The Controversialist No.2 About His Connections

. Let's turn in God's Word to a little selection of readings, and let's put the context together of the verse that I read a little earlier, which was from Matthew's Gospel in the twelfth chapter, tucked away right at the end, our Lord Jesus is maintaining that faith relationship with His Father, which is so apparent throughout the whole of His earthly pilgrimage, and particularly those last three years where, of course, we have the most information. Matthew 11, verse 25, At that time Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.

All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. Let's go through to John's Gospel, the tenth chapter, fantastic words here.

John chapter 10, I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but claims in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. Verse seven, I tell you the truth, I am the gate, I am the door for the sheep. All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers.

Eleven, I am the good shepherd, the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Verse 14, I am the good shepherd, I know my sheep, and my sheep know me, just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. Chapter 13, it was just before the Passover feast.

Jesus knew that the time had come for Him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved His own who were in the world, He now showed them the full extent of His love. The evening meal was being served.

Verse four, so He got up from the meal, took off His outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around His waist. That phrase just before verse four, Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under His power and that He had come from God and was returning to God. Chapter 17, Jesus' prayer, Father, the time has come.

Glorify Your Son, that Your Son may glorify You. I have, verse six, revealed You to those whom You gave Me out of the world. Verse seven, now they know that everything You have given Me comes from You, for I gave them the words You gave Me, and they accepted them.

They knew with certainty that I came from You. Verse 11, I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to You. Holy Father, protect them by the power of Your name, the name You gave Me.

Well, we're continuing this series which started last week on Jesus the Controversialist, and we were looking last week about His teachings, and though these individual studies are not compact, there is a measure of overflow. I want to move from considering His specific teachings to considering His assertion, to considering His claims. Connectivity is a new word for many of us.

It's a language that comes from computers. The more connected you are, the more in touch you are, the greater your variety of software, the greater the connectivity. But, of course, you get this concept in a more comprehensible, at least as far as some of our older friends are concerned, era, situation.

When you think about the expression, He is well connected. He is well connected. In other words, perhaps He's got an ear to Tony Blair or Her Majesty the Queen At the moment, the Elfired family may be improving their connections.

Possibly they're more enthusiastic than the House of Windsor that their connectivity rating is on the increase. Well, let's with that mind think about the connectivity of Jesus, the connections that Jesus had. And I'll give you an overhead just to guide you through what I want to share, and we'll get through it little by little.

Jesus was really an enigma on earth, heaven's enigma on earth. That's how I've described Him. He combines a humility that is winsome with an assertiveness that is awesome.

I mean, take His combination of disinterest and dismissiveness with a so-called great in His day. I mean, you consider what He had to say about Herod. He didn't seek out His company.

In fact, He referred to Herod, who was a very influential man, as being a fox. And when He was in the presence of the Roman official, the procurator pilot, basically all He had to say to him was, you could have no authority of your own unless it was given you from God. The name Annas and Caiaphas, the religious leaders of the day, rarely was upon the lips of Jesus.

And you see from these examples how He seemed to eschew any name dropping at the sort of normal level. His connectivity, His connections really had very little to do with the celebrities of His day. And in one sense, that endorses the winsome humility of Jesus.

But the awesome assertiveness that He has when He starts to speak about God really is quite astonishing. I mean, He who doesn't mention the name of Caesar apart from once, and that's certainly not in a cringing fashion, is constantly mentioning the name of God. And He's not just mentioning the name of God in terms of some theological concept that He's worked through, when He's come to the conclusion that because there is a world, there must be a creator, which seems to be quite logical.

He never touches, actually, on the sort of philosophical proofs for the existence of God. That doesn't seem to concern Him at all. What does seem to occupy Him, I might go so far as to say, what does seem to mesmerize Him, control His whole attitude and His whole demeanor, the way that He lived, is a relationship which He had with God, a personal relationship.

There is, when you study the records of Jesus, a breathtaking familiarity when He talks about God. And this actually would be added to the controversy, you see. It wasn't just His teaching that we looked at last week, but it was His assumptions.

I mean, if anybody spoke as personally of God and for God as Jesus did even today, if they made those same astounding claims, then you would probably put them in the category of some Californian cult leader. When you go back to the day in which our Lord lived, the climate theologically in terms of the knowability, quote unquote, of God was much more Islamic than what it is Christian. What do I mean by that? Well, our Islamic friends, when they come to the mosque, they follow their pattern of prayers.

I'm not speaking critically, I'm just setting up an illustration. If you read the Koran, if you read the teachings of Muhammad, it is so different from the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus. But I'm arguing that in the Judaism of Jesus' day, the theological climate was much more akin to Islam than what it is to what you have assumed.

You see, the problem with you folk is you know too much. Two thousand years of history have spun by, and we've got the concept that when we come together to worship God, we sing. We can have, depending on your denomination, an amount of demonstrativeness in our worship.

There can be an enthusiasm, a joy, a spontaneity. But you didn't get that so much at the time of our Lord Jesus. So, what was Jesus' objective in speaking in the way that He did? What if you like was one of the reasons why He came into the world? And the answer is to disclose the connectivity, the connection that He has with God the Father.

A story I've told before, I'll tell it again because it's a good one, is of a little girl at Sunday school and she comes back home and she's starting to draw. And mum says to her little daughter, what are you drawing? And she says, no mum, I'm drawing God. And mum says, but darling, nobody knows what God looks like.

And she says, precocious little lass, they will do when I've finished. Jesus came into the world so that when He had finished, we would know what God is like. Because He had connections at the highest level.

Jesus brought what was distant near, enabling us to touch the transcendent and to understand the incomprehensible. Now, you get it to some degree in the Old Testament, the idea of God as personal and God as Father. But it's like a wisp of smoke compared to a forest fire as when you go into the New Testament and you analyze the teaching of the attitude of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And if Jesus is the revelation of God, then I tell you He is who I want my God to be. Tender, creative, paradoxically humble, remarkably assertive, open to scrutiny. The first major thing that I bring to you is that when you consider the teaching of our Lord, when you consider His claims about God, there is what I call an unconcealed intimacy, an unconcealed intimacy.

Jesus talks knowingly about God, and He is not ashamed. It doesn't matter if there's some voyeur with a camera in mind in the Middle East to sneak up on Jesus and with a telephoto lens to take a picture. Our Lord has got nothing to hide.

There is an intimacy in His relationship. He doesn't try to privatize His familiarity with the Lord. He speaks openly and in the fashion of a son.

And when He talks about His Father, the disciples too get interested, and He opens up the possibility that this God who Jesus relates to intimately can also relate to them, but He will never relate to them with the same degree of intimacy as He relates to Jesus. They can become sons of God, but He is the Son of God. And He discloses that there is in a very, very general sense the notion that God is the Father of all creation.

He knows when the sparrow falls. He knows about the flowers as they give off their scent and as they illustrate beauty. He cares for them.

Heavenly Father cares for the animals and for men and women. But Jesus will use delicate language when He speaks especially about God. The most common expression I think that you ever find falling from the lips of Jesus when He talks about the Almighty is Father.

Fifty-one times, Father, Father, Father. I'll ask my Father, Holy Father. The disciples come and say, Jesus teaches how to pray.

And so He says, pray like this, our Father. And when you look through the synoptic gospels and go into, that's the first three gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and you move to the fourth gospel, you find exactly the same. Here is our Lord saying of the Father that, I will praise you.

I will praise you in heaven, and I will praise you on earth. But our Lord goes on in uttering His prayer to focus in on the thought that in the praise that He offers, it is the word Father and not just Creator that is forefront in His convictions. When He leaves the world, He talks to His disciples in John's gospel.

You find it in the twenty-third chapter in the seventeenth verse. And He says, I am going to my Father and to your Father. There's a distinction, as I mentioned, between the quality of relationship that exists between the Lord Jesus and His Father and the disciples and the Father.

But the latter possibility is so intoxicating that Jesus suggests to them and to you that the most important thing in life is to develop a relationship, as we were hearing as far as the children are concerned, not just with men and women, not just with mums and dads, not just with brothers and sisters, but an intimate relationship with God so that we could call Him Father. But it wasn't just the delicate language of Father that Jesus used. He went in and He spoke of a more intimate term.

He uses the word Abba. Here He is in the Garden of Gethsemane. You read of it in Mark's gospel in chapter fourteen, the thirty-sixth verse.

He's in great problem. And what does He do when He's strained? Well, He comes to the Father and He says, Abba, Father. And it's an endearing term.

It's a familiar term. It's the sort of language that up to the point of Jesus bisecting history, no one has ever dared to use about God. Abba, Daddy, Abba.

You get it even in the onomatopoeia within the word, the simplicity, Abba. And if only you knew God as Abba, Father, you would be able to cope with all the problems that confront you in life. I argue that our Lord Jesus shows something about His relationship with God, this unconcealed intimacy in the delicate language He employs and in the deliberate routine that He adopts.

I mean, at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day and in the middle of the day, you find Him coming to Father. He'll lift up His eyes and He'll address Father. True, He likes to go off to the desert.

He likes to find a sorrowful place. But the relationship that He has with God is such that simply the lifting of the eye invokes the attention of our Father. There is that connectivity.

There is that connection. And our Lord was teaching the disciples by example that what was true for Him in some measure can be true for them. The psalmist says, I've set the Lord always before my face.

That was almost the life text of Jesus. I've set Father always before my face. You know, in that Jewish musical Fiddler on the Roof, there's a remarkable character, a very strong character there.

And when the fiddler speaks to one of the lads, he says, my boy. And you hear from his gut the affection that he has for my boy. Do I shock you by suggesting that there were occasions when God the Father broke the silence on an earthly hallowed scene at the baptism and at the transfiguration of Jesus? And he said, my boy, my boy, my son, hear Him.

You see, if you put all this together, it gives me the right to say about Jesus that when you examine Him and His claims with regard to God, here is an unconcealed intimacy. But there is more. There is something else that adds to the controversy.

It's what I've called an unqualified monopoly. There's something offensive about Christianity, you know. Do you remember the quote I gave you from C.S. Lewis last week? Tell me what you don't believe.

Don't be so Catholic, so to speak. I use that in the classical sense of that word. Don't be so embracive.

This is the problem with Hinduism. Always be suspicious of the televangelist who goes across to India and reports thousands and thousands of Hindus coming to Christ. I make a boast, but it's an empty one.

I have no problems in winning Hindus to Christ if you give me a tent or give me the music, give me the right atmosphere. They will come and make a commitment to another God. They've got millions of gods.

To add another one, I've been in an ashram before now and seen amongst the gods the picture of J.F. Kennedy. The offensiveness of Christianity is that it's claiming one god. There was a writer, still alive as far as I know, a broadcaster, Gerald Priestman, a famous Quaker, and he attacked evangelicals on one occasion in a publication called The Listener, which gives some ideas as to what's coming up or what has gone forward on radio.

And Priestman said of the likes of me, and presumably therefore of many of you here, that the difficulty with evangelicals is that they're involved in the scandal of particularity. What does that mean? Well, they say they're right. They come to the New Testament, they look at the character of Jesus, and they say about salvation, this is the only way.

And Gerald Priestman is spot on. Where he is to be corrected, however, is that the monopoly doesn't come from the convictions of modern evangelicalism. It's traceable back to the roots of our faith.

It's found in Jesus. He is to blame. I am the way, the truth, the life.

No man comes to the Father but by me. Oh yes, the Bible will allow that God is knowable outside of biblical revelation. It's a fool who says there is no God.

The flower tells you there's a God. Creation tells you there's a God. Conscience tells you there's a God.

But God becomes intimately revealed through Jesus. And when you trace the teachings of Jesus, you find that He has this monopoly. Or so He claims on God-knowledge.

It is He who grants the knowledge of God. Go back to that passage in Matthew's Gospel and chapter 11 towards the end of that particular teaching that our Lord is engaged in. What does He have to say? Well, He tells you no one, verse 27, knows the Son except the Father.

And no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. In John's Gospel in chapter 8, our Lord is engaged in dialogue with the Pharisees who were His greatest critics. And Jesus, He heaps the blame, so to speak, for His ministry on the Father.

He says that what I'm teaching you is not my intuition. What I'm teaching you are the words that I have received from the Father. Now put all this together and I could bring you many other verses and place them into the same category.

You are driven to the conclusion that salvation, knowledge of God is granted by Jesus. And what is more, the monopoly Jesus exercises is not just in granting knowledge, it's in gaining access. Gaining access.

The idea that all routes lead to heaven does not fit comfortably on the teaching of Jesus. This needs to be said. Now when you say you're in trouble, I had great admiration for the Archbishop of Canterbury at the inaugural sermon that he preached when he became the Archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral.

It seems to me, I speak with loving respect, that he's reneged on it to some degree. But when he was claiming the right as a Christian to, in a friendly fashion, confront Jew and Muslim with the fact that Christianity bespeaks a greater revelation, then I think he was discharging his obligation as the leader of the Anglican Church. And he was reflecting the position of the Reformers.

And he was reflecting the position of Evangelicals. Access to the Father is gained through Jesus Christ. Now we're living in such a pluralistic society, that means you put everything together in the part, that if we don't watch it, you could find in some of our big cities that some of the exclusive texts from the Bible will be prohibited.

Why? Because they're offensive. Well, when that happens, we're going to have a situation similar to that of the Acts of the Apostles. To whom do we acknowledge authority? Or to whom is authority traceable to? When the laws of Caesar are countermounted by the laws of God, then Christianity says the laws of God are those laws to be obeyed.

And there could be a cost factor in all this. But it's traceable by, how often do I have to say it, it's traceable by to the person of Jesus. He is the controversialist.

Someone called in at the welcome desk and took umbrage of the poster that we have outside the church. Why? Simply because that proclaims what I'm saying here right now. Jesus is a man of controversy.

They said He's not. And the answer is, I'm sorry my friend, but read the Gospels. See, hear, consider what Jesus is saying.

There is, I say, in the disclosure of God by Jesus, an unconcealed intimacy. The language that He used, the routine of life that He embraced. There is in the teaching of Jesus a monopoly on truth.

He grants knowledge. He is the access point to the Father. And finally, there is in the teaching of Jesus an underlying assertion of divinity, an underlying assertion of divinity.

You see, if our Lord was just like Muhammad, then what He has to say is astonishing. In fact, it's not astonishing, it is blasphemy, it is not acceptable. If our Lord is like a leading Hindu religious teacher, then again you have to discount an awful amount of what He has to say.

The thing that is shocking about Jesus from Nazareth is that He is not just a teacher, He makes an assertion implicitly for a relationship with God that is utterly unique. So, His favorite expression for God is Father. And when you unpack it, you see the intimacy of the relationship that exists between Him and the Father.

They are so close, like Father, like Son. Now, that colloquial expression, although it abounds in the English language in our phraseology when we use it, is actually biblical, and it comes from the Genesis. You will read that Abel has the image of his father, Adam.

So, Jesus has the image of His father. And when you get close to Jesus, you realize that though He is Son of Man, that does not completely define Him. He is that, but He is more.

He is Son of God, man truly, but not man only. He has an affinity with the Father. I and my Father are one, He says in John's Gospel, chapter 10 and verse 30.

And the early church picked it up. In Him resides the fullness of the Godhead bodily. He is the express image of the person of God.

This affinity with God leads our Lord onto an activity which is inexplicable apart from a realization that He and the Father are of the same essence, come from the same stock. What do you mean? Why is Peter the fisherman prostrate on the seashore of Galilee on almost the first encounter with Jesus? Because he feels uncomfortable. Jesus has said, Peter, you may have fished all night and caught nothing, but you do what I tell you to do, and you will catch a lot of fish.

And it wasn't the fish that was important for Peter when that prediction came true. It was the authority of the man who spoke. This is not an ordinary man.

Peter is in the presence of something. He does not know what, and so he falls down at his feet, and he worships Jesus. And Jesus doesn't say, Peter, you've got it wrong.

Muhammad would have done. Here is our Lord, and they've lowered the paralytic into the place where Jesus had been preaching, and even our Lord stopped it sometimes when He was disturbed. I mean, if you pull a roof apart and drop somebody in, and you're preaching down below them, presumably He'll put you off, even if you are the Son of God.

And what does Jesus say to the man who's paralyzed? In the company of the scribes and the Pharisees, He debunked Jesus' ministry from its beginning. He said, your sins are forgiven. And the Pharisees, because theologically they were accurate, they said, which man forgives sins? In other words, it's impertinent, it's blasphemous.

And they were right, it is. Only one sinned against can forgive. And when Jesus sees the sinner, the paralyzed man and all that he represents, or the adulterous woman and all that she represents, He uses more than just a teaching authority.

He plays on the relationship He has with the Father, because He is the plenipotentiary of the Father. What does that mean? When Mountbatten took instructions from Attlee to preside over the dissolution of India as far as the British Empire was concerned, Mountbatten said, I will go, but I will not go unless I have the full authority of the British crown and the British government, and I don't constantly want to have to cable you. And Clement Attlee said, okay, you can go.

And Mountbatten was in India as though he were the king and the prime minister of the United Kingdom. And when Jesus is on earth, He stands as God's supreme representative. He can send prophets.

He can disclose the psychology of the Father like no one else can. Ransack the Koran. Find for me where Muhammad says, of Allah, that He is love, as Jesus spoke of God as being love.

Find a relationship that exists within the Koran, within the Hindu scriptures, that is anything comparable with the teaching that Jesus Christ brought in terms of the relationship that's possible between Himself and also you and God. I finish. A Russian priest, once looking at the picture of our Lord Jesus and His death on the cross, came to this conclusion, that there is a sense in which Jesus is God's prodigal.

He more fulfills the position of the prodigal in the story of the prodigal son than anything else. Jesus is the prodigal son of the prodigal father who gave everything the father had entrusted to him so that we might become like him and return with him to his father's home. Jesus identified Himself with your sin.

He becomes like the prodigal because you are a prodigal. He brings from the father what you need. The father who is always biased towards prodigality, the sincere sinner who repents, receives you as he received Jesus ultimately back into His presence.

Jesus came from the father. That's why He said before, Abraham was, I am. I didn't start at Bethlehem.

I didn't start as Holy Sperm in the womb of Mary. I was there at the very beginning. Before Abraham was, I am.

My antecedents are of old from everlasting. I am born in Bethlehem. I am crucified on the cross.

I am raised from the dead. I am returning to the father. Father, I am coming back to you.

But these who you have given me, they need you. How do they need me? They need you to be their father. And this is what Jesus makes possible.

He has His connections. His connectivity is of the highest level. And by you putting faith in Jesus Christ, you're connected to the father, don't you see? This is the exclusive gospel of Christianity.

Give this up and you give everything up. You sacrifice our history. You sacrifice the promises of God.

You make this book as a religious book have no value or of little value at all. Jesus is the controversialist, but He's on your side. He's on my side.

He is the expression of God to the world, and He expresses love and the possibility of intimacy so that you can know this father and lift your eyes to Him and say, Abba Father, thank you for sending your son to be my savior and to make me part of the family circle. Let's pause in prayer for a moment. We're going to home in on what's just been preached with a couple of songs and prepare to come around this table.

Ruth will help us in our worship. The bread and the wine we bring to you, it's not because you're a member of our church, but because you recognize a holy intimacy with Jesus. You know your sins are forgiven, then take and take gladly from this bounty.

And join together in singing number 133 in the supplement. It will be on the overheads. Royal Sons of a Royal King.

Please stand and sing. His name is exalted far above the earth. His name is high above the heavens.

His name is exalted far above the earth. His glory and honor and praise unto His name. No other name but the name of Jesus.

No other name but the name of the Lord. No other name but the name of Jesus. His name is exalted far above the earth.

His name is exalted far above the earth. Jesus shall take the highest honor. Jesus shall take the highest praise.

Let the earth join them in exulting. The name of Jesus above all other names. Let's bow the name in humble adoration.

For at His name every knee shall bow. His Christ was born this time. Sovereign Lord, we give You glory now.

For all honor and mercy and power belongs to You. Belongs to You. All honor and mercy and power belong to You, living God.

Jesus shall take the highest honor. Jesus shall take the highest praise. For all honor and mercy and power belongs to You.

His Christ was born this time. Sovereign Lord, we give You glory now. Belongs to You.

Belongs to You, Lord Jesus Christ. Belongs to You. Belongs to You, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God.

Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.