Reliance - The Works of Jesus - 2025.03.26

[00:00:00] Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for your ongoing and continued action as our High Priest. Thank you for interceding for us. Thank you for being present with us. Thank you that you will never leave us nor forsake us.

[00:00:28] We pray in your name, Jesus, that you would strengthen our faith, that you would equip us to fulfill the callings that you have placed on our lives, and that you would continue to lead us and to guide us. Holy Spirit, be present during this time. Help us to be edified by the word of God and by the testimonies of our brothers and sisters.

[00:00:52] Lord, help us to recall and to bring to mind and to appreciate and to express gratitude for what you have done and for who you are. Lord, redeem this time and use it for your glory. In Jesus' name. Amen. I was listening to a podcast about the Bible, and this scripture from the end of the book of John came up.

[00:01:17] It is John 21, verse 25, about the many other things that Jesus did. And I think it brings to mind something that's critically important for us, that the Gospels recording the events of Jesus' life are recorded under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit

[00:01:43] and are sufficient for what we need spiritually. And they are, of course, endlessly rich and deep with wisdom and instruction and encouragement and doctrine and teaching. But this reminder from John has always struck me as being so marvelous and so incredible.

[00:02:11] We often think about what it will be like to be able to review our lives, and when we stand before the judgment seat of God, we will give an account. We will give an account for everything, which means that everything must be gone over.

[00:02:30] And it will be so wonderful, so fascinating, so just marvelous for us to be able to see not just what we accomplished on God's behalf,

[00:02:45] because there, of course, there, of course, will be regret and troubling of our spirits in that moment for the times of sin and disobedience and the opportunities that we had that were squandered and the times that we grieved the Holy Spirit.

[00:03:05] But even when we see all of those works burned up and tossed aside, God will wipe away every tear. And what will remain are the things that were done for the glory of God, for His kingdom, in obedience to the leading of His Holy Spirit.

[00:03:25] But how amazing will it be, brothers and sisters, to be given a fuller picture of everything that Jesus did, of everything that He accomplished? John here is, in many points of perspective, using hyperbolic language.

[00:03:48] And just to say that the life and the ministry of Jesus and His activities and His actions were endless. He says, But what occurred to me when I was reminded of this scripture is that Jesus is still active now. He is still our high priest. He is still interceding on our behalf.

[00:04:18] He is still dispensing grace and forgiveness. And He is still upholding creation. And it's a notable thing. Because when we think about the technological platforms that we have now, and the absolutely preposterous amount of data and content and writing and video and images and everything that is getting uploaded to these data systems,

[00:04:45] of a frequency of such preposterous abundance that there's no way for us to, consume or even begin to, consume or even begin to, approach it, every minute that goes by. It's not just hours and not just days worth of content that is being uploaded, but months and years even, depending on the situation. And so when we think about that,

[00:05:14] we understand that not only are the works of Jesus more manifold than this, they are infinite in duration, complexity, and significance. And it's just another way of us to be overwhelmed by the distinction between our Creator and ourselves.

[00:05:43] Even the creative works that we produce, formal, informal, tasteful, maybe not so much sometimes, all of those are done under the auspices of God's sovereignty and His control. Granted, He has given us free will to do these sorts of things,

[00:06:06] but there is an important part of us understanding that nothing that was made was made without Him. Jesus, in the book of John and all throughout the Bible, is the source of our being. Everything that we do is in Him. And when we are trying to wrap our minds around that,

[00:06:34] it can be overwhelming and overcoming, but it should be. It should be something of worship. And it encourages us to, on an ongoing basis, reflect whether it is through prayer and a time alone with the Holy Spirit where we ask the Lord to bring to mind the things that God has done,

[00:06:59] to bring to mind things that happened maybe a long time ago that we have lost sight of, things that maybe we don't even recognize the hand of God in, even though it was there, things that He protected us from that we never saw and never had to deal with. All of these things. I pray that the Lord would open our eyes and that the Holy Spirit would give us vision and insight into these things

[00:07:28] because it brings forth a kind of gratitude and love for the Lord that can set the stage for a desire to grow and to move forward into greater levels of spiritual maturity and to be transformed from image to image and from glory to glory. So let's take that time today, whether you embark upon a full-fledged structured program

[00:07:57] of building this into your everyday routine and writing things down for the sake of remembering them, that's a great exercise and a wonderful encouragement to receive from the Holy Spirit a reminder of what God has done. Not for God's self-aggrandizement, but for His glory and for our own benefit. Out of love, the Holy Spirit will call to mind and bring up not just the things that God has done, but then alongside that,

[00:08:27] maybe the things that God wants to do for us to bring to mind something that we need to forgive, bring to mind something that we need to repent of, bring to mind something that we need to change. And the reminder of God's power and God's activity in our lives in times past and even in the present can serve as an encouragement for us to do the right thing,

[00:08:54] to trust God to lead us in the way that we should go rather than to take things into our own hands and attempt to accomplish things in our own strength. If we had a sense of what it really meant for us to be storing up treasures in heaven and the vast eternal riches that are available to us in the spiritual resources of the grace and mercies of God

[00:09:23] that know no end and know no bounds and know no depletion even to any degree. It's just continual improvement and expansion and growth and somehow the perfect getting better and better and better. in a technical sense because perfection can grow. It feels like a paradox,

[00:09:50] but perfection is operating at maximal capacity in whatever degree or dimension you want to define it. But you can be getting even better than that. And if you are at this maximum level that is possible in a certain situation, there is the addition that is capable because of the passage of time

[00:10:17] of even more treasures in heaven, even more growth, even more maturity. And for us, we would certainly say that relative to our potential, we are not at that maximum perspective. We're not at that situation. But it is something that we can strive to improve our trajectory on. And in doing so, we have to be doing that under the Lord's guidance and through His power,

[00:10:47] through the power of the Holy Spirit, becoming more sensitive to His voice, more quick to follow His direction, and more capable of abounding in the fruits of the Spirit. And let's think again about this Scripture. There are many other things that Jesus did in His earthly life and in His earthly ministry, and there are many other things that Jesus is doing. To get back to the content production example,

[00:11:17] in terms of YouTube, at a baseline, there is a sense direct from Scripture that Jesus is currently upholding the entire state of creation by His ongoing power and influence. If that was withdrawn, then creation itself would cease to be. And so, if we map it out, then it's technically true, because not only is

[00:11:47] every single elementary particle, fundamental physical field, however we want to conceptualize our physical reality, being upheld actively. There's nothing that is outside the scope of God's power and His sustaining. So too are the non-physical components of our existence, our spirits, our souls, our minds, all of these things. So it's not just the physical,

[00:12:16] but the metaphysical that is being upheld by Jesus and by His creative power. And so, technically, John is correct. It's not hyperbole, because the world itself, the physical world, does not have enough space despite its immensity, regardless of how immense it is on a finite basis. Every single

[00:12:46] speck, every single quark, every single atom, every single piece of the universe is, in a very real sense, declaring the glory of God and upheld by His power. It is a thing that Jesus is doing. And so, if you filled the entire universe with books and each book were just a point, you would need each one of those points

[00:13:15] across all of time, across every instance of it. Now, perhaps we can play a semantic game here and say, well, all of that could potentially be covered by a more efficient linguistic description to say that through Jesus' power, He is upholding every component of the physical universe at all points in time. And fair enough. But, for this thought experiment, let's go with the version

[00:13:44] where there has to be this kind of detail and we can't run through these generalizations. Because, when John says, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written, we have to imagine this scenario playing out. And, again, the whole point of the thought exercise is not to play those semantic games that feel very much like a

[00:14:14] how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Those would be, in my view at least, classified under maybe not going so far as to say foolish and unlearned disputes or quarrels or things like that, the things that Paul instructs us to avoid. But, certainly, the question is, what is the best use of our resources? What is the best use of our time? And, there are so many

[00:14:44] different individualized disputes among Christian denominations and individual people and everything else that it's not that they don't matter because the disputes have real world consequence. But, if we are focusing on those things and those aspects and those dynamics rather than being sensitive to the Holy Spirit who may want us to go in a different direction, then we

[00:15:13] are missing out. And, we're missing out on the things that Jesus is doing and the things that Jesus can and will do. So, brothers and sisters, I would exhort you here to think about and allow the Holy Spirit to provide some clarity and some perspective on just the immensity of the activity of Jesus and the power of God maintaining everything in

[00:15:43] creation, looking into our hearts and seeing everything, everything that goes on, being omniscient and not just knowing these things in some kind of distant deistic sense. Even though God is transcendent, he is also imminent. There is personal involvement by God in all of these things, direct involvement. God is not passive. He is active

[00:16:12] in our lives, in creation, not just in sustaining it, but moving through it and in it. And the actions of the Holy Spirit are one with the things that Jesus is doing and the things that Jesus has done. And regardless of ancient disputes about whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son, what I want to reinforce

[00:16:42] here is the plain discipleship perspective that says if we are thinking about these things, if we aren't meditating on these things, then surely it will bring us into a greater appreciation of what our Lord has done, a greater and expanded understanding completely reliant upon his power and his support and his guidance in order for anything to be accomplished

[00:17:11] and to give us a greater sense of gratitude and worship and just of the holiness of God and his power and his might because when we think about the kind of levels of activity that are at issue here, we imagine that it would have to be frenetic. We've all had days and maybe weeks and maybe months and even years where we felt pulled in so many different directions.

[00:17:41] We're multitasking. We are run down to the bone. We are burnt out with those sorts of activities and we have to sleep for our physical bodies and our minds to recover even just from a regular run-of-the-mill day. But that is not so with God. He does all of these things at a level of activity and action that is impossible really to fathom

[00:18:10] from where we sit. But he does so with calm and with love and without being surprised or having things happen that are unanticipated unless I suppose you take the open theism trajectory which I would reject for a variety of different reasons. But again leaving aside the theology and the doctrine to focus on the discipleship not that those things aren't important obviously we have to make sure

[00:18:40] that we are in a strong place and sometimes that requires and necessitates and certainly in all cases is completely benefited by just a thinking on what God has done and allowing the Holy Spirit to expand this. Now I want to issue a word of caution that we do have to be careful if we're thinking about well what are these other things that Jesus did and we end up

[00:19:10] interpolating in a way where we introduce extra scriptural extra biblical other kind of content we don't want to misrepresent the works of Christ and indeed many different charismatic leaders have come down throughout history charismatic in the personal sense not in the theological sense who have convinced other people that they have had a greater or more expanded revelation of Jesus

[00:19:39] and they have been heretical and leading people away from God so we do want to be careful with things like that if we are thinking that in any way we are receiving things and a greater awareness of what Jesus has done and it leads us away from scripture or is inconsistent with the testimony of God then that's not something we want to be a part of in any way

[00:20:09] shape or form and so we're not actively seeking for extra biblical revelation here we're not trying to add to the scripture and that's why I think the best way to approach this is to think more about what Jesus has done in our lives and what the Holy Spirit will bring up to us when we are in that mood or in that mindset when we are open to receiving from the Lord what he has done as a testimony because we

[00:20:39] will overcome the enemy by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony and the word of our testimony is based on what God has done in our lives it's not based on what we have done it is what has God accomplished through his grace how have I been changed how have I

[00:21:12] worked in our lives and the process of following the Holy Spirit so again just a word of caution and we are absolutely in no way shape or

[00:21:42] about what God has done in your own lives and to understand that the attention that God has paid to you is vast it is unique to you personal to you not in the sense that God has given you something separate or some different set of commands but God is personally leading you in a way

[00:22:12] towards him to fulfill his will in a specific and precise situation that he is not leading other people he is leading us all into truth and righteousness and goodness and we should all endeavor to pursue that I guess that's a longer way of saying that God has a plan for your life but let's go one step have gratitude for the amount of things

[00:22:42] that Jesus has done on our behalf if we only stopped at just sustaining our existence then that's an incredible thing that he has done and it's not just one thing it is an ongoing demonstration of attention and power and by definition Jesus has done more for us than we could ever possibly do for ourselves in a variety of different ways not logistically because Jesus is working and doing things

[00:23:12] on our behalf and paying attention to us while we're sleeping but of course metaphysically there are things that we need sanctification that

[00:23:42] we should be endeavoring with all of our might because of the love of God to respond to appropriately and so brothers and sisters as we wrap things up I just want to encourage you to think about the things through his word for spiritual nourishment

[00:24:12] through his own intercession remember in John 17 Jesus is praying on our behalf there is so much to be grateful for and we will never run out of gratitude and that will be something that expands in our spirits in particular in the new heavens and the new earth when we have just a much more clear perspective on who Jesus is and what he has

[00:24:41] done in our lives the God of the universe has poured himself out for you out of his love and in so many ways part of the spiritual battle that we are in is to be able to see that and to be able to receive that there are many strongholds and blockages and obstacles and sins and other things that keep us from really appreciating and appropriating

[00:25:11] the truth of this notion God says he knows the number of hairs on our head that's trivial for him God loves us he is paying attention to us he is acting on our behalf in immense ways that we can't even fathom on this side of eternity and it is an absolutely appropriate and valuable discipleship exercise to spend some time in reflection on the many other things

[00:25:41] that Jesus has done again we are not intending to go beyond scripture or receive that kind of inspired revelation in that same sense because people have gone off the rails in major ways and caused significant damage

[00:28:56] God we love you Jesus thank you for working on our behalf in your name amen