What’s Wrong With Jesus
January 27, 2018 Luke 14:25-35 John 6:60-66
If you were to ask some people what’s wrong with Jesus, you might get responses such as 1) He’s too narrow-minded, 2) He can’t be the Son of God), 3) He expects too much of people, 4) He offends people, and 5) He’s no longer relevant for society. People felt the same way about him in the first century.
If you ever decide to get on Facebook, one of the first things Facebook wants you to do is to add more friends. They want you to have as many friends as you can. They will even suggest people who went to high school, college, church, with you or worked with you whom you might want to send a request to become their friend. They will notify you, that people have requested to become your friends, and all you have to do is to accept their request and you become their friend or one of their followers. They can put up things on their face-book page and you will see them right there on your page, without having to look them up.
After a while though, you will notice that some people are not the people you want as your friend. They put up videos, pictures, and stories that are very distasteful. Some are filled with profanity. Some are filled with pornography. Some are filled with slander and gossip about other people. All of this stuff gets attached to your face-book page, so that if someone is looking at your page, to hire you and they see all this stuff, they may change their mind about you. They assume you are approving and enjoying what’s on your page.
.
Facebook gives you a couple of options to deal with this problem. You can 1) hide the post. 2) Snooze the Person for 30 Days to give you a break, or 3) Unfollow the person, but remain friends. (they don’t know you have un-followed them.) You can also choose to block a person which keeps them from being able to contact you about anything. You can unfriend them which removes you from their lists of friends. This idea of getting friends, un-following them, un-friending them, and then blocking them can actually be found in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John.
Jesus was at the far side of the Sea of Galilee. People were bringing sick people to him left and right. People were being healed and the Scriptures tell us a great crowd of people followed him because of all the miracles that Jesus was doing. People were sending Jesus friends requests and becoming friends and followers of Jesus on their own version of Facebook. Word had gotten out so fast, an even greater crowd came to Jesus up on a mountainside after he left the place of doing miralces.
So Jesus does another miracle. He takes five loaves of bread and two fish and feed 5000 men and probably another 10,000 women and children. This was a buffet meal where you could eat all that you wanted to eat. The food was so good, so abundant and so free, that the people wanted to make Jesus, King right there on the spot. Jesus withdrew again up the mountain to slip away from them.
Later that evening, the disciples head across the Sea of Galilee to get to Capernaum. They run into a midnight storm that threatens to sink the boat. Jesus ends up walking on the water and calming the raging sea. Once he got in the boat, the boat went so fast it immediately reached the shore where they were headed. The word had spread about the bread, so a new group of people landed where Jesus had fed the 5,000 men, but when they saw Jesus had left, they headed for Capernaum. They were shocked to find Jesus was there because they knew he had not gotten in the one boat that had been at the feeding of the crowd.
Jesus was at the top of his game in the eyes of the people. If it were the NBA All Star Game, Jesus would have been named Captain of the Team and MVP after it was all over. Nobody was more popular in the country than was Jesus.
In less than two years, he has a congregation of some 20,000 people. If the goal of the church is to get as many people in the doors as possible, then Jesus was on his way. But Jesus did not come to get as many people on his friend’s lists as he could. He didn’t come to see how many likes and thumbs ups that he could get. He wasn’t even keeping attendance records. Jesus came to get people to follow after Him so that He could lead them to God.
As a church, we want to grow in numbers. We want to see more and more people added. We want to do those things that are going to attract people to our church. But what if God’s will and our desires are not the same. What if God is calling us to a Gideon moment, in which God has decided, we have too many people for God to do a fresh work in our midst.
You see Gideon was a leader with an army of 32000 men going up against an army of 135,000 men. God told Gideon he had too many men for God to be with them. The army would claim credit for the victory. Let anybody go home who are scared. 22,000 men left and un-followed Gideon. 10,000 were left, and God said you still have too many. This time I will separate them from you. God cut the group down and Gideon sent home 9,700 men with only 300 men left. It was now 300 vs 135,000? How many of us does God actually need to bring about a revival? How small do we need to get as a church in order for us to trust God for our future.
Whereas we as leaders seek church “enlargement”, Jesus had a plan for church “ensmallment.” That huge congregation that Jesus had at the beginning of chapter 6, is going to grow into a very small group of disciples willing to follow Jesus in the face of the cost by the end of chapter 6.
Instead of Jesus opening the service with I’m glad that you all came all the way that you did to hear me today , he said, “ Look, I know the real reason you showed up for service to today was not to ask, “what do the miracles you did mean?” You showed up because you ate and got full and now you want so more free food. Stop coming to me, just to grab what you want to satisfy a desire. Come to me and discover what God really wants to do in your life for eternal purposes.
Why did we come to church today? Do we really want Jesus to point out something in our lives that should be changed for God’s purpose to be at work in our lives. Could we be honest and say, “God I came to church today because___________.”
The people asked Jesus, “Look, if you think we are here for the wrong reasons, then tell us what me must do to the work God requires.” Now we are going to find out what’s wrong with Jesus from the responses he give in John chapter 6.
Jesus tells them, the first thing you must do is to believe in the one God has sent. This is a stumbling block. If you believe God has sent Jesus, then you have to believe that what Jesus says is true. If Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me, he either is or is not. That means that all other religions that reject Jesus as the Son of God, may make you a better person, but they will not put you in a right standing with God.
You have a choice of basically 6 Beliefs. Atheism—There Is No God., Pantheism—Everything Together Is God, Deism-There Is A God But He left and has nothing to do with us., Polytheism-There are many Gods., Monotheism- There Is One God. Here O Israel, the Lord Your God Is One God. You have a choice between grace and works. Only one says you sins are forgiven because they have already been paid for by Jesus. Yet our society has afraid of being called intolerant because we claim to have the truth about God. We are suppose to say all religions are equal, when the very nature of them teach that can’t be right. So what do we do, we ask for less posting of Jesus’ post on our facebook page. We still want to see his posts, just fewer of them.
Jesus tells them, the second thing you must do is stop demanding a sign. Stop demanding that God do what you insist on God doing before you will believe. The people were saying, “Look Moses gave us bread from heaven, if you want us to believe in you, keep on giving us some free bread. If you can give in to our desires, then we will believe that you are who you say you are.” What’s your demand that God must do before you will consider Jesus----A Healing, Money, A Boyfriend, A New Job
God is God. God is not obligated to prove himself to us. God says that he has left enough proof in creation for everybody to know that there is a God. Science has shown through the DNA found in every cell, that the idea that there was single cell organism that just randomly sprung to life on its own is not a scientific fact. The laws of nature are so dependable nobody wakes up thinking the moon and earth are going to crash into the sun.
The mere complexity of your body shows design and purpose of a creator. Yet our society has us afraid to challenge some of the theories of evolution, because we do not want to seem unintelligent. Yet none of them of yet have explained the simple reality, if we came from monkeys or apes, why are their still monkeys and apes with no monkey-people or ape-people still alive. So what do we do, we suspend postings from Jesus for 30 days. We still want some contact, but we want a 30 day break from Jesus. We just drop out of the church and fill that time with other things.
Jesus tells the, the third thing you must do, is stop thinking you know everything there is to know about me. Jesus told them, “I have come down from heaven.” The people were saying, “You have got to be kidding. We know your mother and your father. We know the house where you grew up. How on earth can you say you came down from heaven?” What’s wrong with you? Have you lost your mind. Jesus tells them, “you can’t even come to me to follow me, unless My Father draws you. If my Father draws you, then I will raise you up. You want to talk about bread. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. They have no idea that Jesus is talking about his fleshly body being ripped open through his death on the cross. It is the death of his flesh that is bringing in salvation.
They had a problem with this, but Jesus goes even further and starts talking about the need to drink his blood to have eternal life. He goes back to saying, unless you drink my blood and eat my flesh, you cannot have eternal life. They have no idea of Jesus’ side being punctured open on the cross by a Roman spear causing a spilling of his blood down from his body that would wash away the sins of the world.
At this point, many of them knew what was wrong with Jesus. They knew he had lost his mind. They said, “This is a hard teaching, who can accept it.” They knew they were not willing to believe in Jesus or to follow him any further. They officially unfriended him on their facebook page so that they would not get any more posts from him and they blocked him from sending any more friends requests. They had been offended by Jesus for the last time. The Scriptures state, “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.”
They quit following Jesus because he became an embarrassment to them. His teachings offended them and they knew they would offend others. You cannot be a Christian today without offending somebody you come into contact with. The truth of the Gospel is offensive. If you say, that something is sin, somebody is going to be offended. We can see that this passage “ Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
We recently celebrated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and we want to talk about his speaking about justice, while neglecting his call for righteousness. You can’t have one without the other. They put killing centers in our neighborhoods and call them Women’s Health Clinics. They send our kids to jail for selling drugs in our communities, and then turn around and sell those same drugs as medical marijuana and then it will become recreational marijuana, but only rich people can sell them in our communities because you need expensive licenses to do so. But now it’s a good thing for us because they get tax money and profit off of us.
They call it moral hyprocrisy that the Vice President’s wife Karen’s Pence works at Christian school with Christian Beliefs because it will not cave in to the demands of the LGBTQ movement. She must be a bigot. That makes all of us bigots because we are a part of a church that believes the bible is our authority for living our lives. We will not unfriend the Bible simply for people to live whatever sexual lifestyle they desire. I can accept you as an equal person without endorsing your sexual lifestyle in the same way I can accept you as an equal without endorsing your business practices.
God calls us to respect each other and treat each other with dignity, yet we take great proud in slandering and destroying each other with our words and actions. We have become masters of calling evil good and good evil.
The One who speaks for righteousness today finds themselves in the role of Jeremiah when the people told him “Do not prophesy in the name of the LORD or you will die by our hands”— At the moment we won’t die, but we will get fired, get kicked out, or get labeled racist bigots and idiots.
What’s wrong with Jesus, is that Jesus is out of step with the world we are living in. I think I may have led some of you astray in presenting the gospel as a one time decision you make. Jesus seem to have told people, there is a terrible cost you will pay if you choose to follow me. Sit down first and count the cost. Be honest about your willingness to pay. Too many want to follow Jesus at a discounted price.
I think we have too many people relying on the sinner’s prayer as proof of their salvation rather than on their willingness to follow Jesus even when it means isolation, loss, and pain. Jesus knows that many of us will want to stop following Him. We will want to get him off our page, because we do not want to be too closely identified with his message. We think that we can click a button and un-follow him without him knowing that we are no longer following him.
It doesn’t quite work that way. Jesus always knows where our hearts are. It is our own pride that tells us, the word of God can be ignored in this particular section because it goes against what I think is right. What we think has never once changed what was true. We always will be in a battle for who is going to be Lord of our lives. Every time we put ourselves on the throne, we need to ask “What’s wrong with Jesus.”
When the multitudes turned away from Jesus and started leaving before the service was even over, Jesus didn’t offer a compromise to get them to come back and stay. From a world’s viewpoint, Jesus had just failed miserably as a pastor. This was worse than a church split. There was no more congregation. He’s gone from 10,000 to 12 in attendance in one message. He then looked at Peter and the other 11 and asked, “You too do not want to leave do you?”
I can guarantee you, that Jesus is going to force you to take a stand and you are going to want to leave Him. It may be on the extreme of you feeling you can’t take another moment of your circumstances, or it may be because you don’t want to lose something you enjoy, most likely it will somewhere in between. You will wonder, “What’s wrong with Jesus?” Why is he putting me in this place of having to make a decision? That’s the moment you will discover if you are actually following Jesus, or just there because of something you hope to get.
Peter did ask the million dollar question, He said, “Lord if we leave you, where are we suppose to go?” If you decide to un-follow Jesus, shouldn’t you have an eternal plan for where you are headed next. Unfollowing Jesus, doesn’t change who Jesus is. You just stop seeing his messages. Where are you today in your willingness to follow.
