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Hey, you're listening to Cut for Time, a podcast from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. My name is Claire Kingsley. I'm Anna Mitchell.

And I'm Dan Breitwieser. Each week, one of us will sit down with the person who gave Sunday's sermon to discuss their message. Cut for Time is a look behind the scenes of sermon preparation, and they'll share with us a few things that we didn't hear from the sermon on Sunday. 

Thanks for listening. Pastor Tom, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for making time out of your day.

Good to see you. Looks like you're comfortably situated back in the office somewhere. Yep, hidden away in the corner.

Yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, to get us started, can you give us a quick summary of your sermon on Sunday, focusing on what makes John 14, 6 a hard saying? Yeah, I sure can. Yeah, it's a great privilege to unpack this text. 

This is a verse that I probably memorized as a kid, or at least as a teenager, and so it's one of my key verses that I've always had. You might even say it's kind of a midpoint summary of the Gospel of John. It emphasizes the deity, the godness of Jesus. 

John 1, 1, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. Clearly stating that Jesus is God who became man, God in the flesh. And so John 14, 6 really just kind of reinforces a different aspect of that. 

I am, we emphasize, does refer to God. We can come back to that in a moment. But the way the truth of the life just says these things that are characteristics of God, Jesus is claiming for Himself, and so that's really kind of the summary of what it is. 

What makes it a hard saying, I don't think it's hard to understand. In fact, I think it's a hard saying because it's easy to understand and people don't buy it. It's a pretty radical claim, and it obviously puts Christianity on an infinitely higher plane than any other religious founder or religious system, because He claims to be God. 

And so it's not hard to understand, but it's hard to accept, especially in our inclusive world where you dare not lift anybody's truth over anybody else's truth, and language that I don't even relate to very well, but it's our common cultural way of doing it. And so we're asked to embrace one another's truth even when it's a clear contradiction. So if you say it's green and I say it's red, you can believe what you believe, and I can believe what I believe, and there's no kind of objective standard. 

And so that makes it hard. But based on this one verse and the whole Gospel of John, we believe that Jesus is the one and only way to God the Father, and that's very offensive to our inclusive culture that wants to honor every possible way. My response to that is, don't complain if there's only one way. 

Rejoice that there is one way, because if we don't have Jesus, there's no way. And to me, that's an important thing to understand. Yeah. 

Going back to Jesus proclaiming His deity with the I Am, the way, the truth, and the life, throughout John there are a lot of I Am statements. And you mentioned in your sermon a couple of them. Were there any others that you didn't have time to get into? Yeah, well, John is famous for his seven I Am statements. 

And I also noted that there's a lot times we say I Am, which does not have deity implied in it. Certainly doesn't mean if I say, I am Tom Macy, I'm not saying I'm God. But those seven statements are very specifically that way, and they do go back to Exodus and the context in which the term is given as the name for God, because it's rooted in God's self-disclosure to Moses in Exodus 3, and there's an almost endless chain of passages in the Old Testament in which the Messiah of the Old Testament is identified as God. 

And I mean, I could throw out three or four of them. Isaiah 9-6, a pretty famous Christmas passage, He should be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father. That's just loaded with God titles. 

Or David, Psalm 110, the Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand. And David is speaking of the Messiah as His Lord. Another Christmas passage, Micah 5-2, a ruler comes forth from Jerusalem whose comings and goings are, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting.

And so there's many more. Almost all of the prophets have references to this Messiah figure who has definitely God qualities, God attributes that then are claimed to be fulfilled in Jesus. And so then the gospels pick those up and give us the evidence through miracles and through the statements of Jesus and ultimately His death and resurrection, that indeed He is God.

So yeah, that's some of the things you could emphasize there, I suppose. John's gospel focuses more on the fulfillment of these promises maybe than the others, although it's there, the others, but His purpose statement at the end, or the end statement, Jesus did many other signs. That's another common word for miracle in John, He calls them signs, which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, by believing you may have life in His name. 

So this John 1-14 just really encapsulates the whole book of John and really kind of pulls together the Old Testament prophecies as well. Yeah. You mentioned John 8, where he says, before Abraham was, I am, which was pretty controversial for the Pharisees and the people there, how do we follow Jesus' example to speak boldly? He was stoned for speaking. 

We're going to stone Him for speaking out in that way. So what hills do we choose to die on? How do we handle that in today's modern context? Those are great questions and they're tough to answer. I think in this case, this example of John 8-58, it was a trigger for the Pharisees, because they knew exactly what He was saying. 

First time you read through it, I read through it, we might not pick up on that, but even the fact that their response is to pick up stones to stone Him says, oh, He said something really, really offensive here, claimed to be God. You know, Jesus was bold. I mean, in the same text in John 8, He says, I'm not a liar like you.

That's not exactly the way to make friends and influence people. So I don't think it always calls for that kind of boldness, but just being willing to just be willing to speak up and encourage people to take a look at Scripture. It's tough because when you speak truth, people are turned off, but it's often our attitudes may be more than what we say or the way we say it, and so how do we do it winsomely? I mean, that might be a contradiction to John 8, because Jesus doesn't seem very winsome there, by calling them liars. 

But, you know, He does have an ongoing dialogue with the Pharisees. This isn't the first time He had this discussion. But I think more than anything, invite people to just be exposed to Jesus. 

Invite Him to, hey, get a Gospel of Mark or a Gospel of John, and could we read it together, or how about you read a chapter, and we'll get together next week and tell me what you think of it. And I think most of us respond better to invitation than we do pressure, and so warm invitation and dialogue takes time. I mean, a lot of people have come to faith by somebody coming up to them and saying, here's the truth. 

God loves you. You're a sinner. Jesus died for you. 

Put your faith in Him, and you hear stories of that kind of thing, where people immediately receive Christ. I think that can happen, but I don't think that's the norm. I think the norm is multiple exposures out of the context of relationship, where people have a chance to explore, have their own questions honored and respected, and come at carefully and slowly, courageously, but carefully and slowly, not just dumping everything on them at once.

Yeah. I think I kind of got into maybe the next question you were going to look at. As in today's world of contradicting yet equal truths, how do we discuss the truth without hurting people or closing them off? It was interesting what you said about the immediate, just like random interaction, and suddenly you're converted to Christ.

Yeah. A lot of people, if you say, hey, you're a sinner, they take that personally and say, oh yeah, you hate me then. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So how do we respond in love? Yeah, no, that's certainly a problem. In some ways, I don't think our day is all that radically different. I don't think anybody has ever been in a place where they really welcome people coming and telling them they're sinners. 

We have to learn that for ourselves. And as even incomplete Christians, we're an all-in process. I'm still a sinner, saved by grace, by God's mercy, but I don't have any reason to boast anything over my non-Christian friends in that sense.

I think challenges today—I mean, I did make some references, I don't know if it was helpful or not, yeah, because there's so much in the news, every day in the news—Sophie Cunningham and difficult questions regarding transgender and other identity issues. And we don't want to diminish the personhood of anyone. We want to acknowledge the Imago Dei, the image of God in every person. 

On the other hand, I don't think we help people if we affirm their confusion. We can affirm them as persons, but without—and so if someone's confused, we need to lovingly guide them toward acceptance of who God made them to be. But probably the first step there is not trying to change people's minds about those kinds of issues, but how do we invite them to a loving Savior who values them right where they are, and how do we show that in the way we respond to people? So it's tough in our culture of standing up for truth, and that's probably one of the things that I know. 

I'm still trying to learn how to be honest and speak the truth. I worry about honesty, and maybe where I need to be more concerned is sometimes about how being more gracious in the way I speak sometimes. So I don't know. 

It's always easier to speak boldly in the church to people who generally agree with you than it is to the culture at large, where we're not trying to transform people. We're trying to invite them to the one who can transform them. I think that's an important piece.

Yeah, the distinction between us convincing them and the Holy Spirit changing them. Right, yeah. We can be tools in God's hands. 

We don't have the power to change people. Amen. Okay, switching gears. 

How do we handle these kinds of conversations and differences of opinions, not with like the secular world, but more within the church, within different denominations? Yeah, that's a great question, and I set that question up by my opening illustration in which I acknowledge that I grew up in one particular denomination, and during my seminary years made a change to another denomination. So I did that early in life, and so my whole pastoral career has been in the Evangelical Free Church of America. One reason I was drawn to the Evangelical Free Church, the movement that Faith Church is a part of, is because of this very issue, that we can have diverse opinions on a lot of issues, and that does not separate us. 

Our unity is in Christ. There's what we call core Orthodox doctrine, that whether you're from an Episcopal or Presbyterian or Baptist or Methodist, Lutheran, there's a core doctrine, Apostles' Creed, Nicene Creed, those kinds of things where we are united. When it comes to baptism, when it comes to even some aspects of salvation between—I don't know if you're familiar with Arminians and Calvinists and what that means, but the idea one emphasizes free will, one emphasizes God's sovereignty, the Bible emphasizes both, but how some groups interpret that or try to work that out is different than other groups. 

In the Evangelical Free Church, we welcome that diversity. It doesn't mean we have to agree with each other. I can still get up and preach what I think this text means, but if you don't agree with me 100% on that, that doesn't mean we have to separate from one another or have to start our own denomination. 

That's what's happened, to start a lot of denominations, thousands of them, I think, at least hundreds. And that gets a little crazy because unity is important, but the difference between diverse opinions, even on important theological issues, and heresy which departs from important theological issues. And in my case, I identified a heresy that was being tolerated. 

It wasn't dominant in the group that I left, but it was being tolerated in the group that I left, which denied the sufficiency and exclusiveness of Jesus. And that's what I call a core enough issue. That's an Apostles' Creed. 

That's a Nicene Creed issue. More importantly, that's a biblical issue that I don't see wiggle room on. And so I felt like I needed to be a part of a group that was firm on that issue. 

And different issues come up at different times in church history that believers differ on. And it's a question of, is this a hill to die on, or is it one where we can share the hill together? Yes. No king of the hill. 

Yeah, yeah. Now, there's a lot of funny things about that, where people think they agree on almost everything, and then they find one little tiny thing they disagree on, so they push the guy off the hill and condemn him. So, yeah. 

But we don't have to. We can major on the majors, minor on the minors. Yeah. 

There's a lot of diversity at Faith Church on various doctrinal issues, but there's a core. Our Statement of Faith establishes what that core is. That is, we call it essential doctrine.

And it's not a long statement. It's 10 brief statements, where some groups have no, dozens of statements to spell out exactly what they believe, and we've chosen not to do that. I appreciate that it's concise and easy to read through.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's what drew me to the seminary that I went to, because of the doctrinal statement. 

It was easy. It wasn't as long as some others that I considered, and yet it had the core issues solidly affirmed, and that's what I was looking for. Yeah. 

In our own personal walks of faith, as we're deciphering the core issues and figuring out what we believe personally, there's still a lot of tension with the world, with what we encounter in our day-to-day lives. How do we battle the societal pressures that try to keep us from the truth? How do we cling to what actually is good and true? Well, I would say a couple of things that I think are really important, and this assumes that we're talking to people who accept the Bible as God's revelation. So if you don't have that, then you get some other issues you have to wrestle with. 

But if you have that as a base, then I say just keep reading Scripture and interacting with other people over the reading of Scripture. So it's not just you on your own, but yes, you on your own plus. That's one of the reasons—not the only one, but one of the reasons—regular church participation. 

Because we're the church, not individual Christians. We're individual Christians to a point, but we are the church. We're the body of Christ.

We only grow and gain insight and understand things better. I've heard sermons in the past year that explain passages to me that I said, I don't think I understood that right before. It clarified it for me. 

I've been exposed to the Bible for 75 years, since I was born. And so it's both shocking—oh man, why didn't I figure that out a long time ago? Finally makes sense. Now the core, again, I haven't had a lot of revelations on what I call core doctrine, but many different texts I get new insights on. 

So I just keep in Scripture. That's what I encourage everybody to do—be in Scripture if possible every day, and be fellowship with other people of like mind. And then go out with people who are different, hang out with them, and hopefully the light of your life and even conversation will begin to make them curious. 

Why is she that way? Why is she at peace when I'm a mess? Sometimes Christians are the mess. But hopefully, the example of Jesus saying, He is the light of the world, but in other passages, He says, you are the light of the world, as we reflect Him. So that's an important part of what we're to be.

Opportunities for invitation. Yep, yeah. You said the same thing in a lot less words. 

Thank you. No, I think it's good to use a bunch of different words because different things resonate with different people. Thanks so much for talking with me. 

Is there anything else you want to add that we didn't get to? I don't think so. Just meditate on that. If you haven't ever memorized John 14, 6, it's one of the easiest verses in the world to memorize if you haven't already.

And just rejoice that you know the one who is the way, the truth, and the life, and that you can come to the Father through Him. Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. 

Okay, bye. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Cut for Time. If you wish to submit questions to our pastors following Sunday's sermon, you can email them to podcast at faithchurchindy.com, or text them in to our Faith Church texting number, and we'll do our best to cover them in next week's episode. 

If this conversation blessed you in any way, we encourage you to share it with others. We'll be back again next week.

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