Latest / Red Couch Theology / Wrestling With the Text: A Guide Through John 9

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Wrestling With the Text: A Guide Through John 9 · Red Couch Theology

0:00
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Red Couch
0:02
Theology Podcast. Hey, this week we do something a
0:04
little bit different. This week we're going to be
0:08
going through John Chapter 9, which is the passage that Alex
0:11
preached this last Sunday. And I'm going to talk to him
0:14
about how in the world did he study this text?
0:18
How does he approach a new passage?
0:20
How did he work through the difficult parts of this passage
0:22
and come to the conclusions that he came to?
0:25
And maybe you can learn a little bit about how to study the
0:28
scriptures for yourself and and engage difficult things in the
0:32
passage. So and then we end on this
0:35
beautiful note that you're going to have to just find out about
0:38
in this episode. Let's dive right.
0:45
In and on that bombshell. Yes man, I just can't get the
0:49
camera right ever. Who moves it out of interest?
0:54
Well, no, it just it's I need to resave the preset OK because
0:59
it's set to a preset from our old lighting setup and so it's
1:04
just too bright every week. So this is the intro.
1:07
This is the intro of the podcast.
1:11
Welcome everyone to the Right Couch Theology podcast.
1:14
Today we will be talking about camera settings for a which.
1:18
Yeah, this the podcast. We still don't know what we're
1:20
doing. Yeah.
1:21
And by we I mean how long have. You been doing this?
1:23
Alex has never known what we're doing.
1:26
It's for technically how long? Have we been doing this for now?
1:29
I don't know. Are we on like year 3?
1:32
It's a good chunk of time. Chunk of time and we still
1:36
haven't figured out how to make it marketable.
1:40
No, no, we haven't. But it's.
1:43
A good job we. Enjoyed We we we shared some
1:45
news last week, but for those who weren't didn't listen to
1:48
last week's episode while I fix the camera, would you like to
1:51
tell them our slight tweaks starting next week?
1:56
Next week we will be running alpha here at South, which is
2:01
the first time in a long time, right?
2:04
I mean, it's been a been a whole bunch of years.
2:06
So during those weeks, we're going to be asking, you know, 50
2:12
to 60 alpha people if they have any deeper questions around the
2:17
subjects that come up with an alpha.
2:19
So this is the forum that we'll be using for that.
2:23
So what we hope is this, if you send in questions about a
2:26
sermon, then they'll still be answered here in this space.
2:30
But if but, but we'll also be using it for alpha questions as
2:36
well. Does that come?
2:37
Yeah, I'm not very succinct. You're good at this.
2:40
You should run this post. You know what's actually weird
2:42
is when you're not there, I'm like, wait, do I talk to the
2:44
camera or the camera? It doesn't even know where in
2:48
the room of the camera is it. Was just there.
2:50
You just moved it. No, I didn't.
2:52
Oh, darn it. Wow.
2:53
Didn't it used to be there? I just made it focus.
2:56
I didn't change its location. Yeah, so I'm excited about that.
3:05
And yeah, you can sort of get a little sneak preview into some
3:09
of the content we're covering in alpha, and maybe you'll want to
3:11
take it the next go round. So we already have one of the
3:17
things I'm kind of excited about is that Alpha is this just super
3:21
low hanging fruit for to invite people who you love and wish
3:26
went to your church, wish that you could talk about the things
3:29
of God with. And suddenly like Alpha's like,
3:33
you know what, it feels pretty comfortable to invite people
3:36
too. So we already have one of our
3:38
leaders who's like, so we did leader training last night.
3:41
They're like, so I could invite this friend of ours who's this?
3:45
Oh, I'm definitely doing that. And I'm like, great, that's
3:48
awesome. So it's already, we haven't even
3:50
started the class and people are inviting people to it, so it's
3:53
awesome. I love it.
3:55
Yeah, let me just figure out what we're talking about today.
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So this week you talked about blindness.
4:05
Yeah. And.
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Well, actually, Jesus talked about it and I just talked about
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what he talked about. Yeah, yeah, I loved your last
4:14
point. We should.
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Well, let's get our ducks in a row.
4:16
Let's go through the the message.
4:18
But your last point was so fun, comical and accurate.
4:22
So you broke it down into these three movements.
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What Jesus does, what people think about what Jesus does.
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And my favorite one. Jesus says about what people
4:34
think about what Jesus does. Yeah, so good.
4:38
You know, I put those in just to help me think about it.
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Hey. And it was memorable.
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Because I have the three movements in my head, I could.
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Have. Yeah.
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And in the end, I was like, you know, I actually think there's
4:48
some humor to the the ridiculous length of the second one.
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Well, the third one. Sorry, someone.
4:55
Yeah. Yeah.
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It seems to work out. Work out.
4:57
Well, yes. And of course, it all starts
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with a theological conversation, which is interesting to me
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because I always think the theological conversation comes
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primarily after something. But in this case, the
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theological conversation is almost used to, I don't want to
5:17
say bat the theological conversation away.
5:20
It just seems like the whole of the things going to be based
5:23
around this theological conversation.
5:25
And then Jesus almost dispatches the theological conversation
5:29
with surprising ease in one verse, and then they never come
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back to it. Yeah, suggesting it was never as
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central as they thought it was. Yeah, yeah, something you and I
5:43
have talked about just I don't think on the show, but another
5:47
thing that's kind of fun that you you highlighted the reality
5:50
that these several chapters are like one day, yeah.
5:55
And so something that I've observed about this and how it
6:00
sort of handshakes to the previous few days, there's a lot
6:03
of debates about the Sabbath going on at the and those
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debates actually started not on this same day, but like the
6:10
previous healing, big healing that took place where where a
6:16
guy gets healed by the pool and everyone's like that's but it's
6:18
the Sabbath and they debate and then there's several days and
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then this day happens. There's a bunch more debates he
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about Sabbath stuff and then this story happens and almost
6:32
like this exclamation point where Jesus and then John
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mentions. And by the way.
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It was the Sabbath. And then this this miracle story
6:41
is also a bit of a compare and contrast on the first one.
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So the first one, Jesus heals the man, he goes to the temple.
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The man never recognizes Jesus as anything other than a healer.
6:54
And Jesus says to him, go and sin no more.
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With some inference you could take that he has been
7:02
responsible for his condition. Yeah, you know, have to read it
7:05
that way. But that's something how some
7:06
people read it. There's some level of like his
7:09
own actions that led to this. Interesting.
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And so then that makes sense of the Pharisees, the the the
7:16
disciples conversation, you know.
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Oh, so Jesus, what about this guy?
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Like was this his fault? Maybe his parents fault.
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Yeah. And Jesus says in this case,
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there's no in in the message language, there's no such cause
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and effect here. But then he's compared because,
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well, he go, Jesus goes, finds him in the temple as well.
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Yeah. And he comes to believe.
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So there's one that gets healed, goes about his old life and we
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hear nothing else. One that is healed, meets Jesus,
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becomes a disciple of Jesus. Yeah.
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And so, and then there's this, there's this fascinating sort of
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compare and contrast to physical blindness, physical sight,
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spiritual blindness, spiritual sight.
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And, and it is not a secret at all because the, the religious
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leaders even call it out right there.
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So you have a blind man who's also spiritually blind
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potentially he gets physical sight and then he gets spiritual
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sight. And then you have sighted
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religious leaders who they have physical sight.
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And then by the end of the the chapter you find out according
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to Jesus that they're spiritually.
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Blind. Yes, totally.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is fascinating.
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So what was the big punch line of the message though?
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The big idea of the message. Well, I, I, I, it's, it took me
8:44
a while to land on something I was happy with because that,
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because it's so convoluted and you almost like, you know, I was
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doing this with a group of pastors, this message before I
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preached it. And what we do together is we
8:58
sit and we'll have a note in our page of like questions that
9:03
says, what's the big idea? And I actually looked at one of
9:09
the guys who gave me like the thing, he filled it and he had
9:14
about 5:00 and then the last one with its start like because that
9:20
point you really clear and this, this is the big idea.
9:24
But this is this is some of the tensions, the struggle.
9:25
Of more of an inductive method. Right you.
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Did it was a little bit and I think you and I both tend to
9:32
lean inductive. Yeah, when it comes.
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So if you're listening, trying to find the big idea early on,
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we're intentionally withholding it until it kind of blossoms.
9:40
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and it's really not there to
9:42
start with. And so, you know, at one point I
9:45
talked about being certain versus curious, you know, that
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stood out to people that you know, and that seems to be the
9:56
way that the Pharisees and the man are placed against each
9:59
other. But then there's this old
10:00
Genesis story that pops up in the middle of it, you know,
10:04
where where the guy is repeatedly referred to as the
10:10
man. It's always the man.
10:12
It's very specific language is over and over again, which is
10:15
how Adam was addressed or titled in Genesis 1 and 2 before the
10:19
fall. So there's like this throwback
10:21
of Jesus creating. Yeah, so there's this mud
10:25
situation. He creates mud and puts it on
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the guy's eyes. So you can't ignore all those
10:30
and they deserve to be highlighted.
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Yeah. But when you get to the end, it
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becomes really clear that the story's always been about this
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one thing and it's always been about blindness spiritually.
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The the Pharisees actually, despite all of this time with
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Jesus, get all the way through and their last statement about
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the man or to him directly is the same as the disciples was at
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the very beginning. See, you start to see this like
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0 progression from then the Pharisees ask, you know, is it
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his fault? Is he the Sinner or is it the
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parents sin? And the last thing the Pharisees
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says, you are steeped in sin. Like they're still accusing him
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of being responsible for his situation all the way at the
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end. They still are completely
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spiritually blind to what's going on.
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They're blind in regard to the man, blind in regard to Jesus,
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blind in regard to themselves. So it seems like Jesus has
11:39
actually been talking about that from the very beginning.
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Yeah. And so he kind of when he does
11:45
his big reveal at the end where where he says that, you know, I
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have come that those so that those that are blind may see and
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those that claim they already see perfectly well will be made
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blind, will be re revealed to be made to be blind in the message.
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Yeah. OK.
12:02
So we didn't get any questions that were submitted.
12:05
So the question I thought that might be intriguing for us to do
12:08
is maybe something we don't do super often on the show, but is
12:13
to talk a little bit about and try and give people maybe a
12:19
sneak preview. And how you approach studying a
12:22
passage like this, 'cause it's huge.
12:25
There's so much dialogue. So much.
12:27
Yeah. And I thought maybe we could pop
12:29
the thing on the on the screen for those who are watching
12:31
online. And then we'll describe sections
12:33
of it. And like, maybe if you could
12:35
kind of, I don't know if you'll be able to remember you're, you
12:40
know, obviously you've read this way long ago, But like this week
12:43
or last week when you're studying and prepping, when you
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read this like for the first time with the intention to teach
12:49
it. Whoa, OK, whoa, there you go.
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And then what was your process to to hone in and get to the?
12:55
So we and this works well 'cause we were actually talking about
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this a bit this last week, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So we're, so we're Chapter 9. So if you want to kind of follow
13:04
along, you can just listen. This, the entire chapter, is the
13:08
story. Tons of dialogue. 40 plus versus
13:11
it's almost 50, right? Yeah, I think it was 39.
13:15
OK, Yeah. So, yeah.
13:19
And it and it kicks off. I'll just read this first first,
13:22
and then you can just walk us through like how you started to,
13:25
like, follow trails to conclude where you landed.
13:29
Yeah, yeah, yeah. As he went along, he saw a man
13:32
blind from birth. His disciples asked him.
13:35
Rabbi Hussen, this man or his parents, that he was born blind
13:39
and then the story starts to unfold.
13:42
And we, you already told us Jesus says neither one.
13:45
And then it starts to unfold. So how'd you get into this?
13:47
So, so usually what I do on on a macro level with with preaching
13:52
on a given weekend, because I because I preach more than
13:55
everyone else, I don't usually have space to think about it
13:59
super far in advance other than on like a notes level.
14:03
I'll have pages for each, a pages document for each sermon
14:09
I'm preaching in the next Tower of the Lion.
14:11
If something just happens to occur that I'm like, oh, I know
14:14
that story's coming up. That would fit really well.
14:16
I'll just drop a little note and it'll sit there waiting maybe
14:19
4-5, six weeks. I think I just put one in for
14:22
John 17 just the other day that we're doing on at sometime in
14:30
March or something like that. So that that like usually I
14:33
always hope to have something to come back to at some point.
14:37
One of the things I always try and do now and I and I will say
14:42
I do this more if I am not happy with the sermon the week before.
14:46
But on Sunday night when I'm preaching the next Sunday, I'll
14:50
just get out my Bible and I'll just read the passage.
14:54
Just not for any like sense of like, I'm trying to analyze
14:59
this. I'm not trying to get some sense
15:01
of like flow. I'm just trying to read it and
15:04
just see what God happens to highlight in it.
15:06
So it's just a reading through to be like, OK, this is the
15:09
passage, this is what's coming. I've got a good sense of it
15:12
internally now, like it's started to do whatever it's
15:16
going to do in me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:20
And then then I will, before I even get to study verse by
15:25
verse, I'll try and just section it in my mind so I'll know the
15:30
story and I'll just say, try and say, OK, this section seems
15:33
distinct from this section. In this case, with this passage,
15:37
it works really naturally because you have a scene that
15:41
Jesus is in, a scene that Jesus isn't in.
15:45
And then he's. And then another scene that
15:46
Jesus is in so automatically for me, yeah, so So what?
15:51
What I actually wanted to do, use the scenes to do without
15:53
saying it, was to give them a sense of where the character
15:57
movement is, because this could actually be a play, right?
15:59
You could actually have run it on stage.
16:02
You got a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples and a man just
16:07
sat there listening and Jesus heals him and then he goes off
16:11
stage and almost walks into a new set where he washes, you
16:16
know, is he and the the conversation goes there's.
16:18
A whole bunch of stuff that happens.
16:21
And then there's a conversation with him and the Pharisees as
16:23
Jesus is offset doing something else.
16:25
Yep. And then, then he.
16:26
Goes back in the scene. Back to another set, this time
16:29
the temple, and Jesus walks into that scene.
16:33
And that's unusual in John because one of the things we've
16:35
talked about in John is that Jesus is in almost every scene.
16:39
He doesn't drop out very much. Yeah, so you get a little bit of
16:43
like in the middle of this chapter, you get this unfiltered
16:51
commentary on the behavior of Jesus from the Pharisees with
16:55
this guy. They're like, girl, you know,
16:59
and it they start almost trying to attack Jesus and by the end
17:02
they're attacking the guy. Totally, Yeah.
17:04
Yeah. But what?
17:05
But what, what John does that's really clever and and I'm only
17:10
going to assume it's cleverness. I mean, it's just brilliant
17:13
writing is he'll take little snippets of the other gospels
17:20
and he'll tweak them. Yeah, write them in his own way.
17:26
So if you think of like, the Jesus of the Synoptics, what's 1
17:30
of the, like, the big healing stories in the Synoptics, 10
17:34
lepers come to Jesus. Jesus heals them, says go and,
17:39
you know, go and show the priest.
17:41
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nine of them disappear off and
17:44
only one of them comes back. So like now in this story, Jesus
17:48
actually creates a healing and then just leaks it up to the
17:51
man. He doesn't follow after him.
17:54
He's not walking with him to the pool to see this incredible
17:57
miracle. He's just like, OK, go wash,
18:00
it's up to you now. And the guy doesn't even know
18:02
who he is. Doesn't know who he is.
18:03
All he knows is he's got spit and mud on his face.
18:06
Yeah, brilliant. The moment in the sermon where
18:09
you had us all close their eyes. Yeah.
18:11
Yeah, yeah. And I'd tried that with the guys
18:13
and the guys all loved it as well.
18:14
So I was like, OK, this is going to play pretty well.
18:17
Yeah. But they they, you know, that
18:18
that sense of like he's an active participant in his own
18:24
miracle story. He's just brilliant, John work
18:27
like, you know, just love stuff like that.
18:31
And so that that like for me, I've got those scenes then and
18:34
then. So this is so your first your
18:37
first pass in a text. After reading it is.
18:40
After reading it is to just maybe try and divide it
18:46
structurally. Just try and.
18:47
Block it a little bit so I've got some sense of like the, the
18:51
bigger flow because otherwise you just get very stuck in
18:56
what's this verse about? What's this verse about?
18:58
What's this verse about? What's this verse about without
19:01
any relationship to everything else going on?
19:04
So like this passage for this coming week?
19:06
And it's helpful to do it on this, sorry to interrupt, but
19:09
it's helpful to do it pretty fresh off the other one because
19:11
usually there's a handshake to the previous week.
19:15
And so that's fresh in your mind.
19:17
And you're like, OK, there's a certain kind of momentum.
19:19
You just finished preaching. And then you go into the next
19:22
passage, you read it that night, and you start to see, oh, the
19:24
momentum is still tumbling. Because because so like for this
19:27
week, I'll actually finish with the I'll start with the last
19:32
verse of the week before because John 10 just rolls straight.
19:37
It's not even like, oh, they were walking away from a
19:40
conversation and you know, some further yards down the road they
19:45
ran into a guy like in John 10. It's still mid flow of
19:50
conversation. It feels like the subject
19:52
changes to us but you can almost picture the Pharisees still like
19:56
rah. Are you saying we're blind and
19:58
Jesus giving them their response?
20:00
Not only are you blind. Yeah.
20:02
And then he just kind of carries on talking.
20:04
So you almost like need to pause in your mind the scene with the
20:07
fists raised and the like, the anger and.
20:10
And it has to sit there all through the week.
20:13
And on Sunday, you have to kind of be like, oh, and picking up
20:16
from where we were last week. Yeah, this is the continuation
20:19
of the story. So yeah, you're you're
20:20
absolutely right in this. Like in lots of these cases the
20:23
scene just flows on from 1:00. So if, if, if you were to
20:26
extrapolate a tip, yeah, someone's trying to learn how to
20:30
read the Bible for themselves and interpret it themselves.
20:34
Maybe some of that is, is to Yeah, like read, especially when
20:37
you're in a narrative passage to read larger chunks of that
20:42
narrative, you know, and sometimes there's just too much
20:46
for your your mind to maybe like wrap, wrap itself around and
20:50
you're like, I've you've lost. If you start to read so much
20:53
that you've lost some spatial things and where they're located
20:56
and some of that fair enough. Like you can cut it off in the
20:59
middle of an area as almost these chapters.
21:02
Do. But read a chunk of it.
21:04
Enough of the narrative and then start to sort of like mentally
21:09
section it a part of like oh, movement one movement 2 because
21:13
again, it's narrative. This is designed by an.
21:15
Author well, and I'm always shocked but unshocked by the
21:18
number of followers of Jesus that would say, wait, they
21:21
didn't put the verses and chapters in or chapters and
21:24
verses in when they wrote it. Yeah.
21:27
So the chapters and verses are incredibly useful, except when
21:33
they people put them in, they had no concept that years down
21:37
the line we'd be reading books with chapters and watching TV
21:42
shows that pause at the end of episodes.
21:44
Yeah. So everything in our like normal
21:47
workflow for those things tells us this is a cliffhanger where
21:52
we're told to pause and they're going to come back in with
21:56
something next week. Yeah, and a lot of times, like
21:59
the biblical authors or not authors, but the copiers,
22:02
translators and those who added the chapter markers, they do a
22:07
pretty good job. I'd say 80% of the.
22:11
Time. That's probably fair, yeah.
22:13
Breaking at A at a good natural break, but then there's 20% of
22:16
the time the breaks are really unhelpful.
22:19
And yeah, and that even that 80% of the time, it only works if
22:27
you hold in your mind this is flowing on from what I read the
22:32
time before. Yeah, if you come at it from
22:34
like, this is brand new information.
22:36
This is the start of a new conversation.
22:39
This is the start of a new action.
22:41
This is actually even with them being good at it 80% of the
22:45
time, it can send you into a world of like misunderstanding.
22:49
If you remember, you know the text, you the last passage you
22:52
had me preach where I concluded I'm pretty sure it's not in the
22:55
original manuscripts. I was lamenting to Alex.
22:57
I was like, I don't even know how to study.
22:59
Yeah, like without context, because I'm pretty sure this
23:03
isn't the context I was like, I don't even know how to approach
23:08
a passage. Like the first 5 or 6 steps of
23:10
my study process is all contextual is like finding out
23:14
what's his overall flow in the entire book, What's the
23:18
immediate flow in the last few chapters, What's the flow in the
23:22
following few chapters. So that I can say this, I have
23:26
greater confidence that when I interpret this, it can't fall
23:29
outside of that context. And then the last time I
23:31
preached, the passage is more inserted, then there's like jump
23:36
ahead to step 7 of exegesis. So it was like, yeah.
23:40
Yeah. And and so that that that sense
23:43
of like, it's good to know that Jeremiah 2911 says, I know they
23:47
have, I know the plans I have for you, plans to give you hope
23:50
in the future. But it means much more when you
23:53
know that that promise was spoken to a group of people in
23:56
the midst of a military occupation that had lost any
23:59
sense of a hope and a future. And that God had been promising
24:05
them to care for them for an awful long period of time, and
24:09
that this was the lowest point of their existence.
24:13
And that eventually God was faithful to them.
24:16
Now, now there might be questions then will am I allowed
24:19
to extrapolate that promise and make it about me?
24:22
And you might say, well, there's other passages in the New
24:24
Testament that say similar things.
24:26
So yes, based on that, we know that God cares for you as an
24:29
individual, has a plan for your future.
24:31
I hope for you all those different things.
24:32
But the promise makes much more sense when you know it was a
24:36
real promise to real people that was actually fulfilled in real
24:39
time. Yeah, so, and just another
24:44
observation as you, as you become a student, like or a sort
24:49
of a pupil of Jesus or a follower of Jesus and you're
24:53
walking with him and you and you're this on, you're on a
24:55
lifelong journey with Jesus. And part of that journey is
24:59
scripture reading and engaging the Scriptures.
25:02
You'll get better and better at some of this stuff, partially
25:06
because there's an even wider context that that takes place.
25:12
And we already alluded to that early on in this conversation
25:15
where so now Alex has spent, you know, many of you don't have
25:19
time to spend your, your career and your, your day job isn't
25:24
reading and interpreting the Bible.
25:25
So it may take you a little bit more time in your in your life
25:29
to to get this, but when Alex reads a passage like this, not
25:34
only is he thinking about John chapter 8 and John chapter 10
25:38
and how it all flows together, he's reading this and he'll bump
25:42
into a phrase and be like that. Reminds me of Genesis chapter.
25:45
1. And or and two.
25:48
And so the wider context is the entire scriptures is a cohesive.
25:54
And so he's also mentally doing some shorthand because he's just
25:59
saturated in it all the time. And so he'll run into a passage
26:02
be like, ah, that's probably a hyperlink over to here.
26:05
Yeah, I'm going to have to chase that trail later and then
26:08
another one. So as you notice that and you
26:10
live and breathe and continue to read and continue to read, the
26:14
these kind of contextual cues will start to just.
26:16
Jump and that that like most hard things, that probably has
26:20
four stages, right. The first stage is this is super
26:23
hard. There's no way I can do this.
26:24
Yeah. Stage 2 is this is super hard
26:27
It's going to take a lot of work for me to do this.
26:29
Stage 3 is this is becoming easier, but I still have to
26:32
really think about this to make it happen Yeah.
26:35
And stage 4 is this is like breathing.
26:38
I did this not because I thought about it, but because, yeah,
26:42
it's just what I do. Yeah.
26:44
When I approach a passage. Like that's what most of us do
26:48
in a little bit of a scary way with driving, right.
26:51
You know, we, you know, yeah. That happened to me yesterday
26:53
where I was like, was I watching the road or not?
26:57
Yeah, you know, you, you know, I, I've gone driving places for
27:01
a reason and just found myself halfway to church without even
27:05
thinking about where I'm going. I'm like I was supposed to go
27:07
the opposite direction to church but.
27:09
Yeah, and all of this is by design in the Scriptures.
27:12
It's like a it's, it's a the gift that keeps on giving
27:15
because it's so saturated in, in both God's wisdom and in the
27:20
best of the best literary genius that as you continue to read it
27:28
for a lifetime, it just keeps on unfolding and unfolding and
27:32
unfolding, unfolding. So then, so then, so next phase,
27:36
I'll just read through the whole, if I'm doing a passage,
27:39
the whole passage with a commentary.
27:42
So I'll pick my favorite commentary on that book.
27:45
I'll look at others at different points for other ideas.
27:47
But usually at this point in John, I know that now Craig
27:51
Keener is my favorite John commentator.
27:54
Yeah, so I'll just read along with him the whole of the
27:58
passage. I'll circle stuff, I'll grab
28:00
ideas, I'll pull quotes out. I'll kind of notice how he sees
28:05
the flow, compare it to how I see the flow.
28:08
And only then at that point do I actually start writing anything,
28:12
you know, and start getting that sense of like where, where I
28:17
think the flow is that I'm called to present.
28:21
And and of course, that's all mixed in with prayer and saying
28:24
God, like, what is your wisdom here for this?
28:26
Like, you know, what do you have for the church?
28:28
What's your hobby? Like?
28:29
If I can get a sense somewhere having done that of OK, I think
28:33
this is God's heartbeat for me in the church in this passage.
28:40
That usually then grounds for me how I try and shape the flow.
28:44
So as I look at John 10, little spoiler for podcast people, John
28:50
10 actually moves through multiple phases too.
28:53
At one point Jesus is talking without naming himself, almost
28:57
empowerable form. The next minute he's talking
29:01
about himself as a gate to life, and the next minute he's talking
29:04
about himself as a Good Shepherd.
29:06
If you wanted to express that in a simple flow, it's Jesus says I
29:10
am the Good Shepherd who gives life through his death.
29:16
Like it just means that you've moved through all of the
29:18
different pieces. You guys, you guys don't even
29:21
need to show up on Sunday. That's the whole thing.
29:23
Sure, yeah. There might be some other stuff
29:25
there as well. But that, like the sense of the
29:27
heart of the passage is, is really that like, you know, it's
29:31
not only is the Good Shepherd isn't just an arbitrary picture,
29:34
but he's talking about himself and he's talking about him, his
29:37
gift of life. And it happens through his
29:39
death. And that's where you get to see
29:41
in that passage. Well, that's the surprise part.
29:44
Yeah. Like.
29:45
OK, so then since since we're referencing John 9 and we're
29:50
kind of doing a little bit of like behind the curtain, how to
29:53
study the Bible, how to read the Bible, how to interpret the
29:56
Bible. Were there any sections in your
29:59
preparation this last week for John 9 where you kind of maybe
30:04
chased a rabbit that wasn't necessary or you got you got
30:08
held up and you had to kind of do some extra study or you're
30:11
like, I don't know, maybe it's this, I don't know, Like can you
30:15
talk talk about a moment where you kind of got short circuited?
30:17
So this one actually was surprisingly easy.
30:20
This one was one that came together and I was like, oh,
30:24
this just felt like it fell in place in front of me.
30:29
It didn't feel like it was me. Maybe it was that I had to be
30:31
done early at a court case for a guy that we're in connection
30:35
with here at South on Friday. I had a birthday on Saturday for
30:39
one of my kids and I was preaching it on Thursday.
30:42
So I was like, I have to be done by Thursday morning.
30:45
Like I has to be ready to go so I can run through it for that.
30:49
And so this was one where I was like, OK, now I've seen Jesus
30:53
clears away this theological argument and the rest of it kind
30:57
of flows from there. Once I've done that, it actually
31:01
fell into place pretty well with this exception.
31:07
I found myself in this middle section where I was like I am
31:11
just reading texts and talking about them without a bigger
31:17
larger idea about what is going on here.
31:20
And that's. When I started playing with the
31:22
well, well, in the middle of it, the there's just the back and
31:25
forth conversation with the man and the Pharisees.
31:27
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually much harder to
31:29
preach parts of the text that Jesus isn't in because when
31:35
Jesus speaks, you get some sense of, OK, this is stuff for us to
31:38
do, but Jesus is actually going to give us some certainty here.
31:42
We know what Jesus says is right.
31:44
We know what Jesus says is good when other people are speaking
31:49
like, well, how do you know? Yeah, they could be completely
31:52
off. Yeah, in this case, the guy
31:56
doesn't know Jesus, so we can't trust him.
31:59
We can't trust the Pharisees. You have these two untrustworthy
32:01
parties or confused parties having a very extensive
32:06
dialogue. So then how did you muddle
32:08
through that like as you're like, do I skip this section?
32:13
Do I like if someone's reading the Bible and the like, they get
32:16
lost in the weeds of this and they're like, where?
32:18
Why is this in here? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
32:20
How'd you do that? And so, so then, then the
32:23
beautiful thing with a text like John is you get to ask, well,
32:27
what do I think John has this in there for?
32:29
Like, does he have a purpose here that that maybe isn't about
32:33
just directly saying this is what you should do or this is
32:37
what you shouldn't do? Like what?
32:40
What might he be trying to reveal in the midst of this?
32:44
You know, he's now living 60 years after these events.
32:48
He's pastoring church. He is, he's training believers.
32:52
That's great. What's his context for all of
32:54
that? Is the some level which he's not
32:56
speaking to us 2000 years later and he's not actually speaking
33:01
to people of the time of Jesus, even though that's the way the
33:05
language is playing out. Could he be actually talking to
33:08
his own people? Yeah, OK.
33:10
So I want to highlight that. So one section is this, this one
33:15
of the tips is this looking for the general flow of narrative,
33:19
looking for scene changes, character movements and sort of
33:24
trying to bucket some of those context.
33:28
We talked about that what precedes what, what comes after
33:32
and is there any tip or any like observations you can make about
33:35
all of that? And then this one is wait, wait,
33:38
wait, wait, reminding yourself that John is writing, not when
33:43
these events took place. And he has an authorial
33:47
intention. He's trying to communicate to
33:51
some church. Totally.
33:53
Or a group of churches that that will read the book of John.
33:56
Yeah. Who have their own problems.
33:59
So then you. Have to say wait, wait, wait.
34:02
Who is John writing to? Yeah.
34:04
And why would John include this funky section in the in this in
34:09
this passage? So.
34:11
So what was your conclusion there?
34:13
He who is he writing? Well, then, then, then, then, so
34:16
then this was, and this was the interesting part for me.
34:18
Then you've got to decide, well, how technical do I want to land
34:21
on this? Like what percentage of the
34:23
church wants to really nerd out on me with me and what
34:26
percentage wants something a little bit more application
34:31
orientated? Yes.
34:32
So a lot of commentators think that this section where the
34:37
man's thrown out of the synagogue.
34:39
Yeah, yeah. Comes from a a a document called
34:44
The 18 Blessings of Heretics. OK, so Oh yeah, we're going to
34:49
nerd out for a. Minute, the berk of hominem, I
34:52
think it's called. And so around the time of John,
34:58
some really Orthodox Jews put together this document, which is
35:02
18 blessings heretics, but it really means 18 curses, 18
35:07
things that you hope happen to people that that are bad, that
35:10
are bad. Yeah, OK.
35:11
And one of them is directed towards Christians.
35:15
And, and, and so that the the argument of some of these people
35:21
in the more academic stream is that there's not really a record
35:24
of Christians getting thrown out of synagogues or followers of
35:27
Jesus getting thrown out of synagogues anywhere else in our
35:31
readings of the life of Jesus. OK.
35:35
You know, were there even synagogues in Jerusalem that was
35:38
up for grabs for different parts?
35:40
Like was everything located around the temple?
35:41
Why specifically synagogue and not they threw him out of the
35:45
temple? Like these different things like
35:48
that raise questions. Like it just feels like it's
35:51
pulled a little bit out of its own time.
35:54
It's like, wait, which synagogue?
35:56
Like a synagogue in Jerusalem? What was their only one?
35:59
Could he just go to another one? Like, how is this all connected?
36:04
And so then when you start to pull this context into, well, in
36:08
some of these small towns, there's these people throwing
36:12
people out of the one synagogue in town, suddenly it makes a
36:16
little bit more sense. So, so the suggestion, and
36:21
again, I'm not fully on board with this, is that some of this
36:23
language is actually giving Jesus an opportunity to speak
36:31
encouragement to those that are experiencing what this man
36:35
experiencing. 60 plus years. 60 plus years down the line.
36:39
So again, that that's like that's the academic world and
36:42
and that can sometimes be very different from the church.
36:46
And the the wonderful slash terrifying thing about academics
36:49
is like, sometimes they get so hyper focused on one nuance that
36:53
they can just be completely unhelpful.
36:58
And that they they have to keep writing new things if they want
37:01
to keep making like the dollars. Yeah, some of the weird stuff
37:04
that's come up from the biblical theology space where you're
37:08
like, OK, if they could just zoom out 1°, they would realize
37:13
that they're talking nonsense. But the thing that a lot of
37:16
these biblical scholars are actually really exceptional at
37:19
is noticing details like the fact that why in the world is
37:25
there a synagogue in Jerusalem when there's the temple in
37:27
Jerusalem? And we now know the worst
37:29
synagogues, but it's very specific to a specific place.
37:32
Yep. And, and, you know, it's not,
37:34
it's almost like saying like they threw him out of a specific
37:38
church, but he lived in a city where there were 35 churches and
37:42
he could have gone to any others.
37:43
That that makes more sense when you think, well, it's a rural
37:48
town in the middle of nowhere with one church and then
37:51
suddenly you can't attend that one church.
37:53
That makes it a little bit more interesting.
37:56
And relevant. So in the middle of your study,
37:57
you did this first pass. You've got some basic structure.
38:01
You've noted mentally, some like potential hyperlinks to Old
38:04
Testament passages, You've seen the context and you kind of have
38:09
a pretty strong hunch at this point what the main thrust of
38:14
the passage is gonna be. But.
38:15
You're gonna keep it till the end.
38:16
But then you get to this middle section and you're suddenly
38:19
like, you read in a commentary about this debate about
38:22
sabbatics. You're like, oh I gotta chase
38:23
this lead at least a little bit to see if it's relevant to my.
38:27
Sermon. And I'm also like, if I'm trying
38:28
to describe the sermon at the journey as a journey, at that
38:30
point, I'm like, you know, it felt like to start with we were
38:34
driving through some really interesting landscape.
38:37
And the end's kind of interesting as well.
38:39
Yeah. Yeah.
38:39
In between that there's like 80 miles of just desolate.
38:44
Yeah, Nebraska. Highway Nebraska.
38:47
Like it just feels like it's A and.
38:49
You're like, is that a wildflower?
38:51
Should I talk about that one? Wildflower like is there.
38:55
Any hope in this section? So then there's got to be so,
38:57
so, so that's when I started looking at how the characters
39:01
interacted and how they're talking about what's happened
39:06
and about Jesus and about God and about, you know, Jesus as
39:11
God. Is the best way to say.
39:14
That and so that's when I started trying to press a little
39:18
bit on like, well, well, what does Jesus seem to encourage as
39:22
an attitude towards himself? What does he tend to warn people
39:25
about? How does he tend to like operate
39:28
and what sort of people are the people that end up following
39:31
Jesus well and what are the people that tend to end up
39:34
rejecting? Jesus.
39:35
OK, so, but to close the loop on that, that messy middle of this
39:40
text, Jesus isn't in the scene sort of scene to where he's not
39:45
a part of it. How did you wiggle your way out
39:48
of this debate about synagogues? Did you decide that none of that
39:54
was helpful reading? I.
39:55
Think how did you just. Yeah, I would just give a brief
39:59
reference, right. Well, so yeah, so like, was that
40:05
rabbit trail that you chased in your study time, did you end up
40:08
using it as an? Interpretation, yes.
40:11
Well, I did, yes. So I just threw out, hey, a lot
40:16
of academics think John is writing to a different audience
40:19
here and just gave them enough that if people want to follow
40:21
it, they can follow it. But it's going to take a real
40:23
nerd to want to delve into that. World, OK.
40:27
But but I started thinking that. Doesn't mean you didn't use it.
40:30
So like, you can use, for example, again, now we're
40:37
talking about reading the bio plus preaching it.
40:39
But there's an all these Old Testament references here.
40:44
Yeah. And anytime you're teaching,
40:46
especially a large passage, you don't have time to go read every
40:50
cross reference, especially when you're reading a joke John
40:53
passage. There's just so many.
40:54
Of them, yeah. Yeah, it's obnoxious that you
40:57
may use one of those cross references to an Old Testament
41:03
passage to give yourself greater confidence that you're
41:06
interpreting correctly, but never mentioned it to the
41:09
congregation 'cause you don't have time.
41:12
Was that messy middle your conclusion about the whole
41:16
writing to a different audience? Did you use that to like,
41:19
bolster your confidence in your final big idea?
41:23
No, it really actually helped me in that section right there.
41:26
OK, So with the idea of the certainty of the Pharisees
41:30
versus the curiosity of the man of the man, which seemed like a
41:34
healthy extrapolation of yeah, that's exactly what's happening
41:38
in 90 AD 2. There's a whole bunch of people
41:41
that have had this curiosity and actually come to faith in Jesus,
41:44
take the step that the man will take eventually.
41:47
And there's still these Jewish leaders around that are still
41:49
certain that the old truths, the old ways, are still exactly how
41:53
they're. Supposed to so you don't have to
41:55
tell the US as the audience that you follow this, you know,
42:01
rabbit trail. But when you you're move that
42:05
movement at the way you unpacked it, you got a little confident.
42:09
From that exegesis and and then you get like this, these
42:14
parallels that start going off in your mind all the way through
42:17
scripture. Suddenly you're talking thinking
42:19
about, well, Paul talks about like, well, how many of you are
42:22
wise? How many of you are wealthy and
42:24
poor? And like, no, no, that's not
42:26
who's here. Here is those that are curious
42:29
that are desperate for something more like that's how he
42:32
characterizes the church. And then you think through how
42:35
hard it is for people to see God in you know, that that tend to
42:40
and I've been this person and maybe still am at times.
42:42
That's that's the risk. You know, you get very certain
42:46
about how God works. I remember sitting in a
42:48
Pentecostal church. I was probably 2021 years old
42:52
and I remember thinking about theology and I remember looking
42:55
back and saying, wow, isn't it incredible?
42:58
Every big theological conversation in history, the
43:03
Pentecostal church was right on. Like we've landed on the right
43:07
side every single time. Isn't that incredible?
43:11
Like we were like, you know, like when it when the split east
43:13
and West, like we were the right side Protestants versus Rome,
43:19
right side, the work of baptism of adults, right side, the gift
43:25
of the spirit, right side. Like we just were batting 1000
43:30
in terms of what God wants for his church.
43:33
And then you get old enough to spend time with E Eastern
43:36
Orthodox people. Yeah.
43:37
And they're like, no, you were wrong the first time, Like and
43:41
and you've been. Wrong.
43:41
And you're like. Ever since then because of that.
43:44
I think I agree. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
43:46
Yeah. Yeah, you're like this
43:47
understanding, yeah of of like the Trinity or something in like
43:51
the Eastern Orthodox Church just has this gorgeous expression of
43:54
talking about the Trinity and the.
43:56
Yeah, yeah, and and those relationships and you're like,
43:58
and the meanwhile the the the Western side of that argument
44:03
just kind of in the process of debate lost some of the beauty
44:07
of the. Well, they, they, yeah, they
44:08
dissected it and it died in the process.
44:10
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, the frog that
44:12
you cut up in school, like, yeah, you can't, can't survive
44:16
the, the endless debate. Interesting.
44:18
And the Eastern Orthodox Church were just much more comfortable
44:21
taking it as a living truth and, and living into it.
44:25
So I, so I think that then suddenly you've got all of these
44:29
alarm bells going off for the church, local and, and
44:36
worldwide, for yourself, for the people that, you know, in a
44:39
community that are pulled by different elements of culture,
44:45
each of which has a very certain view of Hugh Jesus, who Jesus
44:49
is. And so suddenly you're invited
44:52
into this place of like, oh man, there's one thing we should be
44:56
about Jesus. It's curious.
44:59
Like if there's one thing we should be able to say is I don't
45:02
have him figured out yet. You know, A good friend, Carolyn
45:07
Schmidt, has a lovely an exegesis and love about Isaiah 6
45:13
where it talks about the seraphim and the cherubim bowing
45:16
down repeatedly to God. And she said at some point God
45:21
said, she asked him that, you know, how are they still
45:24
excited, you know, and how are they still lost in worship?
45:28
And she said, God said to her, because they've been worshipping
45:32
me for, I mean, eternity or whatever you want, and they
45:36
still haven't come to the end of me.
45:39
They still haven't got me figured out.
45:41
And so that that's the beautiful posture that the man has right
45:46
now. He's so curious about Jesus.
45:49
And you watch as he grows in confidence as he says more and
45:52
more. And his last, last phrase is
45:57
exactly what Nicodemus has said. You know this legendary teacher
46:01
of Israel. Interesting because that that
46:06
was an interpretive perspective on Nicodemus when we were
46:09
studying that section where Nicodemus is the 1 character
46:14
who's curious enough to approach Jesus.
46:16
He he stays curious enough to say, let's withhold judgement.
46:20
Too soon. And then all of that curiosity
46:22
culminates at the end of the book where he's the one of the
46:25
few religious leaders who gets it and maybe even gets it faster
46:29
than some of the disciples. And it's.
46:31
Curiosity. The drive.
46:32
It's curiosity. Yeah, yeah.
46:34
So. So in scriptural level,
46:37
curiosity doesn't kill the cat. Curiosity potentially makes the
46:42
disciple like it potentially is the thing that we get to do
46:45
where we keep waking up every morning saying I wonder what God
46:49
will reveal about himself today If I'm paying attention, you
46:54
know, will will I get to see another little facet?
46:59
We we S get to start working with kids, you know a few weeks
47:06
old and get to see them come up through, you know, middle
47:10
school, elementary through middle school, high school.
47:13
But none of us, I think would ever say of them.
47:16
I hope that the faith they have here is exactly like that 30-40
47:22
years down the line. We want them to grow when it
47:25
wanted to become their own and what that we want them to see
47:28
Jesus in new ways and and and they will like as they go
47:34
through hard things suffering as they experience loss and
47:39
rejection and all the sort of things that just is a part of
47:43
life in each new way. If they let him, the God of the
47:46
universe will reveal themselves to him.
47:48
And that's exactly what Jesus says at the end.
47:51
He says if you can put up your hand and say I am blind, that
47:55
makes you a good candidate for God's revelation.
47:59
If you put your hand up and say I can see perfectly well, that
48:04
makes you a good candidate for never seeing God this verse. 41
48:08
Jesus said if you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin.
48:11
Yeah. But now that you claim you can
48:14
see, your guilt remains. Yeah, it's yeah, like, yeah,
48:21
Curious. And this is actually talking
48:25
about Scripture in general. If this isn't how you're
48:31
supposed to approach Scripture or how formation actually
48:37
happens, a process of being curious about Jesus for a
48:41
lifetime, then why in the world would God have provided us a
48:45
text like this? It's the nature of the scripture
48:50
itself, the genres. Why in the world, if you wanted
48:53
to create certainty in your followers, would you ever
48:56
include a poem? And almost 1/3 of the entire
49:03
Bible has poetic representations in it.
49:06
You're like, if your goal is to create absolute certainty and
49:09
like, clear up this issue, black and white, don't ever include
49:15
poetry. So it's like God's inviting us
49:18
on these journeys at every text, every story is supposed to kind
49:24
of let you explore and progress and all of this sort.
49:28
And so then this, this becomes the hard thing because, and I
49:32
said this on Sunday, I'd say it again, what we're not saying is
49:34
there aren't truths to hold on to about who Jesus is that have
49:37
been passed down of over thousands of years.
49:41
We're not arguing. I'm not arguing against those
49:44
things and I hold on to those things too.
49:48
It's actually the everyday experience of God we're talking
49:52
about here now. Now theology comes into that.
49:55
And actually, the, the, the fascinating element that we
50:00
talked about with The Academy Is a desire is a curiosity to know
50:06
more. There's a famous book by Raymond
50:09
Brown on John, the community of the beloved disciple.
50:13
And his argument in that is that Jesus had two groups of
50:16
disciples that, you know, the reason John is so different is
50:20
because it's a, a different conversation at times.
50:23
And in the opening to his book, he says, if you can accept 60%
50:29
of what I say, I'd be delighted. He's just swinging for the
50:33
fences. He's like, I'm just going to try
50:35
out some new ideas and if you can buy 60% of them, that that's
50:40
going to be great. So, so sometimes what the
50:43
Academy does can feel a little bit of a stretch and it probably
50:50
is, but it but it's it's own way of trying to be curious and
50:54
trying to figure out who who God is and how he's revealed.
50:58
Yeah. And the best, the best
51:00
theologians are, are the ones that hold their conclusions with
51:07
open hands. And I would argue that the
51:10
majority of those in the academic space, you know, tend
51:18
to help with that process. There's a few conclusions out
51:23
there that some theologians are make where they just become
51:25
bullheaded about. Like, this is what I wrote my
51:28
dissertation on. I can't see anything but that
51:30
thing anymore. And those tend to be the ones
51:34
that I find least helpful, where they're just like, this is
51:37
definitely how you interpret this passage.
51:39
Yeah. Yeah.
51:42
There's a great, There's a great Old Testament writer called John
51:46
Golden Gay. He was a British guy, became
51:50
professor of Old Testament at Fuller Seminary.
51:53
And John's like, I mean, he's just incredible in his breadth
51:57
of knowledge, but he has these great descriptors about how you
52:02
both read a text and try and engage with the God of the text.
52:06
And he says, on one hand, people always say, well, there's
52:09
reading the text and believing. So you read it at its simplest
52:13
face value level, and you just say that's just what it is.
52:16
Now that has a load of problems, as we know, because all of your
52:19
culture is involved in reading the text, all of your
52:21
assumptions that you bring to it, and you may never get very
52:23
far with it at all. And then he says, on the other
52:26
hand, there's criticism. It's reading it, trying to pull
52:28
it apart, trying to, you know, the historical Jesus movement,
52:31
trying to say everything that we believe means nothing.
52:34
Documentary hypothesis all these.
52:35
Throw the baby out with the bathwater method, it says.
52:38
Both of those are wrong postures, he says.
52:40
What we do here is we do believe in criticism.
52:44
We deeply believe in the God who gave us this, the God who came
52:48
and died for us. We deeply believe in the story.
52:51
But we're going to ask as many questions as we can possibly can
52:56
about what God might be trying to say through this test text
52:59
and what it means. And so the, the metaphor that
53:02
comes to mind then is it's like standing in in, in a, in a spot
53:10
and to keep you safe, someone's built walls all around you to
53:15
make sure that you can't get very far from that spot.
53:20
And the problem isn't that you can't move, it's that you can no
53:23
longer see. Like now your vision is blocked
53:26
and you can no longer quite see clearly.
53:29
And I think what we try and do when we come to the text is we
53:32
try and push down the walls that have been built, not so we can
53:35
run from the spot, but so that we can see God more clearly.
53:40
Yeah, so I, I had a professor and he said something and he was
53:44
talking about Old Testament narrative primarily, but I think
53:47
it's true with most, maybe not most genres, but like narrative
53:51
and poetry and stuff. He said the first task of, of,
53:55
of interpretation is imagining. And he said, so here's what I
54:01
want you to do. I want you to read this, the
54:03
passage first few times and let your imagination run wild.
54:08
Yeah. Just what time of day was it?
54:12
Like how is this character feeling?
54:14
Just like let your imagination try and picture the scene go
54:18
crazy. And then like, you do go through
54:23
it with commentary, historical context, the context of the
54:27
author and reign in that imagination.
54:32
Yeah. So like if you say, oh, I think
54:34
so and so feels like this. They they're so sad.
54:39
And then you start to do exegesis and you find this like,
54:43
ancient Hebrew phrase that represents that they're happy.
54:47
Well, you have to throw up the sad and imaginative thing.
54:50
Oh, he's not sad. He's actually happy because we
54:53
see this phrase show up in all these ancient texts and that
54:57
that that figure of speech always means the character's
55:00
happy. OK, so you can like remove that
55:03
imaginative thing, but this is how old test or how the Bible
55:06
tends to function is you're supposed to insert all of this
55:10
exploration, curiosity, imagination in order to to get
55:15
an interpretation. It's designed for that kind of
55:18
engagement. And then you reign it in with
55:20
the interpretive skills that you have over the years and then
55:24
come to this conclusion with you have a really robust text.
55:27
Well, so one of the interesting things about this passage, and I
55:29
didn't get here because it felt the time a little too much and
55:34
all sorts of reasons really, but at its heart, the passage is
55:39
epistemological. It's about how you know how you
55:43
can tell truth, how you can find the answer.
55:47
Almost. The theory of knowledge.
55:49
Yeah. And the Pharisees believe that
55:53
you can find knowledge because somebody told you the answer.
55:57
And the man believes that you can find knowledge because you
56:01
experience it for yourself. So the Pharisees are like, well,
56:06
no, it can't be this because of everything we've been told
56:08
before. And the man believes it because
56:11
he says that's cool. You say he's a Sinner.
56:15
He opened my eyes. Yeah, I don't know.
56:17
Like one thing I know once I was blind.
56:21
This. Is the best mic drop maybe in
56:23
the book of John? Yeah, you're right.
56:25
Like just a fantastic. One, that's a great argument.
56:28
Nifty. Cool, I can.
56:30
See stuff. So he's like, your problems are
56:33
like, you don't know where he comes from.
56:35
You don't know who his family are.
56:37
You don't know how he fits with the narratives that you've been
56:39
given. My problem is you want me to
56:43
reject him for all of those reasons, and yet I experienced
56:48
something beyond any of those reasons.
56:51
And that deep down is what you hope a church community is
56:55
about. We want people to believe first,
56:58
like, and this comes up in John again.
57:00
First we believed because of what you told us.
57:04
Now we believe because we've met him from ourselves.
57:06
Like that's what church is supposed to be about.
57:09
Like, no one in the end can say I believe because someone
57:14
assured me they experienced something.
57:18
This faith is still an experiential faith.
57:21
Like that's why we have as one of our pathways, we want to
57:24
create experiences that lead to encounters with Jesus.
57:28
We want people not just to get knowledge, but have an
57:32
experience of God. And the good news of
57:35
Christianity is the still still the God that appears in visions
57:39
to Iranians all over the world right now, you know, revealing
57:44
himself as the man in white who loves them, who died for them.
57:47
Still appears to everyday suburban folk in Colorado, too.
57:56
Or maybe maybe this last Sunday when we're worshipping being led
58:00
by a salute one of the Tico students and you're just like,
58:04
oh, this is this is only God does this kind of stuff and.
58:08
You're this is where John's brilliant because he talks about
58:11
all that. And then he gets to this week
58:15
and he starts to talk about it not as seeing this time, but as
58:18
hearing Yeah. And and and he starts to let us
58:22
know that we are being called. It's all about whether we're
58:26
here or not. Yeah, you know, and, and, and
58:29
and you know that that that's, that's his brilliance.
58:32
That's his gift of a book that presents the same Jesus but with
58:37
these beautiful different elements.
58:40
I love it. Well, I hope you enjoyed a
58:42
slightly different kind of episode this week where we just
58:46
walked through Alex's study process.
58:49
Hope that was insightful. I know it's a lot of text to
58:51
cover, but maybe if you have time, you could go open up the
58:56
Book of John to Chapter 9 and then and sort of follow Alex's
58:59
process through it and learn a few things about how to engage
59:04
this wild, crazy text that the Holy Spirit's preserved for us.
59:09
Yeah, on that bombshell, on that bombshell, while this page
59:15
loads, loading, loading. I can't even.
59:18
I can't even end the episode because the page won't load.
59:22
Come on now. We may just have an eternal
59:26
episode. Hey, I'm sure it'll turn off at
59:29
some point. You know, with how bad this
59:32
website's running, I hope this whole thing's streamed.
59:36
And on that bombshell? Bye.