I have a question for you. How many of you can recall a favorite teacher that you have ever had either in elementary school, high school, or college? Easily. What would be some of the character traits? What would be some of the skills? What would be some of the things they would bring to the classroom that would make them your favorite teacher? Shout them out. Fairness. Competence. Passionate. Knowing the material. Kind. Fair and aware. Real. What if I said now think of your least favorite teacher? What would be their character traits? Mean?, Rude? When I think of one of my least favorite teachers it was my shop teacher. I hope I am not offending any shop teachers in the audience but shop teachers can be a little bit touchy at times and downright mean. My teacher defined meanness. I may be dating myself but does anybody remember the show Dobie Gillis? Who was the sidekick? Maynard. Looked like a beatnik. That was my teacher’s appearance, but he had the attitude of Charles Manson. You didn’t want to mess with him and every kid knew it except for one kid. He decided he was going to sit in the front row and in about the middle of the course he was going to pull open a magazine and start reading it. Sure enough, the teacher walked over to the desk, grabbed the magazine out of the kid’s hand, smacked him on the side of the head and then threw the magazine out. He picked the kid up, threw him across the workbench. The kid fell on the floor and he picked him up and threw him out the front door and gave him a kick to boot. Just think how bad it would be today if he was texting in class. They could get away with that stuff back then. I was so terrified of him I don’t think I ever took another shop class. There is a common denominator between teachers that are favorable and unfavorable. They leave a strong impression on your mind.
Today, as we begin to open up the book of John, we see another teacher who left a very strong impression on his disciples’ minds. Please open up your Bibles to the book of John 1. If you want to use the red pew Bibles, it is page about 1050. As a side note, we are going through the book of John. We can take as long as we need to. We are only on chapter 1 and it has been four weeks, so that will give you a clue how long we are going to be in there. If you would like, we have these handy gospel of Johns that are available for free. You can put them in your pocket. Go ahead and read through the gospel of John. Read through it several times to begin to understand the themes and anticipate some of those themes. Last week, we began to talk about another guy named John. It was John the Baptist. You may recall that John the Baptist was the one that was called to be the voice of God in the wilderness. He would be the one that would make straight the path of the Lord. More than that, we find out in today’s passage that John the Baptist was a teacher. He was a good teacher. We know he was a really good teacher because he knew that he could only take his disciples to a certain point before he would hand them off to a better teacher. Before he would hand them off to the master teacher, Jesus Christ. Our main passage is going to be John 1:35, but we are going to back up a little bit and start at verse 29 because I want to make sure we have gone through all the scripture and make sure we are keeping everything in context. So starting at John 1:29 and I will be reading from the New International Version. (Scripture read here.)
We know from this reading that John the Baptist was a teacher. We can look at verse 35 that says “The next day John was there again with two of his disciples.” In order to have disciples you would have to be a teacher. A disciple is really a student or a learner. John we know had some disciples just as Jesus had some disciples. We don’t know how many disciples John had. We don’t even really know what John the Baptist would have taught his disciples. But we know enough about John the Baptist to speculate a bit. To get an idea of what he probably was teaching them. He obviously probably would have taught them about the fact that he saw himself as the one who would declare and make straight the pathway to the Lord. He probably would have been someone who would have told his disciples about the coming kingdom of God and maybe would have tried to unpack it a little bit and help them get an idea of what that might look like. We also know that John the Baptist would probably take the time to sit down with his disciples and give them the big picture. Explain Jewish history and what went on in the Old Testament. He would explain that God had created man and woman in his own image. He created them in a way that was so special. He allowed them to oversee all of creation. That was basically their role. They were to oversee all of creation. They were supposed to do this while under submission to God and under the authority of God, which makes sense because God was the creator. As we know, man decided he wanted to go his own way. He didn’t want to submit to the will of God. Over the next hundreds and thousands of years, man decided to go his own way and we see the disastrous effects if we look back in the early books of the Bible. We see eventually that in the Nation of Israel things got so bad that they actually ended up in captivity under the wicked pharaoh making bricks without straw. For 400 years they lived as slaves. At some point, John would tell them that God decided to send a deliverer. God saw the plight of the Israelites so he sent a deliverer by the name of Moses to come in and take care of the situation and free them from the captivity of Pharaoh. That is what happened. When they left captivity, the first thing they were supposed to do was go back into a mode of worship. What happened is Moses got the commandments of God and built this sacrificial system that would allow the Jewish people to live a right and moral life and also a manner that they could continue to worship God.
As we know, once again, they failed. They decided to go back to their own way. They decided to go back to idol worship and worshiping golden calves and that sort of thing. We know that John probably also sat down and told them God gave them one more chance. He said I am going to send a new deliverer. I am going to send the one that we would call the Messiah. The one we would call the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the whole world. Not just a one-time thing in a sacrificial system. When the disciples heard John say “Look, The Lamb of God!” it rang true to them. It rang so true that they didn’t know what to do other than to get up and begin to follow Jesus. The word follow we don’t really know exactly what it means here because it can take on a variety of meanings. It could just be to follow somebody as a curiosity thing or it could be to become a follower, a disciple, and sit at the feet of Jesus. We really don’t know. It is probably some sort of a hybrid at that time because they really don’t know Jesus that well yet. We do know that teacher John the Baptist was a good enough teacher to know that he could only take his disciples to a certain level and that it was time now to hand them off to another teacher, Rabbi Jesus. That is what we see. In later passages, we see John saying things like he must become greater and I must become less. Jesus’ ministry was ramping up and John the Baptist’s was beginning to ramp down. What happened then is they decided to continue to follow Jesus.
At some point, we see in verse 38, Jesus turned around and realized that they were following him and he says “What do you want?” We don’t know how he said it. We just don’t know. We know that when Jesus asks a question, there are no easy questions. Sometimes there is a deeper meaning there behind that question. When he is saying “What do you want?” he is not trying to get an answer because he doesn’t know what they want. We are talking about someone who knew the minds of men. We are talking about Jesus. Jesus knew what they wanted, but he wanted to hear it from their own lips. He wanted to hear it. They didn’t think they knew probably at that moment. But he turns around and asks the question “What do you want?” What are you seeking? What are you looking after? They are probably taken aback. They are thinking I don’t know. They could have said we want you to do a miracle. We want to follow you. We are curious. No they just said “Rabbi, where are you staying?” What kind of an answer is that? It was a good answer actually.
A little side note on the word Rabbi. It comes from the Hebrew word called rav and rav goes way back to where rav meant great in the Hebrew language. Rabbi would mean great one or my great one. It was often a title of honor given to somebody basically of honor. A political person or a master. My great one. As time went on, John clues us in that that word went from being master or great one to teacher. Rabbi meant my teacher. When these guys say Rabbi, they are saying My Teacher. In many ways, you would only call Rabbi your favorite teacher. Just by that answer, it gives us a clue that these guys knew what they wanted from Jesus. They wanted to sit at the feet of Jesus. So they say “Rabbi, where are you staying?” We have to keep in mind here when they say where are you staying, they are not thinking the Motel 6 or the Marriott or the Residence Inn. They weren’t saying where are you sleeping or resting. They are saying where are you abiding. That same word is sometimes translated abiding. Where is your preferred classroom? Do you like to teach by the lake? Do you like to teach in a synagogue? Where are you teaching? So you get the idea that they see him as potentially their teacher and they want to follow him to the place where he will instruct them.
Jesus answers “Come and you will see.” They may think he will show me where he is teaching. But when Jesus says “Come and you will see” he is thinking come and I will open your eyes like they have never been opened before. Like he did with the two guys on the road to Emmaus. Jesus went in and had dinner with them and began to speak. Pretty soon their eyes were open and they began to see Jesus who he really was. I think that is what Jesus is saying here. Come if you dare and I am going to open your eyes and show you things you have never seen before. So they went and it says they spent the day with him. It was about the tenth hour. There is some debate whether the tenth hour means four in the afternoon, which would be Jewish time. If it is ten in the morning, it would be according to the Roman calendar. We don’t really know if it was a 24 hour period. It could have been anywhere from 14 hours to 24 hours. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that John saw that event as significant enough to mark the time like we mark historical events when they happen. He marked it as the tenth hour. This was a special time. This was no normal time. This was a time that we believe John and Andrew got to sit at the feet of the king of the universe. We don’t know what was being taught during that 24 hours. John we can speculate a little bit because we know John’s history. We know what he was doing and we know his calling. Jesus, on the other hand, preexisted from all time. He was a co-creator of the universe with the other two persons of the trinity. Jesus could tell them anything. We have no idea. It is hardly worth speculating. Although we don’t know what the subject matter was, we can pretty much guess what his teaching methods were and why the way he taught was so powerful that he left such a strong impression that the first thing Andrew did was go and get his brother Simon.
That is what I want to do. Just spend a few minutes thinking about some of the things that made Jesus such a great teacher. I am thinking about four different things. The first thing being that Jesus was somebody who probably made his disciples think. We are not taught how to think anymore. We are taught how to get information, but very few people know how to think. A good teacher will challenge the students to think. Jesus probably didn’t come in the class one day and say sit down. I am going to take out the slides and power point and these are the five things you need to know about God. These are the five things you need to know about the Holy Spirit. These are the five things you need to know about me. Then they say when is the test. When Jesus had a concept to teach, especially a new concept, he would mess with their minds a little bit. Let’s say he is teaching on the coming kingdom of God. He taught in parables. He would say the kingdom of God is like a merchant who was looking for fine pearls. When he found that pearl, he sold his whole inventory and came and bought this one pearl. They looked at him like any kid would on the first day of school. Huh? It was like what are you talking about Jesus? I don’t get this. He presented new ideas in a way that got them to think a little bit.
Or he would take some of the old ideas and some of things they probably thought they already knew and he put a twist on them a little bit. He would say you have heard it said that you are to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. They would say yes we know that. We heard that somewhere. He would say well I say you need to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. What are you talking about Jesus? I don’t get you. Will you just tell us some stuff. What he was trying to do was get them to take ownership. He would keep giving it and presenting it in a different framework and a different parable until finally the light comes on and they got it. They didn’t get information. They got knowledge. There is a difference between pure information and pure knowledge. Jesus wanted them to get knowledge. He taught the disciples how to think.
His favorite classroom to teach them was not the synagogue or a formal classroom or a church or a school. His favorite classroom was the classroom of life. The classroom of experience. Some of you know the term experiential learning. There is a system where teachers try to incorporate experience. As we know, when Jesus was walking around, he would use the common everyday objects to try to explain a deeper concept. He would be walking along and find a seed on the ground and he would start talking about the word of God that fell amongst the thorns. Or he would go around and he would be sitting at a dinner and he would pick up a chunk of salt and point at a lamp and he would start explaining about how we need to be the salt and light of the world. I think his favorite thing to do was to get right in the middle of an intense situation to really get his point across. If he was teaching about the concept of faith and trying to get them to understand it, he wouldn’t teach it in the classroom. He would get on a boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee and when a storm would come up and the waves started crashing over the bow and stern and Jesus is downstairs sleeping and the disciples are getting panicky to the point they run down and wake up Jesus who is sleeping peacefully. They would say what are you doing. You are sleeping. Don’t you care that we drown? What was Jesus’ answer? Why are you so afraid? He was teaching them faith in the context of fear. They remembered that. He was about experiential learning.
Not only did he make you think and prefer the environment of life to teach, he would teach his disciples to apply what they had learned. We have gone through school and you are getting all this information. You never learn how to apply it so when you get out into the real world you can’t make the connection there. What Jesus would do is take a concept that he taught them in a field or in the synagogue or the market place and he would say now I want you to take that concept that you say you learned and apply it to this new situation. He would say I just taught you about faith. I taught you how to cast out demons. You were next to me when I did that. I taught you how to heal some lepers and heal the sick and raise the dead. Now it is your turn. There is a place in Galilee that I want 12 of you to go and take nothing with you. Go out there and do the same thing. Heal the lepers, raise the dead, cast out some demons. In the midst of that, I want to remind you that you will be like a sheep going out amongst wolves. The people are going to attack you. I didn’t think you were going to ask me to apply it. They go out there and you know they made mistakes. You know they messed up. You know they said dumb things. You know they tried to cast demons out and the demons probably smacked them. You know that they weren’t able to cure some of the people. They didn’t understand all these question and dilemmas so they would come back and talk about it and pray about it and talk to Jesus. Then they would go out and do it again. That is what we should do. That is what the best teachers do. Have their students take the concept that they learned and apply it to a brand new situation. When I was a chaplain at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH I was one of 15 chaplain interns. There were all these other chaplains from different denominations. We would go through lectures and have guest speakers from hospice and different places and teach us things about how to deal with the dying and sick. When we would get back from lunch we would ask where the lecturer was and they would say there is no lecturer this afternoon. You are going to go out and practice this stuff. Would you go to the pediatric ward and there is a mother there with a very sick child with leukemia. Go comfort that person. Chuck, you just lost your wife a few months ago. Go up to the ICU unit and talk to the woman who is dying and there with her mother. We would all say okay. What would happen is some would go into the library and start pulling out books to get more information. Put the books down. Just go do it. In the chaplaincy world that is called action-reflection-action. You go out there and take action. You make all your mistakes. Then you go back and talk about it and reflect on it and then you go do it again. Action-reflection-action. The more you do it, you get more comfortable. You get better at it. Eventually, you find out you can do it. That is what Jesus would do with his disciples. He would teach them how to think. He would do it in an experiential way, but he would get them to apply it.
Lastly, what he would do is get them to share their knowledge. He would get them to take that knowledge and try to get them to give it to somebody else. To not hold on to that knowledge but to take it and find other disciples and give the information away. If any of you have ever taught anything, you learn the most when you are getting ready to teach somebody else. Even when you teach the little kids in Sunday school. You have to go back and study the stuff that you should know and research a little bit. When I go and prepare for a sermon, I got a lot deeper than what you get. I have to. I have to be intimately familiar with the information so what you end up getting on a Sunday is about a third of the total information. Most of it ends up on the floor basically. It is because we have to do that. A teacher knows how to take these abstract concepts and put them in a way and shape them in a way that they know it so well that they can give it to somebody else in a manner that allows them to understand it. That is what Jesus would do with the disciples. Take this and give it to somebody. Take this information and teach somebody else. That is what we call the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18 where it says “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore, (this is a command) go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.’” That is a commandment. We are to take the information that we learned by sitting at the feet of Jesus and sitting in a classroom wherever he decides to teach us and taking that information and giving it to somebody else out there, creating new disciples. If the teacher has done his or her job right, taught them to think, to experience, to apply, they are going to be excited. They are going to want to share the information. When you really understand a concept, when you really get it, you want to share it. My best sermons are when I really get the concept and the light goes on and I say I have something that I cannot hold on to. I have to give to you or I am going to be disobedient. But it takes work. Once again, what you get is very little compared to what we have to dig into. The statistics are for every one minute of sermon there is one hour of preparation. So a 25-minute sermon is about 25 hours of research. We have to do that. That is where we learn. We take that information and are blessed to be able to take that and share with somebody to help make disciples. To hopefully pass on this nugget of truth that God gave to us and give it out. Hand it to somebody. If the teacher has done their job, the student is excited to do that. We see that because the first thing that Andrew did after he came away from that 24 hours was to find his brother Simon and tell him “We have found the Messiah (that is, the Christ)”. We have found the expected one. What did he do next? He brought him to Jesus. He went into that 24-hour meeting thinking Jesus was a good teacher, a rabbi. A better teacher than John, but he didn’t think he was the king of the world which is what Messiah is. He didn’t think he was the anointed one of God. He didn’t know he was the one who preexisted for all time and will continue to exist for all time. He got that information. At some point that light went on and he went out and shared it with his brother. We have seen the Messiah, that is, the Christ. That is what a teacher does. That is what I think made Jesus such a good teacher. That is what I think enabled him to leave such a strong and lasting impression on anybody that was blessed to have been able to sit at his feet for five minutes let alone 24 hours.
We look at this and think about Jesus and think wouldn’t it be nice to be one of those guys and sit by a tree and sit at the feet of Jesus and take it all in as he wants to pour in those facts and concepts in a new way. I have good news for you. We can. We are not limited to 14 hours or 24 hours. We get Jesus 24/7. Remember when I taught on the Holy Spirit? Just because Elvis left the room doesn’t mean Jesus left the room. Jesus left his spirit. In John 14:25 Jesus is speaking before he left to go into heaven and he says “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” That is cool Chuck. I don’t know if I believe it. How many of you are bold enough to say they believe it? I believe it. You say I think I believe it, but I don’t know what he would teach me. He doesn’t seem to be teaching me something. It says right there. He will teach you all things and remind you of everything. That is pretty broad. What does that mean? It means he is going to customize the teaching to the student, which is another effective method in teaching. How is going to teach me? If you were paying attention like good students, you would have known that I just told you how he would teach you. He would teach you to think. We want to go to God and say I have this problem. I have been unemployed. Would you please give me an answer and fix my unemployment please and he is not getting an answer. Over and over. I guess God is not listening to me. The truth is you maybe have framed the problem incorrectly. The problem isn’t unemployment. The problem may be the fact that you have your priorities messed up or your relationship is messed up. There is a technique in psychology called reframing. It is being able to take what you see as the situation and looking at it from a different angle of view. That is what God does with us. He says I want you to think. Quit thinking about what you think is the problem. Take off your glasses and put on my glasses and Jesus’ glasses and say maybe I could see this from a different perspective. Once you begin to see from a different angle, God starts revealing the truth to you. Before you know it, maybe the problem is solved or you find out it wasn’t a problem to begin with. It was actually a blessing. That is what I mean by he still gets us to think. He also still chooses to work outside of the classroom. I am an advocate for classrooms and home groups and church settings, but I really think that he still prefers to work right smack dab in the middle of our severe life trials. That is the place, if you are paying attention and taking notes, he is going to speak with you in a way you have never heard him before.
I have said it before and I don’t say this to draw attention to myself. I say this because I am speaking from experience. When I speak from experience, I am passionate about it. Ten years ago I lost my first wife Dana a month before I went to seminary. I know what it is like to grieve. I know what it is like to get close to losing your faith or to question God. I don’t say that to draw attention. Just to say that during that time the verse that spoke to me, because God will use anything, he will use scripture and people, came out of Ecclesiastes 7:3. The writer says “It is better to be in a house of mourning than a house of laughter.” He is saying it is better to be in a funeral home than a party house. He goes on to say “Because death is the destiny of every man and so the living should take it to heart.” That is a powerful passage if you are in the middle of grief. It tells you that there is a school out there called grief. If you have your pen and paper ready and you are listening to God, he will tell you more stuff than you will ever imagine about love, relationships, priorities, and all that stuff. That is what he did to me. So much so that I wrote my entire master’s thesis on it. He taught me so many things in there. That is what he does. He will do it in the environment of the severe life trials that we are in, but we have to listen. We have to be willing to sit there and listen at his feet. He will use anything to get his point across.
For me, God speaks to me through movies. I love watching movies. There was a movie that came out about 2000 or 2001 right about when my wife died. It was a movie called Signs. It was with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. It was a movie about aliens coming to earth. It was more than that to me. The overlying story was aliens. The underlying story was a pastor who began to lose his faith because he lost his wife. His wife was killed in a horrific car accident. He began to really question God. He took off his collar at the beginning. Then it went on through the whole movie with the aliens and everything. By the end what did he begin to realize? In life there are no coincidences. All these little things that he saw that he thought were coincidence throughout the entire movie turned out to be things that showed there is a God out there. He had hope. Because he had hope, he put his collar back on at the end of the movie. That movie spoke to me like you can’t imagine. Some people think it is a dumb movie. That is a movie I keep because that spoke to me at the time I needed to hear that there is hope. He still teaches us how to think. He still teaches us in the context of situations of severe life trials. Then he teaches us to apply that stuff. He says you learned faith over here. You learned priorities over here in this situation. I still don’t think you got it. Why don’t you try it over here in a completely different situation. You might have learned faith going through grief and then one day six years later you are trying to balance your checkbook and you realize you have overextended your Visa and everything else. You are saying God why can’t you get me out of debt. What is going on here? He says remember that time I taught you about faith and priorities and you learned that in the school of grief? Now take that and apply it to your finances. Until you get it, I am going to put you in another situation and another situation until that becomes so crystalized in you that you know it beyond a shadow of a doubt that God spoke to you and then you do what you are supposed to do next. You are supposed to take that nugget of truth and give it to somebody. That is where we fall short. People who have gone through all these experiences, divorces, grief, finances, child problems, don’t want to talk about it. Even though God talked to me and God got me through this, I don’t want to talk about it because I am embarrassed about it. If you are embarrassed about it, you are being disobedient because you have been given a gift. I never thought I would say that, but I remember one time I woke up and I realized losing somebody, don’t take this wrong, but it is kind of like a gift. God has trusted you so much with something so precious that he says take this thing that I have shown you about love and relationships that I have shown nobody else and now give it to somebody. Shout it out in any form you get. In fact, there is a scripture that talks about that. It says “What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight. What is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.” That is another passage that spoke to me. God speaks to you in the dark times I think he does more than the day. He gives you insights that you cannot get when times are good because you are not thinking about God. You think about God when things are dark and bad and the kids are in trouble or the bills don’t balance or you are going through grief. Those are the times that he says here is something. Are you paying attention? Write it down. Think about it. Meditate on it because I am giving you something that I didn’t give anybody else. If you want it, take it. Take it and shout it from the rooftops. You say, Chuck, how do I know that is truth. How do I know it is not something I just made up in the moment of my grief? I can’t give you a definite answer but I will give you an insight I got this last week. We are doing a study at our home group and one of the pastors teaching the course is Henry Blackaby who wrote the study Experiencing God. He spoke this wisdom that rang true to me. He says God’s truth to be real truth, to be truly a revelation from God is a truth that you can’t manufacture. In other words, we do not have the human capacity to manufacture God’s truth. When you get a nugget of truth that you know you are not smart enough to come up with, there is a good chance it is God talking to you. It will ring true. It will ring real to you. It will want to get out and tell somebody. That is when you know you have God’s truth.
In closing, when we think about how Jesus continues to teach us. He teaches us by thinking. He teaches us in the midst of experience. He teaches us by applying to new situations. He teaches us by taking that information and sharing it with somebody else. That is what we have to do. We have to take that information through whatever context we find ourselves. Whether schools, homes, hospitals, wherever. We are supposed to take that nugget of truth and sit down with somebody. Especially if we know there is somebody going through the exact same things you went through and you have that bit of information, the secret to comforting them or showing them the light at the end of the tunnel and you don’t give it to them, you have been disobedient. When you sit with them and give them that information, even when you say I believe God gave me this and I am just giving it to you. You just do what you want with it. But when you give that information, you have created disciples. You have created a learner. You have created followers. Before you get a bit head on that and start calling yourself Rabbi, you begin to remember that you are not the Rabbi. The Rabbi is the one that John pointed to and said “Look, the Lamb of God!” The Rabbi is the one that Andrew said “We have found the Messiah.” That is the Rabbi. That is the one that you are leading them to, the Christ. The one who is called the Lamb of God. The one who brings us eternal life who lives now and forevermore. Amen. Let us pray.
