Word of Salvation – Vol. 40 No.09 – March 1995

 

What It Means To Receive Jesus Christ

 

Sermon by Rev. M. Flinn on John 1:9-13

Scripture Readings: Romans 1:18-25 and John 1:9-14

 

Dear Congregation.

John the Baptist was a messenger, an envoy sent by God to announce the coming of the king and to prepare the people for that advent.  John was not the light, but he came that he might bear witness of the light.  So, when the Priests and Levites sent inquisitors to him, in order to find out why and on whose authority he was baptising, John refused to claim a position of honour and importance for himself.

Oh, he could have easily done this, there were thousands who had been baptised by him; there were thousands more who were flocking to hear his messages; his popular success was the dream of every preacher of revival.  But John knew that his role was to play second fiddle and that is precisely what he was determined to do.  There is someone among you whose sandal I am not worthy to untie and you don’t even know who it is.  I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”  John was not the light, but he came that he might bear witness of the light.

What or who is the light?  Well, He is the Word, who was in the beginning, the One who was both with God and who was God, the One who created all things.  And this is affirmed for us again in verse 10, not because John doubted the ability of his readers to get the point the first time, but because this is a point he wants to stress: the world was made through Him.  And this makes all the more staggering the points that John now goes on to make.

I want to look at these next few verses under two main headings.  The first is the relation of Jesus Christ to the world.

The term “world”, or “cosmos” as it is in the Greek, is a very important concept for John.  It occurs over and over in his gospel.  We can see here how keen he is to introduce it.  Verse 9: the true light comes into the world.  Verse 10: He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him.

There are shades of meaning in this concept which are important for us to grasp, especially when we come to that key gospel text in John 3:16, where we are told that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.  What does this term cosmos mean?  Well, at its most basic level, it means an adornment, something which beautifies, like an exquisite necklace or a brooch.

And, by the way ladies, we still have this meaning in 1 Peter 3:3, where Peter says to his women readers, don’t let your adornment, your cosmos, be merely outward, braiding the hair, wearing gold jewellery, putting on dresses.  It is from this basic meaning of the word that we get the term cosmetic.

So what is the point of this?  Well, God is the wonderful craftsman, the creator of this world in all its beauty and grandeur, and we, of all people, should know something of that because we live in a beautiful country where you find some of the most picturesque scenery in the world.  The world is an adornment, and it is supposed to give glory to the One who made it.

But what do we find John saying in verses 9-10?  Jesus, the Creator of the cosmos, comes into the cosmos, but the cosmos did not know Him.  But, this is astonishing, this is incredible!  It is like a famous composer hearing his own work being played in a concert chamber, only to have the conductor announce after the performance that the piece was the work of someone else.

When my wife and I were in Holland earlier this year, one of the things we were determined to do was go to the Rijksmuseum and see some Rembrandt originals.  And we did.  What a wonderful place!  We could have spent days in there.  Some of you may identify with me when I say that it does something to you to gaze at works that are the product of an unquestionable master painter.  Those paintings, as long as they are able to be preserved, will testify to the mind, the heart, and the skill of the artist.  They are, we might say, his adornment.

But now imagine if the paintings had a mind and will of their own and one evening, while no one was looking, they got together and said, “You know, we don’t like the fact that people some in here and go away praising the ability of Rembrandt.  It’s all because of that little signature in the lower right hand corner.  A nasty little badge!  Let’s get rid of it.  Let’s throw off the signature and then maybe the glory will be given to us.”  That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

Well, now consider: Here is Jesus Christ; He has made this world, every part of it; the mountains, the trees, the rivers, the seas, the waterfalls, the stars.  Everywhere He has stamped something of Himself upon it.  His badge of ownership is there.  What’s more, as the owner of the world, He also sustains it, shedding abroad His life-giving light to all.  As John says here, He gives light or life to every man.

Then, about two thousand years ago, He took to Himself a human nature and came into His world as a human being.  And what did He find?  He found that He was not even recognised.  People did not know Him.  They had scratched out the signature.  As Paul says in Romans 1: they had exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator.  And this in spite of the fact that this truth about God was clearly evident through the creation itself.

Now this is bad enough.  Jesus came into the world and the world did not even recognise Him for who He was.  But now John makes another point, and it is more powerful than the last.  He says in verse 11 that He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him.

Jesus came to His own people, the Jews, and of all people they should have been able to recognise Him for who He was.  After all, for centuries He had been dealing with them, giving them His Word – specific prophetic messages that pointed to Himself.  And when He came, He made sure that all those promises were fulfilled even down to where and how He would be born.  He had given them His moral law and then He came in perfect fulfilment and expression of that law.

Of all people, the Jews should have recognised their Messiah.  But they didn’t.  They did not listen to Him; they hardened their hearts against Him, and in the end they crucified Him as a blasphemer.  Think about what that must have meant for Jesus Christ.  The expression in verse 11 can be translated as Jesus “coming home”.  When Jesus came to the Jews, He was coming home.  But His own people, His own family, disowned Him.

So, what is Jesus going to do?  Is He going to go away and reject outright those who have rejected Him and who should have known better?  Is He going to fold up the creation and start afresh, as a painter will destroy a sketch with which he is not satisfied?

Well, that brings me to the second heading: Jesus Christ in relation to His own.

In verses 12 and 13 we read: “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”  It is at this point that we must address the question what it means to receive Jesus Christ and what it means to be born of God.  And let me say that there has been a great deal of confusion about this, especially in the modern evangelical world.

There are those who understand that, to receive Jesus Christ means to pray a prayer asking Him to come into our lives.  It is an understanding that is based on Jesus’ statement in Revelation 3:20: “Behold I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and dine with him and he with me.”  And so the idea is that Jesus stands and knocks at the door of your heart and mine.  He will not force himself on anyone, but will wait until we consciously open up the door of our hearts and invite Him into our lives.

We do that by praying a prayer and then after we have received Jesus in this way, we are never more to doubt that Jesus is living in us.  We are born again and are temples of the Holy Spirit from that point on.  And if we cannot name the day and the time and the place in which we have received Jesus Christ, then our conversion is at best in doubt and at worst not real at all.

This is when we are led to question the genuineness of our Christianity because we simply do not feel like we have been born again.  We may have prayed the prayer; made a decision and even gone forward at a meeting, but what has changed?  We don’t feel as if Jesus is living inside us and we can’t match the experiences of other born again people.  Maybe we haven’t received Christ after all.

We do not have time today to look at Revelation 3:20 in its context.  Suffice to say that if you do read it in its context, you will see that Jesus is not speaking in general terms to unbelievers but to believers in a church that had become unfaithful.  But what I do want to do is put this understanding of what it means to receive Jesus Christ to the test.  And we can do that by going no further than these verses in John 1.

John has just said in verse 11 that the Jews did not receive Jesus Christ.  What does he mean?  Does he mean that the Jews at no point sat down and prayed a private prayer: “Lord Jesus, I invite you to come into my heart?”  No, he simply means that the Jews did not recognise Jesus for who He was.  They did not acknowledge Him as Creator of the world, or their Messiah.  He came home, but they disowned him.

Consequently, the Jews, although they claimed to be children of God because of their background, and their circumcision, and their moral law, and so on, were in fact not children of God at all.

Ah, but to everyone who did receive Jesus Christ, everyone who did listen to Him, believe in Him, trust in Him, confess Him, these people are the genuine children of God.  And just in case John is misunderstood, he defines his own terminology in the second half of vs 12.

What does it mean to receive Jesus?  It means to believe in His Name.  It means to believe that Jesus is Jesus.  He is the Saviour, as the name Jesus means.  He is the Christ, the anointed one, the promised Messiah, as the name Christ means.  To trust in Jesus: this is what it means to receive him.  And if I believe, if I trust, then I have been born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

So then, this matter of receiving Jesus Christ is not a matter of birth.  If you are born a Australian / New Zealander, you are not automatically a Christian any more than you are automatically a Christian if you are born into a Christian family.  It is not a matter of blood, nor a matter of the will of the flesh.  It is not even a matter of the will of man, as if by some sort of decision I can make myself born again.  And neither is it a matter of what you have experienced at some point in your life or even what you feel like at this very moment.

It is a matter of where you stand with respect to Jesus Christ.  It is a matter of whether you recognise Him and believe in His Name as the Creator and the Saviour.  It is a matter of whether you exercise trust, faith in him.  And if you do receive and own Him in his way, then you are born of God and to you is extended the privilege of living as children of God and of bearing His Name.

And here is where I want to close today.  If you believe in Jesus Christ, then continue to own Him Continue to trust and know that you are His.  If you are unsure as to whether you are born again, trust in Jesus Christ.  Jesus came to His own people, the Jews, but they did not receive Him.

Do you receive Him?  If you do not believe and you think that Jesus and all who follow Him are entirely misguided, then think about the name on the painting.  Think about what it is for you, the creature, to disown the One who made you.  What will you then do and say when you stand before him?

“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His Name.”

Amen.