John 2:23-25 & 3:19-21
April 25, 2021
preached by Pastor Ryan Bouton
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Guide for Home Worship

Time of Reflection Quotations

“Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot ‘practice the presence of God’, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there; or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep. But for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.

~C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“You’d better look at whose looking glass you’re looking through
Before the primrose view overtakes you.”

~”Primrose” by Black Eyed Sceva

“I remember my father telling me, ‘The eyes of God are on us always.’ The eyes of God. What a phrase to a young boy. What were God’s eyes like? Unimaginably penetrating, intense eyes, I assumed. And I wonder if it was just a coincidence I made my specialty ophthalmology.”

~Judah Rosenthal in Crimes and Misdemeanors by Woody Allen

“Or to put it differently, God knows that even when we hear of his compassionate pardon, we latch on to that promise with a diminished view of the heart from which that compassionate pardon flows. This is why the Lord continues: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). What is God saying? He is telling us that we cannot view his expressions of his mercy with our old eyes. Our very view of God must change.”

~Gentle and Lowly by Dane C. Ortlund

Sermon Passage

John 2:23-25 & 3:19-21 (ESV)

John 2

²³ Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. ²⁴ But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people ²⁵ and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.

John 3

¹⁹ And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ²¹ But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”