The Gospel of John Explained (The One Word He Used 98 Times That Nobody Told You About)

The Gospel of John Explained (The One Word He Used 98 Times That Nobody Told You About).

98 times. That’s how often one small word turns up in [music] the Gospel of John more than the other three gospels hold combined. And the strange part isn’t the word he kept reaching for. It’s the word sitting [music] right beside it. The one you’d expect on every page that John could have used at any moment and refused to [music] write down even once. The verb is believe. The word he [music] refused is faith. He used to believe 98 times and faith not even once across 21 chapters because believing to John was never the thing a noun turns it into. Not a possession, not a position, not a box you [music] check one time and set on a shelf to prove you were here. The moment you turn believing into a noun, you’ve turned a living thing into an object. And an object can [music] be set down. And the word he refused wasn’t the only thing he was ruthless [music] about. John cut almost everything you picture when you think of the story of [music] Jesus. No manager, no sermon on the mount, no parabolas, not even the bread and [music] the wine at the last supper. Close to 90% of what the other gospels contain is simply gone. We’ll get to why a [music] man would do that. Hold the question because first you have to feel what he was after. If you’ve ever sat [music] through a Sunday, you’ve sat through a hundred times and felt nothing at all, heard the right words, [music] sung the right songs, and walked out as cold as you walked in. This is the detail [music] that matters. The fear underneath that morning is rarely loud. It’s quiet, and it sounds like this. I [music] had it once. I’m fairly sure I did. So, why does it feel like a photograph of [music] a fire now with no heat coming off it at all? That ache has a name almost no one [music] says out loud. I’m tired of trying to believe harder and feeling exactly the [music] same. Hold on to that one, too, because John wrote his whole gospel for the person carrying it. Near the end of the book kick, he stops and tells [music] you in plain words why he wrote the thing. These are written, he says, [music] so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing you may have life in [music] his name. Watch the grammar. Not so that you may have faith. so that you may believe. And then [music] believing present tense, still in motion, still happening as you read. That one [music] grammatical choice is the master key to the entire gospel. And it’s the reason the question most of us have been quietly asking ourselves [music] is the wrong one. Because a fire was never something you own. It’s either burning right now, throwing real light, real warmth, or it isn’t. You can keep [music] a lamp on a shelf your entire life. polished, paid for, [music] yours, and dark. So, the question John is actually driving at was never do you have it. It’s smaller and far more honest. Is it lit? And underneath even that sits a second question, one he buries so deep in these [music] chapters that almost no one digs it back out. The question his whole book was built brick by brick [music] to answer. Who keeps it burning? So, here is the why. Picture an old man with a blank [music] scroll in front of him. He has outlived every other apostle. Peter is gone. Paul is gone. He is one of [music] the last people alive who actually stood in the room. And before he writes a single line about Jesus, he sits with all of it. The manger, the sermon on the mount, [music] more than 30 of Matthew’s parables, every exorcism, even the bread [music] and the wine of the Last Supper. and he leaves it on the floor. Close to 90% [music] of what the other gospels contain was cut on purpose. The easy explanation is [music] that John didn’t know the rest. That doesn’t hold. The other accounts [music] had been circulating for decades. He knew them. He’d lived the events himself. He wasn’t patching [music] holes in his memory. He was making choices. So, the real question was never what Jon forgot. It’s what John was trying to protect [music] you from. Here is the piece that the usual reading walks right past. Look at what all that omitted material [music] has in common. The manager, the sermon, the parables, the bread, and the wine. Every one of them [music] is something that already happened, something finished, something you can revisit, [music] recite, frame, and file away. And the moment your believing gets anchored to a finished event, a thing you watched once or memorized as a child, something quiet and dangerous [music] becomes possible. You can start living off the deposit. That is what a noun does to faith. It turns [music] a fire into a receipt. You did the transaction. You have the proof. You can point back to the exact date. And you can spend [music] the next 40 years warming your hands at the memory of a fire instead of [music] standing next to one. There’s a man, and he’s a composite, though you have almost certainly met him, who gave his life to Christ at a summer camp when [music] he was 15. He can still describe that night in detail. The bonfire, [music] the song they kept repeating, the strange warmth in his chest when he walked to [music] the front. He has been living on that one night for 31 years. And somewhere in [music] there, without ever deciding to, he began believing in the night instead of believing in the person he met [music] that night. The receipt replaced the relationship. The lamp went dark so slowly he never noticed the room getting [music] cold. John saw that coming from a long way off, so he built a book [music] with almost nothing in it, which you can put in a drawer. That is why the word underneath all 98 uses is the Greek verb pistuo which does not mean to hold a belief but to be actively leaning your full weight onto someone [music] right now in this moment not faith as a thing you own trusting as a thing you are doing present tense or [music] not doing at all. John reached for that verb on purpose and never once let it harden into a noun because the second it hardens, you [music] can set it down and walk away still feeling covered. And notice where he chooses to begin instead. Not [music] in a stable you can picture on a Christmas card. He opens before the world exists and lands on one sentence [music] that drops the floor out from under you. The word became flesh and made his home among us. The mind behind every atom did not [music] send a message about itself. He showed up in a body in real time. That is the [music] whole posture of the gospel in a single line. Not here is what happened back then. Here is who is standing in front of you now. [music] Every other gospel hands you a story you can hold at arms length and study. John refuses to let you hold him at arms length at [music] all. He strips out every safe past tense handle until there’s nothing left to grip but [music] a living person present tense asking for your weight which sounds beautiful right up until you feel what it costs you. A receipt lasts forever in a [music] drawer. A flame doesn’t. John has quietly taken away every past transaction you could live off of. Every memory you could coast on. [music] The one thing most of us were secretly leaning on to feel safe. So you are left [music] standing in front of a lamp that is either lit or it isn’t. And on the nights it burns low, and there will be nights it burns low, the question stops [music] being theological and turns personal fast. What keeps it from [music] going out? John’s answer begins in the last place you’d look for one at a party. The wine ran out in the middle of the wedding. It’s a small, [music] almost embarrassing crisis, a village celebration. a host about to lose [music] face in front of everyone he knows and six stone jars standing empty against the wall. Jesus tells the servants to [music] fill them with water. They do all the way to the brim, something close to 150 gallons of it. And when the man running the feast lifts the cup to his lips, he is drinking [music] wine finer than anything poured all night. And he has no idea where it [music] came from. No announcement, no spectacle, just an absurd quiet flood of the best thing in [music] the room. That is the first of them. John picks exactly seven moments like this across the whole gospel. [music] And the way he frames them is the first clue to what he is actually doing. The other three gospels describe these events with a word [music] that means a display of power, a mighty act. Look what he did. Look how strong that was. John never uses that word. Not one time in 21 chapters. When he describes the very same kind of event, water into wine, a dead man walking out of a tomb. He reaches instead for a plain little word that means a sign. And that difference [music] is the whole point. A display of power says, “Look at me.” A sign says, “Look [music] past me at the one who did this.” A miracle ends in applause. A sign ends [music] in a question. Here is what almost no one notices about the seven he chose. [music] They’re in a deliberate order, and the order is a countdown. Each one reaching further than the last, climbing towards [music] something only the final sign finally names. Watch where it goes. Water changed into wine, a substance. Then a royal [music] officials boy healed from miles away. His father not even in the room when it happened. Distance. Then a man who had [music] been disabled for 38 years, longer than many people in that crowd had been alive, was told to stand [music] and standing. Time. Then thousands fed until they were full [music] from a boy’s small lunch. Matter itself multiplied in someone’s hands. Then a man walking across the surface of a sea in the dark in a storm as if the water were a floor. Nature. Then a man who had been blind [music] since the day he was born. not injured, not sick, but never once in his life having seen opening his eyes unto faces and color and light a defect carried [music] from birth and undone. And then the seventh, a man 4 days dead, wrapped sealed behind a stone, [music] already decaying in the heat, called back out into the afternoon sun. The latter climbs through every category [music] there is, substance, distance, time, matter, nature, then birth itself, and finally death. Each rung set [music] higher than the one beneath it. Reaching toward what? Stay with the reframe here [music] because this is where it goes somewhere. The familiar reading doesn’t. If a sign were only meant as proof, [music] you would only ever need one. Proof doesn’t escalate. A single solid [music] demonstration settles the case and you move on. But these clim relentlessly all the way to [music] a grave. And that tells you they were never really functioning as proof at all. They were functioning [music] as fuel. Each one feeds the believing higher, stretches it into a category it had never reached before, and refuses [music] to let it cool into a fact you can write down and shove. Proof [music] is something you absorb once and then own. Fuel is something you have to keep burning. And a fire you have to keep feeding still leaves the question we opened with. standing in the room. Something has to keep the flame alive, and it isn’t the lamp. Watch it land in one man. In chapter 9, a man born blind has just been given his sight, and the religious authorities [music] drag him in for interrogation. They press him hard. They want him to denounce the one who opened his eyes to give them the correct, careful, theological answer about who this Jesus is [music] and is not. And the man will not do it. He has no training. He can’t win a debate with [music] the most educated men in the city. So he says the one thing he actually knows and it’s devastating [music] in how small it is. One thing I know I was blind and now I see. They threaten him. [music] They eventually throw him out. And every single time they push, he does [music] not reach back for a memorized argument. He reaches for what is true in him right now. [music] That is believing as a verb, not a position he is defending from a distance. [music] A reality he is standing inside of that he could not put down if he tried. Then comes the seventh sign. Lazarus has been [music] dead faux for days. His sisters have stopped hoping. The mourning is already underway. [music] When Jesus says to roll the stone away, Martha actually objects because by now there will be a smell. And this [music] is the one category in all of reality where absolutely nothing can be banked. A dead man has no deposit, no receipt, no warm memory to coast on, no past [music] decision to live off of. He has nothing stored anywhere at all. He has only a voice calling his [music] name from outside the tomb in real time. Lazarus, come out. And he comes because the single thing [music] a dead man can do is respond in this exact moment to a life that is not his own and never [music] was. He comes out still bound in grave cloth, blinking at a light [music] he was never supposed to see again. For a moment, nobody moves. The [music] smell of death is still in the air and the dead man is breathing. Sit in that silence [music] for a second because everyone standing in front of that tomb did. Then let it tell you what the entire ladder was [music] reaching for. Not Jesus can do impressive things. Life that does not originate [music] in you. Life you cannot manufacture, store or keep alive by your own strength that exists only while it is [music] being given to you breath by breath from somewhere outside yourself. And that is precisely what the seven I am statements are [music] pointing at. I am the bread. I am the light. I am the door, the shepherd, the resurrection, the way, the vine. Look at the actual list. Every one of them is [music] something you need continuously, not once. You don’t eat bread a single time and call it handled. You don’t step into the light and then carry it home in a jar. Bread, [music] light, the sap that keeps a branch alive. These are things that have to keep coming [music] or the thing depending on them dies. In seven different images, Jesus is saying the same sentence. I am not an event in your past. I am your present tense supply. And once the seven statements became something [music] sharper. In a tense exchange with the religious leaders, Jesus dropped the metaphor entirely. [music] No bread, no light, no shepherd. He looked at men who traced their whole identity [music] back to Abraham and said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” And they bent down and picked up stones [music] to kill him on the spot. Not because they misheard him, because they heard him perfectly, those two words, standing alone [music] from a human mouth. That was the name God had given himself, and every person in that courtyard knew it. The signs and [music] the statements had been circling one claim the entire time. The supply you need to stay [music] alive is not what, it’s a who, and he is God. And then comes the thing John records [music] that the other three never do. It is the hinge on which the entire gospel turns. Because here is [music] the problem you have almost certainly already felt for yourself. You can read about seven signs you did [music] not witness. You can study seven beautiful images that you have not heard of. And you can still [music] stand in your own kitchen at 11:00 at night cold with not one of them burning. Fuel you only read about cannot light your lamp. So on the last night at the table, Jesus says something that should stop you flat. He tells them it is [music] actually better for them if he goes away. better because as [music] long as he stays, he can only ever be beside them, next to them, always an arms [music] length out. But if he leaves, he will send another, the helper, the one called [music] to stand at your side. In the moment you cannot stand on your own. And then the line [music] that quietly rearranges everything. He has been with you, Jesus says, and he will be in you. That is the fire moving [music] inside. The presence of God which had walked next to these men for 3 years was about to take up residence [music] within them. Not the memory of a fire. Not a receipt from an old transaction. A living source [music] of flame on the inside in the one place your willpower can’t reach. It turns out never [music] needed to. The old Puritan John Owen gave most of his life to this exact point. Over and over [music] he argued that nearness to God is never the believer working up heat by sheer effort, white knuckling himself into [music] feeling something holy. It is the spirit of God keeping the soul in living contact with God, sustaining from within [music] what no human being could ever sustain from without. The warmth was [music] never something you generated. It was something kept alive in you by another. So this is why John refused [music] the noun. You do not possess a fire you did not light and cannot keep burning on your own. You can only stay near its [music] source and let it burn. A noun is a thing you keep in a drawer and produce when asked. This is a flame kept alive moment by moment by someone living inside you. That is why he wrote believe [music] 98 times in faith not even once. He was never describing something you have. He was [music] describing something being done in you right now by the helper Jesus promised would come and come to stay which lands very close to home if you’ve been the [music] one straining. You have tried to force it. Most of us have at some point been in the dark where no one could see us trying. There’s a particular [music] posture that comes with it. Eyes shut a little too tight, jaw set, trying to summon a feeling you’re sure you remember having once. the way [music] you’d crank a cold engine on a winter morning that just will not catch. You want to believe you aren’t faking [music] anything. You’re straining toward God with everything you have. And the harder you pull, the more clearly [music] you notice how little is coming back. And somewhere in that effort, a thought [music] slips in, the kind you would never say out loud in a small group. Maybe I’m doing [music] this wrong. Maybe it was never real to begin with. So, let me name the question you’ve probably [music] been quietly carrying for a while now, because nearly everyone sitting where you’re sitting carries some [music] version of it. Am I believing hard enough? And is any of this even real? [music] Here is the gentlest and most important thing I can say to you. That question is [music] the trap. It’s the old noun wearing a verb’s clothes. It quietly assumes the fire is [music] yours to produce. that if you could just bear down harder, grip tighter, feel more, the flame would finally [music] catch and hold. But you already watched this fall apart, walking through John. Lazarus did not [music] raise himself by effort. The blind man did not squint his way into sight. A dead man and [music] a blind man each contributed exactly nothing except their response to a life arriving from outside them. You cannot strain your way into a fire you [music] did not light. And the exhaustion you feel is not proof that your faith is [music] failing. It’s proof that you have been trying to do the spirit’s work with your own two hands and your hands were never built [music] for it. If you are watching this and you were tired, if you got saved at 15 or 35 or last [music] spring and somewhere along the way the warmth thinned out into routine. If you have been quietly terrified [music] that the numbness means the whole thing was counterfeit, I want you to hear where John has been walking you this entire time, not toward a verdict on [music] yourself, toward a person standing nearer than your effort ever reached. Look again at Thomas. He had missed it. The others had seen the risen Jesus, and he had not, and he said the brutally honest thing, “Unless I touch the wounds myself, I will not believe.” And when Jesus finally stands in [music] front of him, he does not say, “Try harder, Thomas. Work up a little more faith.” [music] He says, “Come here. Put your hand right here. Touch the place it actually [music] hurts.” For Thomas, believing was not a feeling he ground out in the dark. It was a single step [music] toward a person close enough to touch. That is all it has ever been. Not the intensity [music] of your grip, the direction of your weight, and remember the blind man hauled in to [music] perform the correct belief. For men who could destroy his whole life, he never works [music] anything up. He doesn’t defend the fire or measure how hot it’s burning. He just tells the [music] truth about what is true in him. You are not required to prove your flame burns hot enough to satisfy anyone, least [music] of all yourself. You’re only asked to be honest about whether there is any light in there at all. Even a flicker counts because John hands you the answer to the whole [music] thing in one image back in chapter 15. A vine and a branch. And notice what the vine never once says. It never tells the branch to [music] strain, to perform, to squeeze out fruit by sheer willpower. It says a single word and Jesus [music] repeats it over and over until it sinks in. Remain. Stay. [music] Stay joined to me. and do not pull away. The fruit was never something the branch achieved. It was the [music] natural overflow of sap the branch did not make moving through a branch that [music] simply stayed attached. So here at last is the answer to the question this whole gospel was built to ask the one we opened with. What keeps the [music] fire from going out is not you. It never was. It’s the spirit Jesus promised [music] the helper now living inside you. The sap in the vine. the oil in the lamp, your entire assignment, the only thing actually asked [music] of you is to stay near the source and refuse to walk away. That changes [music] what your tiredness even means. Now, there’s a real range of understanding in the church about how all of this [music] is felt about assurance, about why some seasons run warm and others run bone cold. And we are not going to settle every piece of that tonight. But scripture [music] stays consistent on one thing, and a great many believers will tell you the same out of their own lives. A flickering flame is still a flame. The wick that grieavves being cold is not a dead wick. The very [music] ache that carried you to this video, the fact that the numbness bothers you at all, that you’re tired of feeling nothing and [music] you wish to God it would burn again, is not the evidence that the fire has gone out. More often, it is the shest sign the source is still in there. Because a truly extinguished thing does not mourn the coal. It feels nothing about feeling nothing. Your grief over the dimness is the [music] spirit already moving under the ashes. So stop trying to be the fire. You were never strong enough to be, [music] and you were never once asked to be. You are the lamp. The fire was lit inside, and the one who lit it has moved [music] in to keep it burning. Your identity was never built on how tightly you could hold the flame steady by force of grip. It was built from the very start to be [music] the place a fire chose to live. That is not a failure of faith. That is the [music] entire design. Picture a single lamp on a dark table. Not a bonfire, not a stadium [music] of light. Just one small clay lamp, the kind that sat in nearly every home in the world. John was writing [music] into burning steadily in a room. The night has almost won. It isn’t bright, but it’s lit. And it has stayed lit hour after hour, [music] not because the lamp worked harder, but because the oil kept quietly feeding the flame from the inside. The one who lit it is the same one John spent 21 chapters pointing at. The word [music] who became flesh and then astonishingly moved in. So you can stop straining. Your only work from tonight on is the smallest and somehow the hardest thing [music] there is. Stay near the oil. Don’t walk away from the source. Let him keep what you were never strong [music] enough to keep on your own. And if you know someone who has heard every answer about Jesus until the answers went quiet and [music] cold inside them, this is the one they need, not more facts. A flame they [music] don’t have to light themselves. Point them toward the only one who has ever kept a lamp burning [music] from the inside