This sermon has the major theme of God’s Timing – things that are pre-ordained are not to happen before their appointed time.
Jesus kept a low profile, not wanting to draw attention to himself, until, again, the right time.
So Jesus wasn’t just doing things at random, like many Christians do.
Jesus wasn’t just a random person, to put it that way.
Everything was according to God’s plan, and according to God’s calendar.
Jesus knew when to hide. He knew when to speak, and when not to.
When he has said these things, he remained in Galilee. As Jesus obeyed his Father, he lived out of the truth that God’s timing is an important expression of his will. Something may be in God’s will, but not yet in his timing.
When out on the streets preaching the gospel, people have said, you guys are strange. You guys are hard. You are weird, They see us as a strange one because we are the light.
There is something that is very key, verse 11.
John 7:11 At the festival, the Judeans were looking for him. “Where is he?” they asked.
Lekan reminds us:
Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kind of evil against you, but mark this, falsely, make sure it’s false.
The timing is important for God to have all the glory.
And it’s very important the time that we do things. The Bible says everything is Beautiful in its own time. So when it’s not the time, it doesn’t look as beautiful.
{for example, a Christmas meal in May}
God’s ways & thoughts are not the same as our ways & thoughts.
Lekan made the point that you can never hear something about Jesus and remain neutral. Like a preacher said, you can’t sit on the fence: It’s not comfortable!
Lekan talked about trust: “The worst thing you can say to a person is “I don’t trust you”. That’s the most painful, the most derogatory thing you can say to someone.
Verse 14: The first time Jesus went to the temple for the Passover was to cleanse the temple. That’s very significant for us as Christians: before Jesus taught in the temple, he cleansed it.
When we speak (preach, teach and the like) it must be for God’s glory, not for our own “vain glory”. The doctrine must be Christ’s doctrine, not ours.
Jesus is saying your understanding depends on obedience to known truth. Jesus questioned the Pharisees about that: That’s a challenge for us too.
Lekan recounted several examples that Jesus quoted concerning the Jews mis-applying the Law (e.g. healing on Sabbath vs circumcising on the Sabbath)
Lekan reminded us about the confusion among the Jews about where Jesus was born, and the significance of it in relation to the prophesied birthplace of The Messiah.
There is a short section about the signs that validated the Messiahship of Jesus and the Jews not seeing the signs right before their eyes – Jesus doing what He did.
Lekan went on to talk about God’s provisions when people are in need (e.g. during The Exodus)
In the Old Testament, we are told that the Holy Spirit came UPON people, but in the New Testament, The Holy Spirit came INTO people.
WE, the people, are the Temple (there is no more “physical” temple i.e. a building)
Next there is a section on Jesus giving living water, then being The Bread Of Life
Close to the end there is a substantial section about a person not needing self-confidence to go out to preach on the street, or to give invitations to come to church, but it is sufficient to have a reliance on The Holy Spirit to work through them.
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PS0: ::: The latest development on the “Transcript” section is that the text-file will be subject to far less preparation than before – less editing and correction. It will still be converted to sentence-column form as before, but any trimming and polishing will be left to the user. Any shortcomings in the transcription software should be pretty obvious and so not a problem in getting the meaning (and the audio file will provide the necessary clarification if required 😀🎧 )
PS1: ::: {not-so-}NEW FORMAT of the transcript.
To ease the processing and preparation of the transcript, and we hope improve the readability of the text, a new format was been adopted in mid October. This breaks the text into sentences instead of arbitrarily-sized “paragraphs”. When the reader opens the file in a program such as Notepad (in MS Windows), then the appearance can be just like a newspaper column. The format is such that the user has many options available, depending on preferences and what software they like to use.
Any feedback on usefulness, improvement suggestions, or whatever, would be most welcome.
PS2 ::::: TRANSCRIPT OF THE SERMON
There is a “button” labelled “Save Video” (or “Download Video” sometimes). This actually links to a text-file to download. It is a transcript of the sermon. At present it is at an experimental stage: it is an aid to getting the most out of the sermon audio. There is no substitute for listening to the verbal delivery of a sermon. However, searching through an audio file lasting the best part of an hour can be somewhat difficult. When you approach the search knowing that you’re sure there is something about “redemption”, for example, then a transcript text-search can take you right there and show you the time in the recording where you will find it! The file is simple “text” rather than a more sophisticated form so that you can edit or reformat as you prefer. This transcript is in 2 forms (in the one file). One half consists of normal text arrangement. These ‘blocks’ were at purely arbitrary boundaries (boundaries were inserted at about 800 character intervals, purely to avoid having one huge unbroken deluge of text, i.e. no attempt at grammatical accuracy). The format has now been changed as described above in PS1. The other section is short bunches of words (8 to 12 nomally) beneath the TIMES at which they occur (for the whole sermon).
This facility is in development (“experimental” as mentioned above) so any feedback on usefulness, improvement suggestions, or whatever, would be most welcome.
