The Truth Will Make You Free

In this week’s message from John 8, we see that the mindset the Spirit produces results in real knowledge and true freedom. Many believed what Jesus said without believing into him. Everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin, but those who continue in his word know the truth, and the Son makes them free indeed.

Transcript

Well, if you would open your Bible to the Gospel of John chapter 8, we’re going to just plunge into a passage this morning in John chapter 8. We’re going to be focusing on a couple of verses here. Well, we’re going to be looking at 31 and following, but we’ll pick up a little earlier than that in just a moment.

Over the past few weeks, several weeks now, we’ve been talking about the mindset that is produced by the Spirit of God in a believer. And we’ve been talking about, in particular, how it changes us, how it changes the way we think, how the Spirit of God, through the Word of God, renews our mind, gives us new thought, changes our vocabulary, changes the way we think about things, changes the values that we hold.

In fact, the last two weeks, we did a tracing of the use of the mind and thinking that runs through the book of Philippians. And the point of that is that a Christ-like mindset values the right things and makes the right judgments.

I’m going to read three verses from Philippians that we’ve looked at over the past two weeks to begin with, just because it’s going to help frame our thinking about what I hope to do this morning. I’m going to read Philippians 1, verse 9. We talked about that a good bit last week. The prayer that the apostle prays for the Philippians and for us. Paul prays in verse 9,

And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment.

And last week we were focusing particularly on the wisdom, the discernment that God gives us to be able to make right evaluations. This morning, I want us to think about knowledge. That’s really part of the focus of where we want to look. The knowledge that we have and what that means.

Philippians 3:8. The apostle Paul writes in valuing and looking at his whole life and making a new assessment of all that he has in Christ and all the worthless things that he thought was valuable before. He says,

More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish, that I may gain Christ.

So there’s that verse. And then in Philippians 3:10, a few verses later, Paul’s aspiration,

that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, being conformed to his death.

So the goal of Christian life involves knowing things. It involves knowledge, and in particular, it involves knowing a person, being related to and knowing in a powerful way the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re going to be thinking about knowledge and knowing.

The mindset produced by the Spirit of God results in knowledge and the freedom for a Christian to love and to please Christ. That’s where we want to go this morning.

Let’s go ahead and read the passage in John 8. Let’s see if I can find a starting place for this. Let’s see. Jesus is ministering and is being addressed and having an extensive conversation with the Pharisees in Jerusalem. I’m going to start with verse 25. They just asked him, verse 25,

They were saying to him, “Who are you?” And Jesus said to them, “What have I been saying to you from the beginning? I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but he who sent me is true; and the things which I heard from him, these things I speak to the world.” They did not realize he had been speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I’m he, and I do nothing on my own initiative, but I speak the things as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me; he’s not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” As he spoke these things, many came to believe in him.

Verse 31.

The TextJohn 8:31–36

So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed him, “If you continue in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

I’m going to stop reading there, and let’s ask God to bless his holy word to our hearts today.

Father, we thank you for these words of Jesus. We thank you, Father, for the truth you have given to us, and we just ask, Lord, for a deep understanding of this passage this morning. I pray, Lord, we’re not going to spend the time on this passage that it deserves, I know. But Lord, open this passage to us so that these most important points we take to heart and truly, truly trust in. We ask this, Lord, in Christ’s name. Amen.

Well, the mindset produced by the Spirit of God results in knowledge and freedom to please God. That’s the idea this morning.

The first thing I want to point out in verses 31 to 36: a genuine freedom is secured solely by the Lord Jesus and is experienced by those people who demonstrate that are his true disciples by continually abiding in his word and knowing the truth he reveals.

The Context of the Passage

Now, just the context of this passage. Jesus is talking. He has just told the people in verse 12 that he’s the light of the world. The Pharisees begin to question him. They question whether his testimony about himself is true.

And you have this unfolding dialogue between him and the Pharisees. And they’re testing him, trying to trip him up. And as he’s speaking, something remarkable happens with the crowd. And that is many of them put their trust in Jesus. Many of them believe in him. That’s what it says in that last verse in verse 30.

As he spoke these things, many came to believe in him.

And then verse 31 is a little bit jarring, you know, especially in a lot of our Bibles because there’s no distinction here in a lot of translations. But it says,

So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed him, “If you continue in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine.”

And what does that mean? And how do you follow that? Are these people believers or are they not? Are they disciples or are they not? If they’re disciples and if they believe in him, do they need to do these extra things? It opens up a lot of questions, doesn’t it?

Believing Him and Believing Into Him

Well, there’s something that you need to understand, and that is, there’s a difference in verse 30 and verse 31 about the group of people he’s addressing. Jesus is talking, and as he’s talking, he’s talking about things that they probably couldn’t comprehend completely, but the power of the Spirit of God was at work. So Jesus says,

When you lift up the Son of Man, then you’ll know that I am.

That’s literally what he says. You’ll know that I am. And the input, when Jesus uses that phrase, which he does often in the Gospel of John, he’s identifying with the I Am of the Old Testament, the God. He is identifying himself with God. And he says,

I do nothing on my own, but I speak the very things that the Father taught me.

And then he goes on to say, he’s talking about him being with him and he’s not alone. So he has the testimony of the Father.

And as he spoke these things, many came to believe into him.

Literally in Greek, the preposition there in Greek is eis, and they believed into him. And in John’s writing, that’s pretty much always used to describe people who actually have put their real trust in Jesus, those people who are truly saved people.

And so you have that. There are people who have listened to him, people in that crowd who have put their trust in a saving way into Jesus Christ. That’s what I’m sure this passage is saying. So the next verse.

So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed him.

It’s not the same. Some translations, unfortunately, translate these two things the same way. And it is very different in Greek.

So believing into him and believing him is two different things. Two different things. But I know a lot of translations translate it the same way both places. But that’s not right.

Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed him.

A Venn Diagram of the Crowd

So Jared was using a Venn diagram this morning, so I’m going to try to do one too, an imaginary Venn diagram, so that we can get this one point clearer in our minds. Jesus is talking to the crowd of people. The crowd of people, there’s a lot of people there, included in that crowd are Pharisees who hate him. A lot of the people, the Jewish people there, truly hate him. They want to put him to death. And as he talks to them, they all hear his voice, this whole group of people.

As he begins to speak, a portion of those people believe what he says. So you’ve got the Venn diagram, and somewhere within that Venn diagram, draw another circle inside that circle. And that’s all the people that believe him. And then there were those in that circle, a smaller number, who believed into him. Into him.

There’s a difference between those people who believe into him and those people who believe him, who understand some facts that he has spoken, who trust what he said is true, and somebody who believes into him, who has a relationship with him, who believes and trusts him as their Messiah, as their Lord. It’s a difference.

So Jesus’ conversation here is not to those people, particularly, that are truly trusting him. It includes those, I’m sure, but it’s particularly addressed to that larger group who believe him. “I believe what you say here.” Not all of them trust him, but they do believe what he said.

If You Continue in My Word

So Jesus was saying to those who had believed him,

That’s a good start, believing Jesus.

If you continue in my word, then you’re truly disciples of mine.

And he goes on to say,

and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

You’ll know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

And they have a problem. A lot of these people who he’s talking to have a problem with what he just said. People have a problem with what Jesus said there today.

There’s a lot of problems. There’s problems with the idea of truth and there’s problems with the idea of freedom, so much so that people today don’t know what either of those terms mean really often. So I want to take a little time to think about just those ideas, those thoughts.

And by the way, this isn’t easy. I mean, I think Haddon Robinson said, trying to communicate an idea is like trying to catch fog in a bottle. And there’s a truth to that. There’s a lot of truth. It’s hard to get things down precise.

And what we’re talking about, this whole series is ideas, isn’t it? It’s thoughts. We have all kinds of ideas. We have ideas that are imaginative. We have ideas of facts that we’ve studied and learned. We have all kinds of ideas and thoughts.

And if the idea that you have is rooted in reality, then that’s a good idea. If it isn’t, then it probably isn’t a good idea. We have lots of thoughts.

You Will Know the Truth

I want to focus first of all on this word,

you will know the truth.

You will know something, Jesus says. You will know something true. Ultimately, he’s talking about himself.

But let’s look at that more generally. You will know something. Knowledge is important. Knowledge for the Christian life is important.

Now, when you’re talking about knowledge in this world, if you were in a university setting and you’re in a class, it could be most any kind of class, and you start talking about knowledge, you know, that is immediately suspect. You become suspect because you’re saying that you know something or that people can know something.

And the general consensus is that nobody can truly know anything. Ultimately, for sure, absolutely. That’s the idea that’s communicated and taught to our children. Can you really know anything? But Christianity is founded on knowledge.

And further in that academic setting, they do, if they acknowledge knowledge at all, which is suspect, you know, in that way, they break it up into categories.

• You have genuine knowledge, scientific knowledge, mathematical knowledge, knowledge that can be demonstrated, you know, by testing, measuring.
• And then you have other kinds of knowledge, philosophy and religion. And that’s really not knowledge at all. That’s opinion. That’s just opinions.

Knowledge Versus Opinion

This morning, I’m not going to be able to quote the thing at all, and that’s not even my point, but this morning Jared played a little clip in the Sunday school class of a lady answering Christian questions. And she was asked about hell, and basically her understanding of hell is nothing like Jesus. It’s very clear.

But she prefaced the whole thing with, you know, “It’s really unfortunate that people have been brought up and taught these things in church when they haven’t really studied church history.” There’s lots of ideas out there. Lots of ideas. And everybody has their own opinion about things.

You need to know that, when you’re talking about any religion, when you’re talking about God, you’re in an area where there is no knowledge, just opinion. People put their trust in things. They believe things. They trust it. But there’s no way of knowing it.

That’s not Christianity. That’s not the Christianity of the Bible. No. Christianity is founded on real truth, just as solid a truth as anything that you could point to scientifically or mathematically.

It’s absolutely true because it’s rooted in the greatest reality of all, and that’s in God himself and then the revelation that he has given. It’s more sure than mathematical facts. It’s absolutely certain.

And that’s what is the foundation for Christian thought. It’s not something that’s just an opinion. People have opinions in things they don’t believe or even trust or know. People will commit themselves to things that they don’t even know if it’s true or not.

Picture a person lost in the woods. They’ve gotten turned around. They’ve been wandering around for a couple of hours. And finally they say, “Well, I’m just going to have to decide.” And so they choose a direction. And they go off in that direction.

People do that with faith. And so these words that we use, faith and knowledge and freedom, they don’t mean what they once meant. They’ve been redefined in our culture, redefined in our situation, so people don’t understand it at all.

The Christian faith is based on knowledge, and real knowledge, historical knowledge, yes, scientific knowledge, rooted in reality, not merely just believing or a shallow commitment to something you don’t know. So we need to just point that out.

What Jesus is teaching and communicating is truth. If you talk about truth, if you talk about knowledge, and people suspect that, when you talk about truth in an academic setting, people will laugh at you. They don’t believe there is truth. If there’s truth at all, it’s your truth. You can have your truth, and I have my truth, and whatever I believe is truth to me, and whatever you believe is truth to you.

But Jesus is the truth, and truth is outside of all of us. We can be dead wrong in what we believe, but there’s only God’s truth. That is what knowledge is. Knowledge is knowing something that is true, that is rooted in reality. It lines up with what is real. That’s what true knowledge is.

Knowledge Leads to Freedom

And true knowledge, as it works in the world, leads to freedom. It generally does. I mean, what we’re talking about is unique and salvific. What Jesus is talking about is saving knowledge that leads us to Christ himself. But just generally speaking, knowledge leads to freedom. It leads to an empowerment, really.

We think about that. I’ve drifted from my notes a bit, but let me take a moment and just explore that just a little bit. You know, if you know something to be true and you accumulate knowledge, then you gain authority in what it is you know.

If you hire an electrician for your house, you want to know that he has some knowledge about what he’s doing, and then you’re going to trust him if he does. If you go to a physician, it’s the same thing. Why do you go to a physician? Because you understand that he has more knowledge than you have and can help you with whatever that condition is that you’re bringing to him to diagnose and to treat.

And where does his authority come from? Is his authority really that certificate on the wall? That means nothing, not the certificate, only that it represents that he has gone through some study and may have accumulated some knowledge. It’s the knowledge that gives him the authority, the freedom to practice.

A person who is trained in a particular discipline is given the ability to do that practice, whatever it is. And that leads to a kind of freedom. And when you’re talking about that kind of freedom, you’re beginning to talk about something that is really freeing. I’ll give you an example of it in just a moment.

The Truth Will Make You Free

But notice in verse 33 that they misunderstood what freedom meant. Jesus said, “You will be free.” And they said, “What do you mean we will be free? We’re not slaves.”

What they’re expressing about freedom here is very similar. It’s actually a little better then. It’s very similar, though, to the idea that people have about freedom today. People don’t know the meaning of freedom. They don’t know the meaning. They certainly don’t have a classical understanding of what freedom means.

When you talk to someone about freedom, what they think freedom means is that you’re free to do whatever you want. If you talk to people about freedom, what they think is that, “I want to be free, and my freedom means that I can do whatever I want to do.” What is it that they want to do? Well, whatever gives them the most pleasure.

Do you know that’s pretty much what Jesus calls bondage? It’s the opposite of freedom. You know, think about that. People believe that they’re free to do anything that they want, and it’s okay for them to do anything that they want. And so what they most want is to get the most pleasure, and that leads to all kinds of things.

• Addictions.
• It leads to gluttony.
• It leads to countless social problems that we have and individual problems that we have.

Is that freedom? That’s not the classical understanding of freedom. We’ve redefined freedom.

Freedom Redefined

And I was reading about a lady that was interviewed in Hong Kong back sometime after the Cultural Revolution in the 50s. And she was in her 80s. I think she was 82 years old, and she’d come out of China just before. And she was definitely a Christian. But her language was steeped in communist language.

And so they start interviewing her, and one of her favorite expressions was “the liberation.” And so the interviewer says, “When you were back in China, were you free to gather together with other Christians to worship?”

And she said, “Oh no, no, no. Since the liberation, no one’s permitted to gather together for Christian services.”

They said, “But surely you were able to get together with a small group to discuss the Christian faith.”

“Oh, no, we weren’t. Since the liberation, all such meetings are forbidden.”

“Were you free to read your Bible?”

“Since the liberation, no one is free to read the Bible.”

Liberation. That’s quite a liberty. Liberty to not do an awful lot of things.

You see, freedom, liberty had been redefined by the culture. And it is for us today. And we can look at that and say, well, look, that was then. You can see how that happened with her, the language that they used in their culture. Well, that’s what’s happening to us today.

The Classical Idea of Freedom

Classical definition, or just give me a general description, outside of Christianity, influenced by Christianity, but outside of Christianity: freedom is a positive ability or capacity that a person has to do or to enjoy something, and that in common with other people, to the good of other people, and in common with other people. That’s freedom.

In other words, growing in the ability of being free to be all the best that you can be, to be as good as you can possibly be. That’s the classical idea of freedom. We’ve kind of lost that definition, don’t you think? Were you taught that in school? You should have been taught that in school. I wasn’t taught that in school.

And Christian freedom is a related kind of an idea. Free to be who you can be in Jesus Christ by the power of God operative in you.

Thinking about that classical definition, what is that saying? It’s like a great musician. I’ll just pick the first one. People might recognize the name, I don’t know, but somebody like a classical musician like Yo-Yo Ma. Yo-Yo Ma is a great cellist, and he goes out in front of an audience, and because of his giftedness and because of the incredible training that he’s had throughout his life, he’s able to perform beautifully the works that he performs.

He’s able to do it because of the skills that has been cultivated and developed. That gives him a freedom that I don’t have and that you don’t have. He’s free to do something extraordinary that blesses the people. It’s something that they share and enjoy in.

Now, if you’re going to take the other definition, he’s free to go out there to do anything he wants. He could dance a little jig. He could sit there and demonstrate how completely he’s capable of belching for an hour. And he’d be doing what he wants to do, maybe. It’s not freedom, and it doesn’t bless anyone.

Freed From the Tyrant of Sin

You see, what freedom is, is the ability, taking away the tyrants, taking away the restraints that keeps you from being all that you can be. For a Christian, taking away that bondage of sin that keeps us from being pleasing to God, to exercising the gifts of God to the fullest that God has given us, to enable us to glorify Christ in all our capacity. That’s freedom. That’s what Jesus is saying to these people.

And they’re tied up with their heritage. They’re descendants of Abraham. They’re okay. And Jesus says, “If you’re okay, you wouldn’t be seeking to kill me right now.” They’re not okay. They’re in bondage to sin.

And the danger here is that things become upside down. You get the world’s definition of things. What we’re doing in this study is the Holy Spirit of God changes the way we think. And the process, coming to the Word of God and being changed by the Word of God, changes our complete mindset.

And we are no longer conformed to this world. Your mind conformed to this world believes whatever the world believes about its values and things and thinking. Gives us its definitions.

But when you come to the Word of God, it changes the way we think. We have a transformed mind. And we’re transformed by the renewing of our mind, by the power of the Holy Spirit of God, through the Word of God. So it’s a positive capacity that we’re talking about, this freedom to be able to do things, to live a godly life because the tyrant of sin has been restrained.

One of the things that struck me is in the book of Romans, several times, Paul talks about death and sin as he personifies them. And they’re like a ruler. They’re like a king who has set themselves up. And he talks about how death and sin reign. They reign.

You know what else reigns? The grace of God. It comes in and brings liberty. The work of Jesus Christ frees the heart in bondage to sin in a powerful, extraordinary, wonderful way. It’s a mighty thing.

We think of grace as something passive, but it comes down like a mighty army to change our thoughts and change our soul, change the way we think, give us a new mindset. And that’s where we are.

The Natural Man

You know, in 1 Corinthians 2:14, a person who is apart from Christ, a person who doesn’t have the Spirit of God within them, Paul calls a natural man.

But a natural man, a man without the Spirit of God, doesn’t accept the things of the Spirit of God because they’re foolishness to him. He can’t understand them because they’re spiritually appraised.

Now, on that college campus, you go to the college campus and you go to the religion department and you sit in one of those departments or the philosophy department, and they can talk about Christianity with incredible clarity and beautifully and accurately. They can convey the doctrines of the faith in a way that really resonates and wants to make you worship the Lord. And they can do all of that and not believe it and reject it.

Why is that? It’s not that they don’t understand it. It’s that their heart is bound by sin. It’s their will that holds them back. And they don’t put their trust in the evidence that that points them to. Even though they understand it, comprehend it, they don’t trust it.

There’s more to the knowledge. It has to lead us in a particular direction. It must lead us to someone. Otherwise, we’re in bondage to sin. But the grace of God awakens us from that. It’s Wesley’s hymn.

Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night. Thy eye diffused a quickening ray. I woke, the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off. My heart was free. I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

So there’s that idea.

I’m going to read one verse for you. And we won’t go into it much, but let me just read. It’s in 2 Corinthians chapter 4. And let me just read the verse. It’s in verse 6.

For it is God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness.”

Let Light Shine Out of Darkness

What is Paul saying there? It is God, he’s referring back to Genesis 1. Well, it’s Genesis 1:3, in fact.

Let light shine out of darkness.

God said that.

Let there be light; and there was light.

There was darkness before. He says, “Let there be light,” there’s light.

God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

A Rational Faith

Now, I’ve been talking about knowledge, and it’s important, it’s vital. Christian faith is a rational faith. We don’t have a blind leap in the dark. We trust where the evidence points. You look at the resurrection of Jesus Christ and it tells us who he is. Look at the evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and it’s overwhelming historically.

But there’s more involved. There’s the power of the Spirit of God who awakens us to the truth of it. And it has to lead us to these things.

You look at the world around you, all of nature, the things that testify of a God, of a powerful God, a wise God. We know more about nature, far more than the writers of the Old and New Testament. And when they looked at the heavens, it declared the glory of God. And we look at the heavens and we can see that much farther.

And you know what it should say to us? God is even greater than we thought. He’s far greater than we ever imagined. The more you learn about the natural world, the more facts you learn, the more it should affirm the nature of God. We should learn how incredibly powerful he is, how amazingly wise he is. And we shouldn’t get stuck on the fact.

Knowledge That Points Beyond Itself

And the same thing is true with the Word of God. The Word of God is precious and true. And it’s wonderful. And it teaches us many, many truths of God.

But those truths, you don’t stop there. You don’t stop with looking at the stars and not see the God who created them. You don’t stop with what we learn in the Bible and not see the Christ they’re pointing to.

It’s like if you take your family out for a picnic. And you’re driving along and you’ve got everything in the car. The kids are in the back and they’re beginning to get hungry. And you want to get there and it’s taking a little longer than you expected, and you’re anxious, and you’re beginning to come to the park, and finally you see the sign that says, it points with an arrow, “Picnic Grounds.”

Well, you know what you don’t do? You don’t stop there and have your picnic in front of the sign. You go on to the grounds. The Word of God, the knowledge that he gives, the truth that is given to us in the Word of God and in all of his revelation, points us to his own glory, to the glory that is him, that is his.

The Glory of God in the Face of Christ

For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The verse before said that people are in darkness. The God who did that creative work to bring light out of darkness does something very specific and personal with us, shining the light of his grace and his truth into our heart, with the result, with the purpose, that we can see his glory, so that we can see all of his beauty and know him for who he is.

And better than that, more than that, see that that glory resides in the face of Christ. It resides in Christ. That’s the goal of the Christian life, that we see the beauty of Christ, and that that working in us enables us to live, to please him, to worship him, to please him in all the things that we do in life.

He gives us a freedom, a freedom to not sin. We get caught up in sin, but we have an ability by the grace of God and the power of the Spirit of God, out of love for Christ, to make the choice to please him in the circumstances of our life. We do it to worship him because he’s glorious. He alone is beautiful. He’s glorious. Let’s pray.

Father, thank you for your mercy and kindness to us, and thank you for your precious word you’ve given us. We ask, Lord, for your help and blessing, Lord, as we take what we’ve learned, and in submission and humility, instead of insisting on our own way, we submit ourselves to your way, to your truth.

And Father, keep us from any arrogance that rejects your truth, and enable us, Father, to learn for the purpose of glorifying and living for you, to bring glory to your name. Help us in these ways, we pray. Help us this week. And I pray, Lord Jesus, that we might glorify your name today. We ask this in Christ’s precious name, to his glory. Amen.