Welcome And Series Setup

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Welcome and thanks for joining us on this episode of the Midweek Podcast, brought to you by a Fresh Wind Church. Each week, our team brings you new content to help you take steps towards Jesus and discover more in Christ. Today's episode is hosted by Pastor Ryan. Hey, welcome back to the Midweek Podcast. Pastor Ryan joined as always with Pastor Tim, and we are in week three of our sermon series, Signs and Glory, where we're walking through uh the gospel of John. And uh man, having a great time uh going through this series. I told everybody in church on Sunday, make sure you tune into the Midweek Podcast because uh we're gonna try to dive into

Why John Calls Jesus The Lamb

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all the stuff we don't get a chance to cover in the sermon today, is no exception to that. Uh this week we're in John chapter one. Uh you know, Tim, uh I think I gave you 18 verses in week one or week two, I took 19 through 51. So and I still got done almost on time. I I probably went a little longer than you did. But uh, when John uh the Baptist sees Jesus walking up, um, he could have called him a lot of things, could have called him prophet, rabbi, son of God, son of man, the king of Israel. Um, all of those would have been right. They they they all would have been true, but he chose one. He called him the Lamb of God. And so in uh the sermon, I I dove into that very surface level. Um, but on the podcast today, I want to I want to dive a little bit deeper into that because every book of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, follows that same thread, this this lamb that shows up in the garden and goes all the way to to the book of Revelation. So I want to kind of trace that thread across those uh across scripture until why the lamb um is such a big deal. And so John 1 29, uh John the Baptist looks out and he says, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away or who picks up and carries off the sin of the world. And so uh let's dive into to this uh idea about this lamb today.

Abraham’s Question That Echoes

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Sometime around 2000 BC, an old man named Abraham was climbing a mountain. It was in the land of Moriah, and he had his only son with him. On his shoulder was a bundle of wood for a sacrifice, and in his belt was a knife, and in his head was the burning question of his life. Was God really gonna make him do this? Halfway up the mountain, Isaac asked his father a question that uh hits the Bible like a meteor. Um He says, The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Where is the lamb? Abraham answered him with one of the most prophetic sentences in the Old Testament, though he didn't know it was prophetic at the time. He said, God Himself will provide the Lamb. The Bible spends the next 2,000 years answering that question, where is the Lamb? And the answer doesn't show up until John 129. When a wilderness prophet named John the Baptist steps in stops in his tracks and points to a man walking toward him through the dust of the Jordan Valley and says four words that change history. Behold the Lamb of God. The Lamb. Not prophet, not king, not Messiah, not teacher. Like I said earlier, all those would have been true. We could have said any of those about Jesus, and and John wouldn't have been wrong. But John reaches deeper and he picks this one title that the man it runs uh all the way through scripture and he hangs hangs it on this one word for Jesus as he's walking towards him, the Lamb of God.

Why Every Culture Makes Sacrifices

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That's such a you know, just uh putting together this podcast and and seeing how it all comes together, it's something that we forget because we read the Bible in snippets, you know. Uh read a psalm here, read this there, but the entire Bible follows this thread, like you said, the Lamb. The Lamb. You know, uh every ancient culture sacrificed something, and a lot of people will say, What is this big thing about sacrifice in the Bible? It's not just in the Bible. Uh you go to uh any ancient culture, anything they wrote down, they all had sacrifices. And uh we think, isn't that primitive? Don't you think God would have went in a different direction? And it's something that you've heard a lot of people talk about, right? Like, well, why did we need a sacrifice? What was the whole point in this? Well they weren't the only ones, let's put it that way. The ancient Egyptians, they sacrificed bulls, the Babylonians offered grain, oil, and sheep and oxen to Marduk. The Greeks burned animals on the altar to Apollo and Zeus, and the Romans had their own sacrificial cults. Um the Ninevehes, uh, even Solomon was accused of sacrificing people. Uh the Bible doesn't say he did. I'm praying that he didn't, but uh at the advice of his nine hundred wives and concubines, he had put up new altars to different gods, and some of those gods were like Melech, the detestable god of the Ammonites, who demanded um a child. And even the Canaanites, um before the sins of the Ammonites had come in, as God had had put it, um they were sacrificing their children. They would put 'em in jars and bury them outside in front of their house so that they would be blessed. Um then the Aztecs, we know here in in in North America or Americas that they were sacrificing human beings to the gods twenty thousand at a time sometimes. And uh even up until the time when the first European contact with uh Papua New Guinea, they were sacrificing pigs. Uh so it didn't stop until then. Now we wonder why. What is what is the reason why? Well, there was a Catholic anthropologist named Renal Girard, and uh he spent his career studying this, and his conclusion is this whether you believe him or not. Human beings carry an unbearable awareness that something is wrong with us between us and between us and whatever higher power there is. We feel the weight of guilt and the threat of judgment. And sacrifice is the universal attempt to say to say it without saying it, I deserve death. Let this Lamb take it for me. Now, he's Catholic, so that that little statement he just made there is phrased in a way that fits right into our doctrinal statement. Um we're sinners in need of a savior. Yeah. Uh we're we're in need of a sacrifice. It's interesting though, because it's not just the Jews doing this, right? Right or every every different tribe, you know, all these different nations, they're all involved in this. Uh there's sacrifice all across. We've we've got to do something to appease the gods. And so one after another, whether it's a lamb, whether it's a bull, um, grain, or sometimes even children, um, they're all being offered.

God Provides A Substitute

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And you know, God uh was very meticulous when he gave the law to uh the Israelites. This is way, way, way after Abraham, um, about six, seven hundred years after Abraham, that we get the Exodus and God gives him the law. And what God was doing there, he was showing the people he was showing Abraham in the beginning that I'm not like it. And that's this is not the only thing he was saying, but he was saying to Abraham, look, I am not like all these other gods. This insatiable altar. You know, if you think about it, you sacrifice something on the altar and you had a good crop. And then so the next year you're thinking, I'll sacrifice the same thing, but your wife says, We should probably sacrifice a little more just in just just so he knows that we're grateful. And then a little more, and then a little more, and then a kid, and then what? What are we doing here? Right. Uh it's insatiable. But when God laid out the the um law on on how to be right with me, he said, You don't have to worry about everybody else, you don't have to worry about what the altar's claiming they want. I will never change my mind. Give me a lamb in the morning, you give me a lamb at night, and we're good. And uh so one of the things he was telling Abraham at that time, I am not like all these other gods, I will sacrifice for you, I'll provide the sacrifice. I remember you preached a sermon um it was probably a couple years ago, but on on that passage of scripture, and one of the things you brought out in that was you know, God's asking Abraham to come and sacrifice his son Isaac. And so Isaac, or Abraham takes Isaac and starts walking up Mount Moriah. And when Isaac asked that question, where's the lamb? And Abraham looks at him and says, The Lord will provide. But Abraham believed God was able to do something because Isaac was the son of promise. And so Abraham went as far as to take the knife and lift it over his head, preparing to sacrifice his son, and the Lord steps in, and one of the things you said was, God in that moment is proving what you're saying here. I'll never ask for this. Right. I'm not like those other ones. That's a great point. And he provides in that moment a substitution. There's the ram who's caught in the thicket, and Abraham gets to offer that as a sacrifice in place of his son. And so God in that moment does two things. He provides a substitute and then also says, I'm not like these other gods. You're not gonna have to wonder with me what I want. And then, like you're saying, in the law, he just lays it out. Here, here's what it is. If you do this, this is what what's required. You don't have to do more next year. You I'm not, I'm not gonna change my mind. You don't you don't have to bring something different to try to you know get a better result? No, it's this and this, and it's always gonna be that way. And you can know how to be right with me, and you can trust. Yeah. Man, that's a a heavy, a heavy burden on a God who changes his mind all the time. How do I trust you? And at the end, when I've done everything right, will you change your mind then? And uh, so I love it how God does that. You know, the Bible is um it's not random in its themes, you know, it's it's not a it just you know, a book of the Bible here, a book of the Bible there. Even in Ruth, um you guys were preaching on it on uh Mother's Day. Even in Ruth, it's it's about being redeemed. Right. And uh so the Bible is about one thing from Genesis to Revelation. It is one story, and it is a story about a lamb. Track the lamb, and you have tracked the gospel from the beginning of creation till the end of time. And

The First Covering In Eden

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I you you I'm gonna leave it up to you. You need to talk about that first lamb that was. Yeah, it starts right right there in the very beginning, right? In the Garden of Eden after um Adam and Eve sin. What's the very first thing that happens? Is God has to they go into hiding, God comes down, you know. Adam, where are you? And Adam says, Here I am, but I we were naked, so I hid because I was afraid. And what does God have to do? He has to provide clothing for them, and so a sacrifice is made so that he can provide um skins for for Adam and Eve, Eve to clothe them, and an animal had to die for those very first sinners to be covered. Um, and then we just we start tracking this sacrifice that covers sin throughout history. So we just talked about Moriah, uh, where God provides a lamb in place of Abraham having to sacrifice his son Isaac. Um, and so Abraham just names the place right there. He said he called the Lord Will Provide. Right. Um, and like we said, we didn't know exactly what that would look like. Abraham wasn't sure either, but he believed that God would do something. And uh 2,000 years later on a hill not far from Riah, God did. Um and then you go to Egypt, and I talked about this a little bit in my sermon on Sunday, but you know, God is trying to bring uh the nation of Israel out of Egypt. They've been slaves there for hundreds of years, and over and over, Moses goes to Pharaoh and says, Let my people go. Moses' like, no, I'm not doing it. And so finally it gets to the point where God says, Okay, if if you're not gonna, if you're gonna not gonna do this, your heart is gonna be hardened towards me, it's gonna cost, and it's gonna cost the firstborn son of everyone in Egypt, um, including Pharaoh. And the only way that the Israelites were protected from that is they had to take a lamb, sacrifice it, and take the blood of the lamb and put it over the doorpost of their house. Um, and this lamb was very specific, right? It had to be a lamb without blemish, meaning it had to be perfect. Uh, it had to be slaughtered, meaning you couldn't just, you know, give it a little cut. You had to slaughter the lamb. It was a substitute had to die, and then the blood had to be applied. Um, knowledge about what was going on was enough. You had to actually put the blood on your house. Yeah. And when that happened, when the death angel came that night, he would pass over uh the Israelites' houses because there was a substitute. Blood was on the doorpost of their home. And so every Jewish family for the next 1500 years would relive that Passover meal once a year, every year. Um, it's something that we've even uh, you know, uh Dave and Nancy have let us through this the Seder dinner, that Passover meal, what they would have um went through that night. I love, I I love you can already feel where Jesus comes in. You know, there's these sacrifices happening that has to do with your relationship with God. And um and now um we're we're seeing this sacrifice and the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus already, and we haven't even we haven't even got to Exodus, we haven't even got the law yet. Right. Well, and very specific, right? I mean, even as he's laying it out, lamb without blemish, well, we know Jesus is the perfect spotless Lamb of God. Uh he had to be slaughtered, and Jesus hung and crucified on that Roman cross. The blood had to be applied. Yeah, all these things. Uh it's very specific, and you're seeing these hints of what is to come.

Passover Blood And Daily Offerings

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And then you get to the wilderness tabernacle. Uh, you you mentioned this earlier, but um, every single day, two unblemished year-old male lambs had to be offered as a regular burnt offering, one in the morning, one at night. And I and imagine that every year or every day of every year this had to be done. For 1,500 years, roughly one million lambs slaughtered, burned, their blood splashed on the altar. And it was never enough. You used the word earlier, insatiable. It felt that way. It's never enough. And the truth is, it was never gonna fix the problem, right? Mankind was gonna go on sinning, and so that meant more sacrifices had to be made. If we could just stop sinning, you know, maybe, maybe all these lambs wouldn't have to die, but we couldn't. We can't. We're slaves to sin, scripture says. And so one after another, day after day, morning and evening, a lamb was slaughtered. And the author of Hebrews just says it this way. He's he said it was impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. It was impossible. It was insatiable. The system was a placeholder, but it was pointing to something else. And what was it pointing to? Well, the prophet Isaiah tells us about 700 BC, he writes one of the most stunning chapters, um, I think in all of scripture. He's he's describing someone who hasn't even been born yet. And so he sees this vision and he writes this He was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities. Punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds. He says, We all went uh astray like sheep, and we all have turned uh to our own way, and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth like a lamb, there's that word, led to the slaughter, and like a sheep silent before his shears, he did not open his mouth. A lamb pierced, crushed, silent, carrying the iniquity of us all. And he says it's it's like a a person, but he's describing it like a lamb. And this was 700 years before Jesus ever shows up on the scene. And so you read that, and if you if you didn't know that that was written in 700 BC, you'd be like, oh, he's talking about Jesus. But nobody had ever heard of Jesus then, right? You know, none of those events had happened. I mean, Roman crucifixion wasn't even invented at this point. That's true. And he's describing all of these things 700 years before it happens, and he sees something that the priests serving in the temple haven't even quite seen yet, that the Lamb is going to be a man. And then you fast forward 700 years, and then there's JB, I called him John the Baptist in the Jordan Valley, and there's people all over the place. He's he's teaching, he's baptizing the people, the religious leaders come out, they're asking them all these questions. And then he sees Jesus, his cousin, Yeshua, walking by, and every thread that we just traced, Eden, Moriah, Egypt, uh, Numbers, Isaiah, it all comes down here into this one moment. Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. So John the Baptist had to be pretty studied in his Old Testament prophets and uh to understand who he was uh making the way for, and and called him by name, the Lamb, the Lamb. And not a lamb, the Lamb, right? Not a substitute for one family or for the the nation of Israel. He said, This is a substitute for the whole world. And he's not this temporary placeholder like the uh sacrificial system in the temple was. This is one sacrifice for all time. The altar is no longer insatiable. We don't have to show up day after day and offer another sacrifice. He was the perfect ultimate sacrifice, the fulfillment of every lamb that ever bled before him was all fulfilled in Jesus. And so Jesus walks toward that cross. He is the Passover lamb, he is the daily sacrifice fulfilled forever. He is the lamb that God himself provided, and he is the lamb that takes away, not covers or delays or partially atones, he takes away the sin of the world.

Revelation’s Slaughtered Lamb On Throne

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And then we come all the way to the book of Revelation. And John, the same John who was there with John the Baptist when he heard John say, Hey, look, behold, or look, the Lamb of God. John, the author of that book, is taken up to the throne room of heaven and he's weeping because no one has been found worthy to open the scroll of God's plan. And then one of the elders around the throne says, John, don't weep, look. The lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has triumphed. And so John looks up and he's expecting. You would expect to see a lion, because that's what the elder just said. The lion of the tribe of Judah. But then in verse 6 of Revelation chapter 5, it's one of the most stunning lines. John looks up and he says, Then I saw one like a slaughtered lamb standing in the middle of the throne, in heaven, glorified in the seat of highest authority after the resurrection and the ascension, after everything. Jesus is still the Lamb. He still carries the scars. He's still called by that title that he earned at Calvary, hanging upon the cross, the Lamb. And he has taken away the sin of the world. Twenty-eight times in the book of Revelation, Jesus is called the Lamb. And in heaven, he's not addressed as teacher or king or his prophet. The angels and the redeemed all call him the Lamb. Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. This is our God. This is Jesus forever, the Lamb of God. Sixty-six books written over a period of time, fifteen hundred years. And uh now since the beginning of it, it's been uh thirty, five hundred years. All of it points to one thing forty different author authors and different time settings, and um all points to Jesus being the Lamb of God. It's one thread, it's the gospel of Jesus Christ runs all the way through the substitutionary atonement of the death of the Lamb. And he's gonna be the Lamb forever, and he'll that's a title that he'll never give up. And it should it should shock you that the as I preached um the uh first chapter that this lamb was the creator God. He spoke the world into existence. But he will always be this Lamb. I told I told them that Sunday that he'll always be a man. He loved us enough that he would become a man for the rest of eternity to be with us. See, a king who wins a battle can shed his army when the war is over, and a general who wins a campaign can hang up his uniform, and a prophet who delivers his message can quit. But Jesus, the conquering Lord of all creation, never sheds the title Lamb. Not in glory, not at the right hand of the Father, not at his second coming, and not in eternity. Why? Because the scars he bore on the cross outside Jerusalem are the marks of the deepest love in the universe. The cross is not Jesus' embarrassment, the cross is his crown. And the lambs, the wounds are the eternal proof that God loves you, people. Um even Thomas, when he wouldn't believe in the resurrection and he spouts off, he didn't know he was gonna get called to the test. He said, I'll have to see his wounds in his hand and put my hand in his hand. Yeah, and put my fingers right in there. Yeah. And Jesus shows up and says, All right, dude. Here you go. Well, I hold on. I get it, I get it, I see it, I see it. No, put him in there. The

Grace Upon Grace You Cannot Outsin

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lamb title means that you can never outsend God's grace. He's the Lamb forever, and that means his grace goes on and on and on. Like John said in the first chapter, he said, Grace upon grace, grace like on the beach when the waves come in. I loved how you describe it, because you can just picture it, right? Just sitting there on the beach, just watching wave after wave after wave. That's that's the grace of God. It just keeps coming in. It's endless. It's endless. You know, I I think it's important for us to step outside of humanity for a minute. Because we struggle with this stuff and we look in the Bible. I know there's a lot of people saying, You guys are just putting this all together, and it's like, listen, it's not just us. It's not just us. It's the angels. It's the um rulers and the authorities and the powers that run our root uh universe. They call him the lamb who was slaughtered. The lamb on the throne forever. That's what they call him. And if I I think that's a pretty good I don't see a lot of t-shirts about the lamb. There should be more t-shirts about the lamb. We got we got a lot of t-shirt. Yeah, we got a lot of we got a lot of t-shirts uh about Jesus being magnificent and all that kind of stuff. And he is. But it's kind of it's it's hard for us to call him the lamb. But if he wasn't the lamb, then you couldn't have eternal life. The lamb, it I mean you just p you picture a lamb and it seems meek, right? Um it just doesn't carry the punchline like the lion of the tribe of Judah. You're like, all right, I can I can get behind a lion, let's do it. Yeah. And then you're like, lamb? Well, golly, what am I gonna do with that? This lamb changed everything. And I love that, like you said, John must have known. Uh he must have been pretty well studied up because when he sees the the spirit descend and settle on Jesus, he knew right away this is the lamb. Everything that we've been looking forward to, everything that the Old Testament law, the sacrificial system, all of that was built on, it's here. It's it's fulfilled in this man, Jesus, the Lamb of God. And he's gonna be that way forever. There's never gonna be a time when he's he's not the Lamb. And when we get to heaven and and look at him, he's still there, the Lamb. And I just I can I'm trying to place myself in John's shoes there in Revelation when he, you know, the the elder comes and says, Hey, you don't gotta weep, man. The lion is is conquered. And he looks up, expecting to see that roaring lion and sees the slaughtered lamb. And the picture just doesn't look like what we thought it would. Right. It it it looks so different and yet this is this is what it's been about, that thread that goes all the way back to the garden when God had to make that sacrifice to create those that covering for Adam and Eve and winds its way all the way through scripture here to say here here he is, the Lamb of God.

The Lamb Looks Weak But Chooses Love

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I think one of the problems with our viewership or or the way we picture this when we think of the lamb is that um the lamb is weak. And it is weak. Um you can uh they say you can slaughter fifty lambs and one right after the other and and the one at the end of the line still don't know what's going on. Hey, what's going on, guys? And and that's that tempts men to think, you know, I don't want that to be me. But we gotta remember when Jesus said, Um, nobody takes my life from me, I lay it down. And that's something that we need to get a hold of in our brains, that Jesus did not have to do this. He did not have to save the world. He didn't have to, he chose to. He chose to lay his life down. Um there's there's no um verse in the Bible that talks about he could have called for support, but um he could have called ten thousand angels to destroy the world and set him free. And I bet that I bet there were legions and legions of angels in um sitting in heaven when he was being cruciflogged and crucified. How long are we gonna let this go on? Um Matthew 26, 53 says, Do you think I cannot call on my father and he would at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? That was twelve thousand. But I I remember that song. He could have called ten thousand angels, but he didn't. He gave himself up for us. Not because God made him do it, he had a choice, he proves that in the garden, right, when he's praying. And but this is this is the the truth about the one you call King Jesus. He is the Lamb because he chose to be, he didn't have to be. Yeah, it looks like weakness, but it's actually strength, you know. You said earlier the the cross wasn't embarrassment, it was the crown. The whole thing looks upside down, man. Um here he is, the the lamb of God. And I you know, I love John in Revelation. He's he's talking about the 144, and there's a lot of speculation on who those 144,000 people are. Right. Um, I remember I had a Jehovah's Witness guy trying to convert me one day, and I was like, hey man, listen, only 144 are getting in. What are you doing? You guys need to wrap this up. Stop it. The ones that are getting in are in, buddy. Right. You know what you're doing. Uh you guys have the wrong uh evangelism strategy here. I'd make sure I was in, and that would be, I'm not telling nobody. Right. I think, you know, again, a lot of speculation. I think it's just saying the fullness of the 12 apostles, 12 disciples. Um, you multiply that and multiply it by a thousand number of completion, and it's okay, 144. I think he's just saying everybody, all those who are in Christ. But in Revelation 14, he says those ones are the ones he says, not defiled themselves with women since they remain virgins. These are the ones who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They were redeemed from humanity as the first fruits for God and the Lamb. Over and over again, all throughout Revelation, as he's talking about Jesus, it keeps coming back to this title, Lamb. And so, as you as you read scripture, I want to encourage you um trace, trace the lamb. As you, I think you said it earlier, as you you follow the lamb, you you follow the gospel, and you can it starts all the way in Genesis and and goes all the way through Revelation, and you just keep following that lamb, and what you'll find is the gospel. God's been hinting towards it for those thousands of years leading up to Christ, and then Jesus walks on the scene and John sees him and says, Here he is. This is what we've we've been looking for. We got to go back to Isaac's question, where is the lamb? So they where is the lamb all the way till John chapter two, right? Where's the lamb? And John said, John, JB, John the Baptist said, He's right there, guys. He's right there. Two thousand years later, um, we should be asking the same situation.

Where Is The Lamb In Your Life

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Every time we get in a situation at work and every circumstance is where's the lamb in this? Yeah. Jesus, what do you want me to do? Where where are you? Where where's the lamb in this? Um we need to be a people who is looking for the Lamb because He's everywhere on this planet. He's um sharing his gospel and the Holy Spirit moves through us, and we'll be able to recognize the Lamb when we see it. And he's promised that. Uh we'll be in tune, or um we'll testify with it, as the Bible puts it. So uh where is where's the lamb in this argument with your wife? Where is the lamb in this problem with your kids? Where is where's the lamb with um your struggle with your finances? Where is he? Where do I find him in this? They ask it for thousands of years, where's the lamb? And uh sometimes even as Christians today, we know he's our savior, but where is he? Where is he trying to save me in the situation I'm in right now? And he's there to do just that. Where's the lamb? Isaac, that's that's a catchphrase there. There's that t-shirt I was talking about. Where's the lamb? Where's the lamb? Here he is, the lamb of God who picks up and carries away the sin of the world. This is uh it's been fun uh diving in. We're only one chapter in into the book of John. And last week on the midweek podcast, we covered seven core doctrines. Here we trace seven different uh spots where we see the lamb showing up throughout history. I don't know if the number seven's gonna keep showing up, but it does make a you know an appearance in scripture. Don't go weirdo.

Go Deeper Without Getting Weird

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But I want to encourage you, keep uh keep showing up on Sundays, keep tuning in uh to dive into these things because I think it's gonna expand our appreciation of scripture. Because we read these things, you know, you said you know, John the Baptist must have must have known. He must have been pretty studied uh to know. Well, John, the author, to to put this all together the way he did and weave all these themes in like he does, he smart guy, man. You know, and well, if you get three years with Jesus alone, you should you should be pretty smart. At least, at least on spiritual things, anyways. And so 40 plus authors, 60 plus books, 66 books written over, you know, 1,500 years in different uh parts of the world, and it's all been pointing to one guy. Hasn't changed, passed down to us 2,000 years later, and we're doing the same thing that they did. Where is the land? Right, right. And so as you you study scripture this summer, I want to encourage you um expand your your thinking. I was talking with Larry this week, and he's like, Man, I just feel like God is calling us as Christians to to go deeper. Go deeper this summer as as we walk through the the gospel of John, go deeper. Look for these these connections. And I think you know, there's there's also a danger. We we try to find something under every every rock, every word, you know, what's the secret meeting here? Sometimes the Bible just means what it says. Jesus said I was hungry. Oh, what's that? What does that mean? You probably wanted some food. Yeah. So I'm not I'm not sure. Number one, now we got to figure out the other six things we know, right? Right. But there are there is this call, you know, and and I feel a little bit like you know, the apostle Paul here, like, let's let's move on past milk. Like, let's start chewing on on some of these deeper things of God. Let's let's dive deep. Um, you know, just right into the deep end this summer and and let's just swim around in in all that God has for us here. Yeah, I think it's important that you do this. Look, you're not gonna find um the all these answers that you want and connect it like you want, and then be able to put that in your memory and be able to pull it out anytime. God wants you to wrestle with him and what he's done for you. He wants you to wrestle with it. And it's the only way you'll ever learn to appreciate it. And if you push yourself away from the scriptures or the deeper things of God, you'll never truly come to appreciate what the Lamb has done for you. You end up at this the place, if you'll do this, where John the author was, where he says, I I don't even need to name myself, I'm just the one Jesus loved. And that's

Bring Your Sin To The Lamb

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enough for me. And you'll get there. If all I can say about my life is I'm the one he loved, it's enough. He did it for me. All this sacrifice talk and all this talk about the Lamb, and he was for me. I'm the one he loved. And what a privilege it is to be known as a friend and a child of God. The Lamb who comes and picks up and carries away not just the sin of the world, he carries away your sin, he carries away my sin. Some of you will pick this up and put it in your pocket and love it and pet it, and it'll be the greatest thing. But I know there's some of you out there who struggle with who you were before you're a Christian, what you've done since you've become a Christian, and you're struggling. And uh you're wondering if you're worthy. Well, let me answer that for you straight up. You're not. And that's he loved you so much to become your lamb. He is your personal lamb who died for you for the rest of eternity. You need to believe it. I know it's it's tough to wrestle with it, but it's okay. The more you wrestle, the more you'll love him. Well, what did Adam and Eve do? When they sinned, first thing that is they try to cover it up, right? I gotta hit, hide, and I'm gonna make these fig leaves. We're gonna cover it up. Quit trying to hide it, man. Just bring it to the Lamb. He he's the one. First John uh 1 7 says, The blood of Jesus his son, or the blood of the Lamb cleanses us from all sin. Bring it to him. Over and over and over again. I know you've prayed about it a thousand times. Bring it to him the thousand and first time. Do it again. The blood of the lamb's enough. It's always been enough. Lord, I pray that the cry of our heart will be where is the Lamb? Every situation we find ourselves in, where is Jesus in this? What's his side? What's his uh view of what's going on here? And how would he respond? Lord, I pray that you'll you'll give us that desire in our heart to look for you in every situation. At the same time, I'm gonna be the voice of a fresh win here, and we're gonna lift up our praises, and you are worthy. You didn't have to do what you did. And you're worthy of all our praise, all our gratitude. You're worthy. Thank you for being you. In your name I pray. Amen. Amen.

How To Connect And Support

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