John IX – Abbey Road Baptist Church, 7th January
2007
I’ve chosen this morning to preach on my favourite
chapter in the whole Bible. There are several reasons
why I like this chapter so much, but perhaps the most
important is this: it is so lifelike. The story is so well
told, I can imagine myself there. The characters are
brilliantly drawn, and they say exactly what I suppose
people like that might have said in such a situation.
In other words, the story is so believable. Not that other
parts of the Bible are unbelievable, but just that this
particular chapter rings true to life – it’s memorable, it’s
funny, and it is full of the sorts of comings and goings
of different characters that make it read just like the
script of a play.
Well, it’s quite a long chapter and there are lots of
different points that I could pick up from a story like this
and begin to unravel and explain and preach about.
For example, there are some great doctrinal statements
made by the Lord Jesus about himself – “The Son of
Man” he calls himself. Some people will try to tell you
that when Jesus said he was the Son of Man, he was
trying to emphasise that he was just a man – in other
words he was trying to correct the false view that he
was divine.
Nonsense!
Read the prophecy of Daniel in Daniel chapter 7 where
the prophet sees a vision of “one like a Son of Man”
coming with the clouds of heaven, presented before the
Ancient of Days,
“And to him was given dominion
And glory and a kingdom,
That all peoples, nations and languages
Should serve him;
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
Which shall not pass away.”
Why do you think that the man born blind wanted to
know who this Son of Man was? Verse 36 actually tells
us the answer, “so that I may believe in him”. Believe
in him. You don’t need to believe in just any ordinary
man. The Son of Man is a divine figure.
Why do think it says in verse 38 that the man
worshipped Jesus once he believed in him?
Let’s get it fixed in our minds at the start of this New
Year that Jesus is the divine Son of God – God from all
eternity. He whom shepherds worshipped and Wise Men
adored – was, and is, the incarnation of God himself.
The person of Jesus Christ must be at the centre of our
Christianity and at the centre of our lives this year. I
know we’ve got jobs to find or jobs to search for, bills to
pay, friends to meet, families to take care of, new
church buildings to fill up with people – all kinds of
things that the year ahead holds for us. But really, we
cannot tell what a day will bring. Who knows when we
shall have those things we are trusting in and
depending on for our security taken from us, even our
own lives. This time last year pastor Iain did not expect
to go through the trials he and his family faced in 2006.
None of us knows what is in store for us in 2007. But
Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday today and forever.
He is the solid rock upon which our faith is built.
Whatever your fears, hopes, concerns, prayers, desires
are for the year ahead, entrust them to Jesus Christ,
and you will know peace in the storm of life.
And it’s exactly that question of life’s storm – life’s
suffering – that is another important one in this
chapter, and it’s put to Jesus by his own disciples right
at the start.
“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born
blind?”
In other words, “What is the cause of this guy’s
suffering?”… “Why is this happening?”
Jesus’ response, is partly comforting, because the
things that happen to us, Jesus tells us, are not
necessarily the consequences of our evil. There is a
sense in which we need this reassurance – that not
everyone who loses a loved one, who dies in an Iraqi
car bomb or a Sudanese refugee camp or a South-East
Asian Tsunami – deserves it.
Not all our pain is divine punishment, thank God.
And yet Jesus’ answer is also troubling, because it is not
an answer of the sort we would like. Jesus doesn’t
actually tell us “the answer” to the question of
suffering – he just tells us that it is part of God’s
purpose.
Now don’t misunderstand Jesus here. Suffering is a
consequence of sin, and it can be a form of
punishment. If people hadn’t sinned there would have
been no suffering, and when sin is done away with
finally and fully in the new heaven and the new earth,
there won’t be any suffering there. So when Jesus says
God allows suffering to get his glory displayed, he’s not
saying God is sadistically making us suffer for his own
pleasure. Never, ever forget when you think about the
question of suffering, that God himself in the person of
Jesus suffered as much as anyone could possibly suffer,
without have ever sinned once to deserve any of it, and
that he did this all out of love for sinners.
There is a causal connection between sin and suffering,
but Jesus basically says God has chosen not to reveal
exactly what it is, or why it’s clear in some cases but a
lot less clear-cut in others. Like the man who’s born
blind, because even the disciples could see… this guy
was suffering before he could ever have sinned.
Jesus told them, and he tells us, to have faith in God –
that God knows what he is doing – that God is working
all things for good, even if (perhaps especially when)
you and I don’t understand what’s going on.
So-called “religions” that claim to answer the question
of suffering and evil only deceive. Some will tell you it’s
just an illusion. Others tell you God will free you from it
and give you health, wealth and prosperity if you just
believe.
Don’t believe that – it’s a lie. Suffering and evil are real
and right with us. But it is in trusting God that we
overcome evil and bear patiently with suffering – these
are the keys to Christian victory. Let me say those
again, because I think it’s important that we get them
the right way round: the keys to Christian victory are
overcoming evil and bearing patiently with suffering.
We’ll not experience the blessings of the Christian life
as they are meant to be known by getting that back-to-
front. We’re not to try and overcome suffering. That’s
what some other religions or cults try to do. It’s what
scientific progress tries to do but it is inevitably
doomed to failure because suffering and death are
inescapable. I don’t mean we mustn’t try to alleviate
suffering – otherwise we’d have no doctors, we’d never
give to the poor, we’d never reach out in love to the
unloved and the unlovely around us.
Even so, suffering is something we as Christians are to
bear with. But more than that, because sometimes
people can bear with suffering without being really
converted by God, we are to rejoice in it. If you ever
need proof that God is at work in someone’s life, look at
how they deal with suffering. Now we need to be
careful, because rejoicing in suffering is not (or need
not be) an attitude which laughs when tears are
appropriate, or which can’t come to God with a heavy
heart and the complaint of a troubled soul. Thank God
we can cry and we can complain and we can come to
him however we feel. But suffering is not meant to
defeat us. It leaves the Christian, as it left the apostle
Paul, able to say at the end of his life, after beatings,
imprisonment, persecutions, and now finally facing the
death sentence in a Roman dungeon, “Nevertheless, I
am not ashamed (I have no regrets), because I know
whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is
able to guard that which I have entrusted to him for
that day.” (2 Tim. 1:12)
That is how the Christian is to approach suffering.
Sin and evil, on the other hand, are quite different. We
are emphatically not to try and bear patiently with sin.
That’s what modern relativism does, with its insistence
that nobody is absolutely right about anything except
the fact that nobody is absolutely right about anything,
and making tolerance the highest virtue. It’s what
secular humanism does, starting off by defining sin in
our lives as just human weakness and then telling us to
be self-affirming about everything we do.
No! We are to fight sin and evil. We are as Christians
engaged in a battle with sin and evil that is both within
us and without us. We are to put on the full armour of
God in this battle (as Win’s Bible verse to me last week
reminded me) and make no compromise with the
enemy who causes so much destruction in human lives.
It is with these keys in our hands that Jesus leads us
through door after door in trust.
Trust means taking Jesus at his word. If you were blind
and I came up with the bright idea of mixing up mud
and saliva and putting that in your eyes, you’d think I
was mad. Surely nothing could be calculated to make
the problem worse!
God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not
our thoughts.
Well, I want to focus for the rest of our time this
morning on the testimony of the man who is
miraculously healed by Jesus.
I think this is crucially important for us today because
we live in a situation where testimony is needed.
People living in London – the vast majority of them –
know next to nothing about Jesus Christ, compared to
all the wonderful things written about him in the
Scriptures. Certainly, the vast majority of them do not
know him personally. They have not spoken to him,
listened to his voice, obeyed him, worshipped him,
loved him. To many people, Jesus means religion and
they have already decided that they want nothing to
with that. How, then, are they going to hear__?
Not, I am afraid, through preaching, if by that you mean
Iain Batty standing up here on a Sunday morning giving
a sermon. No-one is here to listen. Most people are not
ready to listen.
If they are to hear, and if we are to fulfil our
responsibility to the Great Commission, it will be our
words of testimony by which they hear about Jesus, and
that is something I hope we’ll all keep in our minds as
we go on into this New Year.
Now, I hope I don’t need to spend much time this
morning persuading you that sharing your Christian
testimony is important.
In the light of judgment, in the light of eternity, and the
significance of Jesus Christ to eternity for all people, we
have – or we ought to have – the strongest motivations
for making Jesus known, and for encouraging people to
become his disciples.
Let’s make our testimony to unbelievers simple, and
easy to understand. I love the way the man in this story
keeps on repeating the same testimony, and it’s so
simple – and yet the opponents of Jesus can’t get
around it – precisely because of its simplicity.
Look at what he says, first in verse 11: “The man called
Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me,
‘Go to Siloam and wash’. So I went and washed and
received my sight.”
And he says it again – the same testimony in different
words in verse 15, “He put mud on my eyes, and I
washed, and I see.”
And so all the religious objections of the Pharisees
about whether or not you should be allowed to heal on
the Sabbath are trumped by this man’s simple
testimony to what Jesus did for him. If the man had
been a clever theologian, he could maybe have argued
with the Pharisees that God would heal on the Sabbath
as much as on any other day, but we have no reason to
believe that he was particularly clever or educated, and
yet his words couldn’t be ignored.
Even so, they asked him all over again, and in verse 25
he says, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind,
now I see.”
Brilliant! So simple!
There’s no need to use religious jargon. There’s no use
telling someone you’ve been washed in the blood of the
lamb if they can’t understand what you are talking
about. There’s no point in going on about how David’s
branch applied the balm of Gilead to your soul, if the
person you’re talking to doesn’t have a clue what
you’re referring to.
People think Christians are weird enough already
without you making it worse!
There’s no need to have all the answers either. Look
again at verse 24 and see how the Pharisees call on the
man to testify again with an oath, “Give glory to God.
We know that this man is a sinner.” And the man
replies, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One
thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
You see, people do tend to come to us, don’t they, with
things they’ve picked up from newspapers or seen on
the TV or something like that – even worse maybe it’s
something they’ve read in the DaVinci Code, and they
say something like…
“We know that human beings are all descended from
apes.”
“We know that the Church has killed more people than
it has ever helped.”
“We know Moses didn’t really write Genesis.”
If you know how to answer, good! But if you don’t,
don’t worry!
“Whether Moses wrote Genesis or not, I do not know.
One thing I do know, that though my life before had no
meaning, now it does.”
“One thing I do know, that though I used to feel guilty,
my guilt and shame have been taken away.”
“One thing I do know, that though I used to fear death,
now I can face it as a Christian.”
And there’s no need, either, to pass responsibility for
giving testimony on to other people, like the pastor.
We’re often terribly bad at falling for the idea that
talking about Jesus is only for a few, “professional”
Christians to do.
That’s why I like the way the man’s parents in this story
– though their motives are wrong of course, do what
any faithful pastor might do, and allow their son to
speak for himself. Don’t ask us, ask him! Your testimony
is valid, and your testimony is worth sharing with
others.
And I suppose that’s the final thing that stops us, isn’t
it. Is our testimony actually worth sharing? It’s not
really the fear of being put out of the synagogue, or the
social circle we are in, whatever that is. It’s more the
doubts we have that what has happened to us is really
a miracle at all. If only we had something obvious
happen to us, like being healed of blindness, that
everyone could see and be amazed at, then we’d be
happy to share boldly, because no-one could dispute
with us.
Well, first of all, other people could and would dispute
with you. Those who heard about what Jesus did for the
man born blind, even those who saw the miracle with
their own eyes – didn’t immediately fall at the feet of
Jesus and worship him. Their hearts were stubborn.
They didn’t believe. Having a Damascus Road type
testimony is no guarantee that people will respond
favourably to it. The amazing thing is the way that a
true and simple testimony of an ordinary Christian can
bring people to Jesus.
And then, we must see how Jesus truly does do
miracles in our lives. Think again about what I said
earlier about the keys to Christian victory. Anyone who
is in Christ is a New Creation.
Not free from suffering, but bearing patiently with it in
the hope of heaven, even rejoicing in it, knowing that
our present suffering is not worth comparing with the
glory that will be revealed in us.
Not free from sin, but fighting it, and learning to
overcome it as we trust in God.
These are things that the world doesn’t know and the
world doesn’t do. But these are things that the world
needs. And things that only faith in Jesus Christ can
give. And the wonderful thing is that as we pray, God’s
Holy Spirit will go with us and ahead of us and create a
desire for these things in the hearts of those we meet,
those we live with, work with and play with. In this New
Year, let’s trust God that he can and will do this through
us, and that we will see his Church grow, not just in
numbers, but in love for Him expressed in obedience.
Blessing is from Ephesians 6:23
Peace to you all, and love with faith from God the
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace to all who love
our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.

And the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy

Spirit, be upon you, and remain with you, now and for
evermore. Amen