?

But he wasn’t. There were many witnesses to the real Jesus who would ratify what John was proclaiming. If he were making it up, many would have stepped up to declare that he was talking nonsense and spinning lies. Although John wrote his letters years after the other New Testament writers, he was expanding on and recording the truths that had already been disseminated by them.

John equated Jesus with eternal life. No other figure in human history would dare to call himself that – eternal life. Jesus did not give those words to Himself as a title but as a function. He came from the Father to bring life to the world, not only endless life but a new quality of life that belonged to the realm of the eternal.

We humans equate the word “eternal” with “never ending” as though we will just keep on living the same sort of lives we are living now but with no death at the end of it. Our imagination does not stretch far enough to conjure up a real picture of the eternal realm. Eternal life is much more than never-ending. It has to do with a quality of life in a realm that is not ravaged by sin or time, or limited by the limitations of this present world.

What did Jesus mean by “eternal”? He also used the term, “the age to come”. This present age is the age in which we live now, an age of imperfection where everyone and everything in the world is influenced by Adam’s sin. Even the natural world was corrupted by sin and awaits an age when all corruption will be removed and the earth with its plants and creatures will be restored to its original perfection.

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation is groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (Rom. 8: 19-22)

It was sin that brought death to the world. Jesus’ death removed sin and restored the life which God intended for His children from the beginning. When we receive by faith the forgiveness of sin, God removes the penalty, death, and restores us to the realm where there is no death. Although we are still a part of this fallen world and subject to the death of our physical bodies, we are already the recipients of eternal life. When we shed these mortal bodies, we enter the eternal realm where there is no more death.

It is Jesus who brought us the gift of eternal live by removing the penalty of death from us; therefore we can say the Jesus is eternal life.

And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. (1 John 5: 11-12)

The perpetrators of false religions can say what they like and teach what they like but they can never make or prove the claim that those who believe and follow what they teach have the indisputable promise of eternal life. How do we know that Jesus, and those who proclaimed what He taught, was telling the truth? The resurrection!

He claimed to have the authority to lay down His life and to take it up again.

The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life – only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father. (John. 10: 17-18)

These are either the words of a madman or the sober words of truth from the Son of God. He proved He was no madman by doing what He said He would do!  Eternal life in Jesus Christ if a free gift on offer to those who believe that He is the Son of God and that God raised Him from the dead and who confess that Jesus is Lord. It’s as simple as that.

If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. (Rom. 10: 9)

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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The Testimony Within

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THE TESTIMONY WITHIN 

“‘When the Advocate comes, whom I will sent to you from the Father — the Spirit of Truth who goes out from the Father — He will testify about me. And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning.'” John 15:26-27 NIV.

The Holy Spirit, beautiful, gentle, powerful, mysterious, third Person of the Trinity, How was Jesus to explain Him to His disciples?

He would gently lead them into a new realm that they could only know and understand by experience. Although the Holy Spirit has many titles and functions, Jesus chose to call Him the Spirit of truth because truth is what sums up everything that He is and does.

He is not the Spirit of spiritual “goose bumps” or the Spirit of spiritual gifts or even the Spirit of out-of-this-world experiences like being “slain” in the Spirit or being sprinkled with gold dust or travelling “in the Spirit” to other realms. He is the Spirit of truth.

Truth, above everything else, characterises the three-in-one God who calls human beings to worship Him “in spirit and in truth”. Pilate asked Jesus, ‘What is truth?’ not because he wanted to know but because he cynically dismissed truth as too mysterious and elusive to know. But the Bible gives us the answer — God is truth. Everything He is, says and does is the truth and truth is the essence of who He is in His three-in-one being.

Jesus often began an important teaching with the declaration, ‘I tell you the truth…!’ Not because everything else He said was not true but because of the importance of the truth He was about to communicate.

The Holy Spirit’s primary role and the one for which He was sent to indwell believers is to reveal Jesus to the inner being so that His followers can be true witnesses to who He is. It was impossible, at that stage, for the disciples to know everything there was to know about their Messiah. Their minds were still closed to many things, their understanding darkened by prejudice, religion and often stubborn resistance to the truth.

It would take the powerful witness of the Holy Spirit within them to awaken a new perception of their Messiah and a broader perspective of the life they were called to live “in Him”. All the other functions of the Holy Spirit have to fall into place within the scope of truth.

What is the truth that should govern the outflow of our lives as disciples of Jesus? The Apostle Paul called the Holy Spirit the one who “brought about your adoption to sonship” (Romans 8:15b NIV). Until we deal with the issues in our personal lives that block our understanding and experience of God as our true Father, our unfinished business with our earthly fathers, we will never enter into the fullness of Jesus’ life as sons and daughters of God.

Jesus came to reveal the Father and to reconcile us to the Father so that we might receive the life that permits us to be sons and daughters in fellowship with the Father, just like He was. His final audible plea to the Father before He left them was  that the Father and His disciples, present and future, would be one just as He and the Father were one.

“”My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you sent me…I in you and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them as you have loved me.” John 17:20-21; 23 NIV.

It is not tongues, or gifts, or goose bumps that unites us but the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth He reveals about our Messiah and the faith we have in Him that binds our hearts into one.

“Christ Himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip His people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” Ephesians 5:11-13 NIV.

In that unity, created by the Holy Spirit who reveals the truth that we are to treasure and guard because through our unity in Christ, we testify to the truth about Jesus to the world as the Holy Spirit testifies to the truth about Jesus in us.

Faith Is The Key

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FAITH IS THE KEY 

“‘I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish — the very works that I am doing — testify that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has Himself testified concerning me. You have never heard His voice nor seen His form, nor does His word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one He sent. You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.'” John 5:36-40 (NIV).

Jesus and the religious leaders stood on opposite sides of an impenetrable wall. The heart of Jesus yearned for them to see the light and recognize that He was speaking the truth when He declared that the works He did and the witness of the Father pointed to only one thing — that He was the Son of God. Their desperate efforts to protect their power and influence over the people and their prejudice against Him because they hated His love for all people, blinded their eyes to His identity.

Again and again they demanded, ‘Who are you?’ but then rejected the evidence before their eyes because they stubbornly refused to believe His word. In the end it was not about their inability to understand. It was about their refusal to believe because they had another agenda. Had God or an angel personally come to explain the truth to them, they would still have refused to believe.

These men were professional students of the Word. They had memorised and studied the entire Old Testament from childhood and could flawlessly recite any part of it at will. It was in their heads but not in their hearts because their understanding and interpretation of the Word was fixed by their “yoke”, their way of interpreting and applying the Word. They followed the yoke of their rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, and the ancient rabbis who went before them, the men who determined how the Scriptures were to be understood.

Although the common people recognized the overriding authority of Jesus, they did not, and despised them for following and listening to Him. Not even the testimony of the highly revered prophet, John, could convince them that Jesus was the Messiah. They were in bed with the Romans and enjoyed their protection as long as they kept the people under their thumbs. They did not want anyone to rock their boat, especially this “softie” who had the common people eating out of His hand.

Their study of the Scriptures was purely academic, to reinforce their power over the people, not because they were looking for the truth about the Messiah. It was there before their eyes and available to anyone who had the will to believe, but for these men, the truth was safely hidden until they unlocked it with the key of faith.

It was out of these altercations with the religious leaders that some of the richest revelation of Jesus and His relationship with the Father came. His opponents might not have chosen to believe His word, but for those who do, we have the assurance and the witness that Jesus was no fake but truly the Son of God for, as Nicodemus testified, no one can do these things unless God is with him.

How does Jesus’ testimony sit with us? It actually has more to do with choice than with fact. Like the Pharisees we can choose to reject His word, or we can choose to believe and then have the witness in our spirits that what He said and what He promised is true. The world says, “Seeing is believing,” but that is the way of the skeptic. The Bible says, “Believing is seeing,” and that is the way of Father.

Faith must take the first step, based on the evidence, and the confirmation will follow. Faith puts into action what we know to be true, and God responds by fulfilling His word. We all fall into one of two categories, those who choose to believe or those who choose not to believe and the outcome depends on our choice.