Tonight we will be in the Gospel of John. And we will be in the Gospel of John potentially until we see Jesus again face to face. This could be a while. And what I’m gonna ask that you do tonight is something very simple and very practical that we begin with. The first thing I’m gonna give you is an assignment. Very simple. What I want you to do is somewhere on your notes – get a pen. There’s pencils in front of you in your pew. I want you to get your notes, and I want you to draw initially a circle, and I want you to put your name in it. And then around that, orbiting around that I want you to put names of other clusters of relationships and communities that you’re involved in. Any group that you are involved in that is ten or more people. So it could be your family. Maybe you hang out at a club all the time, you know a lot of people there. Maybe it’s a hobby group. Maybe it’s – maybe you’re part of a sports team, and you play in an athletic competition. Whatever it is. Anything.
It can be clusters of ten or more people that you have a relationship with in certain groups. And I want you to put those around yourself. And what we’re gonna build here is your relational universe. And initially this may not make a lot of sense. If I do a bad job, it won’t make any sense all night. But the goal is that by the end of this, this will come into some cohesion for you. And this will be just a very simple and a very practical message tonight. And so think through who do I know? What relationships am I involved in? What communities do I participate in? These can be acquaintances, friendships or family members. Any of those three categories of relationship are acceptable. So take a couple minutes and do that. Some of you are done, and so we’ll pray that you get friends and have people that you have relationships with (Laughter). How are you guys doing? You got a few down?
I did this the other night, and it was actually kind of amazing just to see how many people you really do know and how many places you really are potentially connected. How many of you have got more than five, five clusters? More than ten? Anybody more than ten? More than fifteen? I only gave you a couple minutes. I threw it together the other night. I had 20-something. Anywhere from like 4,000 or 5,000 down to a family of 20 or so people. What I want you to do is just kinda keep that thought in the back of your mind, and we’ll come back to it at the very end. What I want you to see is that we live in a relational universe where we’re connected to all kinds of different people. And where we’re coming tonight in the scriptures is in John Chapter 1. And what I’m gonna do for ya is I’m gonna overlay a lot of concepts and thinking on information and theory and how information is disseminated and how people come to learn things.
I’m gonna lay that over so that when you come into the scriptures with me tonight and you study the story at the end of John Chapter 1, some of these concepts will sort of take flight for you. You’ll see ‘em as they live and breathe in reality. And as you come to the scriptures, I’ve told you guys this upon occasion, that there’s really two primary kind of text that are in the scripture. Some are descripted that tell us a story. Others are prescripted, which tell us what we should or should not do. A prescriptive text says, “Love your neighbor. Don’t kill anybody. Don’t steal anything.” It prescribes conduct behavior. It tells you something. Other sections of scripture don’t really tell you specifically anything. They more describe how God was involved in peoples’ lives, and how people responded to God’s involvement in their life. And through the stories of peoples’ lives, we see how God acts, and we see some life lessons and some principles. Positive like Mary or John the Baptizer. Also negative like Herod and Judas. Positive and negative ways that people respond to God’s involvement in their life.
And so the story we come to tonight doesn’t tell you specifically to do or not do anything, but I want you to look at it and say, “Ah. That’s how God works in peoples’ lives. That’s how God works in the course of human history.” And when you start thinking about it, all of us are connected in relational frameworks and universes, and those tend to be in three different categories. There’s acquaintances, people that we know sort of secondhand. We sort of have a minimal amount of information about them. Maybe we see them upon occasion. We’re not really close with them, but we do know who they are. Okay? We also have family members that we are obligated to by blood. And whether or not we’re very close to them, we do sense sort of obligation to them. And then lastly, there are friends. There are people that we deeply care about and we willingfully commit ourselves to in relationship. And we live with these people and we journey with these people and we invest a lot of ourselves in relationships with those people.
And it’s interesting because those different clusters of relationships accomplish different things for us. There was a study done. It was in 1976 or 1974. And it was about getting a job. And what it discovered was that the majority of people who got employment did so through an acquaintance. How many of you the last job you got was not through response to an advertisement in the paper, but was through a friend or a family member or an acquaintance that then hooked you up? Look at that. That’s how things get done in our world. We get things done through the people that we know. Usually it’s not immediate friends that gets us jobs and those sorts of things because we live in the same universe as them, and we already know all the people that they know. Usually it’s acquaintances. It’s sort of the removed relationships that they found tend to get us things like jobs and then bring us into other places of connection.
Let me ask you a second question. How many of you right now are struggling with the sniffles, a little bit of a cold, flu season setting in? Almost everything. How did you get that? Someone gave that to you, right? You may know who it was. “Yeah, my coworker in the next cubicle was hacking. Two days later I’m hacking too. Now we have a hacking choir thanks to their involvement in my life.” What you find is that the way that viruses and flu bugs and such spread is that certain people are carriers and they are infected with something, and then they give it to other people. And then it jumps and it morphs and it becomes infected in other people. What they’re telling us now in communication theory is that that’s exactly what happens to ideas. Some people know things or they believe things, and then they go out and they infect other people. They give it to other people.
And so what they’re starting to discover – and I was reading a book called “The Tipping Point” by a guy named Malcolm Gladwell. I didn’t get the impression he’s a Christian. It’s an interesting book though. And what he says is that information doesn’t get disseminated and people don’t believe things just because there’s a lot of marketing or advertising. The way people really come to their conclusions is by word of mouth, that certain people that you know bring an idea to you and they convince you of it. And I would say that’s really important in our world. The average television show today is about a half hour. In that half hour you get four-and-a-half minutes of commercials. That means for every hour of television you watch, you get nine minutes of commercials. You’re constantly getting bombarded with information, with people trying to pitch you and sell you something.
The average person sitting in this room is hammered with 254 advertisements a day, commercial messages. Billboards, radio, television, Internet. The more tech savvy you are, the more that you read, the more that you get. Some of you may actually be a 1,000-plus advertisements a day that you are bombarded with. And what happens in our world is that information is moving so quickly. They’re telling us that information now doubles every two to three years. That means half of all available information on planet earth is from Adam and Even up to 1998. The other half is 1998 and 1999. And they’re telling us that within our lifetime, we could see that reduce itself to the place where information is doubling every two weeks, and the amount of advertising will just increase exponentially, which means you are getting hammered with so much information that you completely lose sight of what’s important and what’s not. And what you need is some sort of filtering system that says, “Yeah, there’s a thousand things you could know, but there’s only a few things that are really important.” And the way we filter those things through is word of mouth.
We think things are important if someone who is close to us, a friend, a family member or an acquaintance tells us. That’s how we determine what is important. It’s through word of mouth. And so in this book “The Tipping Point” what this gentleman says is he says that ideas start off like viruses. They start off, a few people catch it, and the all of a sudden it spreads until it reaches a point where it tips, and then all of a sudden it goes from being a marginal concept or idea or product and then all of a sudden it becomes a majority. And he says that there’s three kinds of people that are involved in the transmitting of information. I know I’m giving you a lot of historical background. He says, one, there are people who are connectors. And these are people that know everybody. Any of you have a friend like that? It seems like anywhere you go, they bump into somebody they know (Laughter). It doesn’t matter where you go. You’re at the hardware store, “Oh, hi, how you doing?” You go to the movie theatre, they know – everywhere you go someone knows that person. And if they don’t know that person, they’ve at least heard of them. They’re like “Oh, yeah. My friend told me about you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
And the connectors are people who have not just multiple relationships, but they’re involved in multiple communities. And so groups of people, tribes that would never come together, these people seem to have a foot in multiple worlds and can bring them all together. And some of you – people come to mind like that. You say, “Yeah, I know somebody like that. They just know everybody.” He says in addition, the second type of person that helps in the dissemination of information is someone that he calls a maven, which is a Yiddish word for someone who knows a lot. And a maven is someone who reads everything, takes all the information that there is, and remembers every single detail. And they do you the good favor that if you need something, you don’t need to learn it. You just go ask them. Any of you have a friend like that? You get sick, you call so and so. Your car breaks down, you call so and so. You need something, you call so and so. Why? They know what – they already know the answer. They could save you all the hassle of trying to look for it yourself. They know what the answer is.
And he said the third kind he calls ‘em salesmen. I would call ‘em Evangelists. These are people who can convince you of anything. They can sell an idea whether or not they even believe in it. They’re just very convincing with their ideas. And that can be good or bad. I was raised in a family where that was a survival tactic. I can remember as a little boy I developed that skill very young. I was the oldest of five kids in an Irish family. In an Irish blue-collar family you have to negotiate. The food chain gets inverted very quickly, so you have to jockey for your position. And I can still remember as a little boy developing this skill. I now understand it is lying, but at the time I just thought it was strategy (Laughter). Children tend to work that way.
I can still remember when I was a little boy, my mom came to me and I said, “Mom, can I go out and play?” She says, “Is your room clean?” My answer, “It should be.” (Laughter) Okay? She says, “Okay. Then you can go out and play.” I come home later, my father is home. My father is always the heavy. My father comes home, I come home. My dad says, “Why’d you lie to your mother?” “Oh, now, wait a second, father. Technically I did not lie. I may have pulled a Clinton, but I did not lie (Laughter). I did not lie to you directly. Mom said, ‘Is your room clean?’, and I said, ‘It should be.’ I never said it was clean. I said that it should be.” And it should have been, though it was not. It was very dirty.
And salesmen are these people who can convince you of something that isn’t even true or can pitch you on something if it is true, but they’re very, very, very persuasive. All right? And what we’re looking at tonight is John the beloved disciple is operating at this point in his life as each of these three. He is a connector. He knows everybody in the church. In Revelation 2 and 3 he writes to the 7 churches. Everybody knows John. Everybody knows who John is. He’s the last living disciple. He saw Jesus’ life. He is connected as well as anyone can be in Christianity at that point. In addition, he has information that no one else would have. He saw Jesus. That’s what he says in First John. “I saw him, I touched him, I heard him.” What I’m talking about is firsthand eyewitness testimony. In addition, he is an Evangelist, and he tells us in 20:31 of the Gospel of John “I write these things so that you may believe in Jesus and have life and eternal life in his name. I want you to know Jesus. I’m trying to convince you of Jesus.”
And so these three people what you’ll see what they do is they will convincingly take information and then spread it through networks of people. And what he says is that the process happens whereby it begins with someone who is an innovator. Someone is the first person to recognize something or learn something or know something. Now, in our story so far who is that? Who’s the innovator in the Gospel of John? Who’s the first guy that gets it? John the Baptizer. He’s the innovator. He’s the first one to look at Jesus his cousin and say, “That is God.” And so John writes his Gospel. He starts in Chapter 1. We looked at Verses 1 through 18 where he says, here’s the message, “Jesus is God who has come down to earth to be with us and die for our sin.” That’s the message. Then he goes on to the innovator. Who’s the first person to see that? John the Baptizer.
And then what happens is he goes on to tell us about early adopters, the people that then believe John’s testimony and come on as the original converts, the original followers of Jesus. After that comes an early majority where now the message goes from John the Baptizer to a couple of guys to a pretty decent crowd of people over time. At some point a later majority comes in. After years people that are a little more skeptical get all the information, they see the results of Jesus’ involvement in peoples’ lives, and they come to believe too. And then the last group after the late majority are laggards. They’re people that never ever believe. And this is true whether you’re talking about a business product or an idea or Evangelism in the Gospel. How many of you do not have an answering machine? You are the laggards in this room.
See, there was an innovator, there was a guy at one time that said, “You know, if I’m not home when people call, they should still be able to talk to me.” That’s an innovator. Then he became a salesman. He said, “If I could get my friends to use these, then it would really speed up our life.” So the early adopters come along and they say, “Well, we’re gonna all get an answering machine.” Well, then late majority comes, and then the bulk of the people say, “Well, yeah, we need one.” And then the late majority comes after the early majority. And then the majority of people actually get an answering machine, but there’s a few people that never do. You know what we call them? Sinners (Laughter). No, you’re not necessarily a sinner. But in our culture if you don’t have an email or let’s say you don’t have a phone – some people don’t have a phone. They just refuse to adopt into the new change. Okay? And there may be varying reasons for that. Some people may have a very good reason. Other people may not have a good reason. But any time an idea goes forth, the concept, this gentleman Malcolm Gladwell says, “These are the stages that it goes through.”
You see that same thing with Christianity. John is one of the very first to get the message. The message is Jesus. John the Baptizer’s one of the first to get it. And then a few disciples get it. And then crowds of people start coming. And then an early majority. Then a late majority. But some people never do believe in Jesus. They never come around to that understanding. And so with all of that in mind, go to John Chapter 1. You may say, “Why in the world would you just talk for ten minutes?” And there may not be a good answer to that question, but I hope as we go through this section of scripture, what I want you to see is that I still think God works in the same way that he always has. I think that this gentleman in this book has just found how information goes forth. And I think the same thing happens with Jesus. 1:35. The next day John, John the Baptizer, was there again with two of his disciples, some of the guys that’ll follow. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look. The lamb of God.” John’s the innovator. He sees it. He says, “Ah, that’s Jesus. He’s God.” He’s the first guy to get it, and he points everybody else to Jesus. So the message is Jesus, and the Baptizer’s the first guy to get it.
And when the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Now, we don’t know exactly who the two were. It’ll tell us in a moment that one is a guy named Andrew. Another guy doesn’t name himself. I think it’s probably John, the youngest and beloved disciple, who writes the book. So for purposes of our study tonight, it’ll be Andrew and John are the first disciples. So the Baptizer sees it, points to Jesus. John and Andrew are the first two guys to believe and to start to journey with Jesus. And it says immediately they left John their teacher, and they went with Jesus and they wanted Jesus to be their teacher. This takes a lot of humility on John’s behalf. John just gave us part of his class. “Turning around”, Verse 38, “Jesus saw them following and he asked, ‘What do you want?’” The first question that Jesus asks in this book is he looks at these guys, he knows – he says, “Why are you following me? What do you want? What do you want?” It’s this great question that I think we all should ponder upon occasion.
If we’re going to follow Jesus, the question is “Well, why are we doing that? What are we looking for? What do we want?” And he looks at them, and he wants to codify their intention, their motive for following him and allowing him to be their teacher. And they said, “Rabbi”, which means teacher, “where are you staying?” Now, this is curious to me. They say, “Jesus, we want you to be our teacher.” He says, “What do you want?” And they say, “Friendship.” In that culture if you were to say, “Where are you staying?”, what you’re doing is you’re inviting yourself over for dinner. You would only do that with a friend. They looked at Jesus, and they said, “We would like to go to your house for dinner. That’s what we want.” And I love the fact that Jesus doesn’t say, “Well, here. Here’s everything you need to know. Here’s the whole Old Testament. Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna die on a cross, raise from the dead, I’m gonna work everything out. I’m gonna reconcile – ” he doesn’t tell ‘em anything. He just looks at ‘em and he says very simply “What do you want?” They say, “We want to come over to your house for dinner.” That’s how everything gets started.
Do you see how very little things cause very global change? Just miniscule things have sometimes enormous consequences if the spirit of God is in them. Here are two guys that are following John the Baptizer. Now they decide to go have dinner with Jesus. That changes their whole life. Years later John’s writing this book, reflecting back on it and saying, “Oh, my gosh. How did I get here? How did I get to be the head of the church? How did I get to out live all the other disciples? How did I get to see Paul and Peter murdered? How did I get to write books of the Bible? How did I get there? Yeah. That one night I had dinner with Jesus.” That’s it. That’s how it began. John didn’t even know as much as we know. Didn’t know a fraction of what we now know.
But why did John lead John the Baptizer, why did he go and become a student of Jesus? Because word of mouth, John the Baptizer, his friend and teacher, told him. John and Andrew they didn’t have a full picture of what was happening, but they trusted that the word of mouth information that they were getting from John the Baptizer, their teacher, was true. And so God works through this student-teacher relationship. The reason I had you draw those clusters and communities of relationship, how many of you at some point in your life had a teacher, a Sunday School teacher, an elementary school teacher, some sort of instructor that was in your life that really pressed you toward knowing Jesus? Anybody have a teacher that was really involved that way? I did in high school. I had a gentleman named Mr. Myers. He looked just like the judge from Hard Castle McCormick. And he was the toughest teacher, but he was a very godly man and a good Bible teacher. And he was very open about his faith, and he was very bold about his faith. And I knew he was a Christian. He kept a Bible on his desk.
And he was one of the first men that I met in my whole life who was a Christian, but also had a brilliant mind and an iron will and was – just seemed to be a very dignified, honorable, respectable man. And just because he was a Christian, my respect for those who follow Jesus was heightened. I respected Jesus in some ways because I saw the kind of the character of this man. John and Andrew have this same experience. They look at their teacher and they say, “Well, John says he’s God. John wouldn’t lie to us. We’re gonna trust the instruction of our teacher.” So the story continues. Jesus, Verse 39, “Come”, he said, “and you will see.” Jesus doesn’t tell them everything. He just invites them to come and to be with him and to have dinner with him. So they went and saw where he was staying and spent the day with him. It was about the tenth hour. That’s about 4:00 in the afternoon.
And so they spend the day with Jesus, and they have dinner with Jesus. They get to know him. And, you know, at this moment how big is Jesus’ ministry? Two guys. In retrospect we say, “Well, that’s a pretty humble beginning, all things considered.” Where does God start? Two guys. Andrew doesn’t become a major player – the primary place that we see him show up in the Gospel story is that he brings people to Jesus. Andrew is a gatherer who just brings people to Jesus on certain occasions. And John, this young guy who’s probably in his 20s. Two guys. You think about it. We sit here today because of those two guys and God’s grace and the Holy Spirit, but those two guys. That’s how it began. Andrew and John had dinner with Jesus, and here we sit 2,000 years later. I mean, it’s kind of amazing that this simple story then went global and became an epidemic and got all the way to us.
So Verse 40. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother was one of the two who had heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him “We have found the Messiah, that is the Christ, and he brought him to Jesus. So how does – I mean, you guys all heard about the guy named Peter. Peter starts off as a guy named Simon. What does Simon do for a living? He’s a fisherman. Who does he work with? John. Who’s his brother? Andrew. So how does Peter come to Jesus? Well, because one of his fishing buddies and his brother take him to meet Jesus, primarily his brother. But he’s relying upon the word of mouth testimony of his brother, Andrew, and John, his fishing partner. Peter’s like “What do you mean?” You can see the conversation. “What do you mean you found God?” Well, John thinks it’s God too. “Oh, John. You know, I work with that guy.”
How many of you through a work relationship heard about Jesus or someone has encouraged or strengthen your faith because of someone that you worked with? Some hands go up. How many of you it was through a family member, mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, aunt or uncle? You see how this works, these relational universes that we find ourselves in? God works through those. Here to get Simon it takes two guys, Andrew the brother and John the disciple who ultimately started out as a fishing buddy. And how are John and Andrew connected? They’re just acquaintances. They know each other through Peter. So an acquaintance relationship, an employee – a business relationship, and a family relationship all work together to get this guy named Simon who later becomes Peter. You say, “Well, how did it start for Peter? How did he end up being the head of the church and writing books of the Bible and dying upside down on a cross, murdered for his faith?” Well, it started out the day that his brother and his fishing partner took him to meet Jesus.
Jesus looked at him, Peter, Verse 42, and said, “You are Simon, son of John. You will be called Cephus, which is translated Peter.” It means rock. Let me ask you this. How many people do you have nicknames for? Who do you nickname? Friends. Someone has to be a good friend for you to give them a nickname. Jesus looks at Peter. He’s now friends with Andrew, he’s friends with John. Peter comes, Jesus looks at John – at Peter and sort of gives him this WWE nickname (Laughter). He says, “You will be the rock. That’s who you are (Laughter).” You love that? You know that someone’s a friend when they start to hassle you and give you a nickname. I don’t think he looked at Peter and thought “This guy looks like a mighty rock.” I think he looked at Peter, and I think he began mocking him. And eventually that became true. Peter actually did change and become a rock, but at first he was a bit of a coward who wasn’t a very impressive guy. So you say, “Well, how did it all get started for Peter?” Eh, brother, fishing partner brought him to Jesus who treated him like a buddy and gave him a nickname and made fun of him (Laughter). Peter.
So the story continues. The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. In finding Phillip, he said to him “Follow me.” Now, this was very unusual. Teachers would not pick their students. Students would instead pick their teachers. But he looks at Phillip and just says, “You, come and follow me.” How many of you had that kind of experience? It wasn’t a family member, a friend, a coworker, an acquaintance, God just showed up and told you who he was and you believed it? I had one of those. I had people that I knew who were Christians, but when I first understood the Gospel, I was sitting in my room reading Romans 1:6, and it says, “And you are called among those to belong to Jesus Christ.” And I thought “Well, that’s me.” God just called me to belong to Jesus. So now I do. No one was there. No one prayed with me. No one was telling me anything. I just read it, and God called me. Some of you have that experience. God just shows up and says, “You belong to me now.” Paul had that same experience.
The issue is a lot of us come to Jesus in just all kind of circuitous ways. It doesn’t matter as long as we get to Jesus. So he just calls Phillip and he says, “Follow me.” Again, he doesn’t tell Phillip everything there is to know. Just invites him to come and be with him, this issue of friendship and community. Phillip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. So what do they have in common? How are they connected relationally? They grew up in the same town. Phillip looks and he says, “Oh, I know you and I know you. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I’ll go along. What the heck.” How many of you are not from Seattle, you’re not born here, you’re not native? No one is native. Look at that. And some of you come from really little towns. And as you’re walking around in the city and you meet someone that’s from your same area, what do you do? All of a sudden you feel like you got a friendship. “Oh, I know your brother. He shot my brother. Nice to meet you. Yeah.” Right? And all of a sudden you have a friendship with people just because of geography and proximity.
Some people are connected because of friendship, business. Some people are connected because of acquaintance relationship. Other people are connected because they’re from the same hometown. These guys are from the same hometown. All right? I like to tell this story. I’m from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Is anyone from there? Nobody’s from there. You – there’s probably someone. You just won’t admit that publicly. You just won’t say that out in the open ‘cause you’re ashamed of that. I understand that. I understand that fully. You see, when I meet someone from Grand Forks, North Dakota, I say, “Oh, do you know any of these people or these people? These are my relatives. And where did you go to school?” And I left there when I was a little kid, so I don’t remember much about it. And my grandma’s still there, and my aunts and uncles are still there. And I like to see and hear if somebody knows my family. That’s Phillip’s relationship with these guys.
Jesus says, “Come on. Hang out with us.” He says, “Oh, I know you, and I know you. I went to high school with you. Yeah. What the heck? I’ll go out with you guys.” How does Phillip’s life turn? One day he meets some old acquaintances from the old hometown and goes out to hang out with Jesus Christ, the incarnate word of God. That’s a different kind of day. (Laughter). So Verse 44. Phillip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Beseda, and Phillip found Nathaniel. Phillip goes and gets one of his buddies. See where I was talking about connectors, people that know lots of different people and grab them and bring them in? Phillip goes and gets his buddy Nathaniel. And Phillip seems to be kind of the information specialist. And Phillip starts of with a little more information. He’s a theologian. He says, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law and about whom the prophets wrote, “Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Nazareth – oh, excuse me – the son of Joseph. ‘Cause, you know, we’ve been studying the Old Testament wondering who this guy’s gonna be, who’s gonna forgive us, who’s gonna fix us, who’s gonna – hey, we found him. I found him.”
Nathaniel’s question is “Nazareth? No. God wouldn’t come from Nazareth. Everyone there marries their first cousin (Laughter), you know. They all sit around and watch Jerry Springer and think wrestling is real. (Laughter) These are people that think that, you know, auto racing is a sport. (Laughter) “Nazareth?” ‘Cause you all know there’s certain places, certain towns that you just go “Oh, you’re from there. Well, it’s a good thing you moved”, you know (Laughter).
Nathaniel looks and says, “Nazareth? Can anything good come from Nazareth? I mean, I’ve seen those guys. They don’t have all their teeth, and it doesn’t bother them (Laughter), you know. They just – are you sure Nazareth? God came from Nazareth? I don’t think God could come from Nazareth.” That’s what he says in Verse 46. “Nazareth? Can anything good come from there?”, Nathaniel asked. A little town, 1,500, maybe 2,000 people, back woods. I told you Jesus spoke with a thick accent. “Blessed are you all if you’re poor in your spirit.” You know, it’s a hick town. What in the world. Phillip’s response is not an enormous argument. He says, “Come and see. Come and check it out. Come and meet Jesus. I’m not gonna argue with ya. I know it sounds crazy. Come and get to know this guy.”
So when Jesus saw Nathaniel approaching, he said of him “Here is a true Israelite in whom there is nothing false.” Nathaniel’s coming, Jesus looks at him and says, “Nathaniel, nice to meet ya. I created ya. How you doing?” Then Nathaniel declared “Rabbi – ” oh, excuse – “How do you know me?” Verse 48, Nathaniel asked, “Well we never met. How do you know who I am?” Jesus answered “I saw you where you were still sitting under the fig tree before Phillip called you. I know you. You’re that guy that’s been sitting under the tree today reading the Bible.” That’s usually what people would do in the heat of the day. If you were a student of the scriptures, you would sit under a fig tree ‘cause it would be a place to get shade in the heat of the day. The ancient rabbis actually used it for a euphemism for studying the Bible? “Where is he?” “Oh, he’s out sitting under the fig tree.” What’s that mean? He’s out there reading the scriptures.
So Nathaniel apparently is a guy who loves God and is trying to learn about God and is studying the Bible. And Jesus says, “I saw you were out there today reading the Bible. I know what you were up to.” “Really? How did you know that?” Verse 49. And then Nathaniel declared, “Rabbi, you are the son of God. You are the king of Israel. You’re God. We’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been reading the Bible trying to figure out who this would be. Nice to meet you.” And I wonder what Nathaniel was studying that day. I’ll give ya – this is my speculation. This isn’t – this is just my idea. I think if he was sitting under the fig tree reading the Bible, I wonder if that day he wasn’t reading the story about Jacob’s Ladder, the story in the Old Testament, I’ve got the reference in your notes, where Jacob whose name was later changed to what? Israel. Israel sitting there, goes to bed, has a dream that there is a ladder between heaven and earth, and the angels are ascending and descending. And it’s on this ladder that God comes down to be with his people. And that’s how we have access to God is through this ladder. And he comes to and he says, “Oh, my goodness. God has visited me here. God has come down to be with me. This is unbelievable.”
My speculation is I wonder if Nathaniel – as he was sitting under the fig tree that day, I wonder if he was reading that story and Jesus, being God, knew that. And so Jesus even pulls the story out of the Bible maybe Nathaniel was studying that day and he references it. Jesus said, Verse 50, “You believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that.” He then added “I tell you the truth.” And this is a refrain you’re see throughout John’s Gospel. It’s something that Jesus says quite frequently. He says, “I tell ya the truth. I tell ya the truth. I tell ya the truth.” Jesus continually reiterates the fact that he is in no way a liar. “I tell you the truth. You shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man.”
That’s one of Jesus’ favorite self-designations and titles for himself is the son of man. It’s imagery that comes out of Daniel about God becoming a man. He says, “You know what? You’ll see greater things than me just knowing what you’re doing during the day and knowing what part of the scripture you’re reading from a distance. You will actually experience what Jacob Israel experienced. You will experience God coming down to be with you. God coming down to this earth to dwell among his people. And the ladder that he comes down upon”, Jesus is referencing, “is me.” Jesus says, “I am the way that God comes down to people.” That is because some religions will teach you that people can become gods. Christianity will never teach you that, but it does teach that you God did become a man, which is different entirely.
That God came down here to be with us, that God came down to walk the dust of the earth and become one of us. And the scriptures use this language that Jesus is our mediator, that he stands between us and God the Father, that he stands between heaven and the kingdom of God, that the mediatorship between those two worlds is Jesus. He is the means by which God comes down to be with us and to reveal himself and to come to us. And so the fulfillment of Jacob’s Ladder is Jesus ultimately. He says, “You’ll see greater things that what I’ve shown. You’ll see this. You’ll see that I’m God come down to be with my people.
And so it’s very interesting. It’s very interesting to me that here’s how our great world religion, here’s how our story came to be. A freak comes out of the woods eating bugs and sugar (Laughter), yelling at people, saying that his cousin is God. Right? His cousin. I mean, you know small towns. Sometimes people get, you know – get a little confused. It’s like John’s from a radiation hot zone or something. All of a sudden he wakes up one day, realizes that God is his cousin. He tells everybody to repent, so then John gets well connected, gets to know all these kinda people who come to him for baptism. So then Jesus starts a ministry with two guys. Not even his own two guys. He’s got to borrow two of John’s. John the beloved and Andrew. And they get Phillip and Nathaniel and a guy named Simon who later becomes Peter who later becomes very important, but just starts off as a simple guy who was invited out for dinner with the boys.
A lot of these guys’ whole lives changed just by having dinner with Jesus. It’s amazing. Little things sometimes cause enormous change. And I love the fact that in seeing this, the world becomes so small. If we traced it back, each one of us that is here tonight we are hearing the story of Jesus because somebody told somebody told somebody told – and if we went all the way back, we would go all the way back to John the Baptist. That’s where we would go. Somehow we’re relationally connected all the way back to the very beginning of the story. And it’s amazing to me because even in our modern world, you start to think about it and you say, “Well, how big is the world, and how are we gonna tell all these people?” The reason I started out with information theory, I think in Christianity the information that we have is the story about Jesus, this true story called the Gospel, this good news that God has come down to be with us, to die for our sins and reconcile us to himself and reconcile us to each other.”
The issue is well, how does that story go forward? Do you ever look at the world and say, “How in the world are we gonna tell everybody about Jesus?” I mean, it seems absolutely overwhelming. Billions of people. We’re in the least churched city in the United States of America. We’re in a city that isn’t even close to being tipped. The majority of people here don’t understand Jesus, don’t have any clue about him. The things they do know are probably false, misperceptions that they have somehow received. The question is “Well, how are we gonna tell them? How are they gonna come to know?” And I think that the method that Jesus implemented is amazing. He started with a few people in friendship having dinner, and from there it just keeps going. It’s like a virus that just continues to expand and eventually gets airborne and becomes epidemic. And there is this interesting theory. There was a psychologist in the 1960s. He says that the world is held together by six degrees of relationship. Have you guys ever heard the concept of six degrees of separation? What that means is that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else on the planet through six relationships. Do you believe that?
We tend to view the world as this big, overwhelming thing. We don’t even know where to begin. You are six people away from everybody. Everybody. Which means a little movement in your life impinges upon someone else and all of a sudden sets off this chain reaction through the totality of our world. Do you believe that? I’ll give you an example. Have you guys heard of Paul Revere? We got a country largely because of this guy. I don’t know if he was anticipating getting a nation out of the deal. It’s a pretty ambitious goal (Laughter). It comes time for a battle, they send out a bunch of guys on horses to go out and tell everybody that the British are coming. Paul Revere’s the one who got everybody together and formed a militia. Why? How come his ride we hear about and we don’t hear about anyone else’s ride? In this book “The Tipping Point” it says because there were seven different organizations that were connected and contained all the guys that wanted revolution, and he was involved in five of them. Paul Revere was a connector. And so when he went into towns, he didn’t tell everybody. He knew the most important guy in the town who knew everybody and he would tell that guy and that guy would tell everybody and they would tell everybody else. That’s how information gets spread.
I’ll give you guys a weird story. Years ago I remember praying for Fidel Castro. I have no idea why. I usually don’t pray for communist dictators (Laughter) just because I don’t usually think about their conversion. I should probably pray for them more. But I thought “Wouldn’t it be cool if Fidel Castro just got up and said, ‘My bad, Jesus rose from the dead’”? Wouldn’t that be great (Laughter)? I mean, that would make the news. That would be phenomenal. So I started praying, and I thought, you know, “But there’ll never be an opportunity to get the Gospel to Fidel Castro. I mean, a closed communist nation, embargo. Americans can’t even go there.” And then I meet a buddy of mine, he’s a church planter, and he runs a cigar bar on Nassau, a little island in the Bahamas. Now, if you’re gonna be connected, if you want to meet a lot of very important connected people, run a cigar bar on a small island that launders money. You’ll meet all kinds of amazing people.
So he would sit in this cigar bar. And he was a pastor, which is a beautiful part of the story (Laughter). He was a pastor who would sit in his cigar bar all day, and celebrities and movie stars and wealthy people would come down to Nassau for vacation, and he would sit there and talk to them about Jesus. So one day he’s sitting there at his cigar bar, and he talks to these people, and he tells them about Jesus. And they say, “Wow! You know, that’s amazing. We got some friends of ours that are getting married. Maybe you could marry them and kinda be their pastor.” They introduce him to this young couple. And he starts to get to know them and tells them about Jesus and shares the good news of Jesus with them. And they say, “Well, could you be our pastor? Could you do our wedding?” He says, “Oh, that’d be great.”
So he shows up to do the wedding. It’s on this beautiful terrace overlooking the water, caviar stacked as tall as he is, lots and lots of food, lots of money, lots of wealth. It’s a Mafia wedding. These are – some Mafia boss’s kid is getting married to some other Mafia boss’s kid. Now he’s a little intimidated. I mean, people are driving up in new cars, and that’s the wedding present. “Here you go.” Like “Oh, man.” So he’s a little intimidated. He does the wedding. He gets done with the whole wedding, and the family head of the Mafia comes up to him and says, “You did a very good job. I appreciate you taking care of my children. And for you I’ll do any favor you want me to. What do you want me to do?” And he says, “Do you know Fidel Castro (Laughter)?” ‘Cause my buddy has wanted to go plant a church for a long time over in Cuba. “Yeah, I know Fidel. Would you like to meet Fidel?” “Yeah, I’d really like to meet Fidel ‘cause I’d like to go plant churches in Cuba.” “You’re gonna need some money for that.” “Yeah, we’re gonna need some money for that.” “Okay. I think I can help (Laughter).” True story.
So my buddy’s like “Sweet. If I plant a church in Havana, Cuba with Fidel Castro’s permission and the Mafia money through the cigar bar, this is tremendous. (Laughter). This is unbelievable.” So my buddy, who’s a great guy, says, “Yeah, if you could hook me up and get me to Cuba, that will be great.” “I’ll hook you up.” So what happens is he gets flown into Cuba, gets brought in with the Mafia guys to a steak dinner, and sitting a few tables away is Fidel Castro. He gets permission to plant churches in Cuba. So now they’re working on getting projects going in Havana. You say, “Well, how little is the world? ‘Cause right now I am one relationship away from Fidel Castro. Not that I’ll necessarily make it that far (Laughter).” But you go “How small is the world?” What that means is that anyone you want to know, there is you and this person. If there’s only six degrees of separation, you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows that person. You’re not that far. You’re not that far at all.
That the entire city of Seattle is connected to the relationships that just sit in this room tonight. Everyone in the city of Seattle could hear the good news about Jesus just from you. Not because you’re gonna tell ‘em all. Because you know people and they know people and friends and acquaintances and family and clusters and communities, and tribes of people coexist. And you know someone who knows someone, and all of a sudden the opportunity is, is that those relationships get used so that the story of Jesus goes on. Do you believe that? You ever wonder “How in the world are we gonna make a difference in the least churched city in the United States of America with people who are the least churched generation in the United States of America in the least churched city in the United States of America? How are we gonna fill all these seats? How we gonna get all this done?” Media won’t do it. Marketing, advertising won’t do it. Why? People get 254 messages a day. What is gonna make ours that unique? Nothing.
Word of mouth though, friends investing in friends, leveraging acquaintances, developing other friendships, and doing it not just the way we’ve been doing it. Some of you when you hear the word Evangelism, you think “Mean people who yell at other people” because our strategy of Evangelism has been a three-pronged attack. Take all the information and present it. Call people to a decision right now. “Are you in or out?” And if you decide appropriately, then we let you into the church and you get to be friends with us. As a guy who did not grow up going to church, I hated that. People would come up and say, “Are you a Christian?” “I don’t know. I don’t – I’m not even sure what you mean by that.” “Well, Jesus is God and died for your sins and rose from the dead. Right now do you want to believe that or not?” “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve got questions. Can we dialogue? Is this true? I mean, what – I mean, I’m not there yet.” “Well, until you do, you’re out.” Right? You see how rude that is.
First Corinthians tells us that love is not rude. That’s pretty rude. Imagine if I did this to you. If you were single, how about if we did this as your marital strategy, I came and knocked on your door. You open it up, and I said, “Hi. How are you doing today? I’d like you to get married. I’ve got a woman sitting out in the car. Beautiful. You’ll love her (Laughter). She’ll love you. You’ll have a phenomenal marriage. This will go fantastic. You want me to go get her? You want to get married? Right now. We could just do it right here (Laughter).” You’d be like “Really? Well, I’m not sure. I don’t really think I want to get married right now to a woman I never met. Call me crazy, but we haven’t even been out on a date.” “Look. She’s got a loaded revolver. And either you marry her right now or she’s gonna get angry, blow your head off and send you to hell. Do you want to marry her or not (Laughter)?” “Well, I mean, that’s quite a sales pitch, but no, I don’t want to be married to a well-armed sociopath that I’ve never met.”
And sometimes Evangelism in our world feels like that. You knock on the door. “You want to get married to Jesus?” “Well, who is he?” “Well, he’s God.” “Well, I don’t know.” “You’re gonna go to hell (Laughter).” “Well, okay, but can I go on a date?” “He doesn’t have time for that (Laughter).” And so people look at this and they – you know, you wonder why there’s resistance to the Gospel. It scares me. One of the largest denominations in the United States of America has decided that next year they’re coming to Seattle. That scares me. “No, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Send your money, but not your people. Don’t do that.” And their plan is to go door to door and call people to a decision. Okay? And I’m just like “Man.” Now, God may use that, right? God uses crazy people doing crazy things. I’m evidence of that. But you go “Man, you don’t understand it. That works in places where people have already heard about Jesus and they need to just get with the program. Here people don’t even know who Jesus is. They don’t know anything. Or what they do know is completely misunderstood. So you can’t just start off yelling at people, wanting them to decide on something they don’t even know about.” How did Jesus do it? Where did Jesus begin? “Come in, see. Come on over for dinner. Let’s develop a friendship. Let’s get to know each other.”
Phillip learned that. When Phillip went to get Nathaniel, what did he say to Nathaniel? “Come and see.” He had already learned that from Jesus. Nathaniel’s like “Oh, Nazareth? Old – what do you mean?” Phillip’s like “Look. We’re not gonna argue about all the details. Just let’s go hang out and get to know the guy. Let’s just check him out. Let’s just – let’s start easy. Let’s just be friends and begin with friendship.” Jesus begins with friendship and participates in these peoples’ lives and loves them before they ever fully understand what he’s talking about. Let me ask you this: Simon, Peter when does he become a Christian? We don’t know. Does he? Well, yes. But along the way you look at his life, and he seems to really love Jesus and get the picture, and then he seems to completely misunderstand. He says things like “You are the Christ. You are God.” The next thing he says is “Ah, you can’t do that.” He’s telling Jesus what to do. “Well, now, Peter, what do you mean? You can’t say, ‘You are God, and I’m gonna tell ya what to do.’ That seems like a disconnect.”
Later on Peter is following Jesus through his trials, and a little girl comes up to him and says, “Hey, do you know Jesus?” And what does Peter say? “I never met him. I don’t know who he is.” Peter denies Christ after three years with him. The question is when does Peter believe? I think it’s amazing that Jesus brings these normal guys into friendship with them. He lives with then. He has dinner with them. He gets to know them. He invests in them. He wades with them through their unbelief, through their struggle, through their flip-flopping, through all of this. And through his love and his participation in their life and demonstration and teaching and showing of who he is, at some point for each of ‘em it clicks. They get it. John, Andrew, Phillip, Peter. They get it. These guys – it all of a sudden clicks for ‘em, primarily after the resurrection, obviously as they see Jesus risen from the dead, forgiving of sin.
But my encouragement to you guys would be this: I desperately want to see this city change. I just do. I love this city. I’ve grown up here. But spiritually it’s a dark, pathetic place. That if we believe it, statistically, less than ten percent of people in this city went to church today. Less than maybe five percent of people under the age of 35 went to church today. And out of those, how many of those are churches that are actually teaching scripture and telling the truth? I mean, it’s very, very minimal. There are a few, and I’m not saying we’re the only Christian church. There are some good churches, but it’s a pretty sad, dark place. And it hasn’t tipped yet. The majority of people don’t understand. And I’m saying that through this arrogant colonial pushing upon people, they may never understand.
I think the way Jesus did it makes perfect sense. “Come and see. Come to Bible study. Come to church. Come over to my house for dinner. Let’s just talk. Let’s hang out. Here’s a book to read. Let’s just visit.” Friendships. You guys need to look at those clusters that you wrote down. You are a connector for God. He has called you to bring those worlds together in Christ. You are a maven. You have information that those people do not know. You know about Jesus. And lastly, you are an Evangelist. It is your responsibility and your invitation to find a way to tell each of those clusters about Jesus in such a way that those little tribes get to understand who he is and how much he loves them and how he died to forgive their sin as a substitute in their place, and how he was God come down to us. That we will never be gods, and we will never escalate up to be one with God, but that instead God comes down and humbly unites himself with us and dies for our sin and rises out of deep affection and love and goes on process and journey with us. And his kindness leads us to change and to repentance. And it’s through the process of coming and seeing and living and knowing that the Gospel’s true. That’s how people will come to believe.
And so all of us here tonight are in one category of people. Somehow relationally from John the Baptizer to John and Andrew to Phillip and to Nathaniel and to Simon, Peter the story has worked its way relationally through friends, acquaintances and family members to you and me. And I can’t imagine that at any point the guys sat down around the dinner table with Jesus and said, “You know, one day late on a Sunday night this is gonna make a big difference in Seattle, Washington a few thousand years from now.” But it does. But it does. And so simple guys come to believe that story penetrates their relationships, and here we sit. And so for some of you who are here tonight, my invitation would be for you to come and see. If you do not know Christ, if you do not believe the story, if your life hasn’t been transformed by God, come and see. Thanks for coming to church. Come to a Bible study. Call the office. I’ll buy ya lunch. Get to know some people. Ask ‘em how God has come into their life, what God has done in – see the truth of what God does in human history. Come and see. Come and check it out.
And I would ask each of you to spend some time tonight even in prayer and intercession asking for those relationship communities and clusters that you’re connected to, to see if God wouldn’t, per chance, use you to invite those people to come and see as well. And so what we’ll do now is we’ll respond. All right? We’ll respond to Jesus being alive and present and active in our own midst, calling us to himself and inviting us to be friends. And we’ll do that with communion. And I want you to look at communion tonight as an act of friendship. You sit down and have a bite to eat with people that you love. Jesus every week invites us to communion because he loves us. It’s this picture of family, that Jesus had a Last Supper with his disciples, and that at the end of the age when he comes back, Revelations says that we’ll all sit down and have a bite to eat with him again, all his friends from all the nations of the earth.
And so when you take that tonight, you’ll remember that the bread shows Jesus’ body broken for us, and the wine and the juice symbolize and show and demonstrate his blood shed for us. That it’s all about Jesus and that he is inviting us to come and to see him and to come and to be with him and to come and to invite others to come as well. And so we’ll respond now through financial giving, so that the story can continue to go out. We’ll respond through singing and praying for those people, family, friends and acquaintances that we need to be seeking, that they would come and see Jesus. And then taking communion to recognize the fact that he invites us into friends.
And so, God, we come tonight just sort of amazed at the fact that our sitting here a few thousand years later is inextricably tied to a guy named Andrew and a fisherman named John and a prophet who looked like a freak named John the Baptizer. And that somehow that story has gone from community to relational community, from friends and family and acquaintances to come all the way to Seattle, Washington 2,000 years later to the people that sit in this room. God, it’s just mind boggling that you are sovereign, that you see everything. And, God, I pray that we would just invite others to come and see. And, God, we pray for our city tonight, that maybe, God, just through the life of one person sitting here who brings someone else who brings someone else that a chain reaction is set off and the entire city is changed. God, thank you that you work in simple, small, profound ways to cause large change and shift. Thank you, God, that it’s not because of our marketing strategy or our finances or our income or our skill that things get done, but it’s by your spirit and by your grace and through your people, your simple people doing simple things like having people they love over to dinner and just sharing the good news.
So, God, we love you. We come tonight to celebrate and to come to communion, recognizing that Jesus is, indeed, a friend who has invited us all to come into see him. Amen.
