Sermons from Lone
Rock Bible Church "God's Creel." Here in Montana our fishing
regulations are sometimes confusing, what with different limits for different waters, and
catch and release and all. Today let's take a look into God's "creel" and see
what His keepers look like . . . 1. They know
the Name (17.6a) Jesus spends the first five verses of
His prayer talking about His relationship with the Father. After that, it is all about His
people. It is most amazing to listen in as Jesus prays for His people. Part of that is
prayer for the disciples. They are the immediate point of His concern because He is going
to be leaving them. They are going to be on their own and He wants to lift them up in
prayer. Then He prays for the rest of us. It is amazing to stop and think about what He
has in mind in this prayer. If Jesus prays for you, it’s a pretty good deal. There used to be a lady who used to
pray for kids from Bible college. She had a photo album. If you gave her your picture with
your name, that woman would pray for you. Some people just seem to have it. If you would
want anyone in the whole world to pray for you, it would be her, but I think Jesus tops
that. He knows the Father and He gets what He wants. So if He is praying for you and me,
then that is a good thing for you and me. John
17:6-12 About a year ago on a lovely day I
went fishing. It is rare that I fish, even rarer that I catch anything. I was with my
nefarious partner, Jim Moore, from Condon. We were on Peterson Lake, in the Flathead area,
in a little boat fishing for large mouth bass. We started to catch them! I pinched myself
-- is this really me in this boat? Are they really biting? They were and we started
hauling in these bass. We got to a count of six, and they were nice bass. Jim Moore is a
preacher so he is conscientious about the rule book. He said we had better check so we
know what our limit is. He pulls out the rule book and got to reading. His happy face went
to sad. He said the limit is five apiece. We only had six in the boat. I said we are fine
then. Jim said, “No, we are not fine.
Let me read this to you. Western district, Peterson Lake, Bass -- one daily and in
possession from the third Saturday in May to July 1 must be over 22 inches.” This was
September. “Five daily and in possession from July 1 to the third Saturday in May.”
That was when we were up there. Only one over 12 inches! He got out the ruler, and all
these fish are 15, 16, 17 inches. Tears rolling down his face. We had to let them go! They
were not keepers. It used to be the bigger the fish, the
more you would want to say, “Wow, that’s a keeper!” Not so any longer. When
it comes to being fishers of men, remember, Jesus used that expression with His disciples
when He first commissioned them: “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men.”
What constitutes a keeper? Who is a keeper? It’s an interesting question. I pointed
that out as we read through the Scripture in verse 11. Jesus’ prayer, fundamentally,
before the Father with regard to those who would follow Him is that the Father would keep
them. Keep those, and also we would be keepers. If you ask the world, if you were to
walk out about anywhere in our world today and say, “Who are God’s keepers? Who
has the assurance of heaven awaiting in fellowship with the Father?” The world would
probably let most anybody in except those convicted of deviant crimes and Adolf Hitler.
Other than that -- “If you are sincere. If you are basically good, why sure, you are
a keeper.” I would say, ”Read the regs!” I would have thought that about
those bass too and they are just fish. What does the Book say? The Book says the keepers
are recognizable. On the back of the bulletin are listed
three of what we might call character traits, characteristics -- this is what a keeper
looks like. A creel used to be a woven basket the fishermen kept the fish in, when they
caught them. Who is in God’s creel? -- that’s
why the title, “God’s Creel.” 1. They know the Name (17.6a) Who is a keeper? A keeper is someone
who knows the Father’s name. Understand this: When Jesus says in verse 6, “I
manifested Thy name,” that is a huge statement. First of all, the word “manifested”
is probably not the best, it is not one we use every day. It means “made perfectly
obvious,” “made crystal clear.” There is an argument for capitalizing the
word “Name,” because it represents the Person, Father. I made you obvious to
them. It is important because they had been mistaken about what the Father was like. They
had their own views that had been distorted over many years of time. They were not right
in regard to their understanding of who was God the Father. In order to get an accurate
picture, we will go back to Exodus 3. A
couple passages in Exodus will help us understand something about the Name. The name
stands for the Person. In Exodus 3, who is he, this Father?
In Exodus 3, Moses is dialoguing with God. God is convincing Moses that it is his
responsibility to go to the children of Israel and lead them out of Egypt into the
Promised Land. Moses is reluctant and one of his excuses is “I don’t even know
your name, God, and they are going to ask me your name. Who are you? What is your
character?” The Lord says to Moses: Exodus 3 In Hebrew the name is Yahweh. It is a
simple verb. It means “I AM.” It goes beyond the simple I am, as though I am
standing here. I AM. I always have been. I am now and always will be. Not just in
existence but in promise relationship with my people. I have always been committed to you
and I always will be. I AM WHO I AM. He said, “Thus shall you say to
the sons of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.” The eternally existed, ever present,
promise-keeping God of the Covenant has sent me to you. It is a loaded term. 15God,
furthermore, said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'The LORD, the
God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent
me to you ' This is My name forever, and this is My memorial-name to all generations. This is who I will always be, the
promise-making, promise-keeping God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I AM the one who sent
you. You tell them that. That is My Name. The covenant making God who is present all the
time. That is a great name! And that is good news! Who is He? He is the covenant-making
God. What is he like? Another connection to the name is in Exodus 34. Here Moses is given
another tablet to write on. He had broken the first ones and is about to write the Law
again, giving yet another chance to a disobedient people. 5The LORD descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he
called upon the name of the LORD. He won’t let unrighteousness
slide. He is a God full of grace and a God who stands on truth all at once. He makes
promises and He keeps them. He is committed to His people utterly. He will give them
mercy. He will judge unrighteousness. He is full of grace and truth. In John 17, Jesus is saying in His prayer to the Father, the
disciples have your Name understood. They have an understanding of the Father as He is
presented in the Bible. I made your Name obvious and they have gotten it. They know who
you are.” Everyone, who has ever been born, has a natural view of God. The Bible says
that. There is an awareness of God in the heart of every person. It has to do with the
conscience, with the evidence of a supreme being in nature. What is also true with this natural
view of God is that it is also naturally distorted because our minds, our wills and our
spirits are fallen. So most everybody believes in some sort of god, but not everybody
believes in Him, as the Bible presents Him. It was true in Jesus’ day and it is true
today. If we ask a Buddhist or a Hindu about God they would have an answer. Would it
square with Scripture? No, but they would have an answer. They would have a notion in
their minds as what this god would be like. Ask someone from a liberal or nominal
Christian tradition and you might get an answer about a god who is some sort of a benign
Santa Claus in the sky. That is god as they understand it to be. Does it square with what
the Bible says about covenant-making, covenant-keeping God? No, but it is what they think.
Some people are reared with a god who stands over them with a big club and if you just
step out of line for an instant, boom, he gets you. That guilt has contributed to the
psychology, psychiatry, and counseling industry to an unknowable degree. Is that the God
of the Bible? No, but in the minds of many, that is their god. What Jesus is saying to the disciples
is whatever your view of God has been, however you might perceive the Father to be, square
it with Scripture. Square it with the name. He is the covenant making God of grace. He is
the covenant-keeping God of righteousness. Know who He is. He is the God of Abraham, the
God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is the only true God and these disciples got it. Some people are not religious at all.
They would say, “If there is a god.” (We call them agnostics -- someone who
doesn’t know if there is a god or not. There may be; there may not be.) But they
would maintain that if there is one, he could not be known. That’s the word --
agnostic -- unknowable. Is that the God of the Bible? Or in the mind of many non-religious
types, if there is a god, he just perhaps created the universe. Maybe it took him 4.5
billion years; maybe it took him 6 days. They don’t care; it doesn’t matter
because what he did then, in their minds, is like a clock or some sort of sophisticated
machine. He simply wound it up, set it on a shelf, and went off somewhere and did
something else and let it run itself. A distant god, is that the God of the Bible? No it
is not, not at all. Jesus is praying this prayer. He says,
“Father, these guys have gotten it.” They have embraced Jesus’ Father in
accordance with the way Jesus presented Him. The Bible says in John 1:18, “No one has
seen God at any time.” He is unseeable. God in his pure essence is unseeable. The
only begotten God, that is, Jesus, who is from the bosom of the Father, has thoroughly
explained Him, and in the prayer He is saying, “They have got it.” I have made
your Name clear and they have gotten it. They know the name of the Father. A keeper has a biblical view of the
God of heaven. 2. They make the connection
(17.6b-7) Secondly, a keeper makes the
connection between that God of heaven and Jesus the Son. In John 17:6, He says this: they were
Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word. It is not enough just to understand
there is a biblical God in heaven. A keeper understands the relationship, the link,
between the Father and the Son. Listen to what Jesus tells His disciples in John 16: 28"I came forth from the Father and have come into the world;
I am leaving the world again and going to the Father." They got it. They figured the
connection between the Son and the Father. Fascinating! What else is fascinating is what
Jesus has stated here about the Father’s mind and the salvation of these disciples.
It gets very deep, over our heads. Look what verse 6 says: It says “You had them.
They were yours and You gave them to Me.” Somehow God has people and He gives them to
the Son. The Son says, “I never lose one of them. I have never lost one; I never
will.” Once the Father gives them to Me, they are as safe with Me as they were with
Him.” That causes us to think suddenly, big
and deep and eternal thoughts. Suddenly we are forced into a realm where we cannot have
the bottom line. There is a sense in which eternal life is not just that which goes
forward. That’s how we think of it. A lot of times people think eternal life begins
when you die. No, eternal life begins, commonly thought anyway, when you are born again.
But more than that, because somewhere, relative to time, somewhere eons past, God had
people. God understood people in relationship to Himself, people who were as safe then as
they are now and will be on into the future. He had them; He gave them to the Son and the
Son will not lose them. The idea in Revelation 13:8 is, people’s names were written
in the Book of Life of the Lamb, who was slain before the foundation of the world. Revelation
13:8 So do we grasp that? No. Do we
appreciate it? I sure do. I don’t have to understand the depths of the mind of God
and be able to explain eternity to understand how safe I am. If God had me in His hand
before time and He does now. I am safe. He gives me to Jesus and Jesus does not lose one.
That is really good news. In Romans 8, we will expose to
ourselves a truth that really ought to make us not just think. Sometimes this deep,
theological stuff causes us to scratch our heads. Let’s take it beyond that. This
ought to move us to a higher degree in our appreciation of what God has done. Do I understand it completely? No, and
anybody who says they do is probably from another planet. This is eternity and we are
finite. We have so many cubic centimeters of gray matter in our heads. We are limited in
our knowledge and here is where our limits are pushed. Romans
8:29 “Whom He foreknew” -- That
word “foreknow” does not mean knows “about.” It says He foreknew, knew
the person. How? I don’t know, I just know God is bigger than I am and He is not
bound by the constraints of time. In the mind of God, there is no time. God sees all human
history as though He were watching a parade, not from the side of the street but from the
Goodyear blimp. He sees the beginning; He sees the end. He is engaged in it from one end
to the other equally. We are not. We are alongside the street. We are stuck with where we
are. He has a tremendous vantage point that way. Romans
8:30 A done deal! “Whom He foreknew”
-- God had them. “You had them. You gave them to Me and I will not lose a one.”
Those who are foreknown are those who are glorified. While we might wish we could fill in
all the gaps in between to our own satisfaction, we cannot, but I sure like it. I sure am
glad that I have life like that. Back to John 6 -- this is where the
crowds of people basically got off the bus and the disciples stayed on board. In John 6,
Jesus is delivering a pretty hard sermon, saying things that were difficult. 37"All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one
who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out. Do you see that? That’s Romans
8:29 & 30. All that He has given Me. They were His. He gives them to Me. I will raise
them up on the last day. He foreknew all the way to glorification, right there. Jesus and
Paul are on the same sheet of music here. 40"For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who
beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up
on the last day." It was not good news to them. They
were grumbling about Him because He said “I am the bread that came down out of
heaven.” Here is the stumbling block. 42They were saying, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph,
whose father and mother we know? How does He now say, 'I have come down out of
heaven'?" A keeper is safe in Jesus. The people
did not make the connection between Jesus and the Father at that point. They were wrong,
basically, about the Father. They were wrong about the Son. They did not connect the two.
We must connect the two as the disciples did. The connection really cannot be made unless
both the Father and the Son are seen according to Scripture. Do we understand who the
Father is scripturally? Do we understand who Jesus, the Messiah, is scripturally? If we
do, we make the connection. Jesus also is a confusing person to
our society, to our world. If you ask someone what they think of God, “Well, he is
just this nice Santa Claus guy in the sky.” What do you think of Jesus? “Oh,
great teacher, moral man, perhaps a prophet.” Sometimes people say because they went
to Sunday School or something, “He is the Son of God,” without any clue, really,
of what that means. But we must have a scriptural view of the Father and a scriptural view
of the Son to connect the two. What Jesus is saying of His disciples is, “They got
it!” They understand that what was Yours is now Mine.” They made that
connection. I read an excerpt recently about the
life of Helen Keller, a most fascinating individual. Helen Keller was born about 1880 in
Alabama. Just before her 2nd birthday she was smitten with an illness that they
diagnosed at the time as fever of the brain, whatever that was. It left her blind and
deaf. Back 120 years ago, she was in trouble. Her father took her to to every doctor and
specialist he could find and ultimately took her to Alexander Graham Bell, who invented
the telephone, as someone to help her. He referred Helen Keller’s father to this
individual in Boston who ran an institute for the blind. A match was made between Helen
and a teacher who could not have been 21 years old, Ann Sullivan. Helen Keller was not 7
years old. It was in the spring of 1887 when the two met. It was Ann Sullivan’s
responsibility to teach and accompany Helen. She reports in her own
autobiographical works that she was a very self-centered child. It was all about her as we
can well imagine. We are born that way anyway and when someone is handicapped to that
extent, certainly folks are going to be waiting on her constantly and helping her in every
regard. So she really did feel as though the world revolved around herself. She admits
that in her own writing. Helen talks about the day when she had
only known Ann Sullivan for a matter of weeks. Ann had been teaching her to write capital
letters on her hand, trying to get her to connect the capital letters in her hand with
whatever it was she was touching. It was not clicking. Helen was going her own
self-centered renegade way, not making the connection. One day in the spring, in Helen’s
words, “We walked down the path to the well house, attracted by the fragrance of the
honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my
hand under the spout and as the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the
other the word “water,” first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole
attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly,” Helen writes, “I
felt a misty consciousness as if something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought and
somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the
wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul,
gave it light, hope, joy, set it free.” She got it! She went on to college and
to become a world traveled lecturer and a tremendous force for philanthropy and a born
again Christian. She lived to be 88 years old. She got it. She made the connection between
mere letters in her hand and the actual sensation that she was in the midst of and it
opened up a whole new world to her. She got eyes, in a sense. The disciples got it. Let me read
their testimony from several places in the book of
I John. Hear what they
got in the very first verses of I John, connecting the Son with the Father. It was
revolutionary to them and it should have been. I John 1 There are many such references. They got it. They understood the Father. They understood the Son and they linked the two. A keeper makes the connection. 3. They believe the truth (17.8) We can be amazed with God and with
Jesus and we should be. There is a sense in which we can be amazed with these disciples
too. Jesus is praying: John 17:8 They received. They knew. They
believed. There is an order of progression there that is deliberate. We think obviously
there was something about these guys that was singularly special. No - let’s remember
who we are dealing with here. Who were these guys? A lot of them were Galileans. Galileans
were rogues, rebels and renegades. They were the Jews who did not conform. Yet they became
among Jesus’ disciples. They were fishermen. Their trade was
their boat. Their boat had been in their family for generations. That’s what they
did. They knew how to work long, hard hours. They had calloused hands. They knew what
success was and they knew all about failure. One of them was a tax collector. He
did not have calloused hands because he was slick. He made his living ripping people off.
His loyalties were divided between his Jewish heritage and his Roman conquerors and he was
getting wealthy in the process. That was Matthew. His counterpart would have been Simon
the Zealot. They could not have gotten along. Zealots could not stand Romans. Tax
collectors made their living for them. They came from completely different ends of the
spectrum politically and economically, this zealot and this tax collector. We know that
the disciples had different personalities. Some were passive and some were type A. There
was a doubter among them. Thomas probably spoke for the rest when he said, “I won’t
believe unless I see and feel.” They were competitive. Two of them had
a mother who said, “Jesus, how about when you get to your kingdom this boy gets on
your right and this boy gets on left seated in exalted places of your reign.” The
other disciples were mad at them for that. Who do they think they are? They were a mix of normal, imperfect
folks. They remind me of us. Nothing about them would suggest that they would have some
sort of deep, spiritual understanding or acumen. No, they were working people, normal
people, different people and imperfect people. Did faith come readily, easily for them?
No. They had to be shown and shown and shown. Eventually they got it. It says in verse 8, that they received
the words. They were receptive to God’s Word. Here is a check for you and me. They
were receptive to God’s Word. They were not passive. They were not resistant, having
another argument to come back against what the Scripture might clearly say. They were not
pretenders, thinking “I got it. Sure. What’s for supper?” They did not
pretend. They did not manipulate the Word. They were not selective in it. They simply
received what God had said to them through the Son. They received the Word and they knew. I think this touches on the point
above about making that connection. They got it. Did they get it perfectly? No. The
Scripture says in these verses that they truly understood. They just knew truth. They did
not have all knowledge, just true knowledge. We cannot contain all knowledge. They did not
have to have every single answer to recognize what was true from God and they embraced it. They did not have perfect faith. It
was imperfect. It was going to be displayed here very shortly. In John 18, Jesus gets
arrested and these spiritual giants fled. Jesus knew they would flee. He told them. He
knew that Peter would betray Him. He had told him that he would. Because of their
imperfections and fears and trepidations and their personal spiritual failures, which is
the only way to account for their fleeing and denying, they failed. Nevertheless, they are
keepers. We do not have to believe completely.
We only have to believe truly. They trusted Jesus in truth. Finally, they believed. I love that
part. They put all their trust in Jesus only. That is where they arrive. That was their
destination. I think the disciples speak best for themselves. I’ll quote from John 6.
Having received the words and having come to knowledge and finally, having believed in
Jesus, listen to this conversation in John 6. Remember Jesus had delivered a hard sermon
and because of it, He had a lot of people decide they did not want to follow Him any more.
It was at this point that many turned back. 66As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not
walking with Him anymore. Jesus had crossed the line with the
truth He was sharing and they were not willing to go. Jesus said to the twelve, including
Peter and James and John and Matthew the tax collector and Simon the zealot and Thomas the
doubter -- all these guys. He turns to this imperfect gaggle of followers and says: 67So Jesus said to the twelve, "You do not want to go away
also, do you?" Perfect theology? Incomplete. But they put all their trust in Him alone. There was nowhere else for them to go and they knew it. They trusted. They were keepers. They knew the Name that connected with the Son and they put all their trust in Jesus only. They were keepers. "Scripture
taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Jim Carlson 2005, Lone Rock Bible Church, Stevensville Montana, USA |