-Transcript-
00:35 Amen. Glory to God. Thank you for joining me.
00:38 Welcome to the cafe today. It’s a great day here at the cafe. Always a wonderful day to dive into God’s Word, to look at what He might have for us.
00:49 And here today we’re in the book of John. Oh I love preaching from the book of John. The New Testament Gospel account is so incredible and it’s so true.
00:59 And there’s a lot of red text in there which is words directly from Jesus. I love studying that. When I read that I think this is from God and you should too.
01:07 And so we’re going to look at some words from God here today that are very powerful and that should comfort us. We’re in the book of John, John 14: 1- 2. Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me.
01:23 In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
01:30 Now we look at these verses quickly kind of running through them as you read them and you say okay great you know okay Christ is saying you know don’t be troubled. Believe in Him. There’s many mansions in heaven.
01:45 He’s gonna prepare a place for us. But let’s slow it down a little bit and start with let not your heart be troubled. What does that mean? You know God knows how much trouble we have in our hearts today.
01:58 Is that not true here today? Are you not dealing with trouble, pain, and heartache? Are you not having issues today that you really don’t know how to resolve? Problems in your life, snares, issues, traps, frustrations. We all deal with them. And here Christ is saying in His Word let not your heart be troubled.
02:20 Now how could He say that so authoritatively? How could He say let not your heart be troubled? Well look at the latter part here. It says ye believe in God believe also in me. That’s John 14:1. And so we should not be troubled because we should believe in Christ.
02:39 And if Christ speaking this was alive, telling the disciples this, then also too He could be telling us the same truth. So the same way that Jesus was alive then, Jesus is alive today and He is telling us to let our hearts not be troubled. And let’s look at the context of this verse.
03:04 What was going on in John 14? How about John 13? Helps us understand what’s going on in John 14. John 13 you have the dinner before the crucifixion and He’s with the disciples and He’s gonna be betrayed by Judas Iscariot. And He washes the feet of the disciples in that great sign of humility.
03:26 And He gets into it with Peter and Peter is saying, well you can’t wash me, you can’t touch me. And Jesus says, well I can have no part of you if I can’t. And He says, well wash me all over.
03:38 And He says get behind these Satan, essentially showing that it had to be just the feet, as in just cleansing or sanctifying them for the dirt that they had gotten in the world. But they had already been saved because they believed on Christ. And Peter is informed that he’s going to forsake Christ three times, Amen.
04:00 And you have all of this heartache and trouble. You have Christ and His pending death. You have on the cross, you have Judas betraying Christ.
04:09 You have this servant mentality that the that the disciples don’t really understand because they’re wanting to know who will be the greatest in heaven. You have Peter not understanding the idea of sanctification and humility. You have Peter being told that he’s gonna forsake Christ three times.
04:25 You have all these things happen. And then Christ says, look, do not be troubled. If you believe in God, believe also in me.
04:34 And so we realize here the context of this verse is there was great trials. There was great troubles happening. Again, if you just thought to yourself at that time, being alive, all of those things that were happening, and you looked at Christ as the Messiah, and He is going to be, you know, willingly crucified on the cross, the most brutal death any man would ever face.
04:54 And you say to yourself, how could this be? And you see one of your own disciples there betraying Christ. And you say, how could this be? And you see things looking like they’re falling apart. You know, maybe that’s where you are here today.
05:09 When you look in your life and you say, oh, I’ve got a wayward child. How could this be? Oh, I’ve got an illness, and I just can’t get healthy. How could this be? Oh, I’ve got a financial problem, and I don’t know how I’m gonna pay this bill.
05:21 How can this be? And you have so much trouble in your heart, as they did then, assuredly as they did then. And Christ is saying, be not troubled. Believe in me as you believe in God.
05:32 And we have to take that to heart, that if we believe in Christ, and if Christ was able to communicate this to disciples at that time, that we need to trust in Christ, that he’s still communicating this to us today, that he’s still on the throne, that he is still God, that he’s still holy, that he’s still all-powerful, and that he has a plan. And we understand in Romans 8:28 that God’s plans are good for those that love him, those that are called according to his purpose. Believe in Jesus as you do God.
06:00 That’s another point here in John 14:1. Now a lot of people may kind of delineate and say, well, Jesus was in the Scriptures, Jesus was a good man historically. It’s not— even secular historians don’t deny that Jesus lived. Some even don’t even deny that he was raised again, Amen The Bible says he was seen by over 500 when he was resurrected, Amen But many will deny the deity of Christ, right? The deity of Christ.
06:30 And they will come to the conclusion that God and Jesus are not the same. And God wants us to understand very clearly the Holy Trinity, that you have God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And those three are all the same.
06:45 Matthew 28:19, Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them inthe name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. John 10:30, I and my Father are one. And we understand great depths of the truth.
06:59 Even in John 1, it talks about Jesus being there from the beginning of time. And so there’s great depths of truth in the idea, and in the Bible specifically, about how Christ, God, are one, and the Holy Spirit as well. That’s the Holy Trinity.
07:15 And you see this in the picture of when you’re lost, Amen You are convicted by God, Amen You get saved. You accept Christ, the Son, as your Savior for what he did on the cross. And then you receive the Holy Spirit, amen? The Holy Spirit of promise, the Comforter, Amen And now you see you have the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in the same place.
07:40 You also could look at it like this. When we pray, we pray through the Holy Spirit, having the Holy Spirit. We pray to Jesus the Mediator, Amen And that goes to God the Father.
07:52 And so you have the Spirit, the Mediator, and the Father. That’s the three-in-one Godhead. It’s called the fullness of God, the Holy Trinity.
07:59 And I’m gonna do a message very shortly here coming up to go into detail about that, but just understand that we need to believe in Christ as we believe in God. And we cannot get to God without Christ. That’s how I started working on this message.
08:13 It was later on in John 14, as Christ points out, there’s no way to the Father but by him. But I also want to get to here in John 14: 2, in my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.
08:28 I go to prepare a place for you. In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.
08:34 I go to prepare a place for you. And so we realize that, look, if Christ were to see something different, he would have told us. If this were not true, he would have told us.
08:47 So, it must be true. We know that God can’t lie. The Bible says there’s no variableness or turning with God.
08:50 So as we associate Christ with God, we can then associate all the truths about God with Christ. And we see that he’s prepared a place for us. Our place in heaven is secure.
09:03 Now I love thinking about the mansion in heaven. I love thinking about what heaven will be like. It’s one of the best exercises I do to stay spiritually at peace.
09:12 It’s to think on my heavenly reward and think on my time to come in heaven. But I want you today to think about your present place in heaven. Luke 10:20.
09:24 Notwithstanding in this, rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven. Luke 10:20. Jesus speaking this.
09:30 Because your names are written in heaven. Notwithstanding in this, rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven. You remember the Lord had called the disciples to go out and preach.
09:45 And he said, you know, basically, you know, you can rebuke these spirits, but don’t be excited about rebuking the spirits or having control over the spirits. Rather be excited because your names are written in heaven. Are, the present tense.
09:58 Not will be written in heaven, not could be written in heaven, but are. You see this again in Philippians 4:3. Paul writes, and I entreat thee also, true yoke fellow, help those women which labored with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellow laborers whose names are in the book oflife. And so we have this writing of a, of a name in a book.
10:23 Amen. And that is the book of life also referred to as the lamb’s book of life. And we see here two examples of the new Testament.
10:29 And there’s many examples in the old Testament of this book. And there’s also mentioned of it revelation. We see here that the book of life is where our names are written when we’re saved, that we have a present place in heaven.
10:43 Amen. So we’re already, our place is already reserved in heaven. We’re once saved, always saved.
10:50 And what Christ is doing is preparing that place for us. In fact, God has foreknowledge. So He knew before the beginning of the earth, who would be saved.
10:59 And there are times that, that that’s mentioned in the scriptures, that before the formation of the earth, there were these books. Amen. So God knows who’s going to be saved and who’s not going to be saved.
11:10 And that doesn’t mean that anyone says, well, God must not want me God desires all to come to repentance. That’s in the Bible as well. But he knows he’s got foreknowledge.
11:20 So, to say that God has foreknowledge, he doesn’t know who will be saved. That’s denying God is his power. So we must admit that he knows who’s going to be saved.
11:26 He has these books. Amen. There is a record.
11:29 Amen. And our names are written there. When are our names written there? Our names are written there when we believe on Jesus Himself, no other than Jesus, only by Jesus.
11:38 When we accept Christ as savior, our names are written in the book. And once our names are written in the book, they’re not getting taken out. Amen.
11:45 They’re written, we could say in the blood of the lamb. Amen. When we accept Christ as savior, God no longer looks at us as Clark or John or Steve or Sally or Beth or Karen.
11:57 God looks at us as Christ. He sees Christ’s blood upon us. Amen.
12:03 We are viewed as Christ. We have no longer that sin imputed to us as our sin debt, but Christ’s righteousness imputed to us. We talk a lot about Proverbs in our house at night, we have a family altar time, and we speak on what is righteousness, what is goodness.
12:18 It comes up almost every night because there’s a lot of that in the Proverbs. And what it is, righteousness is nothing that we do or who we are, but it is Christ. It is of Christ.
12:25 Amen. And so we see that our place in heaven is present. I don’t want to get tongue tied here, but our place in heaven is present.
12:34 And why should that be a blessing to you? Why should that help you not be troubled in this world? Because it tells you that you have a home in heaven that is secure. Amen. You have an inheritance in heaven that is not of this earth, and you have a place that you will go to if you’ve accepted Christ as savior that will never perish.
12:51 It’ll never depart. Amen. There are places on this earth that I don’t know if I’ll get to, and if I got to them later on, I don’t know what they would look like.
13:00 They could be very different. Things change all the time. Amen.
13:04 There was a house in North Carolina that one day was on the beach, and it was for sale or something, and the next day it was in the ocean. It was wiped away. You can see it on social media over there in the Outer Banks.
13:13 And you know, if you said, I have a place, I have a house at the beach, well one day it’s there, next day it’s wiped away. But see, our place in heaven is secure. It’s never going to be wiped away.
13:22 It’s never going to be taken away. Christ Himself is preparing it for us. God Himself is preparing it for us.
13:28 God Himself has our name in that book, in that Lamb’s Book of Life, if we’ve accepted Christ as Savior. So our place is secure, and that can allow you to not be troubled in this world, knowing that God has a plan and a place for you, knowing that God is is true and sincere and lovely and will see you through till the appointed time. He will finish that work in you, and all you need to do is be obedient.
13:54 And obedience is grounded in and rooted in faith. Have faith that God is going to do what he says he’s going to do, and thank him in advance now for what he’s going to do, because it’s marvelous, it’s glorious, and we shouldn’t be troubled. We should be joyful, knowing how good God is.
14:11 Amen, I thank you so much for joining me. Take care, God bless, and Amen.