What Jesus Demands of the World - Lesson 1

Since our class is the “Disciple Makers” I think it is especially appropriate for us to study this book by John Piper. I mentioned last week that I had done a small scale version of this study from the Sermon on the Mount. Piper has done an extensive job of categorizing the commands of Jesus and making it easy for us to study them.

Jesus’ last command was “Make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20).

It would be difficult to teach all He commanded but, as Piper points out, teaching us to observe the command rather than to simply know the command raises it to a higher level.  We actually must submit to the discipline of the command to be a disciple. Because of our sin nature our submission or discipleship is a progressive work of God. We don’t want to be drinking milk when we should be eating meat but God also works in each of our lives individually. I’m sure that some of these commands we study will hit home with each of us and challenge us in our walk as we seek obey completely what Jesus has commanded.

Teaching is the means that Jesus ordained for discipleship and the frustration I found in my life was that as I was thinking about Jesus statement that if I love Him that I’ll keep His commandments then I began to notice that I really couldn’t come up with much of a list of His commandments. I decided that wasn’t a good thing because of what Jesus said. In other words, how much do I love Him if I can’t even really list His commands? If I can’t tell you what His commands are then I certainly can’t tell you that I’m obeying them with any confidence.

There is, of course, more to be said and understood like our forgiveness because of the atoning death of Jesus (Mark 10:45) and we respond to the work of the Holy Spirit (John 14:26) by obedience to Christ and prayer will strengthen us (Matt. 6:13).

We pursue these commands, not to be justified before God, but to glorify God. So that we’ll obey the command of Jesus that teaches us to “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt.5:16). This is really important to our study since if you fall into that trap of thinking that you’re becoming justified by obeying the commands then you’ve missed the point.

In essence we must continually be thinking of Jesus commands in relationship to the person and work of Jesus. To have seen Him is to see the Father (John 14:9). Jesus manifests the glory of God and glorifies the Father having accomplished the work God gave him to do (John 17:4). You can’t disconnect what Jesus commands from who Jesus is without falling into error. We simply want to glorify God in our behavior as we let our light shine not fall into some goofy legalistic teaching.

We will continually come back to the person and work of Christ as we study these commands because it is fundamental to understanding what Jesus was telling us to do. Piper said “My method is to reflect on the meaning and motivation of Jesus’ demands as they appear in the New Testament Gospels in the context of his person and work.”  

In our culture and in many popular conceptualizations of what kind of person Jesus was it may seem odd to discuss Jesus having demands. I hope that we can get away from the mistakes of this age in seeing Jesus as a passive nothing. If you teach that Jesus would never demand something of us and is a passive religious teacher of good works then I would think you could hear Paul yelling from heaven but nothing could really disturb the bliss that Paul is in now. However, Acts is given for our instruction and it tells us about Paul’s conversion experience. Jesus often said things that were hard to hear; for example, He calls the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23) children of hell (v. 15), “blind fools” (v. 17), “blind guides” (vv. 16, 24), “hypocrites” (v. 27), “whitewashed tombs” (v. 27), and “brood of vipers” (v. 33). Jesus even said to the disciples “If you . . . who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children . . .” (Matt. 7:11); and to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Mark 8:33); and again to Peter, referring to John’s destiny, “What is that to you? You follow me!” (John 21:22). And especially given our recent study of communion … Jesus said (John 6) “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,” v. 54), John comments that when “many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ . . . After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him’” (vv. 60, 66).

Since we serve someone who has told us that, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18) we need to bow to Him and His will but His will is wonderful and a blessing to us. There are no demands more pleasant to obey and Augustine said, “Command what you wish, but give what you command.”

Jesus has every right to demand and every right to demand from the whole world. The world will not obey apart from a move of the Holy Spirit but lack of inclination to obey does not free the world from the obligation to obey. Jesus commands us to make disciples of all nations. You can’t accomplish this without the Holy Spirit.  No force works to accomplish His goals except the Holy Spirit. Not only have we not killed to extend His kingdom on the contrary we have died. There are so many martyrs that they are seen beneath the altar in The Revelation (6:9-11) and they are told to wait until the number of martyrs is complete. There are many martyrs being made in our time and I pray we will not forget them in all our blessings.

Piper explains why he ignores the literature on the search of a “historical” Jesus. The primary reason is that the literature is so polluted with human stubbornness and enmity against Scripture that there is little if anything of value to be found. Piper says, “The conviction was growing in me that life is too short and the church is too precious for a minister of the Word to spend his life trying to recreate a conjectured Jesus. There was work to be done—very hard work—to see what is really there in the God-given portrayal of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels.”

In the selection of commands for discussion, Piper recorded all the commands in the Gospels. He included the implied commands like “Blessed are the merciful” since it implies that we should be merciful. He had over 500 then he eliminated duplicates and commands that don’t have relevance to us such as the example of “Pick up your bed and go home” (Mark 2:11), then the categorizing could take place. He then moved from categories to the structure of the chapters.

I pray that this study of the commands of Jesus will confront us which His words and that we’ll seek to obey Him.

Demand #1 - YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN

Jesus answered . . . “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”—John 3:5, 7

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”—John 3:3

Jesus was speaking to a Pharisee named Nicodemus who was an expert in Scripture. So Jesus gave Nicodemus a hard time when he seems baffled by Jesus statement about the need to be born again. Nicodemus takes a literal view and acts like what Jesus said was nonsense. Plenty of Old Testament Scripture pointed toward the need for a spiritual rebirth.

Jesus was probably quoting Ezekiel when He said, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). The relevant verse that both Jesus (as author) and Nicodemus (as reader) would have been familiar with is Ezekiel 36:25-27. God says: I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. So really it would be reasonable to think that Nicodemus would have meditated on that verse and longed for a new heart and new spirit. Jesus also said “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6).

In Scripture flesh is frequently used to refer to our fallen nature. This is a general rule that works pretty well in the New Testament. Jesus talks about a second birth because we are born spiritually dead. That is our natural state or where we live by nature. We are not born with a heart that naturally wants to serve God and please Him. The KJV says that, “the carnal mind is enmity against God for it is not subject to the law of God neither indeed can be” (Romans 8). We live our lives hanging by a thread over the fire and desire to be there rather than in submission to God. Jesus said to the disciple who wanted time off to go home to a funeral to “Leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60). What Jesus was getting at was that the walking around dead had time to bury the physically dead and that the disciple didn’t have time to spare from service in Jesus’ 3-year ministry. We hear this in the old born one, die twice or born twice die once.

The repentance experienced by the prodigal son caused his father to say “This my son was dead, and is alive again” (Luke 15:24). Jesus says that “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Because the dead can’t see because they naturally are opposed to the kingdom of God and it appears foolish to them.

As Piper points out, there is a mystery in the salvation experience. It is even more mysterious if you try to figure out what is going on in the midst of a revival. Jesus compares the observation of folks repenting and entering the kingdom to the wind and says, (John 3:8) “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” It is an amazing thing to stand in the middle of revival and watch the wind blow.

No one is exempt from the command that they must be born again. Every person who is saved will need to be born again. You need eyes that see the kingdom and not the spiritually dead eyes of our birth. This is a gift of God that we can pray for in the lives of others. You should have tremendous confidence that God can save anyone. This isn’t moral improvement or a self help process anymore than you’d try moral improvement or self help on a corpse. You’re praying for a resurrection and not a good looking corpse. We must be born again—“not . . . of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

We live in a world that will mostly reject the biblical view of salvation. We live in a culture that wants to make the assumption that all beliefs are valid. Folks act as if you can believe anything you want as long as you are sincere. If you are enlightened, in this view, you affirm all paths as equally valid leading to the same God with God being whoever we want.  So we are squeezed to be “tolerant” and to affirm the valid

Right now tolerance is practiced toward religions as long as no one claims to have “the” truth. When we claim that Jesus is the way the truth and the light and that no one comes to the Father but by Him then we are the subjects of intolerance in the name of tolerance since tolerance means affirmation in the current age.  If we had a tolerant society we wouldn’t see hostility when one group claims to be “right” or more specifically claims that some other view is wrong.

Robert Rothwell has suggested 5 ways to prepare for the culture and age we find ourselves living in.

First, we must make sure that we have a solid grasp on the basics of the Christian faith. The Gospel way of salvation is vastly different than the system found in any other religion, and it runs contrary to the salvation by one’s own good-works mentality to which fallen humanity is inclined.

Second, we need to have a good understanding of those with whom we dialogue. In discussing religious differences it can be easy to mischaracterize the beliefs of those who do not follow Christ. Such mischaracterizations prevent us from accurately critiquing other worldviews and show no respect for the non-Christian (1 Peter 3:15–16).

Third, help the unbeliever question the assumption that religious truth is less absolute than mathematics or science. We don’t say it is alright believe that two plus two equals four while others can believe that two plus two equals five. Why should we approach religious truth any differently?

Fourth, help the religious pluralist see that he does not really believe that all roads lead to heaven. If he did, then he would not express outrage at suicide bombings, human sacrifice, and other such practices that even staunch religious pluralists find abhorrent. One cannot consistently embrace religious pluralism and relativism and at the same time object to any religious belief or practice. 

Fifth, we must love those who in this pluralistic culture do not yet trust Christ. Let us pray for their salvation and preach the Gospel, but may we never see them as nonentities or mere ideas that need refuting. Befriend them. Do good to them. Go the extra mile and understand their concerns, hopes, and fears (1 Peter 2:15).