How To Make Right Choices About Spiritual Issues Series

Back when I was in college I was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ. And I think it was my senior year when CCC invited a staff member by the name of Dick Day to come and speak on Love, Sex and Marriage.

And Campus Crusade had a very flashy sort of ministry. They advertised that a special speaker was coming to speak on this challenging subject all over campus with signs and placards and in every possible way.

And it so happened I had an acquaintance that showed up at noon on the Quad the day Dick Day spoke. He was a tall, young long-haired blonde fellow student who was also a fellow worker at the Ralphs Supermarket I worked at. And he came prepared with a notebook and pen to hear all that Dick Day had to say. After all, he had just gotten married, and I suspect things weren’t going nearly as well as he had hoped, and so he was ready to drink in all the wisdom he could gain that day.

That was, until it became evident that the secret to a good marriage, according to Dick Day, was having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I don’t remember actually seeing my friend walk away during the talk, but I heard about it later that week, along with a number of expletives which described my fellow-worker’s attitude about Jesus Christ and “religion” in general.

Of course, being a believer and wanting to be a good witness to the Lord, I sought to persuade him toward the idea that there might be something to Jesus Christ, and what Dick Day said. I got exactly nowhere with it, and later overheard my co-worker register his complaint against me, Dick Day and Jesus Christ with this statement: “Is Jesus Christ the Son of God? I don’t and I don’t care. I just want to live my life and enjoy it.”

Now, 37 years later, I still remember his quote. I’ve never forgotten it, because I believe it is precisely the essence of why most people who don’t believe, won’t believe. It’s not that they can’t believe in Jesus Christ, or that they have some intellectual reason why they can’t believe in Christ, but rather it’s because they won’t believe in Jesus Christ. And they won’t believe in Jesus Christ because their bottom-line question when it comes to spiritual issues is essentially this: Don’t confuse me with facts. I already know how I want to live my life, and therefore, what I prefer to believe.

And that’s exactly what was happening in Jerusalem at the Feast of the Booths in John chapter 7. Jesus had secretly gone up to the feast late, and had started teaching in the Temple at the mid-point of the 8-day feast, much to the chagrin of the spiritual and political leaders of the nation, the Jews, and the crowds of pilgrims from other places in Israel who had come for the feast. He absolutely amazed both his enemies and his friends with His wisdom, confounded their arguments, and exposed their hypocrisy with lock-tight logic, and thus displaying Himself in yet another way to the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.

And in the process, He gave a clinic on how to make right choices in spiritual matters.

And so it was that Jesus literally astonished the Jews as He began teaching in the temple courts in that final Feast of the Booths He attended in Jerusalem six months before His crucifixion and resurrection. And please remember, when the Apostle John spoke of the Jews in the Gospel of John, he was specifically referring to Jesus’ sworn enemies, the chief priests and the Pharisees, the political and spiritual leaders of the nation, who hated Jesus and had determined to arrest and kill him if He showed up at this feast in Jerusalem. For when they heard Him, He spoke with the wisdom and skill of an educated man, one who knew his letters, and yet they recognized He had not received this wisdom in the schools or seminaries of Jerusalem—which was the only place they thought such wisdom and skill could come from. And so a question naturally arose from their astonishment with Jesus wisdom. Where did it come from? How did such an untaught man become so wise?

So Jesus answered their question in verse 16: “My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me.”

The answer was simple: Jesus got His wisdom directly from God His Father. His wisdom was simply divine, beyond what any man could have ever taught Him—an answer which must have further infuriated the Jews. Once again Jesus was not only claiming to be someone special, even the Messiah, but He was also demonstrating it. Not with a healing miracle this time, but with the very divinely-inspired wisdom which they had to know deep in their heart-of-hearts could truly only have come from God.