Text: John 5:24-27 24 “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. 25 I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. 26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. 27 And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.
Main Idea: Becoming a Christian is not a movement from bad behavior to good, but from death to life.
Vs. 24 “Hears my words and believes”
• Believe Jesus was sent by the Father and the words He speaks are from the Father, confirmed by the miracles He performed.
Vs. 24 “Has crossed over or ‘passed from’ death to life.”
• We have “passed away” from death into life.
• Colossians 3:3 – “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
In order to appreciate the life we have now, we need to better understand the death we were in.
From Death
• Spiritual death, according to Ephesians 4:18 is to be separated from the life of God.
• We only become aware of spiritual death when we become spiritually alive. It is only then we can see the difference.
• Being dead is not all misery; it means we do not have the presence of God within us. Consequently, we did not know the love of God as we know it now.
• The Scripture instructs us that the love God is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We were beneficiaries of it, like the whole world, but because we were spiritually dead, we did not have the Spirit, we did not have His love within me.
• Jesus said of His enemies, John 5:42 “I know you do not have the love of God in your hearts”
• Perhaps the clearest distinctions between life and death is how we perceive and experience the love of God.
• Death restricts our perception and experience of God’s love.
To Life
• Vs. 25 “A time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.”
• That time is now, and that time is to come. Spiritually that time is now. The physical resurrection is yet to come. Those of us who have trusted Christ have already experienced the spiritual resurrection and will one day experience the bodily resurrection.
• Just as you have to be physically alive to receive Christmas presents, You have to be spiritually alive to experience the love of God within.
• The Holy Spirit is the one who gives us the capacity to see and to appreciate a loving relationship with God as Abba, Father.
• He is the difference between God’s love being external and cognitive versus internal and experiential.
• How restricted was our view of the love of God? So restricted that even after we become believers, we still have a dim and doubtful view of it. We struggle to believe that NOTHING can separate from the love of God that in Christ Jesus.
• Why? Because no matter how grand our earthly experience of love has been, we are aware of the human limitations of love.
Vs. 27 “Authority to judge.”
• Only Christianity offers us a Savior.
• A day is coming when every knee will bow before Jesus Christ.
• John 3:36 – Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.
• Spiritual error will either be off on who Jesus is or what Jesus did.
>Who is Jesus? God in the flesh. John 1:1-3,14 “The Word was with God and the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
>What did He do? Made salvation a free gift. Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God lest any man should boast.”
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