That’s a great uh passage of scripture from uh John chapter 3. And this morning we’re going to follow along. Last week we looked at uh Jesus’ uh nighttime visit from Nicodemus, the Pharisee leader. And uh we move from that to this brewing conflict that’s happening out in the wilderness of Judea. Think we just need to maybe just redo that. There’s a there’s confusion. There’s maybe a spirit of competition and some jealousy. People who are laboring for the same cause and the same purposes, but they don’t know that entirely. There’s a bit of an overlapping ministry in the Judeian countryside between John the Baptist and his disciples and Jesus and his disciples. And both of them are attracting crowds and both are baptizing people. Although it’s clarified in John 4:2 that Jesus himself is not personally baptizing anyone, but his disciples were. So during this period of overlap, John the Baptist disciples, they were having a bit of a dust up with a with a Jewish man, bit of an argument over a legalistic matter of ceremonial washing. And afterward, John’s disciples go to see their mentor. But their main concern, it wasn’t related to the argument they’d been having over the legalistic issue. Their main concern was problems they were having with what Jesus and his disciples were doing. They said to John the Baptist, “Rabbi, that man who was with you on the other side of the Jordan, the one you testified about, well, he’s baptizing and everyone is going to him.” And they appeared to feel that their influence and the influence of their mentor John the Baptist was waning. John’s disciples, they’d given their loyalty and their devotion, but things were changing. The sun seemed to be setting on their ministry. There we go. So they looked to their mentor to help make sense of what was going on. And the reply of John the Baptist in verses 27 through36 offers this great model of humility, wonderful appreciation, as John puts it, of the one who comes from above. The one who comes from above. John says, “A man can only receive what is given him from heaven, knowing that the one who comes from above is the one who must be followed. He’s the one who must be listened to.” And belief in that one who comes from above certainly uh it’s not what it used to be in our western world. Tom Stoppard wrote a play in 1972 called Jumpers and he has a philosopher pondering this apparent triumph of atheism over religious belief. He says, “This is a tide which has turned only once in human history. There’s presumably a calendar date, a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer when quite suddenly the nose had it.” And that quote appears in a new book by a fellow named Ross Douet entitled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Doubt’s a Christian and his day job has been to translate religious ideas to people who don’t see religion as plausible. And he begins his book with these words. Says, “For the last 15 years, I’ve been a conservative and religious columnist for the New York Times, a paper whose audience tends to be secular and liberal. Part of my job is to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers. Both those who think of themselves as having grown out of faith’s illusions or escaped its bigotries and those who barely have any acquaintance with serious belief at all. So he joined the New York Times in the heyday of the new atheist or the new atheist movement distinguished by people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. And he says during those days he received a lot of email from people who were eager to inform him that organized religion is both stupid and wicked. There’s no difference between believing in God and believing in a flying spaghetti monster. And it’s time to escape whatever miserable brainwashing he’d received and breathe the free air of atheism. But over time he noticed that the people writing such things seemed less sure of themselves. They’d occasionally express tinges of regret. They’d say, “I I’d happily go back to church except for one small detail. We all know there’s no God.” He says, “More and more of my readers seem to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default. It’s not a freely chosen liberation. More and more they seemed unhappy with their unbelief. So he wrote his book with the idea of making belief plausible to people who might be outwardly denying it yet inwardly yearning for it. And in our passage, John tells his disciples tells all who are yearning to believe that there is a witness. There’s one who comes from above who certifies the truth concerning God. Tim Keller gives the illustration of a of an airplane or a traffic helicopter and it’s hovering over the highway. And if he’s broadcasting and you have your radio on, he might tell you that there’s a 10 car pile up on the Hendai. It’s going to take you 45 minutes to crawl from Lassard Road to Callingwood exit. So you shouldn’t take the Hendai. You should just find an alternate route. And do you sit there in your car and say, “Why should I listen to that guy in the helicopter? He’s not down here. He doesn’t know what it’s like it is what it’s like down here. He has no idea.” And Keller said, “Of course you listen to him because of the fact that he’s not down here. He’s not sitting in the seat beside you. That means he can see the whole road and you can’t. His testimony comes from above. That’s why you listen to him. He can see the end from the beginning. So it’s only that viewpoint from eternity that can tell a person like us what to do in time. It’s only from the viewpoint up there that you can see the end from the beginning. We might not like it. We might not like what he says, but he comes from above and we don’t. Ignoring what Jesus says, the testimony of the one who comes from above. It’s like ignoring the guy in the helicopter saying, “Forget it. I’m just going to take the henai anyway.” John the Baptist says to his disciples, “The one who comes from above is above all. The one who’s from the earth belongs to the earth and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he’s seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony.” So, we know that in in a court case, circumstantial evidence, it points toward a fact. It doesn’t directly prove it. Circumstantial evidence certainly useful, but it it can’t prove a case with certainty. A witness is always someone who can speak with greater clarity. And one of Ross Douet’s appeals in his book is to ask people who don’t yet find the idea of God to be plausible to honestly consider the circumstantial evidence for God. He writes, “Ordinary reason plus a little bit of curiosity should make us all aware of the likelihood that this life isn’t all there is. That mind and spirit aren’t just an illusion woven by ourselves and atoms. That some kind of supernatural power shaped and still influences our lives and the universe. The world as we experience it, it’s not a cruel trick. Our conscious experience is not a burst of empty pyrochnics in an otherwise illimitable dark. There are signs enough to point us up from materialism and pessimism and reductionism. Signs that most past civilizations have observed and followed. Signs that we have excellent reasons to follow as well. Reason still points godward. And you don’t have to be a great philosopher or a brilliant textual interpreter to follow its directions. ordinary intelligence and common sense together are enough. That’s kind of a longish quote, but I think Ross Douet then speaks graciously and passionately of the circumstantial evidence for the existence of God that all rational people should be able to access in their thinking. Evidence that seemed completely obvious to everyone and almost every generation that came before our own. He says, ‘I want you to imagine the world before that shift or that turning point when the burden of proof was still on the skeptic when atheism was a curiosity and supernatural belief was the obvious default. If you were raised with some form of religion, could even be your own childhood. Try to imagine or remember what made belief seem so reasonable and natural. Try to imagine yourself as a religious person untroubled by serious doubts. Finding natural vindication for spiritual presumptions in the world that you encounter every day. It says start with the physical world, the material universe that human beings inhabit and experience and study. What your naive religious self observes at every level of visible existence are regular seeming complex predictable systems. the progress of the seasons, the stars in their courses, everyday workings of the human body. In your own embodied existence, you find yourself surrounded by complex machines of flesh and bone and filament and fiber, animals and insects, trees and flowers. Their individual operations woven together in still more complicated ecosystems. And these systems, they don’t manifest just a crude functionality. They often seem beautiful and graceful, sublime, offering visions that even on an ordinary day can stir extraordinary awe that both inspire and exceed the human capacity for art. The heavens declare the glory of God, the Bible says. And when the biblical God wants to answer a suffering mortal’s questions in the book of Job, he goes straight to that human initial intuition. the intuition that the world seems like a workshop and a cathedral and a theater and a mechanis mechanics shop and more that nothing so vast and complex and beautiful could exist by simple accident. Either some mind or power must have made or organized all this matter for a reason or else the that mind or power is inherent to the system. He says, “From this perspective, you might still doubt the straightforward goodness of the system because the world is so often painful and dangerous and tragic, a veil of tears, and you might question the perfect benevolence of whatever power governs it. But that power clearly matters to your existence. In such a fundamental way, it’d be strange not to wonder about its purposes or where you fit into them. It would be self-defeating not to care about how your own life aligns with the story in which you’ve been placed. Now, sure, the kind of evidence that Ross Det is unfolding there, it might be considered circumstantial, but the sheer volume of the evidence is enough to shift many atheists at least toward agnosticism, saying, “I just don’t know.” Maybe not yet certain, but no longer condemning faith as completely implausible. We have tons and tons of circumstantial evidence for God that the more we stare at it, it doesn’t seem circumstantial. It seems to be very substantial. But then add to that mountain of circumstantial evidence an actual witness and the case for faith is made so much stronger. And John the Baptist tells his disciples that the witness that the one who comes from above brings truth and comes with full authority. Verse 34 says, “The one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the spirit without limit.” Courts are they’re never keen to uh include or to allow what’s called hearsay evidence because hearsay is all secondhand information comes from someone outside the case. There’s no opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses or to verify reliability. The one who comes from above speaks firsthand of the things he testifies to all the other religious leaders throughout history can only offer hearsay evidence about God. Jesus, the very son of God, has communed with his father. So Jesus is a primary witness. Speaks the very words of God. So Jesus’ words very different than the words of Muhammad or Buddha or Joseph Smith or the words of anyone who hasn’t been in heaven and then come down from above. No other religion has a God who has come down to walk with us and live with us and teach us and suffer for us and die for us. Every other religion is hearsay apart from the religion established by Jesus Christ. And it means that the words of Jesus, they just carry an ultimate authority. We could all be in an English uh literature university class and debate the meaning of a poem or a story and we could all put in our own thoughts and we could disagree with one another and we could offer some real outside the box interpretations of the poem. But if the author were invited into the class and he or she tells us what the poem means, really that’s the end of the discussion. We can’t then say, “Well, I think you’re wrong or I don’t think you’ve considered this or I have a different view or this means something else.” And the author has every right to tell us that we’re wrong because he or she is the one who wrote it, who crafted the meaning and they have full authority when it comes to that meaning. Our passage says, “The father loves the son and has placed everything in his hands.” There’s such authority with Jesus that if he tells us what marriage is and if he tells us that any sex outside of marriage is dehumanizing and that money is something to be generous with and that prayer is something we ought to do without ceasing. Who are we to throw our two cents into that discussion? The author himself is telling us how life is to be interpreted and and how we’re to come up with our and and who are we to come up with our own meaning? As Ross Douet says, when the story’s author speaks to you, it’s clearly a good idea to show a little respect. Now, the consequences of not listening to the one who comes from above, they’re too great to ignore. Verse 36 at the close of our passage says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever rejects the Son won’t see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.” As we mentioned last week, this idea of being born again is the thing that just happens to us. We can’t make ourselves become Christians. We simply believe. We place our faith and trust in what Jesus has done on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins to deliver us from God’s wrath. The witness of the one who comes from above not only speaks with authority, but he speaks with a final authority. Either the wrath of God is lifted off us and won’t ever come on us again. Or else if we don’t put our faith and our trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation, there’s no way for us to hide from that settled hostility of God toward the sin that lives and breathes inside of us. So belief means our sins are forgiven. Unbelief means our sin and the wrath of God against sin still weigh us down. I think the saddest verse in our passage is the one that says, “The one who comes from above is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. Now, John the Baptist spoke those words very early in the days of Christ’s ministry. Certainly, there would be all kinds of people in first century Israel who would learn to accept his testimony. And the Christian church would emerge untold multitudes of people who accept Jesus’ testimony. But at the time, Jesus’ influence was very small. And remember those words were were first spoken to some of John the Baptist’s disciples. They were baffled. They were a little miffed by the fact that their own leader and their own organization was bleeding followers who are transferring their their allegiance to that new group of Jesus’ people who were baptizing in the same region. John the Baptist assured his followers that it was all right. It was inevitable. It was perfectly appropriate. He said, “A man can receive only what’s given him from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said I’m not the Messiah, but I’m sent ahead of him. The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and he’s full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it’s now complete. He must become greater. I must become less. The one who comes from above is above all. The one who’s from the earth belongs to the earth and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. You’ve probably never been to a wedding where the best man tried to steal the show. you know, he crowded the groom in front of the church so he could get next to the bride, and then he he stepped on the groom’s lines when the groom went to uh to repeat the vows, and he jumped off out of his seat to get the first dance with the bride at the reception. I mean, nothing would be more inappropriate than a best man trying to upstage the groom. And John the Baptist knows he’s just the best man. The bride of Christ, the church, belongs to Jesus, and Jesus will surely have her. John knows that Jesus is superior to him because of Jesus’ origin. He came from heaven. John just a child of the earth. He knew that Jesus was superior because of his spirit. John told his followers, “The one whom God has sent speaks the words of God. For God gives the spirit without limit.” And John knows that Jesus is superior because of his offer. He can give eternal life. He can deliver people from the wrath of God. The best John the Baptist could do was to call people to repent of their sins, clear some of the blockages in their lives so that perhaps they can end up among the number who will accept the testimony of Jesus. And then John gives that great climactic statement in verse 30. He must become greater. I must become less. He must increase. I must decrease. There’s a terrific movie made in 1957, The Incredible Shrinking Man. And it’s considered still to be one of the finest sci-fi films, especially of its time. For its day, the special effects were considered quite revolutionary. There’s a spoiler alert, but it’s a 1957 movie, so I don’t feel bad about ruining it for you, but it tells the story of a guy named Scott Kerry who’s out relaxing on a boat with his wife, and she goes below deck for a minute, and he becomes contaminated by a radioactive cloud, which leads to him gradually shrinking in size. And as he gets smaller and smaller, all of the familiar things in his life begin to change. After a time, he has to live in a in a dollhouse in the living room. And his relationship with his cat becomes one of absolute terror. His basement is this strange new world. He sees things as he’s never seen them before. Even an ordinary spider that he wouldn’t have taken any notice of previously. It’s a mortal enemy. Last scene in the movie is particularly haunting as Scott gets smaller and smaller and he anticipates his microscopic existence. So his final words are, “The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up as if somehow I I I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature that exist that existence begins and ends is man’s conception. It’s not nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. Now, when John the Baptist said that he must decrease, it didn’t mean that he imagined himself fading into nothingness, into meaninglessness. It meant becoming part of something much deeper and much richer. Jesus didn’t merely expect his best man to fade away. Few weeks ago, we mentioned that Jesus in Matthew 11 speaking about John the Baptist to a crowd said, “Oh, among those born of women, there’s not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Then Jesus said, “Yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” So of all the preking people, those born prior to the time when Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God, John was the very best of the bunch. But when Jesus died on the cross for the sins of all people, including those of John the Baptist, John became one of those living kingdom people as well. And it made so much more of him than he had ever been. While he was alive and serving as Jesus’ best man, he must increase. I must decrease. So, it’s okay for you and I to be incredibly shrinking people in order for Christ to be magnified in our lives. And ironically, the more we shrink down in stature, the greater weight or the greater density, the greater our specific gravity becomes. Ross Douet again comments, “Without eternal possibilities, the stakes of every human life are lowered. The soul that doesn’t exist can’t be endangered or possessed or lost. The cosmos of John Lennon’s imagine is unfeilling and indifferent. But people who sing Imagine there’s no heaven, clearly they feel some kind of lightning of burden. That was such a popular pandemic song that seemed to take the weight off people’s lives. But really, I think it did the opposite. Whereas the possibility of an eternal destiny, as CS Lewis once pointed out, places a great weight of glory on even the most ordinary human life, a sense of overwhelming possibility, real peril intertwined. accepting this weight, living with it, trying to let the awareness of eternity shape your time bound life and choices. All this was once understood as an essential part of human maturity. Yet for some time now, the educated world has cultivated the opposite perspective where intelligence and seriousness is now measured in how meaningless you assume human life to be. Predictably, this perspective has not yielded greater human happiness. Fortunately, you don’t need to embrace wishful thinking in order to abandon it as its promises of liberation dissolve as unhappiness and angst and regret take over. Atheism defends itself by pretending to be hard-headed and extremely serious. That’s the price you pay for intellectual adulthood. It’s none of those things. It’s the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human. It’s the religious perspective that grounds both intellectual rigor and moral idealism. And most important, it’s the religious perspective that has the better case by far of being true. So, the one from above has come to be a witness to all of that. And as the friend of the bridegroom is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice, may we rejoice in the everinccreasing magnitude of Jesus in our lives throughout our world. All of the influence of Jesus that continues to spread every day. Every day our world becomes more Christian than it was the day before. It’s hard for us to believe in the Western world, we don’t have the corner office in terms of uh Christendom any longer. It’s it’s mostly in the global south. But every day more and more the magnitude of Christ is is increasing and expanding. Here’s some things I think that we can pray about as we go to prayer from this passage. You might want to thank God that we have the true witness of the one who comes from above. Ask God for the Holy Spirit transformation that will cause us to submit to the authority of Jesus in our lives. And we won’t fear decreasing and him being magnified. and pray for those uh you know who are unhappy in their unbelief. They’re not yet believing, but there’s something in them that’s inwardly yearning for the story of Christ to be true. Take a couple moments of personal prayer and then I’ll close us off.