Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Sermon text is found in John chapter 1, John chapter 1 verses 35-41. Please stand for the reading of God’s word beginning at verse 35.

Again, the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples, and looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God. And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye?

They said unto him, Rabbi, which is to say, being interpreted, Master, where dwellest thou? He saith unto them, Come and see. They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. One of the two which heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messiah, which is being interpreted, the Christ.

Let us pray.

Father, we pray that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the anointed prophet, priest, and King might manifest himself by means of his spirit. We pray, Lord God, that this word might be written upon our hearts, may it cause us to joy and leap for joy this day, knowing indeed that as we are brought to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, he causes us to abide with him. We pray then that you would illuminate this text to understanding and to our edification and to your glory. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

As the heart about to falter and is trembling in agony, so we are to be as we seek the Lord Jesus Christ. Palm Sunday is a well-known story. I suppose we think of it as when, as we sing the Sanctus today, the great Hosannas that came out of people’s mouths at the beginning of Holy Week so-called. And we remember with gladness that exultation of him as King. But of course we know that by the end of that week, those same voices that yelled out, “Hosanna, the King of Kings, deliverance has come”—those same voices that seemed to seek Jesus as King, those same voices shout out, “Crucify him, crucify him” by the end of the week.

So people seek the Lord Jesus Christ and even praise the Lord Jesus Christ for many motivations.

We want to speak today about what are you seeking? As you come to church today, what are you seeking in your life? What are you seeking when you go about doing whatever it is you do tonight or tomorrow morning or the rest of your life? We want to set it in the proper context. However, we have here at the beginning of this text a marker that we have a different day going on here. It says “again the next day.”

There’s a significance to this opening chapter of John that is easily missed if we just pop right through it the way we would normally do in our reading and don’t pause to consider. And I think that among what else these days might mean, they are certainly a cause for us to pause and to consider, to reflect upon what’s happening here as we go through these opening narratives, the opening narrative events of John’s Gospel.

Now in your outline, I’ve given you several things, several ways that scholars have looked at what this structure of days is.

There is a simplicity to the event we just described. It’s a spring afternoon around four o’clock in the afternoon, and two men are pointed to Jesus by John. And they say, “Well, you know,” he looks at them and says, “What do you want?” And they say, “Well, but where are you staying?” And he says, “Well, come along and I’ll show you.” And they go along and they stay with him that evening.

Ah, simple event. But there’s a complexity to this structure, not just this, but the flow of it. There’s a profundity to it, I think, as well, which we’ll try to get to in today’s sermon.

Proverbs 29:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and it is the delight of kings and their glory and their job to search out matters.” And hopefully you’ve come as kings and queens, princesses and princes, to search out what these texts mean and to try to think through why does he give us the next day and why does he give us as the first words of the Lord Jesus Christ in this Gospel: “What do you seek?”

First words of our Savior in this Gospel. What is it all about? Why these series of days?

Well, some people say that here in the prologue, we have a series of seven creation days. Some would say that we start not with a day being delineated, but Jesus is light. Right, kids? I didn’t give you kids a children’s outline today, and I think that this sermon really is simple enough where you don’t need it. You can use the big people’s outline and you should do just fine. It’d be better if you knew all your seven days of creation, but it’s really not that tough to remember them. And we can remember them by looking at John’s prologue.

Now, whether or not it’s actually intended to see these seven days, I’m not sure. It seems like there’s this structure of days. We have the Gospel of John beginning with “in the beginning,” drawing it back to the Genesis account. Then we have these days going on. So it seems like there’s a correlation there. And some people have said, “Well, day one, what does God say?” He says, “Let there be light.” And in the beginning in the prologue, Jesus is light, and the light shines in the darkness.

Day two would be the first day that’s mentioned specifically in the text in verse 19. He talked about John meeting with those delegations—prophet, priests, and king delegations, who were false prophets, priests, and kings. And they’re questioning him about why he is baptizing. So on day two, we can see baptizing. And remember, we said, kids, that you know, we’ve got that cleansing thing going on in the Gospel of John for a number of chapters.

Then we go to Jesus feeding the people. John chapter 6, you know, food and drink stuff. And then in John chapter 8, he says he’s the light of the world. And so we come to church and we confess our sins. We’re cleansed. We’re fed by the word and sacrament. And he enables us and empowers us to go out as lights into the world. And every day you get up, you wash your face and your teeth and all that stuff. You eat your food, you get ready to go into the day and you’re supposed to shine as lights. It’s that simple.

Well, the creation day kind of happens that way. There’s light that starts the whole thing. But the second day you’ve got this firmament that separates the waters above and the waters below. And the firmament reflects—we don’t take the time to do it, but if I could show you through the scriptures, it reflects the glory of God. The heavens do, the firmament does.

And what’s going to happen is those heavenly waters are necessary to come down and cleanse the world after the world falls in Adam. So cleansing stuff is associated with those heavenly waters coming down. Remember, Passover is the second festival in Leviticus 23. And what happens? Well, God cleanses the Israelites with the application of the blood on their door. It’s baptism for them, but it’s a flood for God’s enemies. So there’s this cleansing action of John’s baptism is the second day.

Third day, what happens next? The text says in the next day after John talked to these guys from Jerusalem. What John does next is he says, “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.” And he talks about Jesus’s baptism. And some people have seen in Jesus’s baptism, he comes up away from the water after he’s been poured or sprinkled by John the Baptist. And you’ve got the land, the holy land, the Lord Jesus Christ coming away from the water.

And on the third day, the land and water are separated, and you have the first fruits thing going on. And Jesus is the first fruits.

Day four would be out here when disciples are beginning to be called by Jesus. They’re going to shine as lights. He’s going to call them children of light later in the Gospel.

Day five might be Peter. I stopped the text here before the next place where it says “next day,” because by the time a time reference is given, okay, so Jesus brings two disciples to himself—Andrew and a guy we don’t know what his name is. It might be John. That’s what most people think. They become Jesus’s disciples.

And Andrew, it says, right away, goes and finds his brother Peter. Well, it says it was about the tenth hour when they met Jesus. And they’re going to spend the rest of the day. The tenth hour—there’s twelve hours of sunlight in the day. Sunset, sunrise happens about six a.m. in springtime in this part of the world. So ten hours later would be the tenth hour of daylight. That’s how the Jews reckon time. And so we’re talking about four o’clock in the afternoon. There’s twelve hours in the day, okay? So the tenth hour is just ten hours down from when the sun came up. So it’s almost sunset. The twelfth hour would be sunset.

So it’s near the end of the day when these two disciples meet Jesus and they spend—they say they’re going to go, they stay with him. Then the next verse says that right away, first thing, Andrew goes and finds Peter. Well, the implication is it was the next day. In other words, the first—there means that the first thing he did the next day, Andrew was to find his brother Peter.

We don’t know for sure, but maybe Peter, that incident, is the fifth day. And then the sixth day would be the finding of Nathaniel. And Nathaniel is a true Israelite. He’s like a new Adam being recreated by Christ. And so then the seventh day would be that wedding feast in Cana of Galilee.

Maybe that’s why these days are laid out for us. The feast in Cana, of course, it says “on the third day,” and we don’t really know what that’s about either. So there’s no clear answers to what these days are. But what they serve is to get us to think, to get us to meditate about the text, to get us to chew the text over, and to slow ourselves down.

Some have remarked that here we have the first week of Jesus’s ministry, and it seems that in some structure of days, we have a week of Jesus doing things. And that correlates to what we’re about to enter, you know, on Palm Sunday, right? There’s a week—Passion Week. And we always think about Passion Week, you know, being with Palm Sunday and going up to eventually Good Friday and then Easter, next resurrection Sunday. Well, some people say there’s a correlation in John now to the first week of his ministry instead of just the last week. So there’s a beginning and end. And God takes special care to teach us about that first week of Jesus’s ministry.

So maybe it’s the seven days of Christ’s ministry that’s focused on. Some have seen a transition from Old to New Testament. You know, on the first day that’s called a day, John meets with those guys from Jerusalem—Old Testament rejecters of Christ. Then John comes along the next day: “Behold the Lamb of God.” And then the next day he points, he says the same thing to two disciples who become the first elements of what we call the Christian church. So there’s this transition from the Old Testament through Jesus to then the beginning of the New Testament church. Some commentators have seen that.

Maybe it’s Old Testament to New Testament days, the great gift of Jesus. Some have seen seven days of Pentecost here. You know, you say, “Well, what’s Pentecost?” Well, you know, when God gave the law to the people—and we’ll look at this more later on as we get to this part of the text—but the third day reference in John 2:1, remember, on the third day is when he turns the water into wine. Well, you can go back to the Old Testament and it was on the third day God told him to prepare for three days and he was going to come meet them and he was going to manifest his glory to them.

What does Jesus do in Cana? It says he manifests his glory on the third day. So there’s a correlation there. And the manifesting of the glory was the giving of the law in Exodus. And here it’s Jesus transforming even the elements of the law into more glorious things—purification water to wine.

So maybe there’s a correlation there. And Pentecost, by the time this Gospel had been written, the Jews had added four more days of general preparation to the three days of special preparation. So some have seen in this text a reference to the days of Pentecost, the great coming of the word. Jesus is the word, the law of God come down from heaven. Maybe so. Lots of things to think about.

But what I want us to do is, at least this middle stretch of these days, I want us to think about these as days of discipleship. Okay? Days of discipleship.

It is certain that what we have recorded here is the beginning of what we call the New Testament church. And in these days of discipleship, we’ll start with John, the first part of the narrative. You remember what the first question posed to him is? Not by Jesus, but by the scribes and the representatives of the Pharisees. Remember what the first question to him is? The Levites ask him, “Who are you? Who are you?”

And the days of discipleship begin with us absolutely having to know the answer to that question. John knew the answer to the question. Didn’t hesitate. “I am not the Christ. I am not the source of knowledge, power, mediation compared to Jesus. I can’t even unlatch his foot, his sandal. I can’t untie his sandal. I am nothing compared to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

The days of discipleship beginning began with this understanding of who we are not. We are not the savior of the world. No matter how much we act like we are in the context of our world. Why do we get impatient? We talked about patience this morning in the men’s Sunday School class. Why? Because we think we can bring it to pass. We’re all powerful. We can affect salvation for ourself or our family or whatever it is. You got to know who you are. You are not the Christ.

Who is Jesus? Remember, last—you know, the first day John says who he isn’t. The next day he tells us who Jesus is. “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.” “Behold the one on whom the spirit of God came down and abided on him, stayed on him at the baptism.”

And John says, at the end of that text, just before where we’re at here in verse 34, he’s the son of God. Who’s Jesus? He’s the son of God. He’s the Lamb provided by God to make full atonement and cleansing from our sins.

Remember, the Lamb is the central sacrificial animal. All that stuff about turtle doves and pigeons and bulls and goats and rams and stuff—it all flows out of the central sacrifice of the Lamb, Abel’s lamb. Talking to my eight-year-old now, this is not complicated. My eight-year-old, I think, if I got her up here—I’m not going to do it—but she could tell me what three kinds of animals provide the ascension offering. There were herd animals—bulls. Then there were sheep. And then there were birds, fowl animals.

And the central one of those, the middle one, is the sheep. And it’s the only one that has to be killed at a particular place on the north of the altar because that’s where God’s judgment comes from. You see, Jesus is the Lamb of God that takes God’s judgment for us. And by doing that, removes the sin—and definitively, and now progressively—of the entire world. In the beginning, the new creation comes about with the work of the Lamb of God.

Who is Jesus? He’s the son of God. He is the word of God who is affecting a new creation, and he does it by taking away our sins.

Here in the third day of this narrative structure, these days of discipleship, we got to know who we are and not who Jesus is. And now we have to know what are we looking for?

Then Jesus asked these disciples, “What do you seek?” Critical question for us. What are we after? What do we want today? When we decided this morning to come to church, what were we coming for? What did you come for? Did you come to have a comfortable day? Come to have a fun day? You come to have a day of fellowship with your friends? Friends are good. We called a meeting and didn’t have any preaching of the word today. Instead, just got together and have fun. Would you come and be just as happy?

What do you seek today? Critical question in these days of discipleship.

“Come and see.” You know, Jesus tells them, they say, “Well, well, where do you live?” And he says, “Well, come and see.”

The disciple is the one who, having recognized the Lord Jesus Christ, has been invited him, called him, commanded him to come to him and to see who he is and to grow in our knowledge of who the Lord Jesus Christ is. Hopefully you’re here today wanting to hear the words of Jesus through the preaching of his word, to know more about him, to come and see who he is as revealed in his scriptures.

Hopefully that’s what you’re involved with as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as this happens, they find more knowledge. Because Andrew, then, the very first thing after he spends time with Jesus the next morning, races off to find his brother Peter. “We’ve found Messiah!”—another title of the Lord Jesus Christ, first time here brought to pass, and Andrew, the first one that says it.

So Andrew grows. He calls—when Jesus says, “Uh, what do you seek?” They answer him by using the term “rabbi,” which means a great one, or a teacher. But now, after spending time with him, they’ve grown in their knowledge of who he is. And now they know he’s Messiah. And Andrew goes off like a shot to find brother Peter and bring him to the anointed prophet, priest, and king of Israel.

We grow in our knowledge. We have found the anointed one.

And then Peter comes and Jesus tells them two more disciples to follow me. We’ll get to these other texts in a couple of weeks. “Follow me.” And then he ends it up by saying to Nathaniel, the last disciple that’s given to us in these days leading at the end of chapter 1, he tells Nathaniel, “Greater things than these shall you see. You’ll see great things.”

And now I’ve got it in your outline in bold. “I say unto you,” Jesus says. And there’s a change in the Greek here. There’s a change of text that deliberately brings the reader of the Gospel or the hearer being read into the account. Everything is said in a different person up to now. In all these accounts, it’s a narrative account about other people. But all of a sudden, at the end of this chapter, Jesus says, “I say unto you, you’re going to see great things.”

And it brings us in into these days of discipleship, and I think gives us justification for looking at each of these days carefully and slowly to see how well we’re doing in terms of being disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Okay, that’s introduction. Let’s look at the text. Pretty straightforward text.

First, we have a context for the question. “Jesus is declared again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples, looking, gazing intently upon Jesus as he walked, he says, ‘Behold the Lamb of God.’”

Now, John had said this the day before in a general context. And now John says it in a specific context with two disciples with him. He is declaring to now specific men, “This is the guy you got to follow.” John is doing one of the most difficult things, and he’s doing it with grace and ease and no problem for him. But it’s one of the most difficult things men are called to do. And that has to deny themselves and point people someplace else. Well, John’s doing that.

And as the great preacher that he is, he tells all preachers to preach away from yourself toward the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the Lamb of God, not the preacher. And when you talk to people about Jesus, you got to deny yourself and point to Jesus. John gives us that again here by telling his disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God.”

“And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. So Jesus is declared, and men then follow Jesus.”

So it might be easy to skip that first part and say, “Okay, got two disciples following Jesus. And Jesus turns around and says, ‘What do you want? What are you seeking?’” But it starts with God’s initiative. And that’s why the text places that first—John’s declaration, “Behold the Lamb of God.”

Conversion—this isn’t conversion, but growth in grace—begins with God’s initiative. He’s the one that takes the initiative in moving us ahead as disciples. He works through men. However, God, John is the voice of Jesus, as it were, first. “Behold the Lamb of God.” And he does that to bring men to himself. So they follow him in response. But just like our worship service is call first and you respond. God says something in his word, you respond by offering. You’re invited to the table, you come to the table. God initiates the whole thing. God is sovereign.

And so it is here. The disciples follow after him. This is the context for this question.

Augustine said that we could not even have begun to seek for God unless he had already found us. And so these disciples are found through the preaching, the proclamation of John, which is really the voice of Jesus, as we said two weeks ago.

And then we have the question itself here. We’ve had the context for the question. Another question, quite importantly, is given to us. And the question, of course, is “What do you seek?”

“Jesus looks at them and says, ‘Well, what do you seek?’ The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus, and Jesus turned and saw them following, and says unto them, ‘What seek ye? What do you seek?’”

And as we said, this is an absolutely profound question. And it’s a question that we should always ask ourselves in the context of Palm Sunday.

It was a question that would likely have lots of answers. Palm Sunday is a reminder to us that what some people sought when they sought after Jesus was political deliverance. What they thought was he was going to kick Rome and take off, take care of all their problems. They thought Messiah was essentially a great, mighty, powerful guy who, through warfare, was going to kill all the enemies of the church.

They’d been oppressed for a long time. They were the chosen people, you know, and here they were under Roman oppression and slavery. They didn’t like that. You wouldn’t like it. But what they sought was not an understanding of their own sins and a forgiveness of them. Ultimately, what they sought instead was political deliverance. So Jesus disappoints them. So he goes from Palm Sunday to Good Friday.

You see, it’s a good question to ask.

There were people who would like to talk to Jesus just because he had a lot of interesting answers. He was a well-learned scholar. He knew a lot about the Bible, knew everything about the Bible, and it was interesting. People come to hear people preach because it’s interesting and it, you know, it tickles their ears—not because it’s what they want to hear necessarily, but it tickles their imaginations. They want to learn more.

You know, sometimes it’s—I don’t want to say anything to criticize—but you know, Elder Wilson and I were talking the other night that, you know, sometimes it’s a little disappointing that the question and answer time isn’t a little more application-oriented. “What can we do to apply this? Dennis, you didn’t tell us all. Or if you did, how can we apply it in my life? Here’s my situation.” See, sometimes people seek Jesus and they seek the preaching of his word because they want to know things, not because they want to do them. They just want to know more stuff.

Sometimes they seek Jesus for just the opposite reason. They don’t want to know anything. They just want to have a mystical experience of being in his presence. See, lots of reasons why people seek Jesus. And we’ll see that as we continue on into this text. But that’s the central question that’s asked here. “What do you want?”

And in the context of the writing of the Gospel, directly, it’s a very important question. Some people wanted deliverance. And if that’s what they wanted—deliverance from the Roman government, somebody to kick the behind of the Romans—they were going to be sincerely disappointed by what was going on here.

“What is it you want?”

Jesus says, “Now on your outline, I’ve given you a number of texts, mostly from the Gospel of John, but in other places in the New Testament. God tells us pretty clearly what it is wrong to seek after and what it is right to seek after. And these texts tell us that.”

Let’s go through them quickly.

First of all, people can seek a clear conscience via murder. What does that mean? Well, if you go through the Gospel of John and you take this word “seek” here, what you’re going to find is nearly maybe ten or twelve times people are seeking Jesus, but they’re seeking him to put him to death. Another five or six times are seeking him to arrest him. So people want to—they seek Jesus to get rid of Jesus, to kill him.

Why? Because he is a reminder of their own sinfulness. Men want to actively suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. And if you got God standing there in front of you, and every word and action that he engages in is righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion, and you’re none of those things—that is an uncomfortable place to be. People want to kill Jesus. That’s what they want. They don’t like the troubling of their conscience.

And to take care of that, they seek after his death. In Romans 10, it says that people seek to establish their own righteousness. And one way to establish their own righteousness is to compare ourselves to others and to get rid of them and call them bad. So Jesus is sought after to be killed by people. That’s the wrong way to seek Jesus.

“Well, I would never do that.” Well, apart from the grace of God, you would. And secondly, you still do it. You seek to ignore Jesus. I seek to ignore Jesus. You know, if our conscience troubles us, sometimes what we do is just put the thing away. Don’t deal with it. Don’t get down on our knees and confess the sin to God or whatever it was we sinned against—we just sort of let it, we ignore it. And we don’t have to literally kill Jesus, but we, in essence, want to do the same thing by just ignoring his word in that area of our lives. We seek a displacement of the convicting power of the Savior.

Secondly, people seek their own will. John 5:30, Jesus says, “My judgment is righteous because I do not seek my own will. You are unrighteous because you seek your own will.” When you get up in the morning and what do we want to do? We want to do what we want to do. You see, this Gospel tells us quite clearly that is the wrong thing to be seeking as a disciple. You do not want to seek your own will.

Third, we seek our own well-being. In Luke 17:33, “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life will preserve it.” If our—we’re number one, and what we’re seeking is to preserve our life, our reputation, our own well-being—that is the wrong thing to be seeking after.

What do you seek?

The Jews didn’t like it. Later on in John 11:48, the Pharisees said, “If we let him alone, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” They—what they sought was preservation of their own well-being. They wanted to be a nation. They wanted to have a place. They wanted to have a house. They wanted to have friends. They wanted what they wanted. They wanted to preserve their well-being. And that’s what they sought after.

See, if you’re seeking after your own will, if you’re seeking after your own well-being, apart from seeking the source of well-being, Jesus says you’re seeking improperly.

Again, in Philippians 2:21, Paul wrote, “All seek their own, not the things which are of Christ Jesus.” Today’s different. You’re here today. But even here, why are you here? Again, are you here to seek your own well-being? Is it some kind of deal—if you know, if you come, things will be better for you somehow? Your reputation will be better? Whatever it might be, maybe God, if you don’t come, maybe he’ll judge you. And so you’re here because you want to keep your place and your position. That’s not really what you’re supposed to be seeking here.

Fourth, people seek miracles. The Jews seek after a sign, and the Gentiles seek wisdom. Paul wrote, “The Jews wanted some kind of miraculous sign and they would follow.” We’ll see. And the rest of God’s Gospel—they go and they see these interesting miracles he does. “Ooh, that’s kind of neat.” Kind of superstitious. They like to see that kind of stuff. Builds them up in their faith. They want to see miracles. They seek to come to see Jesus not for Jesus’ sake, but for the sake of the miracles that he does.

Some people seek joy via the removal of anxiety. Luke 12:29 says, “Do not seek what you should eat or what you should drink, nor have an anxious mind.” Okay, so have anxiety, maybe don’t have enough money. So you seek after food, you seek after drink. But really it results from this anxiety you have in the context of your mind. You want to get rid of the anxiety and as a result of that, move into joy.

Jesus says in John 6:26, “Most assuredly I say to you, you seek me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.”

Now, we can toss that away and say, “Yeah, those guys were just carnal, pagan people.” They were starving to death. We think our tax levels are bad. I mean, they had to give most everything they had to that Roman government. It was horrific. The oppression. People literally starve to death regularly. They were in bad shape. So it’s easy for us to say, “Well, see, I wouldn’t do that. I would really want to be with Jesus.” But you know, when you got down to your last little cone of bread and you got a guy here who’s producing bread off the bread truck for you—you know, it’s easy to mock them, and they’re wrong, sinfully wrong. But you see, it applies to us too.

Often in life, what we seek when we go to work tomorrow morning is money so that we can buy food so that we don’t get anxious about our loss of ability to feed ourselves. Some people seek after joy through the removal of anxiety.

Now, anxiety cannot just be physical. Some people seek to please men. Paul says this. Our anxiety can be because we don’t think people like us. We’re anxious for men to like us. We have an anxiety not just for preservation. We want the joy of other people liking us.

And in Galatians 1:10, Paul said, “For do I now persuade men or God? Do I seek to please men? If I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Jesus Christ.” Pretty clear-cut here. If you are seeking to have a good reputation, for men to like you, if you’re seeking to please people in the context of your life, Paul says then you’re not a bondservant of the Lord Jesus Christ. The wrong thing to seek.

People seek wisdom from below. I said to read this verse earlier from First Corinthians. The Greeks seek after wisdom. They want knowledge. They want the knowledge of stuff. But since they won’t seek it from God in heaven, it’s knowledge from—it’s wisdom from below that James talks about in his epistle.

We seek joy, fellowship with people, good things to eat, the removal of a guilty conscience. We seek a rejoicing thing over here. But if we seek that instead of Jesus, it’s wrong. We seek a knowledge thing here. But if we seek wisdom that’s not from Christ, we seek amiss.

And then finally—the really the center of what the Gospel of John says people improperly seek after—is honor from men. Giving you several references here.

John 5:44: “How can you believe who receive honor from one another and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?”

Again in 7:18: “He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory. But he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.”

8:50, Gospel of John: “I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks and judges.”

1 Thessalonians 2:6: “Nor did we seek glory from men, either from you or from others, when we might have made demands as apostles of Christ.”

You see, over and over again in this Gospel and in the epistles, the problem we have is when we, when we really fess up to God and what we’re seeking, we’re seeking glory and honor from men instead of from God.

Now, it’s not wrong, and we’ve said this before, but it’s not wrong to seek glory. But we’re to seek glory from God. As Jesus just told us, we’re supposed to have honor from him. Again, he says, “You who do not seek the honor that comes from the only God.” In other words, it would be proper to seek our sense of personhood, in other words, our honor, our glory, from God. But it’s not otherwise.

So, what do we seek?

Do we seek honor from men? Or do we come here seeking to be honored and glorified and built up in who we are through God? Do we continue through patient continuance in doing good, seeking for glory, honor, and immortality from God? Romans 2:7. Or do we rather seek to be people pleasers?

What do you seek today, little children?

Do you come here today to please Jesus? Do you come here today to hear Jesus saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? Do you come today to have your sense of who you are and well-being from Jesus? Or do you want it from people, ignoring Jesus? Do you want to understand how the world works based on your own knowledge? Or will you seek the wisdom from the things above where Jesus is seated at the right hand of God?

Do you seek joy in the context of the kingdom of God, as opposed to joy to the removal of anxiety? Jesus said, “Don’t seek after, you know, bread and what you’re going to drink. But do seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things—the joy that these things bring—will indeed be added to you.” First things first: seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and seek it with great desire to find it.

Jesus says in the parables of the kingdom that the kingdom is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls. Do you seek the kingdom, the word of God, as it applies to how you should order your life, diligently, as you go after pearls? Seek the kingdom of God.

Don’t seek miracles, but rather seek the manna that comes down from heaven in John chapter 6. Don’t try for the food that perishes or for the neat tricks of miracle workers, but rather seek the manna that comes down from heaven.

And don’t seek your own well-being. The Bible says, but rather seek to edify others. 1 Corinthians 10:24 and 33: “Let no one seek his own, but each one the other’s well-being. And then in verse 33, just as I also please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit, but the profit of many.” We’re not to seek our own well-being. We’re to seek the well-being of those around us.

And we’re to do this by seeking the Father’s will. Jesus said, “I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me.”

And then finally, what they’re to seek.

Jesus is saying, “What do you seek?”

Well, what are they seeking? In the text before us, they’re seeking the Lamb of God, right? That’s who has been identified to them as who Jesus is. That’s why they’re following him. They want a clear conscience—not by killing the one who reveals their sinfulness, or by denying to themselves that they’ve sinned in a particular area. They seek a clear conscience through the forgiveness of sins effected by the Lamb of God.

Acts 17:27 says that we should “seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far off from each of us.” Ultimately, who we are to seek is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What do we here today seeking?

Do we seek to grow in our knowledge of Christ? Do we seek honor from him? Do we seek knowledge from him? Do we come to his table looking for our sense of community, our sense of well-being as a community, our joy, our eating and drinking in the context of the kingdom? That then forms the basis for how we eat and drink in the context of the rest of our lives. Are we seeking Jesus?

These days of discipleship tell us that the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ seek him. They answer his question. “What seek ye?”

And they say unto him, “Rabbi, which is being interpreted, Master, where dwellest thou?”

Where dwellest thou? You see what they’re saying? What they’re seeking is him. What they’re desiring is to be where he is. You see, they want to—they’re seeking the Lord Jesus Christ. The answer for them and for us is to dwell with the Lamb of God, the true great man, the master, the teacher, the remover of sin. This is to be our desire as well.

The answer to the question is to dwell with the Lord Jesus Christ. And he graciously then tells them, they say, “Well, where do you live?” And he says, “Come and see.” He invites them to come, to be with him.

Every Lord’s day, the Lord Jesus Christ reaches across the airways to your home. “Come and see where I dwell. Come and look at how heavenly reality is portrayed in the context of my word, in the context of the worship of the church and the way it flows through. God giving us honor and glory. God giving us knowledge from his word. God giving us joy and relationships with one another as a result of seeking first the kingdom of God.”

Jesus invites his disciples to come and see the blessing of that abiding with him. As I said, the abiding itself is a blessing, of course, and the result is further knowledge of him.

“Where dwellest thou? Come and see.”

“They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour.”

They abide with him.

“One of the two which heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, ‘We have found the Messiah, which is being interpreted, the Christ.’”

He finds more knowledge as a result of dwelling in the context of Jesus’s abode. And this further knowledge leads him to the fruit of evangelization and further discipleship as he runs off.

We’ll move on from Andrew next week to Peter. But before we do that, you know, Andrew is a great example to us. Andrew was one of the first two. He came before Peter. But you know that Peter is the preeminent one. Will be, as the story unfolds. Peter, John, James—these are the ones who are with Jesus in the important times. Andrew is not. But Andrew is willing to play second fiddle, as it were, if that’s where the Messiah wants him to play. He’s willing to play outfield instead of pitching. He’s willing to be a designated hitter at times. He knows his place in the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he has no problem with him.

The other reason Andrew is a great example to us is we only see Andrew three times in the Gospel of John. Here’s one. The next one is when he goes and has the young men with the loaves and fishes come to Jesus. He brings them to Jesus with their food when they’re hungry. And then later in the Gospel of John, when the Greeks want to come and see Jesus, he brings the Greeks to Jesus.

Now, do you notice a theme there? Andrew is always bringing people to the Savior. Andrew brings Peter to the Savior. Andrew brings the young boy to the Savior. And Andrew brings the Greeks who are seeking Jesus to the Savior.

You see, you don’t got to be Peter to do that kind of work. Andrew knew who he was seeking, followed after the Lord Jesus Christ, sought to stay where he was staying, learn all he could, and based on that knowledge of who Jesus was, Andrew was filled to overflowing. And he went out then to speak to other people about who this great person was that he knew.

Andrew, I guess we could say, is the first evangelist, sort of. Although I don’t think we should think of the disciples as being evangelized here. They’re maturing in their faith. They’re already disciples of John the Baptist. But Andrew is kind of the first one. As the church is being built up, Jesus, through John, directly deals with two guys, and one of them immediately goes and finds somebody else. And what we’re going to find is that’s a pattern that follows through in these days of discipleship. Disciples go and tell other disciples the great news of what they’ve found out.

Now, piety and theology—we have seen already both of these elements, haven’t we? In this story today, we have a picture of piety: a seeking after relationship directly with Jesus, being with his people, being with him, a love for him, a declaration by John of who he is, an overflowing appreciation for who he is by Andrew. There is true piety, good biblical piety, involved in these days of discipleship.

We should all, you know, be ashamed if we don’t have that same devotion and dedication to want to be with the Lord Jesus Christ and to want to see all of our lives somehow as reflecting our abiding with him in the context of Lord’s Day worship and his scriptures, and then taking all that into our lives. And we would be remiss if we didn’t have the great joy of knowing who the Savior is and, as a result, wanting to tell other people who Jesus is as well. Wanting to tell our friends and relatives as Andrew went and told his relatives.

Piety is pictured for us here. But it’s not piety apart from an understanding of theology. Let me read you references to Jesus from this first chapter of John. And most of them we’ve already heard, but you probably haven’t made note of him.

He’s the Messiah. We saw that in today’s text.
He’s the prophet in verse 21.
He’s referred to as Jesus, Savior of the people, in verse 29.
The Lamb of God in verses 29 and 36.
The one who baptizes with the Spirit in verse 33.
He’s the chosen son of God in verse 34.
He’s the rabbi, or teacher, here in our text today and later as well.
He is the anointed one in verse 41 of our text today.
He’s the son of Joseph. This will be later in verses 45.
He’ll be referred to as the son of Joseph of Nazareth.
The son of God again in verse 49.
The King of Israel in verse 49.
And the Son of Man.

There’s—I don’t know—a dozen, fifteen titles, designations of who Jesus is. The days of discipleship are days of piety, but piety properly linked to a complete, or a growing, understanding of who this Jesus is. They knew their theology. Probably the first chapter of John has more Christology—I should say, who the work of who Jesus is—than any other chapter in the entire Bible. So say the commentators, and I suppose they’re right.

Understand that the days of discipleship are days when we seek Jesus, but not in some sort of abstract way that isn’t linked to a proper understanding of who his word says he is.

Well, how is it with you today? I ask myself and I ask you: What do you seek?

When you came here today, did you seek an audience with the King? It’s interesting to me that, you know, we were in a gym before, and we thought, “Well, we get a nice sanctuary. Maybe, you know, we understand more the significance of seeking, on the Lord’s day, to come into the throne room of God and to seek an audience with the King, to dwell with him for a little while in the context of worship.” And maybe our dress and our attire reflects that a little better when we get out of the context of the gym.

Doesn’t seem to have worked that way, does it?