Good morning. If you have your Bibles, please open up to John 8:21. As you all know, we have been going through the book of John, and we are almost halfway through it. We have quite a ways to go. You may recall, if you were here last week, we talked about how Jesus was being challenged once more by the Pharisees, the ruling religious elite. And Jesus being Jesus is always up for a challenge. Last week, we saw how he stood up in the middle of the temple in the middle of the festivities and said “I am the light of the world. If anyone follows me, he will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Of course, they challenged him on this. They challenged him, though, on a technicality. In their law, it required two witnesses. They told Jesus you can’t be your own witness. He said I know where I have come from and I know where I am going. You on the other hand have no idea where I have come from or where I am going. He goes on to say, if you need a witness, I am my own witness. But if you need another witness, I am going to give you my father as one who testifies on my behalf. By the way, you don’t know him because if you knew me, you would know him. Today, as we continue on in the story, they are once again having this discussion with Jesus. Jesus to this point is not telling them that he is the light of the world. He is telling them that unless they begin to believe that he is the one that he claims to be, they will die in their sins. Once again, we are going to be reading from John 8:21, the New International Version. We will be reading down to verse 30. (Scripture read here.)
Jesus is confronting the Pharisees again. There is a lot of information in these nine verses. We can’t go through all of them completely. Really, Jesus sums them up in the very first passage there in John 8:21. He says “I am going away and you will look for me.” Then he goes on to say “and you will die in your sins. Where I go you cannot come.” At this point, once again, the Pharisees are getting a little confused. They begin to grumble and mumble among themselves and say what is he going to do. Is he going to kill himself? Is that why he is saying where I go you cannot come. Jesus obviously picking up on this decides to unpack this whole passage a little bit more. He decides to let them know that it has to do really with their origins; where they are coming from and where he comes from. He goes on to say “You are from below. I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world.” When we think about this idea of world and from above and below and that sort of thing, we often think of earth and heaven. That is one way to look at it because when they refer to the word world the underlying Greek is actually cosmos. It has the idea of the physical realm. Really he is talking about the spiritual realm. He is talking about the world that they live in is a world in opposition to God. It is a world in opposition to the kingdom. It is a world in opposition to the things of God, the values of God, the holiness of God, and the purity of God. Once again, when he says he is from above, he is saying I am in alignment with the father. You are below. You are in alignment with the world and all the evil systems associated with the world, which happens to be under the control, at this point as he would say, under the evil one. We will talk about this in a few weeks when he will actually imply that the Pharisees were children of the devil. The idea back then was that the enemy, Satan particularly, is in control of the world.
In fact, we see this very clearly in 1 John 5:19 where he says “We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” The logic behind this that basic Christianity teaches is that when man fell, they lost their relationship with God. We became disconnected with God because man wanted to do his own thing. Then what happened is not only did we lose that connection with God, we lost the authority that God gave us over all of creation. You may recall back in Genesis God told the people to go forth and multiply and look over the animals and all the systems and jobs and everything else and create whatever they can, but they chose to do their own thing. Because of that, they basically gave that control away. They were supposed to oversee God’s creation while under submission to God. They chose not to be under submission. Basically, that control was handed over to Satan. That is the way it worked. Ever since then basically, the idea is that he is somewhat in control. God has allowed him to be in control. You begin to see that evil manifest itself in many different ways. If you look around and look in the news lately and you see things like the economy going up and down, you see all sorts of perversion, you see poverty, and you see weather doing weird stuff. We could say that this is all accident or we could say maybe there is something in the spiritual realm that is shaking some things up. I am not here to talk about the end times, but I think there is something going on there that gives you a clue that maybe something is up. Something big is about to happen. That is the situation. The people are living somewhat at that point in the worldly system according to the corruption of the world. So he says I am from above and you are below. You are from this world. I am not of this world. What Jesus is doing here is saying it is getting close. It is about six months and I am going to be crucified. Your whole life is about to be turned upside down, all the religious systems and everything, so I am here to warn you about something. I am here to let you know. In fact, I have told you over and over again. I told you that you would die in your sins. If you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins. Indeed. Truly. Amen. That is basically what he is saying. So he is giving them a warning. In many ways, he is acting like what we would call a watchman. Back in the book of Ezekiel it talks about a watchman. The watchman was basically the person who would stand at the gate or stand on guard and when the enemy would come in and begin to invade, they would basically be the ones responsible for waking the people. Getting the people up basically and making sure they can protect themselves. If the watchmen didn’t do his job, then the watchman was responsible for the blood of the people. Jesus is acting the role of the watchmen. He is saying time is coming that things are about to change and I am letting you know right now. I have told you that you are going to die in your sins. If you do not believe that I am the one that I claim to be, you are indeed going to die in your sins. That is what he tells them.
About this point, they are still confused. They say who are you. Who are you to say such a thing? We see in the other verses where Jesus basically says I am just who I claim to be all along. But then he goes on to say when you lift me up, then you will know for certain that I am who I said I am. He says in 8:28 “When you have lifted up the son of man, then you will know that I am the one I claimed to be and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the father has taught me.” This term lifted up actually a two-fold meaning. When he says “when you have lifted me up” he is talking about the crucifixion. When they have lifted him up on the cross. When that cross goes up, that is the lifted up part. That is when they are going to know that he was who he claimed to be. When you read in the gospels, you see that when he was lifted up, when he was crucified, the temple curtain tore in two. The blood spurt from his side mixed with water. You see all these things happening that were all prophesized in the Old Testament. They say uh-oh. We know now that he is the one that he claimed to be. We messed up. Then when he is ultimately lifted up, he ascends up into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father they are going to know for certain that he was the one who he claimed to be. That is the only part of the passage I really wanted to cover in depth.
I want to spend the rest of this sermon just talking about this idea of what it means to die in your sins. Basic Christianity, Christianity 101, teaches that all of mankind was born into sin. In other words, right when we were born, we have inherited this thing called sin. We can trace it back to Adam and Eve. We can trace it back to our ancestors. The bottom line is we have a taint within us. I think most of us know it. We gravitate towards sin. I have said this before. We never have to teach children how to be bad. Did you ever notice that? Little Johnny, you just need to misbehave more. No, we always have to teach our children from day one how to be good. Why don’t they have a natural inclination to be good? They don’t. They are so cute when they are born but give them a couple months. The first time they throw something at you. You never have to teach a child to be bad. So we spend the next 18 years teaching our children to be good. Then we send them off to college and we hope they will remember and maybe the college will help them be good. Then sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. My daughter went in the Air Force a while back. I said that the Air Force taught Natalie in nine years what I couldn’t teach her in 18 years; how to be disciplined and make her bed. I couldn’t do it. You hope that they will just continue to do the right things. The good things. Sometimes they do and some kids are better than others at it. It is not that we can’t do good things. Don’t get me wrong, but we have this natural gravitational pull towards our base desires and base thoughts and all that kind of stuff. It is a natural thing that we have inherited. We are born in sin. Then we walk through life in sin. If we don’t do anything about it, we die in sin. End of story. Almost. Christianity also teaches that if you die in your sin, there are consequences. There are implications of dying in your sin while you are alive and after you die. Most of you know the implications of sin in your life. Some of you have been the victim of people who have sinned against God and sinned against you and now you are paying the consequences. Some of you have committed sins against others. It is really common sense. When you live a life outside any sense of morality, any sort of alignment with God, you are going to have problems. Look around the world. It is just obvious. There are implications on your finances, on your relationships, and on addictions. All that kind of stuff is the implications of living a life in sin. Then we have the implications after you die. I don’t have a nice way to say it but basically some form of hell. I know hell is not a popular word to use nowadays and in the church especially. It is kind of passé. We don’t talk about hell and the fire and brimstone and that sort of thing. But I really think we should talk more about it. No matter what it is, I am not here to talk about what hell is or what it isn’t, but the bottom line is if you die in your sins or at least Jesus is implying that if you die in your sins, at a minimum you are going to suffer eternal separation from God and everybody else. At a minimum that should motivate you to think about what your view is of God.
I am here today in a sense as a watchman. Jesus was the watchmen. To be honest, I had this verse come to me in Ezekiel that talked about the watchmen. I had heard about it but I never really connected it. I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning the other night and God said you are the watchman. I didn’t want to talk about sin. I didn’t want to talk about hell. It is more fun to just give happy-type sermons. I felt like if I didn’t let the people know the consequences to sin then the blood is on my hands. I feel the responsibility to stand up here and say if you go your life living in sin and you do not believe that Jesus was the one who he claimed to be and that he turned out to be the one that he claimed to be, then you are going to die in your sins and you are going to suffer the consequences now and forever. Consider that fair warning. That is what Jesus says. I am just the messenger. I just have to communicate what Jesus said. Once again, he said if you do not believe that he is the one that he claimed to be, which is the Messiah, the king of the world, the savior of mankind, and he turns out to be the one that he claimed to be, you are going to have consequences in this life and the life to come. That is all I can tell you. Not only that, it is going to make it very hard on someone like me to do your funeral. As a side note, we get a little minister manual when we graduate from seminary. They have all these outlines in there. How to comfort people in the hospital. How to perform weddings. How to do baptisms. How to do funerals. There is a sad little section in there that says “A Funeral for an Unbeliever”. It talks about how do you minister to the family when everybody is sitting there thinking Uncle Bill is in hell right now or he is on the way. How do you comfort people with that? What you do is avoid the topic or direct it back towards the people and let them know that Uncle Bill is in God’s hands right now but you are still here so you better think about your life. I am not making that stuff up. It is hard to give any sense of hope to someone you know has never accepted Christ as their Lord. You can’t. It’s impossible. You give the hope to the people, but there is not much hope there for Uncle Bill or whoever.
I communicate that to you all the while saying there is a way out of this. Really it is quite simple. It involves a little English grammar which I was never that good at and that is why I stumble over my words and everything else. I think it involves prepositions. The word ‘in’ is a preposition. What about the word ‘to’. Those are both prepositions. Prepositions have to do with giving location, time, and space or whatever or something. Whatever. I don’t want to talk about it. I think it just involves a swapping out of a preposition. Instead of dying in your sins. Basically the idea is to die to your sins. In fact, that is what he says in Romans 6:11. “In the same way, count yourself dead to sin but alive to God and Christ Jesus.” It is very easy. Just swapping out one little preposition. Going from dying in your sins to dying to your sins. You die to your sins while you are still alive. You do that like the lady who was caught up in adultery a couple weeks ago. We saw that in the gospel. She was dragged before Jesus and Jesus said where are the people that are condemning you. Does no one condemn you? She said no one. He said well neither do I condemn you. Now go and leave your life of sin. In other words, stop it. Stop the behavior. Die to your sin. You have to kill that sin. You have to count yourself dead to sin. How do you do that? You basically do it not by physically dying yourself. You do it by dying with Christ. Because Christ is the one that came to be able to take your sins away. In another spot in Romans, Paul is speaking to the people that have this idea that they can keep on sinning because the more I sin the more of God’s grace I will feel. It is just really crazy logic. Paul says we died to sin. How can we live in it any longer? Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? He is saying you have been dead to sin. You have reckoned yourself. You have counted yourself dead to sin because you have been baptized with Christ. We talk a lot about baptism and we have different views. Whether you should have immersion or infant or whatever. Whatever you believe about baptism, it involves death. That is what it involves. It is all about death. You are dying with Christ. You are immersing yourself in Christ and what he did on the cross. Baptism is about death. The problem is a lot of people don’t want to die. They don’t want to die to those sins. They want to keep those pet sins. They want to accept Jesus but they really haven’t died to the sins. In other words, they haven’t closed the casket. They left the casket open so they never have closure. They never have a full, complete funeral.
There is a book I would like to read from. Some of you are familiar with the book, “My Utmost for his Highest”. It is a classic devotional by a gentleman who lived a long time ago named Oswald Chambers. What he says is in order to die to your sins and to begin the process of sanctification, which is living to Christ, you need to basically have a funeral. You need to mentally have a funeral. He refers to it as a white funeral. I will read a short portion of this. He says “No one experiences complete sanctification without going through a white funeral, the burial of the old life.” In other words we talk about sanctification. That’s what it is all about. That is why we go through discipleship because we want to be like Jesus. But we never died to our sins, our old life. “If there has never been the crucial moment of change through death, sanctification will never be more than an elusive dream.” We like to talk about being sanctified, but we like to hang on to our old life. We do. We hang on to it all the time. “There must be a white funeral, a death with only one resurrection; a resurrection into the life of Jesus Christ. Nothing can defeat a life like this. It has oneness with God for only one purpose: to be a witness for him.” You can’t be a witness to Christ if you have died to your old life. “Have you really come to your last days? You have often come to them in your mind, but have you really experienced them? You cannot die or go to your funeral in a mood of excitement. Death means you stop being. We avoid the cemetery and continually refuse our own death. It will not happen by striving, but by yielding to death. It is dying – being baptized into his death. Romans 6:3.” We don’t want to die to our sins. We liked our sins. We like hanging on to our sins. I see it all the time.
Once again, I talk about Facebook. What bothers me about Facebook is that it gives you the opportunity to just put your sins everywhere. Saying things you wouldn’t say to someone in person you are saying to a thousand people on Facebook. I say it again, if you are a Christian, be careful what you post on there because you are a witness. People are reading that. People who are unbelievers are reading that stuff and saying this person is a Christian? They wrote on their profile: Christian. They put scripture and everything else but they act so contrary to that. If you are a Christian, you are supposed to be a witness. If you truly are being sanctified, if you truly have died to your sins, then act like it. Act like it. If you are going to wear the name Christian, if you are going to wear that badge, then make sure you act in accordance with that identity. If you are not going to do it, then take it off because you are making fools out of all of us that are Christians or trying to be Christians. We have to have this funeral. We have to be willing to die to ourselves. Die to our past. Die to our sins.
But the good news is when you die to your sins, you get to live in Christ. You become alive to God in Christ. “In the same way, count yourself dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” That is the cool thing about it. When you die to your sins, you don’t stay in the ground. You come alive. You come alive in Christ. You get this full energy in you called the Holy Spirit that enables you to walk in his way. Enables you to be the person that God designed you to be. To be filled with the spirit of God. You are living in the world and all the systems and all the muck and the yuck and the temptations and all that stuff, but you are walking outside of it. You are in Christ. You are walking in Christ according to his ways. According to the things that he wants you to do and you have this oneness about you. Even when you mess up and you step aside, you get yourself pulled back into Christ. You don’t get yourself pulled farther into the world. You get pulled back into Christ because you are in Christ. That is a promise. The best way to illustrate it is to take a piece of paper here and a book. This piece of paper represents you. This is your identity. This book is Jesus. We take this piece of paper and I put it in the book. I close the book and I ship it off to Europe. The book and the paper are one. They are not separate. No longer does that paper have that separate identity. It means it can’t be trashed on. It can’t be beat up. It can’t be thrown away. It can’t be stuck in another book because it is in this book and this book is headed off to glory land. This book is headed off to the kingdom and you are in this book. Even if you were to start falling out of the book, you get right back in because it wasn’t you who placed you there in the first place. It was God who placed you in the book through Christ. It was God. Through becoming dead to your sin, allowed you to become alive to God in Christ to be placed in the book. All you have to do is continue to walk in it. All you have to do is continue to walk in accordance with that identity and walk so closely with Jesus that when you step out of line for a minute, you confess it, you forgive yourself, you forgive the person you need to, and even if you have to do it that moment. You ask forgiveness and you get yourself back in the book. You get yourself back in alignment to God. You get yourself back in Christ.
If you want to know, how do I know if I am living in Christ? It is quite easy. He says it in John 1:2. It says “This is how we know we are in him. Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.” Must walk as Jesus did. That is easy. That is what you need to do. You are in Christ so you walk as Jesus did. In conclusion, we can go through life in our sins and die in our sin and say okay God I am done. I had fun. I lived in my sin. I am dying in my sin. I was born, live, and die in my sins. Now I guess I am in your hands. Or you can stop midway and say I think it is time I die to my sins. That I die to my past. That I decide that part of me didn’t work too well. That part of me didn’t work quite at all because it didn’t give me any sense of morality. My only sense of morality was this world system that is currently controlled by whatever you want to call it, but it just isn’t right. You can die to your sins or you can live in your sins. If you die to your sins, then the benefit is you get to live in Christ. You get to align yourself with Christ and you know you have a destiny. You know you have a place and that God has a plan for you in this life and forevermore. Let us pray.
