Many Seeds Series

I have a question for you. Does anybody recognize the name Tim Tebow? If you don’t know who Tim Tebow is, he is a quarterback for a team called the Denver Broncos. I guess last Sunday there was a football game and the Denver Broncos hosted the Pittsburgh Steelers for the first round of the NFL playoffs. Tim Tebow threw for a record 316 yards, including 2 touchdowns, and there was a touchdown in overtime which resulted in the loss, unfortunately, by the Steelers by a score of 29-23. So if you didn’t know about Tim Tebow a couple weeks ago, you probably know the name now. What you might not know is that Tim Tebow is a very, very committed Christian. He grew up in a very strong Christian home. In fact, his parents are Baptist missionaries in the Philippines. So he grew up in the Philippines as a son of Baptist missionaries. So he is very, vocal about his faith. In fact, there is a picture I found on the internet of Tim Tebow and he is doing the Tebowing, which they have coined a phrase about Tim Tebow called Tebowing which is to get down on a knee and start praying even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different. They call that Tebowing. So he is not ashamed of his faith. Because of his outspokenness of his faith, he takes a lot of criticism. A lot of people mock him. There was a Saturday Night Live skit a few weeks ago. After last week’s game, people began to change their tune a little bit about Tebow. They began to think that maybe he does have some sort of a direct connection to God, especially when the number 316 began to bubble up. He threw for 316 yards. I guess the average completion was 31.6 yards. The Nielson ratings were 31.6 whatever that means. Once again, that 316 ties to the verse that many of you are familiar with, John 3:16. “For God so loved the world, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” What happened is after that football game, people really began to seek a deeper understanding not only of Tim Tebow but of the meaning behind John 3:16. I guess the most frequent search on Google and Yahoo last week on the internet was Tebow, Tebowing, and John 3:16.

Today, as we open our Bibles to John 12, we begin to see another search going on. Not by people searching the internet but a group of people known as the Greeks who begin to seek an understanding not of Tim Tebow and John 3:16 but of Jesus Christ. If you have your Bibles, open up to John 12:20. As a refresher, we have been looking at the book of John. Last week, we introduced the last week of Jesus’ ministry that began with what is called the triumphal entry where Jesus came into Jerusalem a the donkey. He was led through town like a processional that went through the crowds. People were laying the palm branches down and there were many different faces in the crowed. There was the Roman army trying to keep the peace. There were the Pharisees waiting for Jesus to slip up or for them to catch him in some sort of a blasphemy. There were the people who had witnessed Lazarus being raised from the dead coming around hoping to see another miracle. Then there were just some other faces in the crowd. Some of those faces in the crowd were the Greeks. The Greeks came with a purpose to come up to the feast with the purpose of worshipping the Jewish God. We are going to pick up the story there again, which is John 12:20. We are going to take it all the way down to verse 36 just so we can read through the section, and then we are going to backtrack through those first six verses in the section here. Reading from John 12:20. (Scripture read here.)

There are a lot of passages in here. We can’t spend too much time on them, so we are just going to go back to the first six verses starting with verse 20. We want to look at the situation with the Greeks coming to visit Jesus. The Greeks were coming to worship Jesus. At the same time, their worship was likely a little bit deficient at least in the eyes of the Jews. The Greeks came from a pagan background where they worshipped foreign gods. Where they worshipped different gods like Zeus and Jupiter and the different gods out there. So their worship, though maybe sincere, was deficient. The good thing about the Greeks was that they understood when they were deficient in some knowledge. They sought out a deeper level of understanding. The Greeks were made up of the philosophers and the scholars. The men who would stand around and be able to answer questions just about any topic in the market place. People would ask them about politics. They would ask them about religion. They would ask them about biology and logic and the arts. They were expected to know something about all these subjects. So when they didn’t know something, they would admit it and they would begin to seek a deeper level of understanding. They must have caught wind that Jesus knew something. Jesus had a knowledge about God that maybe the Jews didn’t. They had heard that Jesus was in many ways a teacher. He was a scholar. He was also a miracle worker. They decided to go seek an audience to Jesus. They decided to go and find out what Jesus knows. Instead of going to the Jews, they decided they were going to go to the disciples. The first disciple they went to was Philip. The reason they went to Philip was because Philip was also Greek. Maybe they felt that if they go to Philip they may be able to have better access to Jesus. In many ways, Jesus at that time was very popular. He came down into Jerusalem in a triumphal, victorious way. He was very popular. Everybody wanted to see Jesus. The disciples were guarding him. They thought maybe if we go to Philip we would have this inside track. Kind of like trying to see a rock star. Get a backstage pass that only Andrew and Philip have available. They went to Philip and Philip went to Andrew and asked him what he thought and they both together went and inquired of Jesus. The Greeks want to see you. The Greeks, Jesus. The smart ones. The intellects. The scholars. It might be good for you if you were to see the Greeks because it might open up new doors in ministry that we didn’t have before. They are encouraging Jesus to visit with the Greeks.