Showing AND Telling
Rev. Res Spears
Beyond the Cross: Jesus’ Prayer for You and Me • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Does anybody here remember Show & Tell?
Of course, you do. We used to have Show & Tell once a week back in primary school.
You’d bring something special to class — a special toy or a photo of special people or whatever — and you’d stand in front of the class, SHOW them the special item, and then TELL them what made it so special to you.
Show & Tell helped kids improve their speaking skills, gave them a chance to share their experiences and learn from those of others, and fed their creativity and individualism.
And if we did Show & Tell right, there was a good chance our teacher would forget the spelling test everyone wanted to avoid.
The truth is that most of us never grow out of Show & Tell. Think of the young lady with a new engagement ring. What does she want to do?
She wants to show it off and tell everyone who’ll listen to her about the wonderful man she plans to marry.
What about the middle-aged man with a new Corvette? What does he want to do? He wants that car to be seen — and heard, too — and he can’t wait for you to ask about it so he can tell you all the important specifications.
For many people, social media has become a modern version of Show & Tell. We post photos of our meals, our vacations, our families and more, and we tell people what makes these things special to us.
In fact, I’d argue that Show & Tell is the main tool we use to help explain our worldview and the values and priorities that develop from it.
And we seem to implicitly understand that it’s the combination of showing and telling that makes this activity powerful.
So, why then, do so many followers of Jesus seem content with either showing OR telling, but not both?
We’re continuing our study of Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John, chapter 17, today.
And what we’re going to see as we study verses 4 through 8 is that Jesus’ ministry here on earth was marked by SHOWING people the character of God and TELLING them God’s words.
And as He prepared His disciples for His eventual ascension into heaven, He was also preparing them to take over His ministry of showing the kingdom of heaven and telling how to become a part of it.
Let’s read these verses together:
4 “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.
5 “Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
6 “I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world; they were Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.
7 “Now they have come to know that everything You have given Me is from You;
8 for the words which You gave Me I have given to them; and they received them and truly understood that I came forth from You, and they believed that You sent Me.
Now, you’ll recall that the first thing Jesus prayed for, in the passage we studied last week, was that He be glorified.
He prayed that His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection would bring Him glory so He could give that glory to God.
He’d glorified God in His time here on earth, Jesus says in verse 4. But how had He done so?
He’d glorified God by doing the work God gave Him to do. So, what was the work God had given His Son to do?
Well, we see Jesus doing a bunch of miracles during His three-year ministry. And we see Him teaching various people in various places.
But I’d suggest that the miracles and the teaching weren’t the actual work He came to do. Instead, I think the miracles and the teaching were simply the tools Jesus used to DO the work He’d been sent to do.
So, what WAS that work? To reveal the Father. To show people who God is. To teach them about His character. To help them understand His values and priorities.
Jesus would use miracles and parables and other teaching strategies to accomplish His mission of revealing the Father.
And even His obedient sacrifice at the cross — where He allowed Himself to be humiliated and killed for us and in our place — revealed God’s love, His grace, and His mercy.
Indeed, as Jesus puts it in the Book of Matthew, it’s only because He reveals the Father to us that any of us can know God.
27 “All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.
So, Jesus came to reveal the Father — to show us the character and values and priorities of God.
And He did so without fail, without ever coming up short. That’s why He could tell Philip, “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.”
Jesus had done what He’d been sent to do. He’d revealed the Father. He’d shown the people God’s compassion and grace and mercy and love.
And He’d told the people how they could experience eternal life — life the way it was always meant to be, in everlasting fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Now, with His work on earth nearly done, Jesus anticipates His return to heaven, and He asks to be restored to the glory He’d had in heaven since before the beginning of time.
Jesus gave up the glory He had in heaven to live among us as a man. He’d set aside the rights and privileges that were His eternally as one of the persons of the Trinity.
Now, knowing that He’ll soon be ascending back into heaven, He asks that God restore what Jesus had given up when He came to be incarnated here on earth.
Remember how John started his Gospel account?
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
From before the beginning of time, Father and Son shared the glory that is God’s. When the angels sang, “Holy, holy, holy,” they were singing about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But, as the Apostle Paul put it in his letter to the Philippians, it was this equality with God that Jesus set aside in His incarnation.
5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,
6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.
8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Jesus gave up the privilege of being treated as God in order to be treated as a man.
Now, with His work on earth nearly complete, He’s praying that His Father would restore the rights and privileges He had when He returns to heaven to be at His Father’s side.
There IS a difference, however, because now Jesus has a body. His incarnation was permanent.
As the firstfruits of the resurrection, He now inhabits a glorified body that’s no longer subject to sickness or death. And in the resurrection, we will inhabit bodies that are likewise glorified.
Did you hear that? We who’ve followed Jesus in faith will be glorified. And that should be something of a shock to us, because we’ve done nothing to DESERVE glory.
But here on earth, in the time between our salvation and our glorification, we’re called to do the same thing Jesus was called to do: to bring God glory.
And how do we do that? The same way Jesus did it; by manifesting God’s name. In other words, by revealing God’s character.
Now, Jesus did that in every encounter He had while on earth. But the most important group to whom He manifested God’s name was His disciples.
In His words and His deeds, Jesus showed the character of God. And, because they’d be left to continue His work when He’d returned to heaven, His disciples were Jesus’ most important audience.
God had taken them out of the world — He’d set them apart as holy, for His service.
Soon, they would be the ones to manifest God’s name. And they could do so only because they’d received the words given to them by Jesus.
They didn’t understand everything Jesus had told them, but what they did understand, they believed. They kept His word.
Furthermore, as Jesus states in verse 7, they’d come to understand that everything and everyone Jesus needed for His work on earth had been given to Him by His Father.
The words that He taught. The miracles He performed. The people He influenced. The lives He changed. The disciples He led. All were gifts from God.
The disciples didn’t choose Jesus; He chose them. This is the basis for the confidence Jesus has that God will honor His request to watch over and protect the disciples in His absence from them.
If their welfare or the success of their mission depended upon themselves, they’d be in trouble.
They’d already shown over and over again that their faith was weak and that they didn’t really understand all of Jesus’ teaching about humility and so forth.
But here, Jesus reminds them that even His OWN ministry had been empowered by God. And if that was true of Jesus, then it’d be even more true of His disciples.
Verse 8 gives us a picture of the three phases of discipleship. First, the disciples heard and received what Jesus said.
This put them ahead of the religious leaders and others who heard what Jesus taught and either rejected it turned from Him because it was hard to accept.
Second, they’d come to accept — to know with certainty — that Jesus is divine, that He is “of God.”
They still didn’t quite understand what that meant, and they still had misconceptions about the kingdom of God. But they had the right attitude about Jesus; they knew He’d come from God and spoke with God’s authority.
And finally, they’d come to understand Jesus had been sent to complete a divine task.
It was a task they’d shared with Him for some time and which was now about to become THEIR task, one that would require their own obedience, just as it had required the obedience of Jesus.
“This is the path we must take as disciples—belief, acceptance, obedience. God too has chosen us in our own imperfection, and we are jars of clay holding God’s treasures.” [Grant R. Osborne, John: Verse by Verse, ed. Jeffrey Reimer et al., Osborne New Testament Commentaries (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 395.]
It’s useful to note here that, right on the heels of having said that everything about His ministry had come from God, Jesus now describes how this is also true of His disciples.
The words they’d received from Jesus had come from God. Furthermore, God had given them the ability to understand that Jesus is the Son of God. He’d enabled them to believe in Jesus; their faith was a gift from God. And finally, He’d empower them to be obedient to the work they were now being called to do.
Which was the same work Jesus had been called to do: to manifest God’s name. To reveal the character of God.
And, like Jesus, they — and we — would need to show AND tell for their message to be effective.
There’s an old saying you may have heard that I want to put to rest in light of Jesus’ example of showing AND telling.
“Preach the gospel at all times. Use words when necessary.”
That’s a neat-sounding quotation, and I’ve probably used it myself at some point. But I want to repent from that today, because I think it flies in the face of Jesus’ example to us.
Think about it. If people are attracted to me because of my Christlikeness, but I don’t tell them about the Christ whose image I’m being made into, then they’d be following me and not Jesus.
On the other hand, if I talk about Jesus all the time but don’t SHOW the kingdom of God in my lifestyle, then I’m a hypocrite.
It’s easy to look at the modern Christian culture and find examples of people who do both of these things.
They bring glory to themselves, rather than God, by showing without telling. Or they bring discredit on themselves and on God by telling without showing.
We, however, are called to do both. We’re called to show AND tell.
We’re called to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that [Jesus] commanded.”
Yes, we need to look and act like Jesus in the world. But we mustn’t think of that as the full extent of our calling.
Showing is really only effective when it’s accompanied by telling.
This week, as you go about looking like Jesus, I want to encourage you to remember not just to show, but to tell.
Let the world see how different you are — compassionate where others might expect judgment, loving where others might expect anger, forgiving where others might expect bitterness and contempt.
But ALSO let them hear WHY you’re different. Let them hear you say that you show compassion because you’ve been treated with compassion. Let them hear you say you love, because God first loved YOU. Let them hear you say you forgive because you’ve been forgiven so much.
Let them see Jesus in you. But let them also hear His words, because in THEM is life itself.
Now, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. This observance is important to the fellowship of the church. It brings us together in a unique way and reminds us that we belong to one another in Christ Jesus.
It reminds us of the love He has for us and the love we’re called to have for one another.
Jesus commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him, as a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him, and as a way of reminding us what He did for us.
The Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests only and completely on the sacrifice He made for us and in our place at the cross. It reminds us that our life is in Him.
And the fact that we share bread from one loaf reminds us that we are, together, the one body of Christ. It reminds us that we’re called to unity of faith, unity of purpose, and unity of love.
It reminds us that, just as He gave up the glory He had in heaven, we who’ve followed Jesus in faith are called to give up any claims we might think we have to our own lives as we follow Him.
Finally, it reminds us that, as we’ve been given the testimony of the Holy Spirit within us, we’re to share OUR testimony of salvation by grace through faith.
We’re not to be lukewarm Christians, but people who are on fire for the Lord. On fire to manifest the name of God in our actions AND in our words.
If you’re a baptized believer walking in obedience to Christ, I’d like to invite you to join us today as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.
Now, this sacred meal dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified, the very night He prayed this prayer we’ve been studying.
The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today. But the significance was the same as it is today.
Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.
Let us pray.
26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”
As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.
“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”
Let us pray.
27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you;
28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.
Take and drink.
“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
Maranatha! Lord, come!
Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.
Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”
