The Skeptical Student

Well, good morning. It is great to have you guys here. My name is Rene. I'm one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. Wow, it's great to be back. Yeah. And whether you are here with us in this building live, thank you for that, or whether you're watching via video over in the venue service, that's kind of a video overflow service that we have going in the 10:45 service every single weekend, or maybe you're watching online, or you're in one of our other video services. I just heard this week from another congregation in Brazil, there's now three churches, three different congregations, that are watching our services as their message. They have live music and everything down there, and then as a message they show Twin Lakes Church subtitled in Portuguese, and there's now a third congregation down there that's doing that. So turn back, look at the cameras, and let's welcome our new church in Brazil. That's pretty cool. That's awesome.

Well, I just want to start out with something that completely had me on the floor laughing yesterday when somebody sent me this link. There's a whole bunch of videos on YouTube that are called "kid snippets," and what a group of young dads did is they had this genius idea. How many of you have kids at home? Young kids at home? Okay, here's what they did. They have young kids at home, and they tape-recorded them talking about anything. And then what they do is they act out, they lip-sync what their kids talk about. And it's brilliant, and it's always a different topic. For example, this one is math class. The kids talked about math class, then their parents acted out. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the screen, you'll get it.

Okay, here's your homework. First let me tell you the directions. What's four take away five? One, two, three, four, five, six. Take away. What's six take away one? One. No. You take away -- so you take away one out of six. How much does it equal? What's five -- ten minus one? I don't know. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six, seven, eight, nine. Ten. Nope. Take away one. How much is it? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Nope. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And one more. And add one more. How many does it equal? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One. It equals -- it makes nine. See how you take away one and it equals -- One. Do you get it now? Yes. Isn't that genius? That's brilliant. These things have gone viral. You can check it out. Kids snippets.

But quick show of hands. How many of you have ever tried to teach a kid something and you have felt like that teacher at some point or another? Have you felt like that? All right. How many of you have felt like that kid when somebody else has tried to teach you something, right? How many of you feel like that every weekend when I preach? Thank you. Okay. You know what I love about the Gospels is that in the Bible, you see Jesus Christ teaching his disciples and over and over and over again, he tries to teach them something simple like, "Love your neighbor." And you can just tell the disciples are looking at him like this. You know, they do not get what he is talking about.

And in the chapters we're going to look at this month, you see that this goes all the way back to the very beginning. Grab your message notes, "Conversations with Christ" is the name of our new four-week series that we're going to be looking at in September, looking at four actual conversations that Jesus has in the Gospel of John. What would Jesus say today if he met a skeptical UCSC student? Or if he met some Santa Cruz, you know, pleasure point partiers? Or if he met some grieving people after a funeral? Or if he met a person banned from a church because of her sexual morals? What would he say to those people? Well, we don't have to wonder because actually he did meet all of those people, actually in the Bible, in the Gospel of John.

We're going to be looking at the very early chapters of the Gospel of John, and we're going to be looking at all those conversations, and they are absolutely fascinating for a couple of reasons. First of all, you see here Christianity sort of before the institutional religion sort of took hold of it in a way, right? You just see Jesus and he's got like a few followers, and it's just Jesus explaining himself and his mission to a handful of people who completely have never heard of Christianity or Jesus Christ before. And so that's another cool thing because you actually, if you're new to church or if you're new to the whole thing about Jesus and you really wonder what's it really about, how would Jesus explain it to you, that's what you're going to find in these early chapters and conversations in the Gospel of John.

And if you're kind of invested in Christianity, you'd call yourself a Christian, and you want to be inspired that it could go viral again. It could just catch a spark and explode again like it did in early days. You're going to find out how that happened in these early chapters too. So I am super stoked looking at these early conversations Jesus has with people very early on in Christian history. We're talking about the first few weeks or months that all these conversations we're going to look at this month happen, and this morning we're going to talk about Jesus and the skeptical student in John 1.

Now the first thing we're going to do, actually, before we dig into the Scriptures, I'm going to give everybody here an assignment. Very simple. Take out a pen, and there's also pencils in the pews there, and I want you to look at this diagram in your notes. This represents your relational universe. Let me try to explain this to you. That's you right there in the center where it says me, and those circles or bubbles orbiting all around you. They represent all your relationship groups. For example, I filled one in already for you with friends. But here's what I want you to do right now. I want you to label the other groups. I want you to just take a moment and think about every group that you're a part of and label those other circles.

Like maybe it's a hobby group, like you're part of a knitting group or something. Or maybe you're part of a sports team. Put down softball. Or maybe you're in a band. Kind of put down the band. Or maybe you volunteer at your kid's school. Whatever it is, anything you're involved with, you probably want to put neighborhood in one of them. For example, here's what I put. Church, obviously. Family. Chamber of Commerce here in Aptos. I go to that every month. Made a ton of friends through that. Second Harvest Food Bank. Made a ton of new friends through that. And my neighbors. And I could have added a lot more circles. So just think through for a second who do I know? What communities do I participate in? And write those down right now as they come to your mind in those little circles.

And if you don't finish it right now, you just take this home and finish it. But finish it today. You can finish it later today when the game gets boring because Dallas is getting blown out by the Niners. Just take this out and fill in all the labels, okay? Now, yes, I'm aware. NFL starts today. But listen, notice on one of these circles, there's extra circles attached. Do you see that? And that's because all of your relationships that you have in each one of those social circles, they also have their own social circles. Everybody you know in your neighborhood, they also have a constellation of other social circles. They're a part of people that they know.

What I want you to see here is that each one of us lives in this relational universe where we are connected to all kinds of different people. You're like, "Why is this important?" There was a book that came out a few years ago called "The Tipping Point" by a guy named Malcolm Gladwell. Show of hands. Anybody here read "The Tipping Point" by Gladwell? Several of you, right? Great book, not like a church book. But what this book is about is this. He says ideas don't get spread because of a lot of marketing. He says that still in this day, of all kinds of media, the way people come to their conclusions about anything is by word of mouth, even today, from friends and acquaintances that they know in one of their social circles.

And here's why. The average person sitting in this room is hammered with 254 advertising messages a day. Now that's average. That's little ads that pop up on websites you visit. That's ads you see in magazines. That's ads you see on television, on cable TV. 254 ads a day. Average. Now if you're young, if you're under 18, the average jumps to 1,000 ads you see every single day. Now is it possible to process that number of ads? No, it's impossible. And so what advertisers know is what do you do with those ads? What do you do when an ad pops up on an internet site you look at or on TV? What do you do? You ignore-- how many of you ignore those ads? We all ignore them. All of us ignore the ads. Unless a friend by word of mouth has told us, you know what, you ought to go to that. This is a good deal. There's a good Groupon today. Or like your pastor told you, check out those kid snippets videos. They're really fun and now a lot of you are going to go, OK, yeah, I kind of heard about those. Now I'm going to check them out. Because by word of mouth, somebody recommended it to you. Right?

And what happens is if enough people tell their friends through word of mouth, then it goes-- and this is a word that Malcolm Gladwell coined in his book-- it goes viral. It's like a flu virus. People tell other people through their social circles until all of a sudden it saturates people's awareness. And it goes from being this marginal idea or song or artist and all of a sudden it becomes a majority, an epidemic. It goes viral. Now my question is, wouldn't you love to be a part of something super positive going viral again? Here in Santa Cruz and all over the world. Well, it can happen again with the message of Christ, just like it happened in the first days. And here's how it happened.

Let's take a look at the top of page two at the social network at work in John chapter 1. This is how it all starts. At first, Jesus kind of strides onto the scene and the only person who knows who Jesus is is his cousin, John the Baptist. Jesus has zero followers. And then one day John the Baptist points to him and says, to all of his followers, and John the Baptist had a ton of followers, the Bible says, and he says, "Behold, the Lamb of God." And that's really all he says. And the Bible says two, two of his many followers start to follow Jesus. And when I say follow Jesus, I don't mean metaphorically. I mean they literally, the Bible says, started to tag behind him. And it says Jesus turned around and says, "What do you want?" That's not like the big spiritual thing you'd think he'd say. "What do you two want?" And they said, "Where are you staying?" Which was a Jewish way at the time of saying, "Can we come over for dinner?" And Jesus goes, "Sure, sure, let's go eat." And so those two guys, Andrew and John, start following Jesus and then watch what happens starting around verse 40.

Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of the two. So now there's two disciples. One of the two heard what John had said. And the first thing Andrew did was find his brother, there's his family relationship circle, Simon, and then Simon starts following Jesus. So now there's three. The next day, Jesus decides to leave for Galilee finding Philip. He said to him, "Follow me," because Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the same town, the town of Bethsaida. And so that's the social circle they all had in common. And then Philip finds Nathaniel, another guy from the same town, kind of a childhood friend or something, and he told him, "Hey, we found the one Moses wrote about and about whom the prophets also wrote." Now press freeze for just a second because when the-- Nathaniel's response is when Jesus Christ gets his first heckler. And we're going to see that in just a second here.

But what you see here in the very early moments, it's kind of like the fraction of a second right before the Big Bang. Like right before Christianity goes viral. It's just like these three or four guys. And what we see here in this story is how even today we can be inviting people into the conversation with Christ and how things can start to go viral again. Very quickly, I see three things in this story. Jot these down. First, connect socially, right? All these guys just had social connections. They weren't going up cold calling. They were friends from town, childhood friends from the same area. They were also fishermen. So make sure you're connected socially. Here's how you can diagram it out in these circles. It goes like this. John speaks to his group of followers, including Andrew, who gets his brother Simon, who's from Bethsaida, as is Philip, who goes to his friend Nathaniel, who is told about Jesus.

Now, here's the problem, and I am just as guilty as this, as anybody, the problem is that most of us here in church all are kind of plugged into the exact same social network after a while, and so it's a closed system. You see, where every bubble is just connected to the exact same bubbles. Like we're connected, but we all know the exact same things about other Christians. And this is, I talked about this last weekend, I was really challenged to kind of get out of my ivory tower here because when you connect to other groups, groups not in your church, like neighborhood groups or hobby groups, or you play in a band, or you're friends at the gym or whatever, then all those people also have friends that are outside of your church social universe, and that's key to an idea going viral.

Suddenly, your influence can really spread virally, so connect socially strategically, right? However, that's not all kind of you need to be prepared to do because what happens next in John 1 shows it does not always go smoothly. Point two is expect cynicism. Expect people to be a little cynical, like they're not all gonna love Jesus like you love Jesus. And I love this little detail because it's like, these first four guys are all like, "Check this out, check this out, check this out!" And Philip finds this guy from his hometown, he goes, "Check it out, I think I just met the Messiah!" Literally, the Messiah that we've been reading about our whole lives, prophesied. I think he's this guy from Nazareth, and Nathaniel interrupts and goes, "Whoa, whoa, stop." He says, "Nazareth, can anything good come from there?"

And don't you just love that detail? You know how there's always some towns where you find out somebody's from that town, not naming any names here, but it comes up in conversation, it's like, "Oh, aren't you glad you're not there right now?" You know, and that's apparently what Nazareth-- Nazareth had a reputation apparently as a backwater, as a place, you know, and Nathaniel's going like, "People there sit on their porch and play dueling banjos, and they watch pro wrestling, and they think it's real, they think NASCAR's a sport. Those are not the kind of people that produce the Messiah!" And please, that was just a joke about NASCAR, don't email me. I've already gotten a couple of emails this weekend about that.

But Nathaniel's just displaying this human characteristic, like, there's the cool people, and I want to be one of the cool people, and there's those uncool people that look like this, or talk like this, or believe this, or they're from that, and I definitely want to distance myself from them, so I'm just going to kind of be cynical about those people. I'm going to judge a book by its character. I saw something the other day, you guys might have seen this too, on that show "Britain's Got Talent," and to me this scene kind of illustrates what is happening in this story dramatically between Nathaniel and Jesus. So watch this clip, it's quite amazing.

Hello. - Hi. - Hi, how are you? - I'm fine, thanks, how are you? - Good, nice to meet you. What's the act called? - Charlotte and Jonathan. - Charlotte and Jonathan, okay. How old are you both? - I'm 16. - I'm 17. - Okay, and you thought the combination would work, whose idea was it? - It was our singing teachers, actually. She thought it'd be good to try us out together, and we both sounded quite good when we sang what we did. - Okay, you're not saying much, Jonathan. Are you shy? - Uh, sometimes. I've always had sort of problems with my size, since, like, I can remember, and when I was in sort of primary school, it was back then, really, that I had sort of the mick taken out of me, and it kind of damaged my confidence quite a bit.

Don't you love that? Kind of the unexpected person is just, like, a genius. And to me, that is exactly what is happening here in this part of Scripture. Nathaniel, though, is Simon Cowell. He's the one rolling his eyes, going, "Nazareth, you've got to be kidding me." And here's the thing that you just got to be prepared for. I think, in my observation, Christianity itself is Nazareth for a lot of people in our culture today. You start to talk about what you're excited about with your faith, and people kind of roll their eyes and go, "Uh, Christianity? You don't church?" Like, "You've got to be kidding me. Christianity is kind of the overweight, unattractive person from the uncool place. That's a nonstarter, man." So what do you do with that? What do you do with that if you feel that way, what do you do with that if people kind of respond to you that way?

Let me just say a couple of things. If you tend to be the cynical person here, I want you to remember two points. First, contempt kills. It's absolutely deadly. If you just ride off somebody because you think they're uncool or something, it kills creativity, it kills problem solving, it kills relationships. And secondly, if you're caught up in this trap of being cynical, you miss the joy of discovering how God works through the weak and the unexpected, like that 17-year-old opera singer. All through the Bible, this is how God works, if you think about, like, almost every Bible story you've ever heard. God always works through the younger son, the barren woman, the plain Jane, the prostitute, the fisherman instead of the educated. In other words, the people from Nazareth. So don't try to put God in a box. Listen, don't get so cynical you're blind to the miracle.

That's if you struggle with cynicism. But what if, you know, you're excited and you're sharing your faith or something and somebody's like, "Uh, yeah, that's an on-starter, man. That's uncool." What happens next? Watch Philip's response. Philip just goes, "Why don't you come and see?" Great example, right? Don't argue. Don't let somebody else's cynicism destroy you. Just give them a chance to check it out. Say, "You know what? You can be like that, but why don't you come and see? Why don't you check it out?" Because the point is not to answer everybody's arguments anyway. The point is just to introduce people to Jesus and so that they can have a heart relationship with them.

And that brings me to the third key in the story, which is respect everyone as you're inviting them to consider having a conversation, their own conversation with Jesus. Respect everybody. And I want you to look how Christ himself reacts here. First, look at how Jesus is positive in verse 47. I love this detail. "When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, 'Ah, here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.'" Right? It's kind of like people used to say of Simon Cowell. At least you know what he's thinking, right? At least he's honest. And that's what Jesus is saying about this guy who probably other people found abrasive. My guess is Nathanael was a little critical in spirit. And Jesus goes, "Yeah, but you know what? You never have to wonder where you stand with Nathanael. At least he's like a no baloney guy. He just tells it like it is, and I appreciate that."

Now, I got to be honest. I look at this and I go, "I would not have responded this way." If I were Jesus with his powers and somebody had just kind of disrespected my own hometown, where my mama is from, I would have been like, "Uh, yeah, now you're blind. Now what more proof do you need right now? You know, try that again. What else? What were you saying about Nazareth, you know?" But Jesus is so cool. And this is super important because as a church, we want to be this way. We want to be a place where everybody is welcome because nobody's perfect. Everybody's got questions. I've got questions. So if somebody says, "Well, I don't know if I can go to church because, you know, I still do this," or, "I don't know if I believe this. I still have questions about that," Jesus would say, "You know what? I appreciate your honesty so much."

He would value that honesty, but he would say the same thing. He'd say, "Let's walk together and you can work through all that with me instead of without me." Jesus is not against people checking out what it means to follow Christ for a while before they make a decision. He's not against people thinking. He's not against people having questions. He says, "Follow along with me and let's answer the questions together." And by the way, that's one of the reasons that we're constantly, as a church, we value offering ways to answer questions people have about the faith, like a week from tonight, there's this little thing coming up. It's a live simulcast here. It's free. There's this insert in your bulletin about it. It's called Science and Faith.

And a lot of people these days have this question, you know, "Is the Bible outdated? Hasn't science disproved Christianity?" And so what some people did was they went for the top. They said, "Who are the biggest brains, basically, that are Christians?" One of these guys who's going to be on the panel is an Oxford professor, Oxford. One of these guys is a New York Times writer. Another one of these guys is a best-selling author. And yet all of them, perhaps surprisingly to you, are solid believers in Jesus Christ. And they're going to be on this panel. And what they're going to be talking about, here's why, though I'm an intellectual, it has not disproved my faith. That's a live panel. It's here via simulcast a week from tonight. So I hope you can check this out if that's one of the questions you've got.

But that brings us to the next bullet point, which is that Jesus is personal. He's personal. He's always personal. He's just said, "Hey, Nathaniel, you're an honest guy. I appreciate that." And Nathaniel goes, and you can still hear the cynical undertone in his voice, like, "Really?" "And how do you know me?" Nathaniel asked. And Jesus answered, "Well, I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you." And, you know, this is one of the reasons that, to me, this really feels like a true story. I mean, one of the reasons I really appreciate this and trust this as an accurate story is that this is such a funny detail. Because if you were making this up, you would resolve what that meant, right? If you were writing a fictional story, you'd go, "And here's what that means, that fig tree detail." But nowhere in the story do we ever discover what was going on under the fig tree.

And I have read all kinds of speculation and all the commentaries about this fig tree, but we just don't know what Nathaniel was doing under the fig tree. All we know is that whatever he was doing was so private and so personal and so significant to Nathaniel, it was so astounding that when Jesus says, "Well, you know, I saw you when nobody else saw you under that fig tree before you even came here," Nathaniel just drops to his knees and goes, "Wow, you are the Messiah." But this shows me a key thought, which is this. Jesus knows me inside and out. Inside and out, right? The first thing Jesus says is, "You're a man without deceit." He knows his heart on the inside. And the second thing he says is, "You were under a fig tree." That's the truth about his circumstances on the outside. And still today, Jesus knows you inside and out.

You never go through anything, even if it's something that nobody else knows you're going through, where you can say, "Jesus doesn't know about it." And I don't know about you, but this is such a relief to me because sometimes I can't feel all alone in my sorrow or in my anxiety or in my temptation or in my desires, and I feel like nobody else gets me, but Jesus does. He knows me inside and out, fully, completely, and totally. And he demonstrates this with Nathaniel. But again, here's how this conversation is a model for you and me. People will want to debate complicated, big truths, and that's fine, but you may not have all the answers to them, and it gets intimidating. So what do you say? You can say, "Listen, I don't know the answer to that question. That is a great question. But let's find the answer together as we focus on Jesus, because Christianity is about Christ, right? Yeah, but what about the Crusades? What about the problem of evil in the world? What about the Trinity? Great questions, man. I got some of those same questions. But you know, I'm not a historian. I'm not a philosopher. I'm a Christian. And that means I'm a follower of Christ.

I may not know all the answers, but it means I like what I see in Jesus. It means I think Jesus is worth following, and as I focus on Christ, I'm going to discover the answers to some of these other questions, and some of them I'll never discover the answer to. But let's keep it focused on him, and that leads to the third bullet point. Jesus does this. He's purposeful. He keeps it gospel-focused. He keeps coming back to his purpose. He doesn't allow kind of a conversation with a cynical student to get himself distracted from why he's here. This is so great. Here's where it just gets mind-blowing, these last couple of verses. "Then Nathanael declared, 'Rabbi, you're the Son of God. You're the King of Israel.'" Again, it's so funny. Nathanael goes from zero to 60 instantly, right? "Nazareth, don't be ridiculous. You're the Son of God." And you can hear Jesus like not being like overly impressed with that. You can hear him kind of chuckling when he says, "You believe because I told you I saw you under a fig tree? You will see greater things than that.

You'll see greater things like what?" Well, here's the very last verse. Look at this. Jesus then added, "Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." Now, the Son of Man was Jesus' favorite way to refer to himself. He referred to himself as the Son of Man. So, what is Jesus talking about? Nathanael, you're going to see heaven open and you're going to see angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Try to picture this. So, Nathanael's going to see angels like climbing up on Jesus' shoulder and climbing up on his head. What does this even mean? Well, Jesus is referring to a very famous story in the Bible that Nathanael would have known because it's one of the seminal stories about the Jews and how they got started. It's in Genesis 28 and it's about one of the forefathers of the Jews, Jacob.

And Jacob has a dream and in his dream, he sees a ladder stretching all the way up to heaven and connecting heaven and earth. And then Genesis 28:12 says, Jacob saw in his dream, he saw heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on this ladder. So, Jacob sees a ladder stretching from heaven to earth and heaven is open at the top of this ladder and he sees angels of God ascending and descending on the ladder, on the ladder that is connecting heaven and earth. And then Jesus quotes the same verse only he changes it slightly. He says, you'll see heaven open and angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. He's saying, Nathanael, you will see me as the ladder to heaven, the bridge that makes heaven open and connects humans to God.

Now, when did that happen? When did Nathanael see Jesus as the ladder to heaven? It happened on the cross because when Jesus died on the cross, he became the ladder because he made it possible for you and me to have a relationship with God. You know, I love how Jesus speaks so poetically. I love the fact that Jesus doesn't say, well, Nathanael, here, boom. Here's a seminar. Here is everything you need to know. Here is the whole Old Testament explained. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to die on the cross. I'm going to raise from the dead. I'm going to work everything out. I'm going to reconcile. He doesn't really actually tell him much. But he does cast this inspiring, poetic, little one-sentence vision. It's almost like a haiku, isn't it? It's so spare. And yet it's so beautiful. He says, I am Jacob's ladder.

And, of course, this is the idea that went viral because this is a new idea. Up to this point, every single other religion had said, okay, here's the instructions for the ladder. Here's how you get from earth to heaven. Here's all the details and all the rungs you've got to build yourself, how you can redeem yourself, how you can do all these good deeds to get to the God from whom you are estranged. Heaven is closed to you unless you work really hard and you build the ladder and you climb the ladder. And then Jesus comes along and says, no, I am the ladder. And I have come as the ladder to have conversations with you, to have a relationship. And this is what blew people's minds. And that's how everything got started.

You know, if we traced it back, each one of us that's here right now, hearing this story I just told you about Jesus, you're hearing this because somebody told me. And they told me because somebody told them and somebody told them. And if you traced it all the way back, ultimately it would get back to this first half chapter of John. A couple of students, one of them skeptical, have a couple of conversations with Christ. And within about three or four years, the tipping point happens and it goes viral. And do you believe it can still happen today here in Santa Cruz? Sometimes as Christians, we can get such defeatist attitudes, like we're a minority or we will always be. I got to tell you, I desperately want to see this county change spiritually. I really do. I love this place. I love it. But at times, spiritually, it can be a dark place.

Statistically, less than 10 percent of the people in this county are in church this weekend. Less than 10 percent and way less than that of people under the age of 35. The county of Santa Cruz hasn't tipped yet. But it can. Not if we're arrogant and stomping all over people. But if just through subtly through little social networks, we say, come and see. Just come and check it out. It can happen. And this is crucial. This is why we all need to look at those relational circles that we wrote down on page one. And we have to ask ourselves the question, am I connected to any groups that are not all already connected to the same church? Because you're a connector to God and he has called you just to be yourself and just in just like normal conversation to bring these worlds together in his love through Christ.

The bottom line is this. Have the conversation. Look for chances to have the conversation with others. And crucially, to have the conversation with Christ. Let's do that now at the communion table. Would you bow your heads in prayer with me? Heavenly Father. We're just amazed today that we. Sitting here in Santa Cruz, worshiping you, we're all tied all the way back to a few students who told each other, let's go hang out with that guy, Jesus. And now, 2000 years later, here we all are in Santa Cruz. And, God, we want to be part of that continuing. And so, God, I pray that we would just be a part of a chain reaction. That Santa Cruz would reach a spiritual tipping point, not by our strategy, even, but just by your spirit working in and through us. And now, Lord, help us to hear your voice speaking to us to get into the conversation as we have communion now with you. In Jesus name. Amen.