Treasury of Sermons
Declaration, Division and Discrimination
By Rev Charles Seet
Preached at / Published Life BPC 8 am service, 2008-11-09
Text: John 7:37-53
This passage begins with one of the greatest declarations of our Lord Jesus – “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink…” (v.37). You will notice that it is directed at those who thirst. Thirst is a very apt way to portray man’s greatest need. In physiology, thirst is the result of dehydration of the body. It is like the warning light that flashes on your car’s dashboard when your radiator needs to be topped up. Thirst is your body’s danger alert that it is drying up and if your body does not get rehydrated soon, it will overheat and die. Recently an NS officer died during overseas training in June. The inquiy of his death of revealed that he died of heatstroke because he had not taken enough water. So whenever you feel thirsty, please don’t ignore your body’s warning signal for water.
I am sure that all of us know what it feels like to be thirsty – especially on a very hot day when you have done a lot of physical exertion. How refreshing it is to have a drink of cool clear water to quench your thirst! However, as water is always so readily available to all of us, I don’t think many of us have experienced the excruciating kind of thirst that results from being without any water for a few days. If you run out of water while traveling through a hot desert you will experience the most awful symptoms of thirst – you will have a dry mouth, a splitting headache, your eyes become bloodshot, your vision becomes blurred, your tongue begins to swell, your lips turn purple and start to crack. You feel weak, hot and irritable with only one thing on your mind – You must get water! Your thirst may even drive you to the point of irrational and sinful behaviour.
This was how the Israelites behaved in the time of Moses during one particular incident in their journey to Canaan. Let us read Exodus 17:1-3–“And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no water for the people to drink. Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?”
We can imagine just how desperately thirsty the people of Israel must have been when they said this. They had been traveling in the desert (the wilderness of Sin) for days, and the water they had obtained from the 12 wells of Elim had already run out. And now with parched lips they complained bitterly against Moses – “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” They were so desperate that they took up stones and almost stoned Moses. But where would Moses find sufficient water for about 2 million people in the desert? This is where God provided water for them from a most unexpected source. He commanded Moses to find a certain rock at that place and to hit the rock with his staff. When Moses did this, water came gushing out in such abundance that every Israelite had sufficient amounts to drink.
That miracle of water from a rock was so great and spectacular that the Jews celebrated it every year during the Feast of Tabernacles. On each day of the feast, a group of priests would proceed out of the Water Gate of Jerusalem to the Pool of Siloam. There the high priest would fill a golden flask with water and carry it to the Temple where it was poured out on the altar as a libation offering amidst much singing and rejoicing by crowds of people. The outpouring of water from that golden flask served as a visual reminder of how God had given His people water out of a rock when they were thirsty in the desert.
And it is quite probable that at the very moment when the water was being poured out in the Temple on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles in AD 29, that our Lord Jesus stood up and said those wonderful words of v.37 to the crowd, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” By saying this, Jesus identified Himself with the miraculous Rock that had provided water to the thirsty Israelites. Jesus was the spiritual Rock that had sustained their lives in the desert and saved them from dying of thirst. This is confirmed in 1 Corinthians 10:4 – “And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.”
And Jesus is the same spiritual Rock that sustains us today. He is our everflowing spring of living water, which is so much better that the ordinary water which the Israelites drank because it meets our deepest need. What is this living water that Jesus gives? It is water that refreshes the soul. This water does not come in pools or in rainclouds or bottles or barrels. In John chapter 4 when Jesus offered living water to a woman of Samaria she thought at first that Jesus had access to some secret spring of fresh water, that was more refreshing than what she drank from Jacob’s well (John 4:10-15). But she realized later on that Jesus was offering her something far better than that:
Living water is spiritual. It satisfies you far deeper than your physical needs, social needs or intellectual needs. It meets the innermost need of your life: your spiritual needs, which cannot be met by anything else in this world. Ordinary water can only quench your thirst temporarily; living water will quench the inner thirst of your soul forever. Dearly beloved, if you have not received this living water yet, there is only one way that you can get it – by asking Jesus to be your Lord and Saviour.
Now, some people would try to quench the inner thirst of their soul with knowledge. They spend all their life gathering more and more learning, but what they learn from the greatest human philosophers and most erudite professors cannot satisfy the soul. Others try to quench their innermost thirst with pleasure. They indulge in every kind of worldly pleasure and recreation that is available today but all these provide only a temporary relief. They leave the soul as empty and as thirsty as it was before.
Dear friends, you need Jesus to quench the inner thirst of your soul. Listen to Him saying to you now, “Come to Me. Drink of Me. Listen to My words. Come into a personal relationship with Me. Let Me walk with you. Draw from My unlimited wisdom, draw all the strength you need from My strength, draw all the comfort that you need from My presence. Your soul will be deeply satisfied!” It is my prayer that some thirsty soul may come to Jesus this morning. Will you come now and take Him as your Saviour? Will you have your thirst quenched? But perhaps you have already done that – you have already trusted in Christ to save you from sin. Then there are 3 things you ought to be doing. Let us look at the rest of the passage now to find out what they are. The first is to:
I. Express the Declaration of Christ to Others (vv.38-39)
In v.38 Jesus tells us that anyone who believes in Him will become a source of living water – “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly (innermost being) shall flow rivers of living water.” In other words, the wonderful joy and blessings of having Jesus in you will overflow to others as well. By drinking from Christ the Rock of Ages each of us becomes like a rock in the wilderness to the people around us. The living water which flowed from Christ now flows out from our innermost being to bring blessing and life to others.
How does this happen? The next verse provides the answer: “But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive.” Every true believer has the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells inside you from the very moment when you believed in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. And as you learn to yield more and more to the Holy Spirit’s influence, He reproduces in you the same characteristics of Jesus which had blessed the lives of people who met Him. According to Galatians 5:22,23, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, [and] temperance.”
This was the secret behind the amazing growth of the early church. Torrents of living water flowed from the hearts of the Apostles after the Holy Spirit was poured out on them at Pentecost. It enabled them to declare the Gospel of Christ with conviction and power. It enabled the Church to conquer the world with love. It enabled Christians to exert an influence which brought thousands to repent of their sins and put their trust in Christ. It even enabled them to forgive their persecutors and to do good to them. What blessings overflow from lives that are filled with the Spirit!
Do you know how you can tell if the Holy Spirit is really working in you? Not by speaking in tongues or falling backwards, but when you become a blessing to others, when someone else is helped, strengthened, encouraged or comforted through you; when your concern is to reach out to someone else in need and help him. If what you have benefits no one but yourself, there may be doubts that it comes from the Holy Spirit. But if what you have enables you to be a blessing to others and to minister to their need, and even brings them to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, then you have every confidence that it is the work of the Holy Spirit in you.
Dearly beloved, please don’t quench the work of the Holy Spirit. He wants to use you to bless many other people. Make sure that you walk in the Spirit; that you are consistently filled with the Spirit, and are led by the Spirit. Only then can those rivers of living water flow out of your innermost being to pour the Lord’s blessings into their lives.
And there is perhaps a greater need for us to do this now than ever before. During the present economic downturn, there will be many thirsty souls out there whose wells have run dry. Many people will reach the end of the road, and some will feel like giving up altogether. Many will lose all confidence in this world and will not know where to turn for help. Will you be a rock in the wilderness for them, a source of living water for them? Will your life draw them to the Lord Jesus, so that they can experience His saving grace and find new hope and new purpose for living? I hope we will all do our part. But let us also not expect that every one will respond to us in the same way. The next point will tell us why. When we express the declaration of Christ to others, we should
II. Expect Division on Account of Christ (vv.40-44)
Verse 43 brings out this truth to us – “So there was a division among the people because of him.” But isn’t Jesus supposed to be the Prince of Peace? In Matthew 10:34-36, Jesus Himself had said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.” As long as the depraved heart of man refuses to believe and obey the Gospel of Christ, there is bound to be division. Let us see how divided the people in our text were.
According to v.40 many who had heard Jesus preach and teach in the Temple thought that He was the Prophet. This Prophet spelled with a capital ‘P’ refers to the one that Moses had foretold in Deuteronomy 18:15-19. He will be the final prophet of God whose words will be of equal authority as the words that God first spoke to Israel on Mount Sinai.
Then according to v.41 others rightly concluded that Jesus must be the Messiah – Who else but the Messiah could make such great declarations? No prophet would ever dare to say, “If any man thirst, come to Me and drink?” Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah had used similar words but only to exhort Israel to turn to the Lord and drink from Him as the fountain of living waters, not to themselves (cf. Isaiah 55:1; Jeremiah 2:12,13).
But verse 41 also tells us that there were some who doubted that Jesus could be the Messiah because they thought He originated from Galilee since He was commonly known as “Jesus of Nazareth”. They were correct to understand from Micah 5:2 that the Messiah would originate from Bethlehem. But what they did not know that Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem before growing up in Nazareth. And they also forgot that there is a Messianic prophecy concerning Galilee in Isaiah 9:1,2 (“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light”). Now, besides these, there were those who thought that Jesus was neither the Prophet nor the Messiah but a troublemaker who should be stopped. In fact they wanted to arrest him, according to v.44, but God prevented them, since His hour had not yet come.
Here then is the lesson we want to learn from this: We should not expect everyone we share the Gospel with to receive Jesus readily as their Saviour and Lord. There are bound to be a variety of responses. And we must expect to see division because some will reject Him. But we must also keep praying for those who reject Christ because some day they may see the light and stop rejecting him, e.g. the officers who were sent to arrest Jesus (v.45, cf. v.32). Although they served the Pharisees who rejected Jesus they came back testifying of Him in v.46 – “Never man spake like this man.” They who had been sent to arrest Jesus were instead arrested by Him!
A similar thing also happened to the apostle Paul. Before he was saved he was arresting Christians. But when he set out to Damascus to arrest the Christians there and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains, Christ ‘arrested’ him on the Road to Damascus. After that he was despised by his fellow Jews as a traitor and he had to endure persecution. The same thing happened to the officers who came back to the Pharisees emptyhanded in v.45 – they became the subject of unkind words from them. This brings us now to the third and final point in our sermon – besides Expressing the Declaration of Christ to others and Expecting Division on account of Him, we should be willing to:
III. Endure Discrimination for Christ (vv.45-53)
When the officers who came back testified, “Never man spake like this man” the Pharisees were not impressed at all. Perhaps the officers had hoped that their frank personal testimony would at least make their superiors consider coming with them to listen to Jesus for themselves and change their minds about Him. Instead, they were unjustly ridiculed as victims of deception! “Are ye also deceived?” (v.47)
In the rest of the chapter we see the Pharisees practicising discrimination against everyone who disagreed with them – not only against their officers who returned empty handed, but also against the common people, and even against one of their own members – Nicodemus (He was the one who had visited Jesus by night in John 3). How cold and closed and unkind these Pharisees were! What a contrast this is to the warm, open, caring attitude that Jesus had displayed in v.37 – “If any man thirst, let him come…”
But why were they like this? Because of their selfish pride and prejudice. They may have thought, “How can we be wrong? We are always right. We are the ones who know the Law. Everyone must listen to us.” But though they claimed to know the Law, it is evident that they did not really practise it – for when Nicodemus pointed out a fundamental principle of the law – that no one should be judged until he has the opportunity to defend himself – they conveniently labelled him as being from Galilee, insinuating that he was in favour with Jesus.
But their claim to knowledge was really quite shakey. In v.52 they said, “Search and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.” But if they themselves had searched and looked they would find that the prophet Jonah came from Galilee (2 Kings 14:25-27). The prophet Nahum was from Elkosh which is a village of Galilee. In fact Capernaum, the port city on the north of the Sea of Galilee was probably named after him. If the Pharisees could be wrong on such simple verifiable facts how could they be trusted to be right in their judgment of Jesus?
In their own conceited pride these Pharisees had assumed that they were always right, but they were not. They had also assumed wrongly that Jesus originated from Galilee, when He had not. If only they had been humble enough to check their assumption they would have discovered that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
Brethren, let us beware of becoming like these Pharisees. Don’t be self-righteous, thinking that you are always right and everyone else is wrong. Even though you may know a lot and you have got a string of degrees after your name, and though you may have much more experience than others, always be ready to humble yourself and say, “I stand corrected.” Be willing to admit that you don’t know everything, or that you have made a mistake, or that you have made a wrong judgment or even a wrong decision.
Now this is easier said than done because we don’t like to lose face before others, or look like a fool. I have sometimes had to eat humble pie especially when answering some difficult questions on the Bible at the end of a church camp or lecture. So I put in a qualifier before any questions are asked – I do not have all the answers, so please bear with my ignorance.
So brethren, let us be humble and willing to listen to others so that we will not discriminate against them. This does not mean however that we simply accept everything that comes to us without exercising good discernment. You see there is a difference between exercising discernment, and practicising discrimination. Discernment is based on objective truth while discrimination is based on subjective pride – the desire to be the number one authority that everyone will look up to.
And if you ever find yourself on the receiving end of such discrimination, take it as part of the cross that you are called to bear. Don’t be afraid to face it. Jesus says that you are blessed when people mock you and ridicule you for being a Christian – count it a privilege to suffer for being a follower of Christ (Matthew 5:11). Nicodemus, who was a ‘Master of Israel’ (John 3:10), had to endure sarcastic ridicule from his own colleagues. After Jesus died on the cross, he boldly displayed his allegiance to Jesus by preparing His body for burial. This meant of course that he would be ostracised and despised.
This morning we have seen that if we have come to Jesus we ought to do 3 things: Express the declaration of Christ, Expect divisions on account of Christ and Endure discrimination for Christ. May the Lord help us all to be wells of living water – so that the blessings of Christ who lives in us may overflow to bring life to the thirsty souls around us.
