Do You Believe?

Hello, everyone.I hope you’re excited to be in the house of the Lord another evening to spend time in worship and hear from God’s word. We are in the ten question series. I believe there’s one more message left in this. And I have the privilege of being able to go through kind of an obscure question, something I don’t recall ever reading or at least spending more than just a casual glance at all of these years. And I was stunned at the level of depth and level of just meaning there was behind this one question that I had ever known. And this is despite reading this chapter dozens, maybe a hundred times over the years, again and again, hearing it at funerals, hearing it at really anything requiring any sense of hope or any in a place of despair like a funeral or sad place, this is a passage that’s often covered, and I’m just thankful for being able to spend this time to go through it, but also for the immense work that other men of God have placed and put in over the years. Tim Keller and D.A. Carson and John MacArthur, I’ve had the privilege the last couple of days of spending more time with them than I have with Justina and the kids. But the amount that I’ve been able to unpack and hopefully convey to you in some relative rational way, hopefully, is really a blessing. So I’ll just start with that, that I learned a lot, hopefully you will too this evening by the power of the Holy Spirit. Okay.

So let’s first talk about Bob Ross. Bob Ross, if you grew up in the 80s and 90s, was a regular on television. Back then we just had Channel 13 as our only source of entertainment, which was KERA or PBS, and one of the shows that was I think a daily thing was Bob Ross and the Joy of Painting. And so this guy would basically start off with this blank canvas at the start of every episode, and I think within 30 minutes or an hour would pretty much end up with something like that, the mountain landscape and the trees and the river, or some similar painting by the end of it. It was literally just a blank canvas that he would start off with and end off with this very beautiful painting every single time. And back then it was really boring, but now it’s actually really therapeutic. If you have a very stressful life or two kids, watching an hour of Bob Ross’s painting is actually a very, very nice change of pace. But what you notice as you get older is not so much the end result, but how he gets there. And a lot of times he actually says it. His method of painting would actually be to get a white blank canvas and then paint over it white. And by adding the white to it, he was giving it more of a firm ground to be able to put the rest of the colours on. And then you would see in the initial phases there’s just more white and then shadows would start appearing. He would introduce the black and the darker colours. And so, if you were to get a snapshot of just those first few minutes of the painting, which I looked everywhere for, I couldn’t. It was only the final results. But if you looked in those first few minutes, it was just kind of white and black and shadows and a lot of… it seemed like kind of meaningless dabs and blotches of this colour and that colour. Not a lot of… really nonsensical in the first few minutes. But as time went on, you found that there was a lot more meaning, a lot more sense behind those initial brushstrokes. It just needed more time, right?

And so, we’re going to get into a passage in John 11:17-26 where we see how the passage of time and how timing and God’s timing and how Jesus spends his time and how he delays certain things at certain times was actually ultimately for the glory of God, even though for Martha and Mary, it was excruciating. And how that actually has a significant application to our own lives. God’s timing, God’s purposes all have to do with his perfect will, his wisdom, his knowledge. Let’s read John 11:17-26. That’s going to be the core part of what we’re going to cover this evening. But this is a huge passage. It’s 53-something verses. And all of it is relevant to what we’re going to talk about today. And I can’t cover everything. It’s just too much. But we’re going to focus on just these verses and then we’re going to cover something before it, something after it, and then come back to this section. So let me read. John 11:17-26. On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. Lord, Martha said to Jesus, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now, God will give you whatever you ask. Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Martha answered, I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?

So just some background. The book of John is very familiar to all of us. You’ve probably read it several times over most of our short lifetimes just because of how much it explains about Jesus, about his deity, the fact that he’s the son of God, his authority in his ministry and the salvation narrative, we see a lot of in the book of John. Because of how expansive it is, a lot of us probably refer to John more than any other of the gospels because of how much we get out of it as far as who Jesus is and what he did. John, it turns out, actually very strategically writes his narrative. He writes, if you can go through a few of those next couple slides, he writes in cycles. He writes first as going from feast to feast, we’re masters at the feast. We’re really good at understanding what the feasts are now because we spent so long on it a couple of years ago. He writes going from feast to feast, he starts with the Passover and he ends with the Passover. There’s a couple unnamed feasts that we didn’t really learn about. And then this cycle of feasts or festival cycle is what a lot of theologians called it, starts with the Passover, that’s four, and then ends with the Passover at seven. So we’re just before seven. That seventh feast, we’re just before that Passover. So the multiple cycles of Passover. John has a very specific reason behind this. What is Jesus? He’s the fulfillment of all of the festivals and the feasts, right? Every feast that we went through exhaustively is somehow pointing to Jesus, somehow pointing to his life, his death, his resurrection, some aspect of it is covered in one of the feasts that we learned about. And then we also see, and I didn’t include all of these, but we also see many lists of sevens throughout the book of John. And one of those lists are seven I am statements in John about Jesus. I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the door. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the vine. Those are seven I am statements in the book of John. One of very many sequences of seven that John covers. And so we see, as we do in a lot of scripture, we see the strategic escalation of a certain point that he’s trying to make, and that’s Jesus is the son of God. And where we are in the book of John chapter 11 is the climax of this escalation that John is creating in writing out this narrative. It’s not what we call the synoptic gospels, right? It’s not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which is this general summary of the life and ministry starting from birth to death, covering the span of Jesus’ ministry. It’s actually very specific to the very last few weeks, or last week of his ministry. So from John 11 on, it’s just the last seven days of Jesus’ life. Up until that point, he’s going from festival to festival, going from sign to sign, going from I am statement to I am statement. It’s very distinct from the other three gospels in what John is trying to convey here. And so we see that in what we’ve just read, John is very… he’s trying to make a point. He’s the only gospel writer of the four that includes this narrative about the resurrection of Lazarus. None of the others cover it. This is the only book that talks about the resurrection and the events leading up to the resurrection of Lazarus. So as we can… I’m trying to kind of highlight here how important, how critical this narrative is, but also the sequence of events that lead us to this point.

Theologians called the book of John the book of signs. It’s sign after sign after sign. It starts with the sign at Cana, with water turning into wine. There’s one cycle where it starts in Cana and ends in Cana, and the next cycle starts with Passover and ends with Passover. This is something that I think probably hits home for a lot of us, but I wanted to kind of cover a consistent point that John makes by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit from the very beginning to the end. Sign after sign happens. Water’s turned into wine, people are healed, the blind can see, 5,000 are fed, Jesus calms the storms, Lazarus is raised from the dead. But as a result of these signs, is there really true belief happening behind any of this stuff? If you can turn to John chapter 2, 23 and 25, I’m just trying to set the context behind this amazing miracle that happens. John chapter 2, 23 and 25. Let me just read it here real quick. Sorry, the pages are sticking. Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, another Passover, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man. What a crass statement, right? You see all these miracles, people are believing, seemingly droves of people are coming to his name, believing in him, believing in his work and who he is. But John adds this and says, there’s a lot of people, there’s large multitudes, and they believed in his name, but Jesus wouldn’t entrust himself to them. Moving on to the next kind of evidence of that, John chapter 6, 14 and 15. After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, surely this is a prophet who is to come into the world. Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself. People saw how five loaves and two fish were magically or miraculously transformed into this enormous meal for 5,000 plus people. And with, you know, full stomachs and happy hearts, they rushed Jesus to try to make him king. They wanted this kind of welfare state where miracles were happening, food was coming from all over the place, signs left and right, maybe even one day Jesus would overthrow the Romans and, you know, remove the taxes that were burdening them. They were in it for what they got out of it in the moment. And Jesus knew that. Jesus knew very well that the belief that was happening, the people coming to his name, that there was a shallowness to it, that there was a shallowness to their belief.

And that’s why, coming back to our passage, this question is so relevant. Jesus said to her, verses 25 of the passage you just read earlier, Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? Why does Jesus ask Martha if you believe? It seems pretty obvious that, you know, Martha kind of gave this theological exposition of all of her beliefs, why she believed in Jesus, what Jesus could do. And yet Jesus asked, do you believe this? Why does he need to ask that? Hopefully with this context it’s starting to piece together. Now, I said in the beginning, we’re going to cover some things before this passage and some things after this to kind of bundle it all together. So what’s happening? Jesus is in an area across from the Jordan. He’s very close to where John the Baptist’s ministry took place. And we are introduced to this man named Lazarus who is sick. Lazarus, his sisters, Martha and Mary, lived in a place called Bethany. And Bethany was just two miles away from Jerusalem. At this point, from chapter 5 on of the book of John, things are really heating up. Jesus is declaring his divinity. His I am statements are coming left and right. People are getting really, really annoyed. And that’s where we first start seeing that people are wanting to kill Jesus. They’re wanting to stone him. They’re wanting to kill him for blasphemy. And so Jesus is understandably trying to, because it’s not yet his time, he’s trying to keep a very low profile. And so he’s away from the action in Jerusalem. He’s away from that radius where Lazarus, Martha and Mary live.

So Martha and Mary, they send a messenger, most likely. And they tell Jesus, hey, our brother is sick. Lazarus is sick. He’s probably young at this point. There’s really no reason for him to be chronically ill with anything. So whatever happened is probably something that happened very quickly. And it’s very, very quickly taking his life. And they tell Jesus and Jesus says, this sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s son may be glorified through it. If Lazarus is truly Jesus’ friend, if Martha and Mary and the family are truly friends of Jesus, why would Jesus not rush over there? He seemingly wants to provide miracles for the widow’s son and the centurion and he’s willing to change water into wine. But why allow for this delay for such a dear friend if Jesus truly loved Lazarus? It says in verse five, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he heard Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days. Now, I don’t need to tell y’all why he had to stay and the reason behind staying. We’ve read this a thousand times. Even Levi can say Jesus wept. I’m trying to get him started young. He can say at least Jesus wept. We’re trying to get work on the P. But this narrative of how Jesus waits just long enough for Lazarus to die is very clear to us. And moving on to the narrative, the disciples say a short while ago the Jews tried to stone you. Oh, sorry. Let me go back one verse. Then he said to the disciples, let’s go back to Judea. But rabbi said, a short while ago the Jews tried to stone you and yet you were going back there? Jesus answered, are there not 12 hours of daylight? A man who walks by day will not stumble. For he sees by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night that he stumbles. For he has no light. Kind of a very Jesus like way of saying, hey, I’m still with you. Let’s do what we need to do because I’m with you. The light is still with you. And then he went on to tell them, Jesus, he knows that his friend Lazarus has fallen asleep. He has died. And then he says, I’m going there to wake him up. And then the disciples, being disciples, said, Lord, if he sleeps, will he not get better? Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. Then he told them plainly, Lazarus is dead. And for your sake, I’m glad I was not there so that you may believe. But let us go to him. Thomas, the most optimistic of all the disciples say, let us also go that we may die with him. You know, Thomas gets a bad rap, right? He’s the one that doubted Jesus. Actually, he didn’t. He doubted. He actually doubted Jesus. But there’s an honesty behind what Thomas is always saying. Even if he’s kind of a pessimistic guy and he’s ready to just call it quits and just die with Jesus, there’s actually an honesty and kind of a brute honesty at that. There’s a loyalty, too, that we see in Thomas here.

So if we could just plant here for a second. What Jesus is doing here is intentionally allowing Lazarus to die so that his glory, his power, his authority, and ultimately his love would be manifest. And that’s sometimes a hard pill for us to swallow, right? God will delay things. He’ll close doors. He’ll allow minutes, months, years, decades, maybe even a lifetime, go by before he works. And so sometimes that prayer that we’re praying for, that need that we need in our life, that miracle that we’re asking for, he may not even provide that in our lifetime. That’s a tough, tough pill to swallow. I remember as a kid, there was this YouTube video called Why Won’t God Heal an Amputee? That gave me pause when I watched. I don’t remember all the points that they made. It was an atheist that was trying to make the point that Jesus doesn’t exist, God doesn’t exist, because if God existed, wouldn’t the amputee be able to ask for prayer and get healing? But that’s not always God’s will. And just because there isn’t healing, because there isn’t an answer, because there’s suffering in the world, because there is delay, that doesn’t mean God isn’t working in the background. That is love can’t be manifest, that his glory can’t be manifested through that suffering. That is power, his authority, that those things can’t still be working in the background, even if there’s suffering and pain and delay happening in our life. So that’s kind of the pretext before this passage that we’re going through right now. That God is that Jesus is intentionally allowing for delay because it’s still part of his plan, still part of his will, and it can still it’s still what is the best thing for Lazarus, Martha, Mary, and the disciples at the time. As hard as that is to swallow at the time, and I know every one of us has or is presently or will in the future will need something where God we need Jesus to work very quickly on our behalf. We’re probably praying for something right now, in fact, where we’re asking for quick deliverance, quick healing, and quick answer. But God doesn’t work on our timeline, and that’s still, for me, for all of us, is very, very difficult to go through, especially when we’re going through the heat of something, the heat of trouble, heat of difficulty, heat of affliction.

Now, I’m going to fast forward to post-conversation. Jesus asked this question, do you believe this? And then how does Martha answer? Yes, here, she told him, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world. And after she said this, she went back and called her sister, Mary, aside. The teacher is here, and so Mary comes, going from to verse 30. Now, Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. And the Jews, this was probably a wealthy affluent family, many of the Jews on the area had come, they’re comforting her, and they noticed that Mary runs to where Jesus is, and supposing that she’s going out to mourn, they all follow. And so there’s kind of a crowd that’s growing. Mary reaches the place where Jesus was, she falls at his feet and says, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw the weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. Where have you laid him, he asked. Come and see, Lord, they replied. And Jesus wept. The shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, see how he loved him. But some of them said, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?

So Jesus is first troubled in his spirit. He’s deeply moved. He’s deeply moved. He’s troubled in his spirit. He asks where they laid the body of Lazarus. Jesus presumably goes in front of the tomb and he weeps. Jesus wept. Why did Jesus weep? Answer I thought was pretty clear. Jesus is sad, right? He’s his best friend or one of his best friends, Lazarus is dead. The brother of some of his best friends, Martha and Mary, has died. They’re sad. They’re grieving. They’ve likely seen Lazarus at the top of his health decline in a very short time. They probably saw him gasp for breath. They probably saw him breathe his last and had to see every last bit of it, knowing that Jesus was relatively close, could have come any second and healed him. But they saw Lazarus die. Lazarus is probably grieving over their loss, just like the Jews around them that had gathered around them. He’s probably seeing I have to say Chosen does a really good job of explaining this process of grieving in that part of Israel. They would hire people who would professionally grieve. Sometimes they would bring instruments and they would kind of have this dirge or this very kind of melancholy music going on in the background. And they would hire usually women who would wail for days and weeks at a time as part of the grieving process. And if you remember that scene in Jairus’ when Jairus’ daughter died, this is exactly what happened, right? They’re pestering Jairus, hey, are you going to hire us or are you going to have us play our dirge and wail and weep at your daughter’s funeral? And it’s kind of almost like this almost service that you kind of order for whenever someone dies. And so that especially with this very affluent, rich family, they probably have several mourners, several people who are playing their lyres and lutes and whatever and kind of setting the scene for a very, very sad, sad environment right now of Lazarus’ death. Lots of mourning, lots of wailing.

And so Jesus naturally in his humanity, he’s probably weeping with them, seeing all of this. And kind of broadly, if you’re kind of considering the bigger picture of all this, he empathizes with us, right? Our suffering matters to Jesus. If we’re kind of looking, taking a step back and looking at all this. Jesus is weeping with his friends just as Jesus grieves with us in our suffering. When we’re going through difficulty, when we’re going through the scary diagnoses and the car accidents and the unforeseen deaths of loved ones and parents and children, Jesus is the high priest who grieves with us. Hebrews chapter 4 goes through this at length, right? He empathizes with us. He’s gone through every temptation. He didn’t fall. But he knows exactly what we’re going through. Our suffering matters to Jesus. But I put bullet 5 there and put a bunch of question marks. And this is why. Every single person that I and I didn’t know this, full disclosure. I read D.A. Carson’s take on this and then I read five other takes on this. And I was like, what in the world? How did I miss this? There’s a chance that this is just the surface level of this. That there’s actually another reason why Jesus is weeping. And here’s why. There is a troubled spirit here, right? In verse 33. There is a spirit that’s troubled. And the word that is used for weeping here is kind of a mistranslation in English. Other languages, never mind other translations, but other languages, D.A. Carson said Spanish and other languages where this is translated, weeping is not boo-hoo crying. It’s actually a bitterness and a troubled heart and an anger. And that’s what’s missed in the English translation here. Jesus wept to us doesn’t sound like there’s an anger behind it, but there’s actually anger. There’s a troubled heart. There’s a distress that the words here don’t exactly convey. Why, I don’t know. Why would Jesus be angry? Why would he be troubled to a point of being distressed to a point of anger? Why would he be angry at Lazarus’ funeral? Context matters, right? Verse 36. The Jew said, see how he loved him. He must be crying because he loved him, right? Verse 37. Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying? He just finished his conversation with Martha about being the resurrection and the life after hearing Martha’s kind of theological exposition, which we’ll get to in a second. He asked her, do you believe this? Both Martha and Mary both say, Jesus, if you had just been here, our brother would still be alive. And in the context of what we went through about five minutes ago about how miracle after miracle, sign after sign, big and small, secret and public, after all of those things, people were still not believing. People were still not truly believing in who Jesus was and why he came. The fact that he’s the son of God. They were believing the miracle, but they weren’t believing the man. Could Jesus be weeping about something entirely else? Or could the deepest meaning of Jesus wept be Jesus was bitterly weeping over something else? And everyone I read, all the takes on this seemed to agree on this one thing. That Jesus was weeping over the unbelief. That Jesus was weeping over how he was soon to go to the cross. He was soon to be by the same people who were affirming him and trying to make him their king would soon crucify him. That there was a chance that perhaps people weren’t truly believing the miracles and trying to and believing in who he truly was. It was just a superficial surface level belief in who Jesus was. Was that why Jesus wept? It’s possible. And if we parse the Greek and all of that stuff, that seems to be one of the more likely explanations. That Jesus was weeping because he would and we read this in Luke. We read this in other places where Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem. Because they wouldn’t believe in him. They forsook him. Right? And so if you kind of connect the dots and everywhere Jesus was weeping, it was over his people. Over Jerusalem. Over the fact that there was a significant lack of belief. Is that why Jesus was weeping?

So we know how this story ends. Right? Lazarus is raised from the dead. There’s a thousand messages that we can talk to you about that we can go through with that later. But my objective here this evening was to cover this one phrase. Do you believe this? I am the resurrection of life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Jesus asked Martha, do you believe this? This is why this is relevant especially to us. Evangelicals but especially to those of us who were born and brought up in the church. Nothing Martha said was wrong. Right? Lord Martha Jesus said to Jesus sorry, Lord Martha said to Jesus, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know even now God will give you whatever you ask. Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Martha said, I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Martha knew the theology. Right? She knew that who Jesus was. She knew that he was the Christ in verse 27, the son of God who is coming into the world. She knew the Christology. She knew the eschatology, the fact that Lazarus would one day rise again. She knew everything but at the same time she knew nothing. And the question I want to post to you all today is how many of us also fit in the same category of knowing a lot of things. We know the things but we actually don’t know the thing. The thing. Capital T. And this is how we know this. Right? So Jesus is about to raise Lazarus from the dead. What does Martha tell him? In verse Jesus is about to raise Lazarus from the dead. Verses 39. Take away the stone, Jesus says, but Lord, said Martha, the sister of the dead man, by this time there’s a bad odor. The King James says, he stinketh. He has been there for four days. If Martha truly believed that Jesus was the resurrection and the life and truly believed that Jesus was who he said he was, would he object to Jesus’ request to open the tomb? No. And Jesus kind of gently rebukes it. Didn’t I tell you that if you believed that you would see the glory of God, that if you believed in my timing, that if you believed in the fact that I came when I came because there was something else, some other glory that needed to be manifested here, there’s another love that needed to be shown here. There’s another level, another depth of authority and power that needed to be shown here. If Martha truly believed in who Jesus really was, that question wouldn’t have arose, risen from Martha. If I could simplify this for you, Martha believed that the resurrection was an event. Jesus showed her that the resurrection is a person. Martha’s knowledge of eternal life was this abstract idea. Jesus proved that the knowledge of eternal life is a personal relationship. Martha thought victory over death was a future expectation, eschatological promise or hope that Lazarus would someday rise from the dead. Jesus cracks her showing that victory is a present reality. This is why we can confidently read John 11, 25 and 26 as we often do at funerals in times of deep despair and seemingly in times where hope is lacking. We can confidently, as we always do, we can confidently read this and know that this is not some sort of promise for the future. It is a present promise. This is something that we can rely on in the moment, in the time of suffering, and in the time of need, that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. He’s not going to be the resurrection. He’s not some kind of ethereal life for some people. He is the resurrection. He is the life. And if you truly believe, even if that person dies, he will never die. Do you believe this? And that’s the question I think that we all need to ask ourselves. Do we truly believe this? Is our Christianity a superficial hope? Is our Christianity, is our coming to church and worshiping and going to Sunday school and the things that we do, the things that we confess, and Martha did it all, right? Is it superficial? Is it a surface-level understanding because it just makes us feel good? And no fault against Martha. What Martha does is what Martha needs to do, right? Martha’s saying the right things. But is there another level of understanding of who Jesus is, his reality, and why he came, and what he’s doing presently in our lives? Do we have a superficial understanding of all this?

If there’s any doubt as to the sufficiency of who Jesus is and why he came, let’s go through this quote. No one has ever yet discovered the word Jesus ought to have said or the deed he ought to have done. Nothing he does falls short. In fact, he is always surprising you and taking your breath away because he is incomparably better than you can imagine for yourself. He is tenderness without weakness, strength without harshness, humility without the slightest lack of confidence, holiness and unbending conviction without the slightest lack of approachability, power without insensitivity, passion without prejudice. There’s never a false step, never a jarring note. This is life at the highest. If we thought that if we think that Jesus is delaying, if his timing is off, if God’s ways are harsh towards us, if we feel that there’s an emptiness, there’s a silence that we’re not hearing from him, this quote from John Gerstner tells us that it’s everything but that. Right? Every way of his every deviation that we think is happening is his perfection manifest.

So I thought just how do I make this hit home? Kind of life for Christians, people who can talk the talk really, really well, but are we walking the walk? And I think it’s the Holy Spirit kind of prompted me to the next chapter, chapter 12, and this is where I’ll end. A very famous a famous display of true worship. Six days before the Passover, Jesus arrived at Bethany where Lazarus now lived. Jesus had raised from the dead. And so there’s a dinner given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served like Martha does. She’s the server. She does the thing. She says the talk. Says the things. And Lazarus is reclining, chilling at the table after being resurrected from the dead. Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume. She poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. What Mary is displaying here is that she’s not just talking the talk. She’s living it out. She understands. She understands who Jesus is. Maybe the first person, a woman, for that matter, especially in this kind of ancient time, is the first person seemingly before the disciples, before anyone, who understands who Jesus is. How? Because of the sacrifice that she makes in her attempt to bring homage and worship to Jesus. A pint of pure nard’s, a year’s salary, an expensive perfume is what it costs to buy this perfume. And she pours it on Jesus’ feet. At the objection of the disciples, at the objection of everyone who is staring at her, judging her for doing such a frivolous thing, she wipes his feet with her hair and the house was filled with the fragrance. This is what true belief looks like. The sacrifice is there. And that could look a million different ways, but the sacrifice is there. The understanding of who Jesus is there is clearly there because of the sacrifice and the worship, because of the extravagance of the gift that’s laid before Jesus’ feet, literally on Jesus’ feet. And the effect that has is the fragrance fills the room. True belief will lead to a display of worship, a display of sacrifice, and the whole world will see it. That’s how we go from being a Martha who knows the things to a Mary who does the things. Martha truly believed do we.

Worship team, if you could come up. Guys, we talk the talk, we say the things, we hear the things every week, but my greatest fear and why I feel like there’s so much de-churching and deconstruction and how maybe even some of your friends growing up at church have left the face of abandon or who just don’t care anymore. Was there an understanding there but without a true belief? And if there is, my charge to all of us is if we, in worshiping like Mary does, in our display of our adoration, of our love, of our devotion to God, if that draws other people, if that fragrance fills the room, what sort of effect, if we truly, radically, sacrificially worship and praise and declare God’s goodness, the effect that it happens, that has in the room will be as fragrant as this bottle of nard that’s broken over Jesus’ feet. Are we ready for that sacrifice of that level of worship? How else do we declare, how does anyone know that we truly believe what we believe, that Jesus is the Son of God, that He came to die for our sins, that He resurrected on the third day? Is it surface-level knowledge? Is it something that we can just recite in our sleep? Or is it something that we truly believe that’s what Jesus is asking us, that’s what He asked Martha and that’s what’s being asked this evening, do we truly believe?

Let’s pray. Father, we thank You, Lord, for this precious opportunity to go through Scripture and even though we read this time and time again, as I have a thousand times, Lord, we thank You that You are unpacking the depth and the immense meaning, Lord, behind Your words, O God, spoken so many thousands of years ago, Lord. God, forgive us for glossing over these things as if they’re just things that are just narratives, things that we just rent from a library, but God, we thank You that Your words are life-giving, that they, with meditation and with understanding and memorization and truly sitting at Your feet and listening to Your Word and truly unpacking it, Lord, there’s so much, so much meaning, O Lord, for our day, for our time, O Lord, and God, we pray that this would not be an application that goes over our head, O Lord, but there’s true meaning behind the words, Do You Believe? God, we pray that as a generation of Gen X and Millennials and to come Gen A, O Lord, God, that we would not be the generation that lives this superficial Christianity, that sees Christianity and Christians deconstruct left and right, O Lord, but by our worship, by our praise, by our adoration, by our sacrifice, O Lord, God, let the fragrance of that be deafening, O Lord, let it fill the nostrils of every single person, O Lord, that we come across at school and at work, in our very homes, O Lord, in our churches, O God, let that fragrance be so overwhelming, O Lord, that the whole world would see who You truly are, O Lord. God, we thank You that we serve a risen Christ, O Lord, that You are the life, that You are the resurrection, and those that believe, O Lord, will never die, O Lord, but experience that life and the resurrection in this present time, O Lord. If your coming tarries, O Lord, God, we will have that opportunity to share Your gospel, that beautiful word, of this Good News, O Lord. God, we pray that as restoration takes off, and as days become weeks, and weeks become years, O Lord, God, we pray for something radically different, O Lord, than we’ve ever experienced before, that there be such a move towards sharing this gospel, of showing the world who You truly are, O Lord, that nations will look back and say, man, there was this movement in Dallas, there was this church in Dallas that lived, that did more than talking the talk, but they walked the walk, and so many have been affected by that. Let that be the testimony of this church one day, O Lord, of the believers in this room, O God. Lord, let us do what is radical, do what is expensive, do what brings sacrifice, O Lord, and let the whole world see that one day, O God. We ask all this in your might and precious name.