God Is Father

Posted on July 24, 2025 by salooper57

(From the series, What Is God Like?)

Viewing Time: 25:30

(Watch the sermon by clicking the “Read on blog” link in this email. Prefer to read? The text is below.)

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

The other night, I woke up from a dream in which I was home, but my home wasn’t at 29851 County Road 12, Elkhart, IN. It wasn’t at 220 E. Lockwood Road, Coldwater, MI—where we lived before we came here. It was 910 Lake Avenue, Elyria, OH.

That was the house where I grew up. When I dream, if I’m home or headed home, it is almost always that home. I haven’t lived there since the 1970s and haven’t been in the house since 2002, when my mother died. I’ve lived here for over a year, and spent more than 35 years on Lockwood Road, but in the recesses of my mind, it’s the house on Lake Avenue that is home.

Most of our views – well, not so much our views as the mental lens through which we view everything else – is shaped by the time we are twelve years old. That lens gets scratched and cracked, but most people are still looking through it when they’re seventy years old. How we look at the world around us, the friends near us, the enemies against us, and the God above us is shaped by those early years. They have a lot to do with whether we see life as an opportunity or a trial; earth as a safe place or a war zone; God as a Father to be trusted or a bully to be avoided.

That last one is what we’re thinking about today. If you were not able to trust your dad when you were ten, trusting God now will be a challenge. A dad will make it easier or harder to trust the heavenly Father. Harder – and this is important – but not impossible, for God himself will help you.

If you are a dad, you are making it easier or harder for your kids to trust their heavenly Father. This is true even if your kids are grown, but if they are still at home, the importance of your role is almost impossible to overstate.

My own dad, like most peoples’ dads, made it both easier and harder. He made it easier because I learned from him that a Father takes care of his family. I could have walked through a dark alley on the wrong side of town without fear, as long as he was with me. That will make it easier for me to walk through the dark valley when I enter the shadow of death. During my time on Lake Avenue, my dad stopped two robberies, ended a murderous fight between strangers, and gave me every reason to believe – and no reason to doubt – that he could handle any threat that came our way. When the 1965 tornados tore through the area, a small town just thirteen miles south of us was all but wiped out. But I wasn’t afraid because my dad wasn’t afraid. I never doubted he could keep us safe.

Nothing from the outside world could threaten me while my dad was there, which makes it easier now for me to believe that God can shield me from danger. But with my dad, the danger didn’t come from the outside world; it came from within. He could be angry, demeaning, critical.

Most of us have things to unlearn regarding the Fatherhood of God, as well as things to learn – to learn deep, in our souls and bodies. The person to teach us is Jesus, and one of the things we will learn from him is that God is Father. Jesus was always saying, “Father.” He said, “my Father,” “our Father,” “your Father,” and even called God “Abba,” which is what a little child calls his daddy. The four Gospels have the word “Father” on the lips of Jesus more than a hundred and fifty times. Compare that with the entire Old Testament, which is ten times as long. No one in the Old Testament ever addressed God as Father and the references to God’s fatherhood, while they are there, are few. (Fourteen, if I remember correctly).

Do you remember the first words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels? While you’re trying to think of that, I’ll give you the backstory. The Passover Festival had just ended and tens of thousands of people were returning home. When Jesus’s parents suddenly realized he wasn’t with them, or their friends, or their family, they panicked. They started searching for him and found him in the temple, talking with a group of religious scholars. His mother said (in effect), “Son! We were worried sick! How could you do this to us?” The 12-year-old Jesus answered, “Didn’t you know I’d be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). Jesus knew God as his own Father and he wants us to know him as our Father too.

In all extant Jewish literature, from the beginning of Judaism until ten centuries after Jesus, no one else addressed God as “Father.” Jesus did, and he taught his followers to address God that way. He wanted us to have a rich, loving child-to-father relationship with God.

In certain segments of the church over the last fifty years, people have urged us to stop calling God “Father” because they think it is sexist and misleading. They want us to use gender-neutral or gender-inclusive language when we speak of (or to) God. In some circles, the Lord’s Prayer begins like this: “Our Father/Mother…” They claim that the use of father-language for God evolved in a patriarchal society and takes part in its sexist prejudices.

And there is truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. If using father-language for God was merely the result of living in a patriarchal society, why in two thousand years did no Jew besides Jesus address God as Father? Jesus’s understanding of God was revolutionary. It completely undermined the paradigms and prejudices of culture.

Jesus revealed God to people as no one else ever has, but in no way more important than this: God is a Father. He is our Father. Jesus taught us – something no other Jewish teacher taught – to begin our prayers by calling God, “Father.” He knew God as Father and wanted us to know him in that way.

That may be difficult for you, especially if your relationship to your human father was strained (or even non-existent). You may need to unlearn a few things and learn some new ones. You may need to unlearn a few things in order to learn some new ones. So, let’s look at what Jesus taught us about our heavenly Father.

First, he gets you. Your heavenly Father understands you. Our biological parents often don’t really know us. They make the mistake of treating us as if we were younger replicas of themselves. “But you like to fish. I’ve been taking you fishing since you were in diapers!” “Of course, you’re going to play the piano.” “You can’t be serious about joining the Marine Corp! That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.”

But our heavenly Father knows who we are. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows our likes and our dislikes, and he knows when we think we are something we’re not. He “perceives,” as the Psalmist wrote, “my thoughts from afar.” He is “familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue,” he knows “it completely” (Ps. 139:2-4). Or, as Jesus put it just before he taught the disciples the prayer we’re looking at: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask” (Matthew 6:8). He knows what you need because he knows you.

The Father knows us. Jesus said he even knows the number of hairs on our heads (Matthew 10:30). He knows everything we’ve ever done, ever said, and ever thought. He knows everything we will do, and say, and think. When I say he gets us, he gets us!

The idea that he knows us – knows everything about us – might be a little unsettling. I thought that the less my dad knew about me, the better. Christopher Hitchens put it this way: “I think it would be rather awful if it was true [that the biblical God exists]. If there was a permanent, total, round-the-clock divine supervision and invigilation of everything you did, you would never have a waking or sleeping moment when you weren’t being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity from the moment of your conception to the moment of your death … It would be like living in North Korea.”[1]

That would only be true if God were Our Dictator in heaven. But God not only knows us – knows everything, the good, the bad, and the shameful – he loves us. He is not our dictator in heaven but our Father.

In the upper room, a few hours before his arrest, Jesus assured his disciples that “the Father himself loves you” (John 16:27). It was almost unthinkable: The God who made the universe knew all about these ordinary guys. He not only knew about them; he loved them.

Here is something else Jesus knew about his Father: his children can always go to him … even after they’ve messed up. The story Jesus told in Luke 15 – we’ll go into it next week – is a great example. The Father, Jesus taught, is like a dad whose son walked away from his relationship with him. Then, when the son got himself into trouble, he came back to his dad because he didn’t know what else to do. The father didn’t lecture him or say, “I told you so.” He was overjoyed to have him back! He hugged him and threw him a party. Even when we’ve messed up, our heavenly Father loves us.

God always has time for us. I’ve had days when the interruptions have been non-stop. Just as I’d finish one call, another would come in, and I found myself wishing that Alexander Graham Bell had pursued a career in baseball instead of engineering. Yet if one of my sons calls, I am eager to pick up. God is like that. He loves it when his kids call. He doesn’t let their calls go to voicemail.

Jesus tells us something else about our Father: he is someone we can respect. There is nothing more disheartening – or damaging – than for a child to learn that his dad is not respectable. To discover that one’s dad is not truthful or is lazy or is unfaithful or is a coward will deeply wound a child’s heart. But Jesus revealed to us a heavenly Father who merits our deepest respect.

He tells his disciples, and that includes all of us who have come to Jesus to learn from him, to pray, “Father, hallowed be your name” (Luke 11:2). The heavenly Father Jesus knew is not one of those divorced dads, trying to buy their kids’ affection. He is not a disconnected dad, off doing his own thing. He is a father who loves his children and wants – insists on – what is best for them. He will never let his children disrespect him or each other in order to have a little peace and quiet. He will not turn a blind eye to their wrongdoing. Because he really loves them, he will discipline them: as the Proverb has it: “The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son” (Proverbs 3:12). He is a father we can be proud of.

He is also a strong father. Absolutely fearless. There is nothing he cannot handle. Jesus’s way of putting it was: “What is impossible with men is possible with God” (Luke 18:27). During his own dark night, Jesus began his prayer, “Father, everything is possible for you” (Mark 14:36). That was his starting point. He knew his Father could do anything – he is that strong. On another occasion he said, “My Father is … greater than all.” He sounded like a boy on the playground, bragging that his dad is stronger than anybody else’s dad – or everybody else’s dads … combined.

God is a Father whose ability we need never doubt. If we don’t know that our Father can do whatever is needed, we will worry ourselves sick or wander off into error. Jesus once said to the Sadducees: “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). We fall into error for the same reason.

But knowing that God can help us is not the same as knowing that God will help us. And the plain fact is, he may not help us in the way we desire – not when a better way is available. On the eve of his crucifixion, Jesus asked for his Father’s help to escape the cross; but such help was not forthcoming. The Father did help him endure the cross, despise its shame, and attain the joy set before him, but he did not help him escape the cross. Let that sink in for a moment. The Father said “No” to the eternal Son.

When he says no to us, we must be able to do what the eternal Son did: entrust ourselves to the Father, knowing that he is good and his way will work out for the best. It was because Jesus knew his Father that he could say, “Not my will but your will be done” (Luke 22:42).

Do you know why Jesus could trust his Father even when his Father did not do what Jesus wanted? Because he knew him. After all that happened to him, how could Jesus, hanging on a cross, commit his spirit to his Father? Because he knew him. He knew from experience that his Father always heard him (John 11:41-42). He put himself – the incarnation is Jesus putting himself – in a place of reliance on his Father. That’s what we try our best to avoid, but it is the only way we’ll ever learn to do what Jesus did. You can’t do what Jesus did unless you know the Father Jesus knew.

Do you know God as your loving, strong, and good Father? Before John W. Fountain was a journalist and university professor, he was a kid growing up on the west side of Chicago. When he was four the police led his dad away in handcuffs in the middle of the night, and he disappeared from John’s life.

But after John lost his biological dad, he found his heavenly Father. He says God warmed him on those days when he could see his breath inside their freezing apartment; when the gas was disconnected in the dead of winter, and there was no food, or hot water … or hope.

God was the Father who spared him when other boys in the neighborhood were being swallowed up by violence and death. God was the Father who claimed him when he felt like “no-man’s son.”

Fountain says, “I believe in God, God the Father, embodied in his Son Jesus Christ. The God who allowed me to feel his presence … whenever I found myself in the tempest of life’s storms, telling me (even when I was told I was “nothing”) that I was something, that I was his, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.

“I believe in God, the God who I have come to know as father, as Abba—Daddy.”

He said, “It wasn’t until many years later, standing over my father’s grave for a conversation long overdue, that my tears flowed. I told him about the man I had become. I told him about how much I wished he had been in my life. And I realized fully that in his absence, I had found another. Or that he—God the Father, God my Father—had found me.”[2]

Do you know God as your Father – the good Father who will never leave you nor forsake you? The way to know God as your Father is to trust Jesus as your Lord. He said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Not because God doesn’t want everyone, but because Jesus is the only one capable of bringing us to him; the only one who can help us experience his Father as our Father.

If you have not already done so, I urge you to become a student of Jesus. He can teach you to relate to the God of the universe personally as your Father. He can do more than teach you; he can help you. But becoming Jesus’s student is not automatic. You must decide.

[1] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, © 2007 by Christopher Hitchens

[2] Excerpted from “The God Who Embraced Me,” All Things Considered, http://www.npr.org (posted 11-28-2005)

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How Did Sin Lead to Jesus’s Death?

Posted on July 19, 2025 by salooper57

St. Paul says that “Christ died for our sins.” St. Peter, referring to Isaiah 53:4, says that “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.” While there are numerous theories about why Christ died and what his death accomplished, it is clear that human sin was somehow responsible. In the Gospel accounts, it is clear that human sin was also directly responsible for Christ’s death.

What happened to Jesus on the cross reveals how sin (both in the immediate situation and across time) led to the death of the Messiah. A cursory reading of the Gospels does more than provide prooftexts for a substitutionary theory of atonement; it shows how sin in real time led to the crucifixion.

There are many examples. Perhaps the following will suffice to make my point. Both Mark and Matthew tell us that the sin of envy brought Jesus to the cross: “For [Pilate] knew it was out of envy that [the Sanhedrin] had handed Jesus over to him.” Envy. One of the so-called “seven deadly sins,” which merits mention in many biblical listings of sin. The chief priests and Pharisees were green with it. They felt it on a visceral level, and it moved them to get rid of Jesus.

Greed also played a part in getting Jesus to the cross. Judas sold his friend and master for what amounted to four months wages for a working man. It’s doubtful that greed alone led Judas to betray his Lord, but greed was present in him (see John 12:6), and the greedy chief priests knew how to manipulate it.

Lying, especially lying under oath, is seen as a serious sin in the Bible (e.g., Exodus 19:16-19; 20:16; 1 Tim. 1:9-10), yet the chief priests looked for witnesses who were willing to lie under oath in order to destroy Jesus. After Jesus’s resurrection, the same religious leaders paid Roman soldiers (yet another sin, bribery) to lie about what had happened.

Malice, which is the desire for harm to come to another person, was present when Jesus was crucified. The Jewish leaders held a preliminary trial for Jesus, found him guilty, and then abused him. They spit in his face, slapped him, struck him with their fists, and mocked him. These men wanted to hurt Jesus. There was something in them that wanted to see him suffer. That is malice.

It wasn’t just the Jewish leaders. The Roman soldiers also wanted to hurt Jesus. They too struck him, tortured him, and mocked him. They laughed as they stripped him naked, humiliating him. They took pleasure from striking him and taunting him.

Some of the malice displayed by the Roman soldiers and their governor grew in the soil of racial and ethnic prejudice. It is clear that the Roman governor despised Jewish people. He had treated them abominably, misappropriating their money and then killing them in the streets when they protested. He resisted the Jewish leaders, not at first because he wanted to protect Jesus, but simply because they were Jews. When Jesus was first brought before him, Pilate asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Literally, it is “You are the king of the Jews?” (John 18:33-35; Matthew 27:11). By placing the word “You” at the very beginning of the sentence, the evangelists give it emphasis. The Roman Prefect was mocking: “You? You are the king of the Jews? (Just the kind of king Jews would have!)”

Later, when the Jewish leaders coerced Pilate into crucifying Jesus (read the story—it’s fascinating), Pilate used the titulus (the sign stating the reason for Jesus’s execution) to take a swipe at the Jewish leadership. It read (in three different languages), “The King of the Jews.” When the Jewish leaders objected – they didn’t want people thinking that Jesus was their king nor that the despised Romans could possibly execute their king – Pilate dismissed them with a word: “What I’ve written, I’ve written.”

The racial hatred worked both ways. The Jews detested Pilate (not that he hadn’t given them reason) and treated him disrespectfully. They refused to call him by his title. They did not say, “Prefect, thank you for seeing us.” They did not call him, as was expected, “Most excellent Pilate.” Without any niceties, they spat out their complaint: “We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar…” Of course, Jesus had not forbidden people from paying the tribute tax; this was yet another lie. When Pilate asked for a summation of their evidence against Jesus, they responded rudely, “If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you” (John 18:30).

The crucifixion is a microcosm of sorts, displaying how human sin, from envy to ethnic and racial hatred, results (both immediately, at the time of the crucifixion, and over the millennia of human rebellion) in rejection of, and hatred toward, God. Jesus died for sins, so that they might be forgiven. He also died because people who did not want to be forgiven sinned against him.

The extraordinary thing is that he knew that the sins of others would lead him to this cruel death (Mark 10:45), and he accepted the fact. He accepted it because he genuinely loved envious, greedy, untruthful, malicious, and bigoted people and wanted to rescue them from their sins. Those people included high priests, Roman prefects, soldiers, and Pharisees—and us.

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The God Who Is Light

Posted on July 16, 2025 by salooper57
The God Who Is Light (Series: What Is God Like?). Viewing time: 29:20.

A.W. Tozer famously said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” C. S. Lewis famously countered: “I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.”

Lewis was right, but let’s not miss Tozer’s point. What comes into our minds when we think of God has a profound impact on our lives, our happiness, and our hope. But what comes into many people’s minds when they think of God actually hinders them from trusting him. What comes into your mind when you think of God could be making it harder for you to experience the goodness of the life in Christ.

Let me share two competing visions of God, one from the world’s most famous contemporary atheist and the other from Jesus himself, as summarized by one of his earliest disciples. Here is what the atheist Richard Dawkins thinks when he thinks of God.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully (Richard Dawkins).

Dawkins wins the prize both for most adjectives and for most contempt in a single sentence. And he wrote it about God!

Now, here is Jesus’s view, summarized by the early disciple and apostle John: This is the message we (the apostles) have heard from him (Jesus) and declare to you: (Here it is, a much shorter sentence than Dawkins’s without a single adjective): God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)

What we think of when we think of God matters. I know someone who was actively engaged in ministry and hoping to become a pastor, who began having doubts about God. I don’t know when the doubts were first planted, but I do know something about the soil in which they grew. To borrow John’s words, my friend was not walking in the light. He wasn’t being honest with himself or others. I suspect he was only reading the Bible when he was preparing to teach and only praying when he was in front of other people. He was (John’s words again) walking in darkness—and doubts grow in darkness. When he watched a YouTube video by an atheist, he was quickly drawn in.

But even before my friend began listening to Richard Dawkins and his imitators, he already had ideas about God. And some of those ideas were wrong, as are some of ours, and they hindered him from trusting God, as do ours. We may one day find ourselves in a place where our peace and maybe even our sanity depends on us being able to trust God, and those wrong ideas will keep us from doing it.

That is why we will spend the next couple of months thinking about what God is like. And we will do it through a very particular lens. We will learn about God from Jesus himself. He knows what God is like, and he came to make him known. The Apostle John wrote: “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only” (he’s talking about Jesus), “who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). Jesus is the lens through which God is seen most clearly.

Bible teachers believe that John was in his late teens when he began following Jesus. For three years, he and eleven other men were with Jesus day and night. They ate meals together, worked together, and traveled together. After Jesus’s ascension, John lived for something like sixty more years. He had decades to think about what Jesus taught about the kingdom, the Law, God’s power and authority, divine punishment and love.

Imagine you were John. You were with Jesus 24 hours a day for three years. You ate with him, worked with him, traveled with him. You heard him speak publicly on hundreds of occasions and had countless private conversations with him. Went to synagogue with him. Went fishing with him. Went through life-threatening situations with him. How would you summarize Jesus’s message? Would you talk about the Kingdom of God? How about righteousness, prayer, judgment, resurrection? How could you possibly sum up all that you learned from Jesus? Tough assignment, isn’t it? Now, let’s make it even tougher: you have to do it in ten words.

That is what John did. He took all the things he ever heard Jesus say about God and, after spending decades thinking about them and talking to God about them, he summarized them in ten words (in Greek). He said: “This is the message we heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

Maybe that’s not how you would summarize Jesus’s teaching. Andrew, Peter, Matthew—they might have done it differently too; but that is how John did it. According to John, Jesus’s message to humanity was: “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”

Since our first parents, humans have faced the temptation to doubt that God is light. Remember the temptation in the Garden: The serpent says to Eve, “Did God really say…?” and a shadow of doubt was introduced. “God said that? Really? Hmm. That doesn’t sound right.”

Have you ever noticed the serpent didn’t say, “Eat the fruit”? It said, “God knows that if you eat this fruit, you will be like him” – and the implication is that God doesn’t want you to be like him. He doesn’t share; doesn’t want what’s best for you. The temptation was never simply, “Disobey God.” It was, “Doubt God.” The idea the serpent introduced into Eve’s mind – and implanted in humanity – is that there is darkness in God.

I’ve found the thing that frequently turns people away from God – sometimes to atheism but usually to some form of selfism – is the idea that God is not all good. He is not all light; there is a dark side to him. God is selfish. Proud. He doesn’t love everyone – not really: not immigrants or Communists; not LGBTQ+ people; not Republicans and certainly not Democrats. He is not all light.

And what about the nations Israel drove out of Canaan, the people they fought and killed in wars? God ordered that, didn’t he? There is darkness in him.

What about all the people who’ve never heard of Jesus? Doesn’t God send them to hell to endure eternal torment? There must be darkness in him.

What about the dozens of kids and counselors at a Christian camp who were killed in a flood? If God wanted to, he could have made things happen differently. If he did not want to, how can he be good? How can he be light? There must be some darkness in him.

Do you think those questions are new – that they weren’t being asked in the first century? Of course they were. John’s friends – his fellow apostles – were beaten and wrongly imprisoned. Every one of them died a violent death. John himself was falsely accused and exiled alone to the mountainous wasteland of Patmos.

And don’t forget that John saw his best friend, teacher, and leader die an unspeakably gruesome death at the hands of evil men – a death that God allowed. He saw the same kinds of evil in his world that we see in ours and worse, yet he could say that the message Jesus brought was that “God is light; in him is no darkness at all.” None; not a shadow. He is light all the way through. That’s how John summarized Jesus’s teaching about God.

If that really was Jesus’s message, if God is light and in him is no darkness at all, then what seems to be darkness in him – things we think the Bible teaches – are either untrue or we are not yet developed enough to see them for what they really are.

And that is certainly possible. There may be light in God that we are incapable of seeing. In the physical world, we only see light along wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers. Anything shorter, like ultraviolet light, or longer, like infra-red light, is invisible to us. Some animals see light that we can’t. And what might angels see? A dazzling spectrum of beauty that we’ve never imagined.

So, if some thought about God seems to suggest he is dark, it is either not true or you simply are not developed enough to see the light in it. For Jesus knew that “God is light; in him is no darkness at all.”

Since the Garden, satan has been whispering that there is darkness in God, and humans have believed it. If you believe the idea that there is darkness in God, your path to joyful, purposeful living will be blocked. You may detour around a false idea of God for a while, but you will keep running into roadblocks. A false belief about God will keep you from experiencing spiritual transformation and joy.

When Jesus was on earth, many people believed and taught things about God that admitted darkness into his very nature. But the message of Jesus, the One who knows God and makes him known, is that there is no darkness at all in God.

Here are some examples of what people thought about God when Jesus was on earth. Many (both Jews and Gentiles) considered God stingy. He’s not going to do anything without being coaxed. He doesn’t care if you’re in need. He doesn’t want to help. That is not light; that is darkness.

Some people thought they could bribe this stingy God. They could bring offerings or give money to the priest to leverage God into doing what they wanted. It was a religious version of Archimedes’ law: “Give me an offering big enough, and an altar on which to set it, and I’ll move God.”

Any God that can be leveraged – or needs to be leveraged – is not the God Jesus made known. He is nothing like that! Jesus taught us and showed us that his God and Father is generous. He is a giver – “How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11). Jesus not only told us this; he demonstrated it by giving his life.

Yet to this day, many people – including so-called “Bible-believing Christians” – think of God this way. They make vows to him. They promise him things. They give to the church or to charity in the hopes of working a deal. But the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is not stingy. He gives, as brother James learned from Jesus, “generously to all without nitpicking” (my paraphrase of James 1:5). He is not stingy. He is light all the way through.

Here’s another distortion. When Jesus was on earth, many Jewish people believed that God was cliquish. If you met certain religious and social standards, God would take you in; otherwise, you would always be an outsider. People who were already in (or thought they were) appreciated a God who keeps the riff-raff out. The us-against-them God has been one of history’s more popular deities, but he is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

You see this kind of thing in the Gospels. The Pharisees, the religious scholars, and the wealthy thought of themselves as being on the inside and thought of the irreligious, the poor, and the uneducated as being on the outside—which is where they wanted them. They were busy remaking God in their own image rather than being conformed to his.

When Jesus came, he opened the door to people on the outside and invited them in, which really upset the religious leaders. Jesus liked the wrong people and had the nerve to suggest that God did too. His opponents thought Jesus’s approach was reckless and his message about God dangerous. He accepted sinners and implied that God accepted them too. But if sinners believe that God loves them, why would they ever change?

When these religious leaders looked at God, they saw darkness, but the God and Father of Jesus is light; in him is no darkness at all. Both Jesus’s teaching and his life reveal a God who is light, a God who loves the world. Jesus taught that all heaven erupts in joyous celebration every time a person leaves his or her sin and comes to God (Luke 15:10). He not only taught this, he lived it. He ate with people (which, in that culture, was a sign of acceptance) who were considered outsiders by the religious community. He demonstrated that his Father God wants everyone on the inside. Anyone can come in; they just have to leave the darkness to do so.

Here’s another distortion Jesus encountered. Many of his contemporaries believed that God is a kind of cosmic accountant, a religious bean-counter, where the beans are good deeds, especially religious deeds. They knew that God watches over people, but they thought it was so he could track their religious performance. It never occurred to them that he watches over people because he loves them. They thought that God made people to follow the rules that he loves, not that he made the rules so that the people he loves could thrive.

John himself almost certainly grew up believing some of these things – dark things – about God. From Jesus, John learned that God is light all the way through. He is light when he heals and light when he does not. He is light when he judges and light when he rescues. He is light when he hates sin. He is light when he loves sinners. What John came to understand is that the true God is just like Jesus—and that is great news.

That truth was so liberating, so joyous and good, John never got over it. Sixty years later, he still marveled at it. Sixty years later, the best way he could find to summarize the message of Jesus was to say that “God is light.”

How should knowing that God is light impact us? First, when something is said about God that seems dark, we should be careful about accepting it, even if it comes from someone we admire. It’s possible that it is light but that there is so much darkness in us that we can’t see it. If we can’t see it, the safest thing we can do is say, “I don’t see it, but I know the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is light.”

But for us to know the God who is light – this is the very point John was making – we must come into the light ourselves. We cannot live in darkness and know the God who is light. This is verse 6: “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” To the degree there is darkness in us, we will not know God. To the degree we do not know him, we will not trust him; to the degree we do not trust him, we will not live the joyful, loving, beautiful lives we could.

“God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” In the aftermath of the Texas floods – in the aftermath of your life – that may be hard for you to believe. Will you ask God to reveal himself to you over the course of this series? Ask him to shine light on any false ideas that you hold (and don’t even know you hold) and replace them with truth. Knowing God, according to Jesus, is eternal life. Knowing him is the key that unlocks the door to joy and leads to glory. So, in the words of Hosea, “Let us press on to know him” (Hosea 6:3).

I close with a story. The psychologist Larry Crabb had a friend who grew up in an angry family – lots of yelling, insults, and threats. Mealtimes were the worst, either silent or sarcastic. Just down the street was an old house with a big porch where a happy family lived. When Crabb’s friend was about ten, he would ask to be excused from the dinner table as soon as he could without being yelled at, walk to the old house and, if he arrived during dinnertime, crawl under the porch and just sit there, listening to the sounds of laughter.

Larry asked him to imagine what it would have been like if the dad in that house somehow knew he was hiding under the porch and sent his son to invite him in. He told him to envision what it would mean to accept the invitation, to sit at the table, to accidentally spill his glass of water, and hear the father roar with delight, “Get him more water! And a dry shirt! I want him to enjoy the meal!”[1]

I share that story for two reasons: 1) to introduce what we’ll be looking at next week (a very important message): God our Father; and, 2) to get you to reflect on how you think about God. What you think of when you think of God is fundamentally important to your experience of life. It will either propel you toward or hold you back from the strong, joyful, purposeful life God has for you.

[1] Larry Crabb, Connecting (Word, 1997)

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How Do You Identify?

Posted on July 12, 2025 by salooper57

If someone asked you how you identify, what would they be expecting you to say? I suspect that, in this era of history, they would be expecting something about your sex at birth or about your gender identity.

But why limit our answer to matters of sex and gender? Why not, “I identify as a white male, born in the 1950s, with unusually large feet, an active (sometimes overactive) mind, a wife of 46 years, three sons, three daughters-in-law, and six grandchildren.” Why not identify as a guitar-playing, book-reading, music-loving man who enjoys treks in the outdoors, fishing in the Canadian wilderness, golfing (when on those rare occasions I hit a ball somewhere near the fairway), who owns Jesus as teacher, savior, and Lord?

Identity is more than fingerprints, facial identification, ethnicity, sex, and gender. Identity is who I think I am and who I don’t yet realize that I am. Identity is how I have come to understand myself in the light of my joys, desires, sorrows, and suffering.

I read once that our sense of identity is largely in place by the time we are tweens, even before ideas of sex and gender have fully settled in on us. And once we have an identity, we will fight like tigers to keep it—even if it is leading us to make terrible decisions that are ruining our (or other people’s) lives.

I just sat through a workshop titled “Identity Evangelism.” The presenter made sure that we knew that challenging a person’s identity – he was talking about sexual orientation and chosen gender – is counterproductive when it comes to evangelism. Instead of lecturing people, he said, we need to listen to them, love them, and introduce them to Jesus.

I thought the presenter made his point well. He wasn’t suggesting that we compromise biblical standards, but that we follow Jesus’s example. But I wished he could have gone further (time did not allow it) to talk about the larger frame of identity into which issues of sexual orientation and gender fit. For identity is much more than sex and gender (though you’d never know it from watching TikTok videos or listening to podcasts).

The forging of identity begins early, perhaps even in the womb. We begin getting a sense of ourselves early on. By the time we are preschoolers, we are identity-making machines, and the process continues throughout life.

One of my early memories has to do with walking to school. I started kindergarten before I turned five. I can remember standing in our kitchen, crying. I didn’t want to walk with my brother to school, which was two blocks away, because I was sure I would be late. To this day, I hate coming late to an appointment.

When I was young and my dad was still drinking, I learned how to be invisible. I can remember my mother hushing my brother and me and saying (as if she were afraid), “Be quiet or you will wake your dad!” I learned to think about my surroundings, to see where trouble might lie, and to take steps to avoid it.

Because life was dangerous, I learned to be hypervigilant, which led me to see myself as an excellent driver. I see the car that’s just entering the on-ramp a quarter mile ahead of me. I gauge its speed and know it will enter my lane about the time I pass by. I also note that there is a car in the left lane a quarter-mile behind me and that he is closing the gap between us. I realize that he and I will reach the on-ramp simultaneously.

I also see myself as an introvert who enjoys being with a few close friends but is wearied by large crowds. I see myself – but am I right? – as someone who will take responsibility when it is necessary and even when it is costly. I think of myself as an outsider, a person who hates fads, thinks clearly, and acts judiciously.

I see myself as much more than a white heterosexual male. Of course, I may be wrong about some of the ways I see myself: Am I really a clear thinker? Am I a guy who acts judiciously? Perhaps my thinking is not as clear as I imagine. Perhaps my actions are sometimes injudicious. Whether or not my identity fits, seeing myself in these ways it shapes my actions and my emotions, for good and for bad.

If you want to convince me to convert to Catholicism and begin your pitch by stomping on my identity – “You are not a clear thinker. All you Protestants are muddle-headed” – you will not get far with me. My identity – even if I have completely misunderstood it – is just too important to my sense of self, of worth, and of safety for me to tolerate your attacks on it.

And yet, when Jesus warned (repeatedly) that the person who loves his life or soul (Greek: ψυχή) will lose it, while the person who loses his life for his sake will find it, it sounds like he is talking about losing our identity. Is this what Jesus had in mind? Would he rob us of our identity?

He will not rob us of our identity, but he will relieve us of a mistaken identity, one forged in the fires of a deeply disordered world, so that he might bestow on us our true identity, and the new name that goes along with it (Rev. 2:17). This is the richest of gifts: the gift of ourselves—our true selves.

And yet it is a painful gift, for we are deeply invested in our current identity. We have fought for it. (Most of our fights, I suspect, are about protecting identity.) We do not know who we are without the identity that was forced on us by nature in its bondage (Romans 8:21), by parents (in their bondage) by the taunts and praises that have come to us, and by our own choices.

Imagine that a baby has been kidnapped and raised under a false name. It is, however, the only name she has ever known. (There are many examples of this kind of thing—just google it.) When she tries to enlist in the service, she learns that she is not who she thought she was. An investigator uncovers her real name and reunites her to the parents who have loved her and sought for her throughout her life.

But now, she has a problem. To accept the change is to reject the false parents she thought she knew, to reject her way of life, to reject her identity. She will need to learn who she really is. She will need to accept an identity that does not seem to fit her at all. If she does this, she will lose herself – the only self she has ever known.

There are real life examples (Kamiyah Mobley is one, but there are many) of people who cannot accept their true identity and cling to the old, false one. This is our battle too. Will we give up our identity? If we do, will we be nobody, a ghost, a Sartrean nothingness? Can we accept our new identity as Beloved, as Brother or Sister, as Child? Will we learn to see ourselves, our neighbors, and our world through the lens of our identity as Jesus’s person, God’s beloved?

Poised between two identities, we are faced with the decision to repent, which is so much more than turning from our sins. It is a turning from our identity, a losing of ourselves (our soul, our ψυχή) in order to become someone new, someone different, someone formed “after the image of their creator” (Col. 3:10). Someone we were always meant – and have always longed – to be.

This is why repentance cannot be a one-and-done thing. Our old identity is layered like an onion, like Eustace the dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It keeps us trapped in a false self. We must relentlessly choose our new identity in Christ. This is a daily choice—and a lifelong battle. This is what the Bible calls sanctification.

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Why I Had So Much Trouble Reading the Bible

Posted on July 5, 2025 by salooper57

We just got back from a trip to northwestern Ontario. I’ve been going to the same lake since 1964. My parents took me, and my wife and I took our sons, and now our son is taking his wife and children.

A couple of weeks before we left, I began sorting through equipment: fishing rods, reels, lures, tackle, line, and more. I brought tackle boxes up from the basement, along with all the other equipment, and set it in our sunroom. It took up much of the floor space.

The sunroom is also where I sit each morning with a cup of tea or coffee and read Scripture, think about what it means and how it applies to my life, and pray. I’ve been in a habit of doing this for decades, and I value the practice highly.

Photo by Kelly on Pexels.com

I’ve been using the sunroom for this devotional time since we moved into our current home (about a year ago), but before we went on vacation, I had to move out of the sunroom to read and pray. There were just too many distractions there. Every time I looked at a lure, my mind went to someplace on the lake, and I would daydream about casting that lure along the south side of the reef. This spinner harness I would troll along the weeds at the west end of Beaver Bay. My mind could visit a dozen places on the lake (it’s a big lake, over 68,000 acres) before I brought my daydream to an end.

If I wasn’t daydreaming, I was fretting over how I was going to get everything ready before it was time to leave. This rod tip needs to be replaced. The bail on that reel wasn’t closing like it should the last time I used it. I need to pay for an Ontario Outdoors Card and apply online for a fishing license. The car needs an oil change. The hinges on that tackle box are loose. Are we going to remember to take our passports?

I would read some passage in the Gospels and, before I was done with the first paragraph, wander into some daydream or fretting episode. When I finally emerged and returned to my reading, the same thing would happen again within moments. After four or five days of this, I gave up and moved to the living room. My fishing gear proved too powerful a distraction for me.

I suspect that many people set themselves up to fail at having a meaningful daily devotional time. Their room may not have any fishing equipment, but it is full of distractions. This floor needs to be cleaned. I forgot to email the boss about those orders. That bill needs to be paid by tomorrow. I didn’t pick up his meds at the pharmacy. I wonder who is texting me at this time of the morning? There is a reason Jesus taught that people should go into the “closet” – the inner room where there are fewer distractions – in order to pray.

Prayer is sometimes work. Sometimes it is like close-quarters combat—Paul said that Epaphras was always wrestling in prayer. It takes focus. Attention. We set ourselves up to fail when we furnish our prayer room with distractions—or bring our distractions with us in the form of our iPhone 16.

If you do not have a practice of reading Scripture, thinking about it, and praying over it, consider starting one. It is central to the “renewing of your mind.” There is no substitute for a thoughtful reading of Scripture, intertwined with prayer. If you are just getting started, a how-to guide may be helpful (see https://www.cru.org/us/en/train-and-grow/spiritual-growth/devotionals/how-to-have-a-quiet-time.html or https://www.navigators.org/resource/how-to-have-a-daily-quiet-time/) but keep in mind that your devotional time is an investment in a relationship with a person (God), and relationships are hard to script.

For years, I have taken time each morning to read from the Psalms, the Old and New Testaments, and the Gospels, as listed in the Common Lectionary. I think about what I read and allow the Scriptures to inform my prayers for myself, my family, church, and others.

I am currently using the acronym H.E.A.R. as an aid to thinking and responding to the Scriptures. With each text I: Highlight a verse by handwriting it; I Explain what the verse or text is about; I write out at least one way the text Applies to my life; and I Respond with prayer or with a decision to act. I also choose one verse (not necessarily from the texts I am reading) to memorize.

This practice has been the mainstay of my spiritual disciplines and I value and protect it. Yet a few fishing lures (my wife would say, “A few?”) and some rods and reels were enough to nearly nullify my benefit.

Beware of distractions. Find your inner room (which might be outside if that is where you are least distracted) and use it. If you would like help starting a devotional reading practice, let me know in the comments section (you’ll find a link in the small print near the bottom of this page), and we’ll correspond.

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Jesus: The Divine-Human Interlinear

Posted on June 14, 2025 by salooper57

I meet with a small group of men who are reading through major sections of Scripture together, and today’s reading had me in John 1. I sat for a long time, seeing significance in every line, almost in every word. Verse 18 (literal translation), “No one has ever seen God; God Only Begotten, the one existing in the Father’s bosom, has interpreted him,” made me think of Jesus as a kind of Divine-Human interlinear, who enables us who could never otherwise make sense of God, to know him.

Earlier, in verse 14, John wrote, “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, full of grace and truth.” What was John thinking about when he wrote, “We have seen his glory”? When did John see his glory?

Of course, there were many times when Jesus displayed his power—walking on the stormy sea of Galilee, calming the wind and waves, healing the sick, transfigured on the mountain. But these do not seem to have been uppermost in John’s mind. As many scholars have noted, it is not of Jesus’s power that John thinks, but his remarkable humility. Born in an animal’s stable, laid in a feeding trough, turned away from the inn. He would later say that, while foxes have holes and birds have nests, he had no place to lay his head. Near the end of his Gospel, John borrows that last phrase verbatim (though in English it is translated, “He lay down his head”).

So, Jesus finally found a place to lay his head! He was moving up in the world at last! Yes—up a cross. For John uses that phrase it is in this context: “Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head” – “he lay down his head” – and gave up his spirit.” The only place he found to lay down his head was on an executioner’s cross. He spent his earthly life in a backwater province of the Roman Empire, doing manual labor, then preaching to poor people, often in rural (and sometime remote) areas. So where is this glory that John claims to have seen?

We don’t see it because we think of glory as glitz and hype and notoriety. Glory, in our minds, is being selfie-stalked on the street, going viral on social media, entreated for interviews and autographs. Glory is Pomp and Circumstance and Hail to the Chief. But this is not what John sees.

John sees the Ancient of Days willingly imprisoned in time, the omnipresent one enfleshed in a body, the Holy One nailed to a cross, bearing our sins. Real greatness doesn’t hunger for praise. When it sees something that needs to be done, it does it. It leaves the exalted place, performs the necessary deed.[1] On the night of his betrayal, when Jesus prayed for the Father to “glorify the Son,” his prayer found its answer not high on a dais before an adoring crowd, but high on a cross before a jeering mob. Instead of defiantly pumping his fist before a multitude, he submitted to having his hands nailed to a cross. This, John realized, is his glory, and it shines like a halo around the cross.

There is one more thing to note. Though his glory was misunderstood and his own rejected him, there were some who received him. Back in verse 12 John wrote: “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” In every generation, there have been those who welcomed him, believed in him, and by faith received him. They become children of God, and receive a new kind of life.

That new kind of life opens up a new way of life. It does not replace physical life but envelops it. It begins to change those who have it, replicating Jesus’s life in them (doesn’t that sound like something from a Michael Crichton novel?), so that they begin to think as he thought and live as he lived. As they are conformed to his image, they become a kind of interlinear themselves, enabling people to know Jesus.

[1] See Leon Morris, “Expository Thoughts on the Gospel of John,” Grand Rapids: Baker Books © 1986. P.23

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Where Do You See Yourself in the Good Samaritan Story?

Posted on June 7, 2025 by salooper57

In 1973, sixty-seven students at Princeton Seminary agreed to take part in a study, which they were told was about religious education and vocation, but was really an experiment in social psychology. The students were told that some of them would be sent to one building to give a brief talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, while others would be sent to another building to make a presentation on the types of jobs available to seminarians after graduation.

The students were sent off one at a time. Some were told they had a few minutes before they needed to be there, others were told the staff was waiting for them, and still others were told they were already late and needed to hurry.

So, each participant took off for the other building and each encountered a man (who was an actor), lying on the ground, doubled over and coughing violently. Among the group tasked with talking about employment opportunities, almost three out of four failed to stop, but most people in the other group, the one that was supposed to speak on the Good Samaritan, did stop. But that distinction didn’t hold in the subgroup that was told they were already late and needed to hurry. In fact, one of the “Good Samaritan students” even stepped over the “seriously ill man” because he was blocking the doorway.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan was today’s gospel reading from the lectionary. Jesus told it to a man who was eager to talk about theology but passive about living it out, for twice Jesus told him to “DO” something. It reminds me of what George Macdonald wrote. God, he said, is looking for someone who “will do the will of God—not understand it, not care about it, not theorize it, but do it…”[1]

In Luke’s Gospel, the expert in the law could talk about what to do – “‘Love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” He just wasn’t doing it. So, Jesus spoke to him frankly: “Do this and you will live!”

Such straightforward talk made the scholar uncomfortable and “wanted to justify himself.” He could not do that on a personal-behavioral level, only on an intellectual one, so he tried to shift the conversation back to something more abstract. He asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

When I see how quickly this man found a path to self-justification and how he transitioned to it with such agility, I think he must have had a lot of practice. We get good at what we do regularly, and he was good at this—not that it did him any good. The trouble with justifying yourself is no one outside yourself (and a tiny circle of friends) will buy into it. Self-justification is like Argentinian currency, which has been experiencing a 193% inflation rate. Nobody wants it. You can’t give it away.

When it comes to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, people who write Bible studies like to ask questions like, “Where do you see yourself in this story? Are you most like the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan?”

I think they should add, “Or are you most like the expert in the law?” Sadly, that is where I see myself. Comfortable with abstract ideas. Enjoy a good debate. Far too nimble at self-justification.

I don’t want to look like the priest or the Levite, but neither do I want to look like the expert in the law. The person in the text that I want to look like is Jesus. But looking like him doesn’t happen because people have right answers. It happens because people do what Jesus does in a spirit like his. But that is not natural for me and would be impossible except for one thing: by the grace of Christ and the miracle of Pentecost, the Spirit that was in Jesus is in me.

Pentecost, which marks the outpouring of the Spirit, is in a couple of days. How good of God who gave his Son to give his Spirit. Because of his incredible gift, I need not look like the priest or the Levite, or even the expert in the law. I can hope to look like Jesus.

[1] George Macdonald, God’s Word to His Children, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1887

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The Ascension and Spiritual Gifts (Eph. 4:7-16)

Posted on June 4, 2025 by salooper57

Watch here or read below.

This past Thursday marked forty days since Easter, making it Ascension Day, when the church celebrates Christ’s ascension to the throne of heaven. Ever wonder what is he doing up there? Lots of things, but I’ll mention one in particular: he is giving people gifts (sometimes called spiritual gifts) for the purpose of building up the church. Jesus is absolutely committed to the church.

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says: “When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men.” …It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.  (Ephesians 4:7-8, 11-16)

The ascended Christ has gifted every one of his people to serve his church. You, if you are Jesus’s person, have been given a gift and it is important to the church’s – and your – success that you use it. Your unique combination of personality, experience, and gift make your contribution irreplaceable. Other people may have more Bible knowledge than you, may be more outgoing, or more talented, but no one else can serve like you.

“Serve” is the operative word. Karen and I were in Israel in 2015, and we saw thousands of tourists there: people from just about every place in the world. You know how you can tell the tourists? They’re the ones sitting down. I never once saw a tourist serving meals or sweeping floors or taking out the trash.

It’s okay to be a tourist when you’re touring, but it’s not okay in the church. Yet church in America has become a kind of religious attraction featuring educational tours, entertainment tours, and self-help expeditions. But church members are not tourists.

The tourist mindset is all about self, but we connect to God best when we’re not thinking about ourselves. It’s a paradox: our needs are best met when we’re meeting the needs of others. We’re happiest when we’re not trying to be happy. In fact, just thinking about whether or not you’re happy will kill happiness every time. It’s only when we lose ourselves that we can be found. That’s the way it works. That’s who we are.

And God designed the Church to fit who we are. Or perhaps he designed us to fit how the Church is. The Church is not a stage on which professionals perform for tourists. The church not a cruise ship; it is more like a commercial fishing vessel. There are no passengers, just crew.

The journal Psychological Sciences published a study that suggests too much talent can actually hurt a sports team, especially in sports like soccer and basketball, which depend on teamwork. Franchises that spend tens of millions of dollars to stack their lineup with superstars usually don’t fare as well as teams that have only one or two star players. In basketball, for example, the number of assists and rebounds goes down as the number of superstar players goes up.

In reviewing that study, a writer for Scientific American concluded that successful teams have “a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual.”[1] That is certainly true of the Church. Our goal is beyond the reach of any one of us, no matter how talented we are. Paul writes about that goal in verse 13: It is to “reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

When the Church attains “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,” Christ will be operating through his global Church without limit to his power. Then the lion will lie down by the lamb, there will no longer be any curse, and God will be all and in all. But the Church will never reach “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,” on the strength of celebrity preachers or rock star worship leaders. It will take every one of us using our combined gifts. Every one of us, if we belong to Christ, has received a gift. That is Paul’s point in verse 7: “But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.”

Ancient Greek has different rules for sentence structure than modern English. In English, I might write, “John throws the ball” – subject-verb-object. That’s the way we like it. I would not write, “The ball John throws” – object-subject-verb – but in Greek (which can sound a lot like Star-Wars-Yoda-speech) that would be perfectly acceptable. In a Koine Greek sentence, any word can go almost anywhere, and word placement is used to adds emphasis. To place a word first in a sentence is like putting it in italics and bold print. Paul puts the word “one” at the beginning of verse 7. He wants to drive home the fact that the ascended Christ had given each and every one of us a gift for the sake of the Church.

And every one of those gifts is needed; God did not send the church spare parts. When I was in college, I bought a timer that plugged into a wall outlet, and then plugged my stereo into the timer, so that I could wake up to rock and roll. And that worked great, except for one thing. The timer developed a humming – almost a grinding – sound that drove my roommate crazy.

So, I took the timer apart, looking for whichever gear wasn’t meshing or whatever else might be wrong. But I didn’t find anything, so I decided to put it back together and hope that it would somehow work better. When I got done, I had two little pieces left over.

I looked at the pieces. I looked at the timer. I thought: “Maybe they’re not important.” So, I plugged the timer into the wall and flames shot out of the outlet. They melted the prongs on the plug, blackened the wall around the outlet, and probably blew out every fuse on my wing.

Who would have guessed? Those little pieces were important. And so are the gifts that God gave to each of us. You can say, “My gift is probably not important,” but Jesus gave that gift to you for a reason, and gave you to us for a reason. Without your gift in place, we could have a meltdown.

Now look at verse 11: “It was he” – the ascended Christ – “who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers…”

 In verse 7, Christ gives grace-gifts to each and every one of us for the sake of the Church. Verse 7 is about Christ gifting individuals with spiritual gifts. Verse 11 is about Christ gifting the Church with gifted individuals: apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor-teachers.

Why did Christ give these gift-people to the Church? Verse 12 tells us: “to prepare God’s people” – that’s you and me – “for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up…”

Let me read that to you again, but this time from the King James Version, which had a corner on the Protestant Bible reading market for hundreds of years: “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” I love the King James, but that translation has led to a centuries-long misunderstanding of these verses and an unbiblical paradigm for church ministry. It seems to be saying that God gave apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor/teachers to the church for three distinct purposes: (1) the perfecting of the saints; (2) the work of the ministry; and (3) the edifying of the body of Christ.

That fit perfectly with the church paradigm of the day: the gifted individuals of verse 11 are clergy and everyone else is laity. And it provided the clergy with a job description: whip the saints into shape (the perfecting of the saints), do the ministry (things like preaching, teaching, and visiting the sick), and build up the Church. Church clergy are active: they do the work. Church members are passive: they get worked on

So, the clergy has three responsibilities: perfect the saints, do the work of the ministry, and build up the Body of Christ. But in the original language, there are prepositions at the beginning of each of those three clauses, and the first is different from the other two. That’s important. That first preposition indicates that Christ gave the Church apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors/teachers for a purpose: to prepare (NIV) or equip (NASB) or perfect (KJV) the saints for (same word in English, different word in Greek) “the work of the ministry.” It’s the saints who do the ministry.

Now by “saints,” we are not talking about Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, or one of the other great people the Catholic Church has canonized. For Paul, the saints are simply the people who belong to God – that is, everyone who has faith in Jesus. The saints, in other words, are us: ordinary men, women, and children. The saints go to work every day. They get married and they get the flu. They make RVs and they make babies. They have migraines and they have a sweet tooth. The saints are us.

The word translated as prepare or equip is the noun form of a verb that is used thirteen times in the New Testament and is translated by the NIV in eight different ways. Its basic idea is to get something into working order. For example, the first time the verb appears, it is used of the commercial fishermen getting their nets in order for another night of fishing. There were holes that needed to be closed, knots that needed to be retied, snarls that needed to be untangled. They were getting the nets into ship-shape, which is to say they were mending, restoring, and getting them ready for use.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus says, “The student who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” The word translated fully trained is the same verb. The disciple is, in other words, someone who is being restored, mended, equipped, and got ready to be like his teacher.

The noun form of the word (which is what we have here), was used in medical parlance for putting a patient back together after an injury. Maybe your bones need to be set. You need to learn to walk again. If that is going to happen, you will need to be restored, mended, and got ready.

That is what the gift-people of verse 11 do for the gifted people of verse 12: Restore them, train them, and get them ready. How do they do that? In many ways. They pray. They preach God’s word. They teach. And because the saints often bear wounds, they mend. And the gift-people of verse 11 help the gifted people of verse 12 – the saints – find ways to use the gifts Christ gave them.

They get them ready for (there is that change of preposition) works of service. Paul’s ministry model was very different from the one that has dominated the western Church, in which the clergy does the work, and the members pay them to do it. In Paul’s model, the clergy’s job (though clergy is not even a biblical term) is to get each and every church member restored, mended and ready to minister. That’s the model. Every person using the gift God gave him or her. The pastors and teachers of verse 11 can preach spellbinding sermons and be on-call around the clock, but they fail at their job unless they are readying church’s members for, and releasing them to do, ministry.

When the gift-people of verse 11 prepare the gifted people of verse 12 to do the ministry, the Body of Christ is built up (this is verse 13) “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

When the church is moving toward that goal instead of some other goal – higher attendance, bigger media footprint, larger endowment – people grow personally and spiritually. Respect for one another soars. Miracles take place. The world takes notice. And this happens because every Church member is engaged, using the gifts that Christ gave him or her. “The whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Verse 16).

If you’re hearing this and thinking, “I should find out how Christ has gifted me and do something about it,” I couldn’t agree more. You absolutely need to find your spiritual gift and use it.

I’m not going to walk that back a bit. But I want to add this: we don’t usually find our spiritual gift by looking for it. We find it by seeing what needs to be done, and doing it. When we see a need – and it’s often one that others overlook – and get busy meeting it, that’s when we are most likely to discover how God has gifted us.

Let me illustrate that point with a story from World War II. When the Americans thought the war was all but over, Germany sent 200,000 troops and hundreds of tanks west and overran the American defenses. It is known as the Battle of the Bulge, and it was costly. The U.S. suffered 80,000 casualties and 19,000 deaths.

In the chaos, American commanders asked for volunteers to try to stop the German tanks that were wreaking havoc on them. A 19-year-old draftee from Baltimore named Albert Darago said he would go. His superiors gave him a bazooka – he had never held one and hardly knew which end was which – and sent him down a hill under heavy German fire. Albert snuck up behind some bushes and found himself a short distance from four tanks. He aimed at one of the tank’s rear engines, as he was told, pulled the trigger, and to his surprise, scored a direct hit.

When he got back to his own lines, his commander asked him to go again. And he did. Another direct hit. Seventy years later, when The Washington Post interviewed Albert for a commemorative piece on the battle, he said: “It was something that had to be done and we did it. I never considered myself brave. Somebody had to do it, and I was there.”[2]

Albert could have been talking about the way people find their spiritual gift: “Somebody had to do it, and I was there.” Spiritual gift inventories can be helpful, but only if we’re there,caring, involved, and willing to make sacrifices. In the process of doing what needs to be done, we discover our gifts. We also discover what we’re not gifted at, which is very helpful. Most importantly, we discover that God will work through us.

But discovering a spiritual gift, like most other discoveries, happens over time, after multiple trials, and not a few missteps. And we probably won’t find it sitting in our Lazy Boy; we’ll find at the church’s point of need.

One last thing: I’ve spent many hours preparing this sermon, translating the Greek text, looking for main points, choosing helpful illustrations. But what you do in the next moment is more important than what I did over the last week. If you decide to find and use your spiritual gift, your life will change for the better, you will grow in the knowledge of God, and our church will benefit. But it is your decision.

[1] Roderick I. Swaab, “The Too-Much Talent Effect,” Psychological Science (6-27-14); Cindi May, “The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent,” Scientific American (10-14-14)

[2] Adapted from Michael E. Ruane, “In 1944 Battle of the bulge, Albert Darago, then 19, took on a German tank by himself,” The Washington Post (12-15-14)

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Church, Church Life, Encouragement, Faith, Mission, Sermons, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jesus and the Fishermen

Posted on May 31, 2025 by salooper57

Watch here or read below.

If I told you that Jesus is here right now, would you believe me? Most of you would, or would at least want to. You’d remember that he said, “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matthews 18:20) and take his presence here on faith.

So, let me ask you: if he is here, why doesn’t he do something to let us know? If he is with you on Thursday at work, why doesn’t he let you know? When you are going to the hospital for a test, why doesn’t he reveal himself. Couldn’t he at least make it so that when you turn on the radio, you’d hear the lyrics, “Fear not, I am with you”?

Why do we go through days and weeks without sensing him? As an atheist once said to me, “If he really exists and wants everyone to believe in him, why doesn’t he write us a message across the sky that everyone can see?”

If God’s goal was to prove that he exists, perhaps that is what he would do. But if his goal is to transform human beings into genuinely free, authentically good people who can intelligently engage with him in his plan for creation, that might not be helpful. An appearance a minute on his part, or even an appearance at the last-minute to save the day, would not accomplish what he’s after and might even delay it.

But if he isn’t going to show himself – at least not in the way my atheist friend suggested – where does that leave us? Are we just supposed to pray and read the Bible all the time? Do we dare do something just because we enjoy it? What are we supposed to be doing?

The apostles must have wondered the same thing after Jesus’s resurrection. He was no longer with them all the time, as he had been. Over a period of 40 days, he came and went, but mostly he went. What were they supposed to be doing when he wasn’t there?

They had not seen him for a while when (verse one) “Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Tiberias.” There are three things to note in this sentence. First the word “appeared.” A literal translation would be – but we don’t talk this way in English – “Jesus appeared himself.” It means to “make visible what would otherwise be unseen.” The idea is that Jesus was with the disciples even when they didn’t see him. When he made himself visible to them, it was at his discretion and for their good. That he wasn’t always visible to them was a new kind of good. Remember, he had told them, “It is for your good that I am going away” (John 16:7).

Over that forty-day period when Jesus appeared and, just as importantly, disappeared,he was teaching his disciples to trust that he was present even when they didn’t see him. They would need to know that in the days ahead. We need to know that too.

The second word to notice is again. This certainly refers to the previous appearances – one week apart – in the upper room. But John, who loves double meanings, might also be referring to an earlier time when Jesus revealed himself to his disciples on this same body of water. When they were caught out on the lake in a terrible storm, Jesus calmed the wind and the waves with a word. That’s was a revelation to the disciples. St. Luke writes, “In fear and amazement, they asked one another, ‘Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.’”

The third thing to notice is the name of the lake: Tiberias. Herod Antipas founded the city of Tiberias on the shores of Galilee in 20 A.D. in honor of the emperor. That’s when the name of the lake was officially changed, but locals continued calling it “Galilee.” In the New Testament, only John ever calls the lake by its official name. I think that’s because he was writing fifty or sixty years later to people living in modern-day Turkey, who would know the lake (if they knew it at all) as the Sea of Tiberias. When you think of it, this is supporting evidence for the authenticity of this gospel.

Verse two gives us the names of the disciples who were together. First, Peter. That is no surprise: he is always mentioned first in every list of the apostles. But notice that Thomas is mentioned second—the only time that ever happens. Then Nathaniel. Then James and John, the sons of the commercial fisherman Zebedee. And then there are two unnamed disciples.

Peter, who had failed miserably – and publicly – a few weeks before, is still a part of the group. In fact, he is still its leader. When he says, “I’m going fishing,” the other six chime in, “We’ll go with you.”

Preachers often fault Peter for going fishing. One says that Peter “was turning back to his old life,” and lists four evidences that the disciples were in the wrong. He says that, (1) the darkness indicated “that they [were] not walking in the light; (2) they had no direct word from the Lord; (3) their efforts met with failure; (4) they did not recognize Christ when He did appear, showing that their spiritual vision was dim.”[1]

I think that preacher misread the situation. (1) When Jesus appears, he does not rebuke Peter and the others for fishing; and, in fact, (2) he helps them. And (3) while they had no direct word from the Lord, neither do we on many occasions. And (4) Jesus went on to commission Peter right then and there, with the others as witnesses. I don’t think Peter and the others were doing anything wrong.

But whether the fishing trip was blameworthy or commendable, one thing is clear: it was not successful. Verse 3: “That night” (nighttime was the prime time to fish on Galilee) “they caught nothing.”

Now, verse 4: “Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.” The preacher I mentioned faulted the disciples for not recognizing Jesus, but would they recognize him from a hundred yards away in the gray light of dawn? I doubt a man would recognize his own father under those conditions.

So, Jesus stands in the half-light on the shore and, verse 5, calls out to them: “Friends, haven’t you any fish?” The Greek reads, Children rather than Friends. It would be like an Englishman calling out, “Lads, you don’t have any fish to eat, do you?” (That’s the way the question is phrased in the original language.)

Their reply is a terse “No.” When you have been fishing all night and you haven’t caught even a little one, and somebody says, “Well boys, you didn’t catch anything, did you?” you don’t feel very talkative.

Today, people would criticize Jesus for being insensitive to their feelings. I think Jesus asked the question because he knows that until we admit that what we’re doing isn’t working, we won’t try something else. So, he draws the admission from them, however reluctantly. Then, when he tells them to throw out their net on the right side of the boat, they were willing to give it a try. When they did, they made a huge catch of fish.

Everyone sprang into action, pulling nets, shoving oars and equipment out of the way, making room in the boat. They tried hoisting their catch over the gunnel, but it was too heavy. While they were debating what to do, the beloved disciple, whom most scholars think was the Apostle John, had an “Ah, ha!” moment. The man on shore was Jesus! He was sure of it.

Everyone else was so excited about the catch that they hardly gave a thought to the man on shore (which, by the way, happens in churches, too. We can get so caught up in church work that we ignore the church’s Lord.). But when the beloved disciple said to Peter, “It is the Lord,” Peter knew he was right. Every church needs people like the beloved disciple, people who are quick to recognize the Lord. They are often not the first to act, but they are the first to perceive, the first to recognize that some leading is from the Lord.

Once Peter knew it was the Lord, he wrapped his outer garment around him and jumped into the water. Now, if I was going into jump in the water, I would take my outer garment off. Why did Peter put his on?

He wanted to be dressed when he greeted Jesus. In Judaism, a greeting was a religious act, just as it is today in Islam. Even the Greeks would not greet one another when they were not suitably clothed. For example, no one exchanged greetings in the public baths.

Whatever was the case with Peter, he did not wait for the others. He wanted to see Jesus. And that is just like what we know of Peter. Always the first to act. Always the leader. The others followed in the boat. Unable to hoist the net over the gunnel, they had decided to pull it behind the boat until they got to shore.

When they arrived, they found a charcoal fire with some fish cooking on it, as well as some bread. Jesus said to them, verse 10, “Bring some of the fish you just caught,” and Peter (once again) took the lead. He climbed aboard, untied the net, and dragged the fish to shore. Some commentators see this as a miracle. They say Peter was given supernatural strength to lift the net. I’m not so sure. For one thing, dragging the net is a very different thing than lifting it. For another, just because Peter responded first does not mean that others did not join in. I doubt they would just sit there and watch their friend do all the work.

John tells us that the net was full of large fish, and he mentions a specific number – 153. That number has fascinated Bible readers ever since. Some have found great significance in it—or at least, they assume there is great significance in it – and they have come up with some novel theories to explain it.

The church father, Jerome, claimed that the total number of species of fish in the world is 153, and that one of each was in the disciples’ net. (Jerome was only off by about 37,000 species.) Other people added the numerical value of Simon’s name, 76, to the numerical value of the Greek word ἰχθύς (fish), 77, to come up with 153. Still others see the number 100 as representing the Gentiles, the number 50 as representing the Jews, and the number 3 as representing the Trinity. There are other ideas out there besides.

I think they are all suspect and some are just plain silly. I think the real reason John said there were 153 fish was because – don’t be shocked – there were 153 fish. John has a penchant for being precise, which we see throughout this gospel. If he were here today and you asked him the time, he wouldn’t say, 10:50; he would say 10:51. That was just the kind of guy he was.

And he was another kind of guy, as well, which we mustn’t forget. He was a fisherman – and a commercial fisherman, at that. I once went on a fly-in trip to a remote Canadian lake. One day, my friends Dave and Bill fished for pike and caught 70 of them. How do I know? If you were a fisherman, you wouldn’t need to ask. Fisherman keep track, especially of big catches. If I were to call Dave up today, twenty years later, and ask how many fish they caught that day, he would know. If universities required biblical exegesis majors to take an immersive study abroad in fishing, it would make for better biblical scholarship.

So, what does all this mean for us? First, what we have here is a visual, real-life commentary on John 15:5: “Apart from me you can do nothing.” The professional fisherman caught nothing until Jesus joined them. We, too, need him to join us: in our marriages, our parenting, at work, at school, and especially at church. When he joins us, it makes all the difference. You can work (for instance) on your marriage. You might do everything you can think of, but if he is not in it with you don’t expect too much. But ask him to join you – better yet, ask to join him in his plans for your marriage – and watch what happens.

Next, the beloved disciple was the first to recognize Jesus. Every church needs its beloved disciples – the people who discern the Lord in the events of everyday life. How did he know it was the Lord? I think he put together the sound of his voice (remember – my sheep hear my voice) with what resulted from following his directions.

Those are keys for us, too, if we want to recognize him. First, we need to learn to distinguish his voice when he speaks to us. We can start by familiarizing ourselves with its tones. The principal way we do this is by spending time – significant time – in the Scriptures. (Anyone who ignores his voice in Scripture yet expects to hear him speak in time of need is just fooling himself.)

Here are some truths about his voice: He speaks with authority. He never whines. His voice is never grating. A person struggling with guilt need never think the voice that says, “You stupid jerk!” is his. That is not how he speaks. If you want to be like the beloved disciple, want to alert the rest of us, “It is the Lord,” you must learn to recognize his voice. That means spending time with the Scriptures.

Secondly, when the effects are greater than the effort, the Lord is near. When John saw the great catch of fish, he immediately discerned the Lord’s hand in it. When the American evangelist D. L. Moody went to England to preach, Dr. R. W. Dale made a point of attending the meetings. He wanted to discover the secret of Moody’s effectiveness. After two or three days he made an appointment to see Moody, and this is what he told him: “The work here is plainly of God, for I can see no relation between you and what is being accomplished.” In other words, “How could an uncultured, uneducated yokel like you accomplish what is happening here? It must be God.”

(Moody, by the way, was not offended in the least. He laughed and said that he would be very sorry if it were otherwise. He knew that when the results are incommensurate with our efforts, the Lord is at work.[2]) 

Cal Road needs its beloved disciples, the people who are quick to recognize the Lord. Will you be one of them? Will you learn his tones, discern his hand? But we also need men women like Peter, who jump right in, people who lead the rest of us in following Jesus. Maybe God is calling you to be one of those people. If so, don’t let anything get in your way.

Peter could have let his recent failure – he had denied his master, betrayed his trust, and disgraced himself – get in his way. Yet he rushed to be with Jesus. Why? Because he knew the kind of person Jesus is: forgiving, loving, great to be around, always a faithful friend. Perhaps he had been hesitant to see Jesus before, but not now.

Maybe you are hesitant to come near to Jesus because something in your past is holding you back. If you only knew the kind of person Jesus is, you’d come. He is forgiving – he won’t look down on you, whatever you’ve done. He’ll welcome you. If you ask his forgiveness, you’ll have it, and he won’t keep bringing up your fault. He wants you to be with him.

One last thing. On three different occasions, Jesus said something like, “Whatever is concealed will be revealed.” We take that as a warning that our secret sins will be exposed, and that may be the case on one of those occasions, but the principle is broader than that. We’ve been talking about how Jesus is concealed now, at least from most eyes most of the time, but it will not always be so. Now, when we don’t see him, we still believe in him, as St. Peter said. But the day is coming when we will see him, and just one look will change us forever.

God grant us that look, and may we be glad of it.

Blessing/Sending (Psalm 67; John 14)

May God be merciful to you and bless you. May He smile with kindness upon you, that His ways may be known throughout the earth, and His saving power among people everywhere. Now go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

[1]Wiersbe, W. W. (1992). Wiersbe’s Expository Outlines on the New Testament (p. 269). Victor Books.

[2] From Dallas Willard, Hearing God, IVP © 1999 p. 49

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John 3:16: The Bible’s Most Popular Verse

Posted on May 30, 2025 by salooper57

In 1993, while working for Calvin College, Nick Hengeveld founded Bible Gateway. In the 32 years since, the Bible Gateway site has been visited billions of times. It attracts almost 90 million visits a month from countries all over the globe. While more searches are initiated by Americans than any other country, over three million searches a month are performed by Filipinos. Colombians and Mexicans add another million searches each.

According to Bible Gateway, the Bible verse that is most often searched is John 3:16, with over 2 million searches every month. John 3:16 is the world’s most beloved Bible verse, but what does it mean? Why does it start with the word “For”? Does perish refer to hell? Does eternal life refer to heaven? What does it mean that God gave his Son?

The word “For” at the beginning of the verse signals that an explanation (in this case, of the claim that “the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life”) is being offered. In typical Johannine style, the phrase “the Son of Man must be lifted up” has a double meaning: the Son of Man must be exalted and the Son of Man must be crucified. John sees no conflict between the two. In fact, he sees the crucifixion as the fullest revelation of Christ’s glory.

John tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” Sadly, as N.T. Wright has pointed out, much evangelical preaching sounds as if “God so hated the world that he gave his one and only Son.” Nothing could be further from the truth. God loves the world. He loves winners and losers, saints and sinners. He loves the believer and the atheist, the ardent church-goer and the guy who has never darkened a church door.

Because God loved the world in this way – a literal translation might go, “God loved the world thus” – he gave his only Son. “Thus” clearly points first to the lifting up of the Son (the crucifixion), but the giving of the one and only Son did not start there. Perhaps creation itself is the result of another giving of the Son (see John 1:3, 10 and Colossians 1:16), and he was certainly given to the world in the incarnation (John 1:14).

The word “whoever” (repeated in verse 18 and throughout this Gospel) is important. Whoever includes “everyone believing in him,” as a literal translation might go. I’ve known two different drug dealers who prayed from their jail cells for mercy. Their prayers arose from troubled souls through drug-distorted minds and went something like this: “God, if you’ll get me out of this, I will believe in you.” Both men got out of their trouble in remarkable ways, and both men believed. Decades later, they are still believing. Whoever means whoever.

The words “believes in him” deserve careful attention. A strictly literal translation would go, “believes into him.” This is a Johannine phrase, used only in this Gospel and in the First Epistle, but used more than twenty times. What does it mean to “believe into” Jesus, and why did John latch onto this preposition?

This preposition (εἰς) implies motion toward or into something. I suspect that John wanted to convey the idea that the life of faith is not static. You don’t believe in Jesus from a distance. Belief moves you into him, into fresh experiences of his wisdom, kindness, and grace. Into a fresh awareness of your sins and weaknesses, and fresh dependence on his righteousness and strength. The life of faith is always calling us, as a line from C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle put it, “further up and further in.”

Jesus frequently spoke of believers as followers. The chief thing about followers is that they follow. They don’t just sit, not even in a pew. Their motto is, “Further up and further in.” If we stop moving forward, we can be sure that a distance will grow between us and our savior since he has not stopped moving.

Those who believe into Jesus will not perish. That word can mean “kill” in the active voice. In the passive and middle voices in can mean to perish, to be lost (it is used of the lost sheep in Jesus’s parable) and to be ruined. It can have the idea of loss or ruin through one’s own actions (the execution of a priest’s daughter who had taken up prostitution, for example) or neglect, by “trifling away one’s life.”

Hell is not mentioned in connection with the word “perish,” nor is heaven mentioned in connection with “eternal life,” though it is possible that Jesus had both in mind. But perishing (or being ruined) begins long before hell, just as eternal life begins before reaching heaven.

Setting “perish” in apposition to “eternal life” recalls Moses’s offer more than a millennium earlier: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life …” John understood that the way to choose life is to believe into the Son whom God had sent.

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