Hardened // John 12:36-43

But Father, the task before us this morning is heavy.

Father, you know how inadequate I feel to preach this text.

So Father, I pray, I ask, that your spirit would come this morning and preach a better sermon

in the hearts of those listening and the sermon that I am about to preach.

Father, I pray that you would give me a boldness, that you would give me a zeal,

that you would give me a gentleness, to be able to speak the truth apologetically and in love.

Father, I ask for your help so that we may understand to greater glory the gospel of your Son Jesus Christ.

That's in his name that I pray these things, amen.

Turn please in your copy of the scripture to John's Gospel, chapter 12.

The poet John Milton begins his epic poem Paradise Lost by writing a God,

raise what is low, strengthen and support, that I might raise to the height of this great argument

and justify the ways of God to man.

There are some passages of scripture that you know that if they are faithfully preached,

they're going to result in a sermon that is a profound encouragement to the soul of everyone listening.

It's inevitable that text just radiates joy and comfort.

If you just preach what's there, everyone is going to be encouraged by that kind of sermon.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

That's going to be an encouraging kind of sermon.

Come unto me, all you are weak and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

That is going to be an encouraging kind of sermon.

But not all sermons can be like that because not all texts, not all passages of scripture are like that.

We don't preach just the easy text, but because we are committed to preaching the whole council of God,

the chapter by chapter, verse by verse, inevitably we will come to difficult text to preach

and also therefore difficult texts for you to hear.

The text this morning is a difficult text to preach, and it is a difficult text to hear.

But that doesn't make it an unimportant text, in fact quite the opposite.

This is a very important text of scripture.

The passage before us this morning gives to us what we might call a theology of unbelief.

That is how is it and why is it that despite the clear revelation and the faithful proclamation of who Jesus is yet so many persist in

in obstinately refusing to believe in Jesus.

How is it and why is it that that can be the case?

If God has revealed his Son clearly, then why do some continue in obstinate unbelief?

Beloved, some of the answers to those questions that this text gives to us are going to be hard and heavy for us to hear.

But these answers are important because they are deeply relevant to our understanding of God, to our understanding of ourselves,

and to our understanding of the wonders and the glories of our salvation.

So this morning, let's be a people who are committed to being submitted to the authority of what God's Word says, especially when we come to difficult truths.

I want to begin by reading our text which follows immediately on the heels of Jesus declaring that the light who is his own person is about to go out of the world so that those who hear the voice of Jesus should come to the light today while there is still time so that they might be sons of light before the time of darkness returns.

Immediately after that saying from Jesus, we get this, the latter part of verse 36, when Jesus had said these things, he departed and hid himself from them.

Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him so that the Word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled Lord.

Who has believed what he has heard from us and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

Therefore, they could not believe.

For again, Isaiah said, he has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.

Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him. Nevertheless, many, even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees, they did not confess it so that they would not be put out of the synagogue.

For they love the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.

This is the Word of the Lord.

I want to consider this text this morning in two parts or really through the lens of two questions.

First question is this, why is it that so many people absolutely refuse to believe in Jesus despite the abundance of evidence about who he truly is?

That's the first question we're going to spend the majority of our time on that question this morning.

The second question will be this, why is it that some people claim to believe in Christ privately but refuse to live for Christ publicly?

That'll be our second question.

So first question number one, why is it that so many people absolutely refuse to believe in Jesus despite an abundance of evidence about who he truly is?

Look again with me at the latter part of verse 36 and verse 37.

When Jesus had said these things, he departed and hid himself from them, though he had done so many signs before them, yet they still did not believe in him.

I want to observe with you a couple of truths about the nature of unbelief itself that will help enable us to answer this question that we are trying to answer.

Why is it that despite an abundance of evidence so many persist in unbelieving?

We need to look at what the nature of unbelief is as given to us in these verses or to answer that question.

So here's observation number one, the sin of unbelief in the hearts of men and women is not the result of a lack of clear and compelling evidence about Christ.

Look again there at verse 37, though he that is Jesus had done so many signs before them, yet still they did not believe in him.

The people have been presented with a mountain of proof regarding the person of Jesus, both the quantity and the quality of the evidence in favor of the identity of Jesus as the Son of God is utterly overwhelming at this point.

But they will not believe in Jesus, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah that John quotes here that begins Isaiah 53.

Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

That is a familiar passage to many of us that begins one of the most famous passages in the book of Isaiah that many of us are familiar with.

But do we understand what Isaiah is saying there before he immediately launches into what is one of the most famous messianic texts in all of the Old Testament?

Do we understand what it is that Isaiah is claiming?

Lord, who has believed our message?

All of the law of Moses, all of the prophets, all of the historical narratives, the whole of the Old Testament pointed to Jesus.

His very identity drips off of the pages, off of the lines of every Old Testament text and narrative.

He is its dominant theme.

If the Old Testament were symphony, and all the different parts of the Old Testament were sections of a great orchestra, then beneath and over and through, and in all of the beautiful lines of harmony that are being played,

it is Christ himself who is the unifying melody to which each section of the orchestra bends its attention and for which the whole symphony itself is being played.

That melody for which the whole symphony and all of the orchestra is playing, that melody is Christ.

We're thinking for a second about a telescope.

You look through a telescope to see something that is far away in the distance.

Often it is something that is so far away that it would be difficult to bring into focus with just the naked eye.

It is something distant, something remote, far off.

But you look through the narrow end of that telescope, and the lens of that telescope so magnifies that distant object that it fills the eye and floods the whole vision with the sight of that thing.

So that the thing that is far off is brought close and enlarged in your sight.

That is what reading the Old Testament should be like.

It is like a telescoping lens that points forward beyond itself to Christ so that the whole of the Old Testament is pointing to something that is distant and far off but then viewed through the Old Testament lens, his person, his identity is magnified and made abundantly clear.

The law, the prophets, the historical narratives, the wisdom literature, all of it pointing like a lens magnifying the person of Christ.

So that when the Christ himself appeared to those who had been reading the Old Testament faithfully, in memorizing and reciting the Old Testament faithfully,

or as it were who had been listening to this infinity or staring through the telescope, all of their lives, they should have recognized him immediately for who he was.

All of the Old Testament, it was all about him. It all pointed to him. It all prepared the way for him. He is its glorious subject and its most important theme.

Isaiah cries out the exasperation, Lord, who has believed our message because in the fulfillment of his prophetic ministry pointing to Christ, Isaiah is confronting shocking unbelief in his day.

In fact, not only of Isaiah's message, but of the message of all of the Old Testament, but it isn't just an issue of refusing to believe the message, the revelation of the message, but also refusing to believe in the displays of God's glory and power that he's made evident to the people.

Because Isaiah continues his lament by saying, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed. In other words, the irrefutable displays of God's power and his majesty have also been largely ignored by the people of Isaiah's day.

And if that was true for Isaiah and his time, how much truer is it of all those who have seen the so many signs that Jesus has performed among them and yet they still do not believe?

In what day has the arm of the Lord been revealed to a greater extent than during the earthly ministry of Christ?

Think for a moment. If you were just to take the collective account that we have of the public ministry of Jesus that is presented in all the gospels and to bring them together for a moment.

These people who are listening to Jesus who are responding to him in unbelief, these people who have once again remember all of the law and all of the prophets preparing them to expect the coming of the Christ, these people have seen a man come among them who was announced to be the Lamb of God by John the Baptist.

Who they believe to be a prophet. This is a man who the Holy Spirit visibly descended upon in his baptism and whom a voice from heaven declared to be the Son of God.

This is a man who gives sight to the blind, who makes the lane get up and walk again, who cleanses lepers, who is able to discern the secret thoughts of the intermost heart, who teaches with an astonishing authority over the law unlike any other teacher in Israel.

Man, you cast out demons nearly everywhere he goes, who miraculously feeds thousands of people out of virtually nothing except a lad's scanty picnic preparations.

A man who walks on water who is able with the word to calm storms and who has on at least three occasions to this point raise someone from the dead.

That's just a snapshot, by the way, of all that has been written just for our benefit.

John tells us at the end of this gospel that if everything that Jesus had said and done were to be written, all the books and all the libraries in the world would be insufficient to relay the half of what Christ had done in the context of his earthly ministry.

So when John says that Jesus had done so many signs among them, he is referring to a flood tide of evidence about who Jesus is, the arm of the Lord has been revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

But they don't believe.

They don't believe the message of the law and the prophets gave and they don't believe even when the arm of the Lord has been revealed in the miraculous signs and wonders performed by Christ himself.

See, it doesn't matter how much evidence or how much revelation they have, they won't believe.

Their unbelief, in other words, has nothing to do with a lack of compelling proof about who Jesus is.

Instead, their unbelief has everything to do with having sin hardened hearts.

The sin of unbelief in the hearts of men and women is not the result of a lack of clear evidence, which brings us to a second observation about the nature of unbelief.

On their own, the natural person with their sin hardened heart is incapable of believing in Jesus.

Verse 39, therefore they could not believe.

The issue is not merely that these people would not believe, it is also that they could not believe.

This is why no matter how much evidence has been placed before them or how eloquently the law and the prophets have prepared them, they absolutely refuse to turn to Jesus.

Friends, we need to be clear in our thinking this morning about the true gravity and peril of our condition in our sin nature before Christ saved us.

We were not released from contracts as servants or contracts as employees in another person's house in which we were free to come and go whenever we wished.

We were freed from slavery, slavery in which our hearts and minds and our wills were bound and in chains.

Now, if a slave or a prisoner had the key, if they in their possession had the key that would release them from their prison or release them from their chains, then they wouldn't actually be a slave or a prisoner in the first place.

They wouldn't be there if they had themselves the means of releasing themselves from the prison or the enslavement that they were in.

Your heart, your mind, your will was bound and held fast by the power of sin.

That's what the Scripture said.

Nor to use another prominent biblical metaphor, where we're dealing with just being spiritually sick, we're having a spiritually head cold, but still able to respond and function to the truth of God.

That's not the metaphor the Bible uses for our spiritual condition.

The Apostle Paul says, you were dead in your trespasses and sins.

Dead, dead, buried in the tomb of your sin with that great stone rolled over the mouth of the door of your tomb, stinking in the putrifying decay of your depraved nature, kind of dead, dead spiritually.

A corpse that no pulse, no brain activity could not function and was totally unresponsive to any external stimuli spiritually speaking, dead, dead.

We may not like hearing that because as independently minded 21st century Westerners, we like to preserve for ourselves the illusion of our autonomy and our dignity.

But this is the consistent biblical account of our condition as the natural person in a fallen and sinful nature.

Total inability to respond to the truth on our own.

Where's the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God.

For they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

That's the condition of the natural person, not able to understand the true spiritual things.

Therefore, as John writes here, they could not believe. They were not able to believe.

But that is still not yet the hardest truth that we have to confront in this passage.

There is still something more difficult for us to wrestle with here.

This is the third observation about the nature of unbelief.

God himself hardens the hearts of those that he has not given to the Son for eternal life.

That we may shrink back from that truth.

We may be horrified or immediately try to explain away that truth.

Friends, let us not be like those who are earlier in this Gospel were disciples in name only and he responded to Christ by saying,

this is a hard saying who can listen to it and then departed from following Jesus.

Verse 39, therefore they could not believe for again Isaiah said, he that his God has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart,

lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn and I would heal them.

Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.

This passage that John quotes here is from Isaiah chapter 6.

Isaiah chapter 6, Isaiah has just been given this vision of the Lord sitting upon the throne.

And there in the throne room the Lord is surrounded by these angelic seraphim who cry out to one another,

holy, holy, holy is the Lord of the hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory.

And Isaiah is devastated by this side.

Devastated because he understands for the first time in his whole life the full depths of his depravity and his unworthiness,

as he finds himself in the immediate presence of the searing holiness of God.

So he falls to his face believing that he is undone and utterly lost that he is about to be consumed by holy fire.

He is not worthy to see what his eyes are beholding and he knows it.

But instead Isaiah is told that his sin is a tone for.

So Isaiah offers to go into be God's messenger to the people of God.

And here is the sermon that Isaiah is commissioned to deliver.

Isaiah chapter 6, verse 9, and he said go and say to this people,

keep on hearing but do not understand.

Keep on seeing but do not perceive.

Make the heart of this people dull in their ears heavy and blind their eyes.

Unless they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and turn and be healed.

I have to tell you as a preacher that is a heavy sermon to be asked to preach.

It's one thing to get to be the man called by God to lead a revival.

That's one kind of commissioning.

But to be commissioned to proclaim a message that God is going to use to in fact harden the hearts of your hearers.

So that as they continue to hear your message your sermon as you continue to preach it and they continue to reject it.

God is using that very word that he commissioned you to preach to harden or calcify their will in its obstinate rebellion against him.

That's heavy.

That's a difficult sermon.

But just like those who continue to sin against their consciences and God hardens that conscience until eventually is seared and it doesn't work at all.

In a similar way Isaiah informs us and John tells us that it is God himself who is using his word to harden the hearts and blind the eyes of those that he has passed over for eternal life.

Now you may be thinking wait a minute.

Do people harden their hearts against the truth or does God harden the hearts of people against the truth and the answer to that question is yes.

It's yes.

For example, if you've been reading your Bible in your Bible reading through the year program, you've probably just recently wrapped up or you're in the end part of reading through the book of Exodus.

And so you'll know that the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh is a prominent, even dominant theme in the early going of the book of Exodus.

God demonstrates his awesome power over the Pharaoh of Egypt and over all the so-called gods of Egypt in plague after plague after plague and yet instead of turning and repenting and humbling himself before God,

Pharaoh's heart just gets harder and harder and harder.

It's like watching these dripping mineral deposits from the top of a cave fall to the ground and then harden into rock in real time in the heart of Pharaoh.

That's what's going on. He is just hardening his heart against what God is doing.

Ten times in the book of Exodus, we are told of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart.

And you know what? Five times the text says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart and five times the text says the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart.

Perfect symmetry. Five times Pharaoh's the hardening agent. Five times God is the hardening agent of Pharaoh's heart.

Did Pharaoh harden his heart or did God harden Pharaoh's heart? Yes. Both are true.

But that infatic duality of Pharaoh's hardening his own heart and the Lord's hardening of Pharaoh's heart tells us that here we are looking into a mystery that is difficult to understand and one which we need to be careful not to probe too far into.

But from this we can safely say a few things. Number one, we learn from Pharaoh hardening his own heart that we are absolutely morally accountable before God for our sin for rebellion.

You are responsible for hardening your own heart. Pharaoh hardened his heart and God judged him for that.

We are responsible for the moral choices that we make. And we also learn from God hardening Pharaoh's heart that God is also also absolutely sovereign over the hearts of men and women.

Now there's a great tension there between those two things. There's a great mystery there.

One that God in his wisdom and in his providence has chosen not to fully reveal to our finite understanding.

And yet a faithful reading of scripture demands that we both wholeheartedly affirm man's moral responsibility and also affirm God's comprehensive sovereignty.

To fail to do so means that we can only read five of those hardening and have to neglect the other five. No matter which way we go, if we will read all ten of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, we have to hold both of those truths in tension.

Man hardens his heart and is morally therefore accountable before God and God is absolutely sovereign over the hearts of men and women.

Second, the term hardening that's there both in Exodus and also here in John chapter 12 though they're not exactly the same word, but both of these terms for hardening express this sense of strengthening or petrifying like with organic matter that hardens into stone strengthening or calcifying or petrifying that's the idea of these words. That's what they mean.

In other words God doesn't take someone who is otherwise inclined to the truth or who is otherwise inclined to follow Jesus and then bend them against their will to become his enemies that's never what God does.

Truthfully such a person has never existed in the history of the world.

We aren't born with a morally neutral free will.

We are born in the scripture tells us with a sin nature and therefore we are bent to pursue evil as God's enemies. There are none who in the flesh seek after God, the scripture said.

So God doesn't twist someone's heart against their will.

Rather he strengthens, he calcifies, he hardens the willful rebellion that was already there or in the language of Romans chapter one, God gives these people up to the sinful passions that they were already exercising.

See us with this said to those who will not say to God, thy will be done. God says to them, your will be done.

So there will be no person who experiences the eternal judgment of God who is not getting exactly the outcome of what their will and their actions deserve.

Not one person will be able to charge God with injustice on the day of judgment.

Now you may say, fine, but if God harder in their will so that they couldn't turn from their sin and believe if they couldn't repent, like the text says here in John chapter 12, then how can they be responsible for not repenting and believing?

And once again, because we were all dead in our trespasses and sins, unless God comes and by the Holy Spirit gives us the new spiritual birth in our hearts, not one of us would turn and believe it requires a miracle for any one of us to turn and believe and follow Christ.

Not in the flesh that seek God truly. Only those who have first been born again by the Spirit of God come to God, as Jesus tells Nicodemus back in John chapter 3.

None will turn from their wicked way unless God first turns them.

So brothers and sisters, we cannot claim injustice that many get exactly what their wicked will or their evil deeds deserve. No, that is just. God is just.

Instead, we should be overawed this morning by mercy that any receive the grace of God whereby he comes into unworthy sinners who are bent on pursuing hell. He opens their eyes.

He transforms their will and gives them a new spiritual life with a new spiritual heart so that they will see Christ and they will desire Christ and they will turn to Christ in faith.

That's what you've been given if you're a child of God here this morning.

In light of these admittedly challenging truths to hear, I want to offer you five brief additional practical reflections about what these truths mean for us.

Number one, if you are here this morning and you have refused until now to come to Christ, I plead with you, I beg of you, do not harden your heart again this morning.

There may come a day when God so hardens your heart that you will be no longer able to hear or respond to the gospel.

Don't presume that God will extend his mercy to you one day longer if you continue in your sin.

Now is the favorable time. Today is the day of salvation. What grace it is, if today you are sitting here and you are hearing the voice of God calling you to come to Jesus, do not neglect this grace if you are hearing that voice this morning.

If today you hear that voice do not harden your heart by the deceitfulness of sin, you may never hear that voice again.

Come to Christ when he may still be found. Come to the light before he hides himself from you.

Do not linger today over questions of your eternal future. Come to Jesus this very hour.

Second, these truths should reframe our view of gospel success by reshaping our understanding of what it is that brings God glory.

I think we too often fall into the trap of thinking that if we present the gospel to people and then they don't come to Christ, but that's a failure, friends that isn't true.

Of course, we want people to come to Christ. We desperately want people to come to Christ so that they will escape the wrath to come.

And so we plead with sinners to turn from their sin and fall after Jesus.

Brothers and sisters, do you realize that God's glory is revealed just as much in the application of his just judgment as it is in the application of his just mercy?

Do you realize that heaven is for God's glory and that hell is for God's glory?

Before time, God in his abundant mercy, elected some for eternal life, that by making people holy, he might reveal his everlasting glory.

And before time, God in his perfect wisdom determined to pass over some that he would not give to the Son, but rather give over to their sin and he would harden them in that sin so that by his consuming holy wrath, he might also reveal his glory.

Perhaps you bristle this morning at such a thought a God that could have his glory revealed in judgment, but that's just because you and I are fallen people who unlike Isaiah have not yet glimpsed sufficiently the true reality of God's blazing holiness or therefore understood sufficiently the true heinousness of our evil.

Perhaps you want to hear this and say, but this just isn't fair that God would choose and elect some to save and to show the gospel of his son and that he would pass over others to judgment that just doesn't strike me as is fair.

Friend, thank goodness. None of this is on the basis of our perception of fairness. It precisely isn't about fairness. It is about God's justice and God's justice is either needed on the cross of Christ or does meet it out in hell.

In either case, God is just the question is not about fairness. It is about the absolute absolutely astonishing reality of mercy.

The fact that we have a sovereign God who says, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.

So here's what the Apostle Paul has to say about all of our objections in Romans chapter 9. He writes, so then he that is God has mercy on whom ever he wills and he hardens whom ever he wills.

You will say to me then, why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will? But who are you? Oh man, the dancers back to God.

Well, what is molded say to its molder? Why have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump, one vessel for honorable use and the other for dishonorable use?

What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make his power known, has endured with much patience, vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy which he has prepared beforehand for glory?

Even us, whom he has called, not from Jews only, but also from the Gentiles.

We need to reframe our understanding brothers and sisters of gospel success by reshaping our understanding of what it is that brings God glory.

The faithful proclamation of the truth brings God glory even if it doesn't produce repentance.

Even in fact, when the proclamation of that truth further hardens the unbeliever to reject it because it is that faithful proclamation of the gospel that further condemns the unbeliever and vindicates the righteousness of God's justice in that coming day of judgment.

So that God will be able in that day of judgment to say, I sent you friends and family and neighbors and co-workers and missionaries and pastors who proclaimed over and over again to you the gospel of my son and you rejected him again and again and again.

So now, O man, your will be done to you.

This was Isaiah's whole ministry to preach for a generation to a generation that would not listen.

So was that ministry of Isaiah a failure?

Was God not glorified in the preaching of Isaiah?

Now God was glorified in his mercy and in his judgment. God is glorified in his holy grace and God is glorified in his holy wrath.

Third, these truths should encourage our evangelism.

Perhaps that seems surprising to you.

Perhaps you've been sitting here thinking of the exact opposite. Perhaps you've been thinking, well, if God is hardening some people's hearts so that they cannot believe then what's the point of evangelizing anyone?

You might be speaking to a brick wall if that's true.

First, because as we have just seen, proclaiming the truth of the gospel brings God glory even when it does not result in someone coming to Christ.

It vindicates the righteousness of God's judgment even if it doesn't produce repentance.

The gospel that has received in faith by unworthy sinners is a display of God's mercy.

The gospel rejected is a further vindication of God's justice against the unrighteous and both of those outcomes bring glory to our God.

Second, because the sovereignty of God in salvation is the only means by which our witness to sinners could ever have any hope of being effectual.

These people in John chapter 12, they had all of the Old Testament scriptures to prepare them for Christ.

That is what every line of the Old Testament was for, that they had read and recited and memorized their whole lives to prepare them for the Christ.

And now they're looking at the Christ.

These people, some of them, they have tasted the miracle wine at a wedding.

They have eaten the miracle bread on the side of the mountain.

They have watched as others received their sight.

They have watched as sick people are healed and as the lame got up and walk again.

They've seen demons flee.

They've seen this man raise the dead.

And they have heard this Jesus teach.

Imagine that.

They've heard Jesus teach.

They've heard the gospel directly from Jesus.

And they didn't believe.

So if people are actually able to turn from their sin and turn to God on their own, if the natural person without God's help can turn from their sin on their own without the new birth of the spirit.

But these people who saw Jesus and who heard Jesus, if they didn't believe, then why would I ever try to evangelize anyone?

How am I going to convince people 2,000 years later about the words and works of a man who the people who are there to see him and hear him didn't believe?

I would have to think that I'm literally a better evangelist than Jesus to ever proclaim the gospel to anyone, if that is the case.

Now if God isn't sovereign in the hearts of men and women, then the response of these people to Jesus should be enough for all of us to throw in the towel on evangelism altogether.

It would be entirely pointless.

It would have said, my confidence in evangelism is that while I admittedly do not know who they are, I believe that God is working in the hearts of men and women who he is calling to Jesus because he has ordained them for eternal life.

He is removing the stone from the mouth of the tomb of their sin so that the corpse that was inside before can hear and respond to the gospel and can come forth from that tomb of sin in new resurrection life.

And God uses men and women like you and me as the means by which His Holy Spirit is calling and working in the hearts of men and women and drawing them to His Son.

And I therefore have the tremendous privilege, someone who has once myself dead and trespasses this sins lying in my own team of sin, I have the privilege of getting to be used by the Holy Spirit to call sinners to repentance.

What a glorious gift it is to be used by the Redeemer for someone like me.

So my evangelism is freed by the knowledge that I am not the one ultimately responsible for the fruitfulness of my labors.

It's that I am called to faithfully plant and sow and water, but it is God who gives the harvest himself.

Fourth, these truths should encourage our prayer.

If God is not the one who can and does transform the hearts of hard-hearted sinners so they can respond to the gospel, then why would I be praying for anyone?

It is because we believe it is the power of God the Holy Spirit that works in the hearts of men and women that I pray that He will do the miracle that only He can do in the hearts of hard-hearted sinners that I love and care for.

And why I pray because I think that God can actually do something about what it is that I am praying for, that He will give the new life where now there is only spiritual death and the hearts of the people that I love.

My prayer is motivated by the fact that I believe that God can actually do something miraculous in the heart to change the heart.

Our belief in the sovereignty of God should actually be what puts us on our knees every day.

Fifth, these truths should deepen our love and our gratitude for the work of the person of God the Holy Spirit and the grace and the gift that we have received by His hand.

I was reflecting on these truths in my devotions a few weeks ago.

I was deeply convicted and moved in my heart by realizing how insufficiently I have loved or often on a daily basis failed to consider the person of God the Holy Spirit.

I think about loving God as triunity of Father, Son and Spirit. Yes, it's true.

I certainly think often and love the Father for what He has done for me in salvation.

I certainly think often and love the Son for what He has done for me in salvation.

But too often the person of God the Holy Spirit is an afterthought in my thinking and in my love and in my gratitude.

Brothers and sisters, think about what it is that we confess each month and the nice and creed.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.

I am only standing here today as a child of God because God the Holy Spirit came and took my dead heart and gave me new life.

He came and transformed my will to see Christ and to desire Christ and to know Christ and to love Christ.

I am who I am today in Christ because the Holy Spirit loved me and gave me the gift of life because He is the giver of life.

So how can I not love Him? How can He not be precious to me when I think and see of so many other hardened sinners that are standing in the place of wrath where I should be standing if He had not intervened in my heart to save me?

Blessed be God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

We need to turn our attention to the second pressing question from our text but one that we will consider far more briefly this morning.

That is why is it that some claim to believe in Christ privately and yet refused to live for Him publicly?

Verse 42. Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in Him but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it so that they would not be put out of the synagogue.

For they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.

Here John informs us that in the midst of all of these people you do not believe there are nonetheless some who have intellectually been convinced that Jesus is the Messiah.

In fact, some of these people who believe are even among the authorities. These are some of Israel's leading men it would seem.

They are convinced that Jesus is the Messiah perhaps some of them are even convinced that Jesus is in fact the Son of God but this is an important but they won't publicly confess that belief.

They won't show or tell anyone that they believe Jesus is who He claims to be. Why?

The text gives us two reasons. Number one, these people live in the fear of man. They are afraid. They are afraid that they will get thrown out of the synagogue by the Pharisees if they admit to believing in Jesus which will mean being thrown out of polite and respectable society and out of the hub of the social and community life of Israel.

The risk of that happening was far too great a price to pay in the minds of these people. The consequence of being ostracized from society was an unacceptable risk so they decided not to tell anyone that they actually believed that Jesus was who He claimed to be.

Regardless of whether Jesus was the Messiah or the Son of God himself, whatever He might be, even believing that He was who He claimed to be, the fear of what man could do to them loomed so large in their thinking.

They would not publicly follow Christ. Think about that reality. They actually believe Jesus is the Messiah. They actually believe Jesus might be the Son of God.

But they are so afraid of the Pharisees that they won't admit aloud or show anyone that they actually believe that this man has come from God.

Second, they live for the glory of man.

Whatever we have an outsized or we might say an oversized view of the significance of man in our hearts, our entire perspective gets warped and misshapen and distorted.

For these people who believed in Jesus privately and yet denied him publicly, they were so concerned John tells us about winning man's approval that they thought nothing of God's approval.

They were willingly exchanged, in other words, being accepted by God in order instead to be accepted by man.

They gave up being honored by God so that they could instead be honored by their fellow man.

You say what a foolish and shortsighted decision that would be. I agree.

But are we as different from these people as we might like to think?

Today you may be living for Jesus, but you may just be doing so because it's socially acceptable within the circles that you're in.

But would you still be living for Jesus publicly today if it was not as socially acceptable to follow Jesus?

If following Jesus cost you something, if it meant that the people that you like and respected no longer liked and respected you,

if the people that you felt that you needed or relied upon no longer wanted anything to do with you, would you still publicly follow Jesus?

If following Him boldly and publicly cost you something at your job, it's possible in fact that there are some of you here this morning who are not living publicly for Christ in the way that you know you ought to be because of fear that it might have repercussions for you somewhere in your life.

Maybe it's personally with relationships in your family or with your friend group that you just don't want to lose, but you know you will lose if you live for Jesus publicly the way that you ought to be living.

Or maybe professionally, you know that there are certain things that would be put in jeopardy if you proclaimed Christ in your word and in your deed the way that you really know the disciple of Christ ought to be living in the public square.

Is fear of man causing you to not live for Christ the way that you ought to live?

What would radically living for Jesus without the fear of man look like in our lives?

Are you living for Christ because you desire the glory that only God can give or is your life in my life marked by a craving for the praise that comes from man?

Here's the sobering reality.

Jesus says elsewhere that those who refuse to confess him before man, he will refuse to confess before his father.

He will say, I never knew I would never knew you apart from me you who practiced lawlessness.

There is therefore a literal eternity's difference between intellectual belief in the truth about Jesus and having saving faith in Jesus.

The demons have intellectual faith or intellectual belief in who Jesus is. They know who Jesus is and yet they have no kind of saving faith in who Jesus is as James tells us.

There's an attorney of difference between those two things.

The one penetrates the mind but never reaches to the heart.

The other transforms the whole of one's life so that every part of you is different as a result of believing in Jesus.

You become a new creation.

These people who are still living for the glory of man reveal that whatever may be their intellectual condition, they are still spiritually dead because they have not received the new spiritual birth.

They are just as spiritually dead in other words as those who are rejecting Jesus outright except that there is a greater hypocrisy here because there is a chasm between what they claim to believe in their mind and the way that they are actually living with their life.

People who have been born again by the Spirit of God reveal it by living for Christ with a passion for the glory of God.

Riches are heed not, more man's empty praise, thou mind inheritance now and always, thou and thou only first in my heart, high king of heaven, my treasure, thou art.

While it is still today, brothers and sisters, come to Christ. Let's pray.

Father, I ask this, if there any hear this morning to whom you are calling, to turn and repent from their sin, that Father your Spirit would not let them alone this morning until they have humbled themselves,

thrown themselves upon the mercy of Christ, come to Him in faith.

If there are any hear this morning who have intellectually ascended to the truth about Jesus but have never yet submitted their heart to Him,

that you would destroy the bastion of cold-hearted intellectualism and instead replace it with a passionate faith that would live one's whole life,

would turn one's whole countenance to follow after Christ that where He is we would be.

Father, I pray this morning that these truths about your sovereignty would humble us, would cause us to worship, to give thanks to the person of the Holy Spirit.

I pray that we would take seriously the warnings of Scripture, as far as it depends upon us that we would not harden our hearts by the sequelness of sin.

And so, Father, knowing that you can do a work in us, I do ask, be merciful and gracious to us.

Their hearts would remain soft to Christ, that you would give us the eyes to see and the ears to hear, that we might know Him in His name, amen.