Josh Benner

Tag: truth

  • The greater worship to which Jesus points. Studying John 4:22-26

    The greater worship to which Jesus points. Studying John 4:22-26

    In John 4, Jesus is speaking with a woman at a well. Already in this passage, Jesus has pointed to the new life he gives and to the greater access to God that he provides. At the end of the passage. Jesus points to the greater worship of God that he points to. 

    In John 4:22-23, Jesus is speaking to the woman at the well: 

     22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 

    He says that she worships what she does not know. And he’s referring not just to her but to the Samaritan people. 

    When Jesus says “we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” he’s saying that the promise of God, the covenants God had made, the promised land, the scriptures of the Old Testament, the royal line which brought forth Jesus was also from the Jewish people. 

    The Samaritans had an incorrect understanding. But what Jesus is also saying as we move into verse 23 is that a paradigm shift is coming.

    But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth

    Jesus again refers to the hour. Not only is that hour coming, Jesus says that this hour is now here. The hour is coming and will be actualized at his death and resurrection. And that hour is already present in the world at that time as Jesus ministers to the world. 

    The time has come when true worshippers, when people who really are worshipping the Father will worship him in spirit and truth. 

    Spirit and truth

    What that means is that it’s worship from people who have the Spirit, in other words, people who have been born again, been regenerated, have the living water that Jesus provides.

    And the truth is referring to THE truth. Jesus. Jesus came into the world and he did not merely believe true things, or make true statements but Jesus himself is THE truth. 

    Grace and truth come through him (John 1:17). 

    He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). 

    And worship of the Father is meant to be in Spirit and truth. Not Spirit or truth, but Spirit and truth. 

    Jesus brings the greater worship. Jesus brings a Spiritual revolution. And it is through Jesus and Jesus alone that God is truly worshiped. 

    In verse 24, Jesus says:

    God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

    God is Spirit. Not God is a spirit, but God is spirit. God and existence is not merely about the material world, because God is spirit. 

    But God cannot merely be known intellectually or cognitively. He is Spirit. 

    When Jesus told Nicodemus that we must be born again, the reason why we must be born again is because we’re dead in our sin. That we need new Spiritual life. The wages of sin are death (Romans 6:23). 

    A dead person can’t worship the living God. We cannot worship God in Spirit and truth if we have not been born again. Because if we have not been born again, we do not have the Spirit. 

    It must be worship based around the gospel from people who believe in the gospel. God must be worshiped this way. It’s the only worship that God will accept. Spirit and truth. 

    Jesus came to bring the greater revelation, the greater access to God, and the greater worship. 

    Meditation – Worship without Jesus is not worship 

    You cannot truly worship God without Christ. That’s what this verse is saying. 

    A person who is not a Christian is incapable of true worship of God. Because if you don’t have the gospel, then you cannot worship in Spirit and truth. There are no participation trophies. 

    Matthew 7:21-23

    21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ 

    Just being here is not what causes you to be born again and enabled to worship in Spirit and truth. It’s faith. Faith in the gospel. Faith in Jesus. 

    Hebrews 11:6 says that it is impossible to please God without faith. 

    Participation alone is not good enough for the Lord. Singing songs by itself does not constitute worship in Spirit and truth. I could sing “O Canada,” and that doesn’t suddenly make me a citizen of Canada. Just as much as singing Amazing Grace does not inherently make you a citizen of heaven. 

    It doesn’t if you don’t have faith. 

    Someone who is unregenerate is incapable of worshiping the Lord as the Lord has ordained to be worshiped.  

    The exclusivity of the gospel  

    This flies in the face of any argument that many roads lead to God. One road leads to God. One road leads to salvation. One road leads to true worship. 

    We don’t decide the worship which is acceptable to the Lord. 

    He does. Jesus is the one who gives us grace and forgiveness. Not the Old Covenant, not another religion, and not our own goodness.

    Jesus is the place where we go to meet with God. And he is the way we worship God. 

    For the Samaritan woman, she has been told the most amazing news that has ever existed in the world. It’s overwhelming. It’s difficult to understand and comprehend. 

    She still does not fully understand. 

    25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.”

    She points forward to a coming Messiah who will explain all of the things about which Jesus is speaking. 

    Once again, we see the irony. Because she is talking to the Messiah, to the Christ. 

     26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” 

    Fun fact. This is the only place in the gospels where Jesus acknowledges his messiahship before the time of his trial. Jesus is the Lord’s Messiah, he is the savior of the world. And it’s because of who he is that he can speak with authority. 

    Time and again, this gospel makes absolute claims about Jesus and Jesus makes absolute claims about Jesus. There’s no gray area. It forces you to pick a side. 

    Jesus is the Christ or he is not. He is the one who leads us in true worship or he is not. He is the one who brings us into the presence of God, or he’s not. What do you believe about Jesus? 

    Don’t believe that? Then we have work to do. 

    If you do believe it? 

    Then the response is to come and worship the savior of the world who has brought us into the presence of the Lord, forgiven us of our sins, and allows us to worship today and forevermore in Spirit and in truth. 

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  • Sermon: Witness to the truth – John 18:36-38

    How is truth defined? Biblically, we see truth by looking to Jesus. As Pilate continues to question Jesus, Jesus will teach that he has a kingdom that is not of this world. Pilate misunderstands and Jesus will give the further clarification that Jesus has a kingdom which is based In truth which is comprised by those who follow the truth.

    Sermon transcript

  • What’s the greatest danger to the American church?

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    There are 300,000 churches in America.
    There are many wonderful churches that boldly proclaim the gospel and faithfully teach the Bible every week. There is no perfect church in the world, because every church is full of members who are imperfect people.
    I think that the biggest issue the American church faces today is related to truth and love.
    Love that undermines truth and truth that doesn’t practice love. I’ll briefly explain what that means.
    Love that undermines truth 
    Love is important. The greatest command in scripture is to love God and to love people. God is love.
    But some churches can emphasize love to the point where it undermines truth.
    For instance, there is a temptation in some Christian circles to consider the love of God and reason that: “since God is love, his love extends to all people, whether or not they believe in God and whether or not they want or accept his love.”
    God is love. But that is just taking a slice of the character of God and acting as if that’s the whole pie. God is love. But he is also just, and righteous, and holy. He judges, he has wrath towards sin. God has all of those qualities at all times.
    God is love. But the idea of love is not only exclusive to what our culture defines love as.
    We tend to value acceptance and tolerance as what it is to love. And it’s true that God meets us where we are, but Jesus doesn’t save us to keep us the same. God is a perfecting God. We sin. We sin so much that we needed a savior, and the gospel is not a message that teaches us that we’re ok and we should just keep doing what we’re doing. We need to live for God and pursue him.
    Making love purely about acceptance and tolerance is not the full Biblical scope of what love is. And so it undermines the truth of scripture. And it runs the danger of undermining the inerrancy of scripture (taking the Bible as practical wisdom rather than the infallible word of God). And this view runs the risk of undermining the gospel itself.
    Assuming that love and  demand for justice are mutually exclusive.

    I observe this being the great risk in more liberal denominations.

    Truth that doesn’t practice love

    I think this is more of a danger in conservative and evangelical circles. We place a high value on the scripture and theology. And well we should because both of those are hugely important.

    But we can get so preoccupied with having the right answer that we lose sight of actually living out what we know. This is very similar to the failure of the Pharisees in the gospels. They were very well studied and trained in theology, but they missed the heart of the message.

    It can be easy to know the right answer but it’s difficult to live it out in practice.

    Truth and love. It comes down to belief and practice. We need both.

    Originally published May 9, 2018 under the title “What’s the greatest danger to the church?”

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!

    Josh Benner has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He has served churches in Minnesota and Illinois. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in St. Louis.

     

  • God’s truth is true. Even if we don’t like it.

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    I was recently reading a profile on a popular singer. The profile said that she had been raised going to church but she had stopped going because she disagreed with the church’s teachings on LGBT issues. Because the church didn’t agree with her, she left.

    We try to dictate what truth is, based on preferences.

    LGBT issues are a hot button political topic right now. Many don’t like the idea of a God who disapproves of those lifestyles and so, just like the singer, people decide that God affirms it. They overlook clear Biblical teachings and concoct arguments based on feelings.

    God is awesomely holy and perfectly righteous. We are not.

    And because we’re not, there can be times where we read something in the Bible, where our initial gut reaction is to dislike what God has done or to dislike his moral will.

    There are people who don’t like that God is just and a judge. So people simply decide to ignore those texts. They throw out the true notion of God for one that accepts everything they want to do.

    Some people want to believe that a person doesn’t have to have faith in Jesus to be with him, and so they decide that being a good person is the basis on which God judges the human soul. But that’s not a Biblical idea. Jesus says: “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the father except through me” (John 14:6).

    There are people who like to speak for God and suggest that God is too distant. That such an infinite God wouldn’t care about the world, therefore it doesn’t matter what we do. That’s an assumption which contradicts the Bible. These people still often assume there’s a heaven. So they believe in a God who made the world, but doesn’t care about it. Yet, he made a paradise for people from the world that he didn’t care about?

    Based on what?

    Based on nothing! Based on what a person wants to believe. Based on the god a person makes up in their own mind.

    We’re created in God’s image, he’s not created in ours. And it’s tempting to believe in a God who only believes in what you believe in.

    Or people pick and choose which teachings of the Bible they want to apply to life and disregard the others. All sorts of ways that humanity tries to speak for God.

    It can be really hard for us to not want to create these caricatures of God.

    Even for people in the church. We might not talk about it. We might not say it in Sunday School or in a small group. But is there something about God, where you see it in the Bible but have a justification for why it’s not true?

    If you believe in a God who never disagrees with what you think, you might be worshipping a god you’ve made in your own image rather than you worshipping the God in who’s image actually you’re created.

    There can be times where we don’t understand a teaching, perhaps we don’t like a teaching. In those times, let us walk by faith, to trust that his ways are good. That his ways are higher than our ways.

    Do you have any areas of your life today where you struggle to not justify a certain sin?

    It’s so tempting to want to believe in a God who only believes in what you believe in. But God’s truth is not up for a vote.

    It’s so tempting to undermine the gospel and to say it’s really about how someone lived, regardless of what they believe.

    It’s about trusting in Jesus.

    That is how the unholy are made holy. Jesus is the great high priest who gives us access to God. And that is true, regardless of what we want to be true. Salvation is entirely the work of Christ.

    People undermine the morality of the Bible. They suggest that it’s just teachings created by men. Or suggesting that God doesn’t really care how we live.

    Again, that’s an assumption people make based on what they want.

    The God of the Bible does care. Because he’s a Holy God. And he made us for Holiness and righteousness. Maybe you have an area where you struggle to accept something about God’s word. I pray that the Holy Spirit would convict you of that. I pray that you might know that God is good. When I say his truth is true, regardless of what we want, that it’s not up for a vote, my point isn’t that it’s just a top down dictator imposing things upon us.

    Thanks for reading my 500th post! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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  • Proverbs: we can never be right when we disagree with God

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    No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel
        can avail against the Lord.
    -Proverbs 21:30 

    God created all things and he knows all things. All truth is God’s truth. God is a God of truth. In the gospels, Jesus is THE truth (John 14:6). God’s word is truth (John 17:17). The Psalmist said, “The sum of your word is truth,and every one of your righteous rules endures forever” (Psalm 119:60). 

    We can never be right when we disagree with God, when we go against God, when we decide we don’t like a teaching that the Bible makes. There is no “agree to disagree” with an all-knowing, holy, righteous God. God is not our peer, he’s not our college. Our views of morality, salvation, the world, and reality are not equally valid to God’s truth.

    There will be teachings or situations in the Bible where our initial reaction is to not like them or to disapprove. Because we’re sinful, because it might be exposing an area of sin in our own heart. Or we might disagree with God’s righteous application of justice. But because we’re sinful people, it makes sense that we’d have times where we disapprove or disagree. Tim Keller says, “If your God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshipping an idealized version of yourself.”

    We must approach the Word of God with humility. Maybe we have something in our life that we’re doing and the Bible commands otherwise. Conversely, maybe we have something that we’re not doing and the Bible teaches that we should. In either case, follow God’s way. No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the Lord.

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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