John Chapter 17:12-14

God will use a situation or He'll use a person to point out to you that your joy is not full. And here's the danger. You look at that person, you go, that person has a problem. No, the reason you've gotten upset, lost your peace and lost your joy is not because there's a problem with other people.

It's going to sting for just a little bit. It's because there's something wrong in here. And see, we do that in the body of Christ.

And it's a dangerous thing. Welcome to Cross the Bridge with David McGee. David is a senior pastor of The Bridge in Kernersville, North Carolina. And today we have a very joyful brother with us. This is brother and pastor D.A.

Brown, one of David McGee's associate pastors here at The Bridge. D.A., do you want to have joy in Jesus? Bob, we all want to be full of joy and Jesus is offering us that opportunity.

I don't know what you're going through today. I don't know what battle or storm you're in, but the Lord is about to bless you. While the Bible does reveal our problems and our shortcomings, it also reveals how we can have ultimate joy in Jesus. Today, Pastor David explains this more as he continues in the Gospel of John chapter 17.

So let's jump in as David McGee teaches part four of the real Lord's Prayer. John 17 verse 12 says, While I was with them in the world, I kept them in your name. Those whom you gave me I have kept, and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. Now this is interesting, the son of perdition.

Who do we think that is? Judas. He was the only one lost, and I want you to notice this, he was the only one that wanted to be lost.

He didn't want to follow Jesus. I have kept them in your name. Understand, God can keep you.

You understand that? Some of you think you got to keep yourselves, and to some degree there's some truth in that. You got to watch what you do, watch the places you go, watch the positions you place yourself in, but God is the one who keeps you. Our God is a keeping God.

Now you have to allow him to keep you. If he says, Hey, don't go in there, you're going to get in trouble, and you go in there anyway, then there's sowing and reaping that goes on. But God is able to keep you. Our God is a keeping God. What he starts, he finishes. What he starts, he finishes. A couple of verses reinforcing that. Romans 8, 38 says, For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other created things shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can get between you and him. Nothing.

It's an amazing thing. Now I'm not going to get into the free will and the sovereignty thing, but again, Judas elected, Judas decided to walk away from Jesus. Now if you decide that, friend, you're in trouble.

You're in a bad place. And we can sit here and academically discuss what your eternal destination is. But again, the discussion is merely academic because we spoke of this last week. Why would you want to spend an eternity with a God that you didn't want to fellowship with here on earth? I don't understand that. And Philippians chapter 1 verse 6 says, Being confident of this very thing that he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Boy, I love that verse. Now notice who started the work? He did.

You understand that? He started it. See, a lot of us think, well, yeah, he started, but I was actually the one that responded and went forward. Really, how long did God chase you before that happened? How long did God try to soften your heart and woo you before you responded? You can't take credit for that. So God started the work, and then of course, once he starts the work, he goes, hey, I've started this thing in you, and I hope it all works out.

We'll see you later. Is that what he does? No, that's not what he does. That's not what he does.

That's what many of us think. That's kind of what happened in my life, to be honest. God started the work in me, and I was like, okay, God, thanks for saving me.

I can take it from here. And God was like, oh, man, are you headed for trouble? Because I jumped over there and grabbed the wheel. And of course, what happened? The car ends up in the ditch. I'm going, God, what are you doing? I thought you could do me faultless, present me faultless before the third. I can, but you grabbed the wheel.

Leave your hands off the wheel. God is able to keep you. God is able to keep you. He started it.

He's going to finish it. Just keep walking with him, keep serving him, keep loving him, stay in fellowship, and watch what he does in your life, and don't walk away. Verse 13, but now I come to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. This is an interesting verse, isn't it?

Have my joy. Being a Christian doesn't have anything to do with joy, does it? I don't know, does it? If you look at some people's life, that's what you'd think.

Hey, man, let me ask you a question. Do you think that appeals to people? The joy of Jesus, man, is so contagious. It is so contagious, and that's what he wants to give to us. And there is a joy in the Lord that so surpasses everything the world has to offer us, that those things don't even compare, is what Paul says.

They don't compare. And Jesus wants our joy to be full. First John, chapter one, verses three and four says, that which we have seen and heard, we declare to you that you also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you that your joy may be full. So after John says it, after Jesus says it, the life lesson, God desires that our joy be full. Is your joy full? Is your joy full? Here's what happens in our lives. God will use a situation or He'll use a person to point out to you that your joy is not full. And here's the danger. You look at that person, you go, that person has a problem. No, the reason you've gotten upset, lost your peace, and lost your joy is not because there's a problem with other people.

It's going to sting for just a little bit. It's because there's something wrong in here. And see, we do that in the body of Christ. And it's a dangerous thing. See, when you're in the line at Walmart and you get upset, what's wrong? Oh, you can talk about mismanagement or inefficiencies or whatever, but what's really wrong is you don't have enough patience. And God's pointing that out to you. But you'll sit there and go, I can't, new clerk, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no, no, no. Problems in here. Now, let me get a little closer to home. We do this in the body of Christ.

And here's the form it takes. We go to a church. It's a godly church.

The word of God is being taught, but we sit back and we go, well, this is not right and that's not right. And you know what? I don't like that. I'm going to go over here, go to another church. And this is not right and that's not right. And I don't like that. I'm going to another church.

And we spend our lives doing that. Meanwhile, do you understand what's going on? At each place, God's holding up a mirror going, there's something wrong. There's something wrong in your life that you won't submit to godly authority and to the scriptures. And I'm trying to point that out to you. Think long and hard about that before you run.

We're too flippant about our commitment to the local body of Christ. Because sooner or later, let me assure you, I'm not just going to gingerly reach over there and tap on your toes. I'm just going to get over there and dance on them one morning. Now, this may be your morning. I don't know. But see, that's God speaking truth.

And you know what? The book at some point is going to speak to issues in our life. I'm the messenger. The message is from him. And at certain points, God's going, you know what? You need to let go of this.

This is an issue in your life, not in his life, not in her life, but in your life. Verse 14, I have given them your word and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I have given them your word. Now, this phrase, the word here is different. In verse eight, it was rhema. That's the face-filled word. That's a right word at the right time kind of thing.

But this is the word lagas. And it speaks of the word of God. Now, this Bible points out our shortcomings. It reveals our problems.

That's what happens. And so the problem that people have with the Bible is not the Bible. It's the mirror function of the Bible that causes people to go, oh, this, this, that, and the other. The Bible says things like, you know what?

You can't save yourself. Some people don't like that. Some Christians don't like that. The Bible says that, you know what?

This earth is not your permanent home. Some people don't like that. But that's what it says.

You can't fix yourself is what this book says. Some people don't like that. And so what they do is they reject the word of God. We can pray for them as well just by simply going to crossthebridge.com and click on the Pray for the Lost button. All you need to do is put in the first names of the people you love that need to know Jesus as Savior, click on Submit, and immediately hundreds of people will begin praying for your lost loved ones. And what an awesome way to bring your loved ones to Jesus. Here's a word from associate pastor D.A.

Brown. Thank you for the work that you're doing in their life. Them listening is evidence that you're at work. Father, I pray that you would fill them with the faith to believe in what you're doing. Lord, help them to say yes to everything that you're wanting to do in their life. We pray for the city leaders, the mayor, the police chiefs, the fire chiefs. Lord, we pray that you would give them wisdom, the town council, and Lord, we pray for your Holy Spirit to pour out in these cities. Give the pastors wisdom.

Help people to get plugged into churches. And Lord, we thank you that we can ask for your help and expect you to move. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.

Thank you, brother. And now let's get back to David McGee as he continues teaching verse by verse. I want to take a couple of minutes to give you a little history about this book, The Sword of the Lord. The word Bible comes from the Greek word biblios. It means parchment.

Sheep skin, goat skin. And it would actually, for a fourth century New Testament, it would take a whole flock of sheep to form one New Testament in the fourth century. The 13th century, a Bible would have cost you about a year's salary.

A year's salary to buy a Bible. It's interesting because, well, on the parchment issue, the sheep skin issue, it's really interesting because what happened was some people accused the guys who were putting the Dead Sea Scrolls together. They said, you guys are just making it all fit together so it reinforces the Bible. And for years, they just said, no, we hadn't, no, we didn't. But what happened, now that we have the type of DNA testing that we have, they've been able to go back and DNA test the sheep skin, showing that the passages that they've put together were actually from the same sheep.

Isn't that cool? See, God gave us the technology of nothing else to help hush their mouth. Origen, like in 210, pretty much said this is the New Testament. These are the books that are in the New Testament. And again, in 315, it was Eusebius and Athanasius gave us pretty much the 27 books of the New Testament.

They said, these are the 27 books. Had nothing to do with the council nasi or any of these things. Now, what's interesting is by 400 AD, this book had been translated into over 500 languages. And by 500 AD, it had been reduced to two.

What happened? A church gained power. We came to know this as the Church of Rome, the Catholic Church. And Jerome wrote what was called the Latin Vulgate. Now, Jerome took from the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, and then he took the Greek version and he put it into the Latin. Now, some people at that time spoke Latin. Rome was still in power, and so Latin was being taught. Latin was being spoken. But the problem is that over the next hundreds of years, more and more people quit speaking Latin. And it became a language that was only taught at the upper schools. And fewer and fewer people spoke. And the Word of God began not to be circulated anymore.

It couldn't be trusted to the normal person. And then, quite honestly, the text became corrupted. Now, I said two languages. Still the Greek, well, three languages, the Greek and the Hebrew, the original languages still existed. I'll get back to that in a second. But the Latin version, the Latin Vulgate is what we call that, did become corrupt over the next thousand years.

Why? Because it became corrupt. And this is just historical stuff. I'm not bashing the Catholic church.

This is historical stuff. Pope Leo X said, indeed it has been profitable. No, how profitable it has been for us, this fable of Christ. That was the pope that said that. Understand, another pope decided that prostitution was a necessary evil for those in the ministry. And at one time the church employed as many as 100,000 prostitutes in Rome.

Guys, these are historical facts. They got in another fundraiser was indulgences where you could pay a certain amount to engage in a certain kind of sin. It was a fundraising thing. Not only for your sins, but you could pay for the sins of those who had already died. Those who were in purgatory. They came up with a saying whenever a coin in the coffers rings a soul from purgatory springs. Very unbiblical.

But see, less and less people knew the word of God. For $1.75, you could kill somebody. For $2.25, a priest could have a mistress.

Or for $12, you could be forgiven of all your sins. How twisted that got. How twisted that was.

Now, this is one segment. Okay, but while this is going on and entered into a time of history we call the dark ages, there was something else going on. There was a church that began in England. Tradition actually tells us that Joseph of Arimathea went and started this church in England.

That's tradition. We're not sure about that, but a true remnant stayed with those original languages. In about 535, there was a Bible college that sprung out in Iona, Scotland that for the next thousand years, the evangelism that happened all over the world came out of this one Bible college in Scotland.

They were kind of the rebels, if you will. So a lot of things happened over that thousand years, but to kind of boil it all down, we know that the Bible stayed uncorrupted in those original languages. And we know this by an interesting thing. We know it by several things, but one of the things is we have Hebrew scrolls of the Old Testament that are over a thousand years old. We've compared them to the Dead Sea Scrolls that were 1,200 years going back 2,200 years. And we've compared that Hebrew scroll with the Dead Sea scrolls to the Bible that we have today.

The text has not been corrupted. The Latin version of the Latin Vulgate was corrupted. There was a man, Lineacre, who went and studied Greek so he could read the original languages. He went into the Latin Vulgate and he read it and he was shocked.

He said, you know what? Either this is not the gospel or we're not Christians. See, because as he read it, he saw the disparity between what the church at Rome was teaching and what the Bible was saying about the just shall live by faith and we're saved by grace alone. And he was staggered at it. And of course this began the Reformation.

And you have heroes of the faith like John Wycliffe who translated from the Latin Vulgate into the English. And he started teaching these things. The church got very nervous. They hated him later. They hated him so much later, 15 years after he died, they excommunicated him. 46 years after he died, the Pope said, dig up his bones, burn them and throw them in the river. And his crime translated in the Bible into English. It entered a dark time. It was a horrible time. They killed five men and two women, burned them at the stake.

You know what their crime was? They were teaching the Lord's Prayer to their children in English. But still God had her in that. God had her in that. We've got Fox's Book of Martyrs in the bookstore. If you're not familiar of what all happened to believers during that time, let me encourage you to dig a little bit. And when you think you're having a bad day, I keep a copy in my office.

When I think I'm having a bad day, I dig that out and I read a couple of those stories and go, it ain't so bad. Because people were willing to die. Martin Luther translated from the original Greek into German. And again, this fueled fire to the Reformation. Then a man, William Tyndale, many of us have never heard of him. He's called in some intellectual circles, the father of the English language. See, because when he translated from the original languages into English, and that was the first time in English that had been done, Shakespeare quotes over 5,000 verses that this man translated.

The King James version contains 90% of what one man, Tyndale, accomplished over a lifetime. He did it at a great price. After he did this, he had to stay on the run for nine years, moving from town to town. And then finally, through a betrayal, he was arrested. Stayed 500 days in a dungeon. The only writing we have from that period is that he said, if you could give me two things, he wrote to the governor of the castle, if you give me two things, I would sure like a cap because of the congestion and the inflammation and since it's winter.

But above all, please send me my scrolls and my Hebrew dictionary. After 500 days, they brought him out. They gave him an opportunity to recant, and he said, I'm not gonna recant. May God open the king of England's eyes. And they strangled him, and they burned him at the stake. We need to know who these men are because they paid such a price for us to have the uncorruptible word of God. Word of God. What's interesting to me is that the modern church freely and carelessly gives away this book that these men of wisdom and honor died that we might have. That some people are saying, you know what?

We don't need to teach the word of God. We need to get out of the book. This is a precious book. I hope it gains more and more value. I hope this morning you've gained some insights and that you see it more as a treasure.

Because you know what? The attacks against this book, they're not gonna slow down. As we see time winding down, we're gonna see attacks against this book even speed up more. This is the precious word of God. In it, we can learn how we might have eternal life. This book gives us hope.

The hope is not of you. It's of God. And you need to know your sword. I know for many of you, because again, I surveyed, I walked around people and I said, how did we get the Bible?

How did this happen? How did, you know, and I got some interesting answers. But we need to know these things. But we need to know these things.

You need to know these things. And I understand I'm okay if you didn't know these things because they haven't been taught in the church today. I understand that.

I sympathize with that. But please don't in arrogance think, well, I don't need to know them. That's why I don't know them. No, friend, if you're following Jesus, you need to know these things so that you can have discussions with people who don't know Jesus and so you can know your sword. It's a weapon. Know your weapon. Know your weapon.

Because this is what brings freedom to people in bondage. This is what gives hope to a world that is without hope. And this is the book where Jesus says, come to me, all you that are heavy laden, all you that are heavy laden, and I'll give you rest. Do you need rest this morning? Do you think that you're sufficient within yourself and you don't need any of these things I'm talking about? Well, may the Lord bring you to the place that you realize that you're not sufficient of yourself so that you can gain what you will not lose. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for the word of God. Lord, we corporately and individually ask for forgiveness, for not valuing it as a treasure.

Lord, thank you for the treasure that it is. Lord, thank you that it offers us hope and freedom. Perhaps you're here this morning and you don't know Jesus. Perhaps you sat here this morning and you thought, well, I thought doing the best you could was what Christianity was all about. No, the fact is without Jesus, we're without hope. He died because our best is not good enough.

We can't reach that standard of perfection. And perhaps this morning you've been freshly convicted of that. Then I want to encourage you that the offer still stands, that Jesus has His hand extended towards you. I encourage you to come. Friend, do you know for sure that your sins have been forgiven?

You can know right now. I want to lead you in a short, simple prayer, simply telling God you're sorry and asking Him to help you to live for Him. Please pray this prayer with me out loud right now. Dear Jesus, I believe you died for me that I could be forgiven. And I believe you were raised from the dead that I could have a new life. And I've done wrong things. I have sinned.

And I'm sorry. Please forgive me of all those things. Please give me the power to live for you all of my days. In Jesus' name.

Amen. Friend, if you prayed that prayer according to the Bible, you've been forgiven. You've been born again. So congratulations, friend.

You just made the greatest decision that you will ever make. God bless you. If you prayed that prayer with David for the first time, we'd love to hear from you. You can visit crossthebridge.com to receive our First Steps package with helpful resources to help you begin your walk with Christ.

Or you can write to Cross the Bridge at P.O. Box 12515, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 27117, and share how God is working in your life. You know, the Bible tells us that the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. But it does cost for us to come and bring that message to you and to others in your neighborhood, through radio, through the internet, and through the mobile technologies that God has gifted us to be able to use. So if you'd like to support this ministry, please go to crossthebridge.com, click on the donate button, and ask God how much he would have you give, either on a one-time basis or a continuing basis each month to help ensure that the teaching of God's Word continues to go out through Cross the Bridge.

Thank you so much. Well, DA, before we go, what are some ways that we can bless our listeners? Each day you can wake up with encouragement from Pastor David through the Word of God, with his email devotional, life lessons to consider, a daily reading plan, and a thought to meditate on throughout your day from the heart of David McGee. Those are terrific, and it's easy and it's free. So folks, sign up today at crossthebridge.com. Thanks again for listening, and join us next time as David McGee continues teaching verse by verse in the Gospel of John.