Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through John 13:18-30, focusing on Jesus' experience of betrayal by Judas. He emphasizes that Jesus knew of the betrayal in advance, illustrating God's sovereignty and the importance of trusting in His plan during difficult times. The sermon highlights how Jesus responded to betrayal with love and compassion, urging listeners to guard their hearts and choose humility over bitterness when faced with betrayal in their own lives.
Welcome and Housekeeping
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen. Well, thank you, men.
If you have a child who wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, they'll be doing that this morning. Like he said, it's great to see Miss Elaine here.
It's great to see Dale. It's also good to see Dennis here. Dennis has had some surgery recently as well. Good to have him back with us and be praying for my wife. She's normally here.
I sort of feel lost without her here. I don't know if you know, but I do look at her about 80% of the time while I'm preaching. I make eye contact to see if what I'm saying is resonating.
She woke up yesterday not feeling well, and then this morning when we left to come to men's breakfast, she said, James, I am not feeling well enough to come to church.
And I said, okay, stay home. And then she texted me and said, Brody's not feeling well. So they're staying at home away from everybody.
So if I feel a little off, it's because half of me is not here. And so be praying for them, be praying for her.
But today we're going to be in John chapter 13. We're going to look at verses 18 through 30. We're beginning to walk through this passage that Jesus begins to teach his disciples.
And so he's in his last and final teaching, his biggest portion of teaching that we have recorded in the book of John. And he is in one setting in the upper room. He sits down with his 12 disciples. Last week we looked at him living in humility and him washing his disciples' feet,
loving his disciples, washing the one's feet that's going to betray him, washing the people's feet that are going to deny him and forsake him while he's on the cross, and still loving them.
And then today we're going to be looking at betrayal.
We're going to look at Jesus and how he handles betrayal and how we can sort of learn what to do, how to respond when betrayal happens in our life. And so we're going to look through this passage.
Ben, as I was telling someone this morning, one of the encouraging verses that I've looked at this week through this passage, you know, you can read a verse and you sort of know it, you know what it says and you sort of read by it in your Bible reading.
But when you really begin to study and you sit down,
there are some words and just statements that have just helped my heart out this week. Hope it helps yours as well as we look through this. But let's stand out of reading God's word. Verses will be on the screen as well for you today.
Scriptural Context of Betrayal
Bible says, verse 18, I am not speaking about all of you because I know those I have chosen, but scripture must be fulfilled. The one who eats my bread and raises his heel against me. I'm telling you that it now,
now before it happens so that when it does happen, you will believe that I am he. Truly, I tell you, whoever receives anyone I sends receives me. And the one who receives me receives him who sent me. When Jesus had said this, he was troubled in his spirit and testified,
truly, I am saying to you, one of you will betray me. The disciples start looking at one another, uncertain of which one he was speaking about. One of the disciples,
the one that Jesus loved was reclining close beside Jesus. And Simon Peter motioned to him to find out who he was talking about. Right?
Peter wants to know what's going on. And so he leaned back against Jesus and said, Lord, who is he? And Jesus replied, he is the one that I will give the piece of bread to after I have dipped it. When he had dipped the bread, he gave it to Judas, Simon Iscariot's son.
After Judas ate the piece of bread, Satan entered him. So Jesus told him, what you're doing, do it quickly.
None of those reclining at the table knew what he said to them at this time. And since Judas was the keeper of the money, some thought that Jesus was telling him, go and buy needs for the festival.
Or so go and give something to the poor, give alms to the poor. Verse 30, and after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately left and it was night. Father, we love you. Thank you for the reading of your scripture.
Thank you for the passage that you've given us here to help us as we go through difficult times, to relate to us as you go through betrayal, as you go through hard times, as you were loving these disciples to the very end.
And I pray that you'd help us to come to a new light of this passage and help it to hurt, help our soul, help us to grow closer to you in everything we do. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated.
I, if you haven't been around me enough to know, I love history. I love civil war history. I love any history of any kind.
My wife just thinks it's the craziest thing that I will sit down and watch a historical documentary about some figure or some person and just try to learn or read a book.
And I got a book from Dale this past year at Christmas that I'm excited about reading, about one of the presidents and Teddy Roosevelt.
Historical Illustration of Betrayal
And so I just love history. So a lot of my illustrations come from history. And we know the history of the Civil War. And we know what happened. But in 1864, there was a young Confederate soldier named William Scott. William Scott was court-martialed and sentenced to death for one reason.
His reason was falling asleep on duty while he was doing his job. The night before his execution, he had wrote letters to home. He had wrote letters preparing people for what was going to happen, that he was about to be killed for not doing his job. And he also,
the word of his situation reached the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln began to review his case.
And he chose that in this moment, he was going to pardon him for not doing what he was supposed to do. The next day, he was lined up to go to the firing squad.
And as he was being made his way there, word came that President Lincoln had pardoned him. And Scott was released. And this was the orders.
He had sent a letter to Lincoln. And it's recorded that he told Lincoln, you're not, or Lincoln had told him, you're not going to be shot. I've ordered for you to be pardoned. Scott began to weep and cry.
He returned to his unit. And he wrote a letter back to the president. And he made this promise, I will make this up to you, Mr. President.
He had this obligation that you have saved me, and I'm going to do something to make it up. As the story goes on, a few months later, he was killed in battle while fighting bravely for the union.
And what most people don't know is there were others who weren't pardoned for doing different things.
And some of those men, in his same unit, turned around and deserted and turned their backs on their nation when their nation needed them most. Grace was extended to them. They were part of the same unit. And yet, every one of us responds in a different way.
History is full of all kinds of these stories who men were trusted, men were put in a position to do great things, and yet, when hard times came, they turned their back and they went the other way. There's something uniquely painful about when someone close to you betrays you.
Has anyone in here ever been betrayed by someone that's been close to them? I think it's safe to say that we can all look and we can all say, I've been hurt, I've had someone that I love, someone that was close to me, and yet they used something that they knew or
they used something that was close to us to do something and hurt me later on in life. See, Jesus didn't just face enemies from the outside.
We're gonna look later, we're gonna see how Rome came against Jesus and how Jesus was tortured and put to death because of the Roman soldiers, but the Roman soldiers didn't betray him in this moment.
It was one of his 12 from the inside that he had spent three and a half years loving.
Looked at Jesus and said, I'm gonna betray you, I'm gonna go the other way. And John 13 looks through this and begins to lay out that this is sort of the turning point against Jesus in this moment.
It's about a disciple, it's about someone who sat at the table, it's about someone who heard his sermons, it's about someone who saw the miracles that Jesus did, it's about someone who's just moments before this, Jesus had washed his feet.
And imagine this, it's about a person that Jesus just took this bread in this Passover meal and had dipped it to partake in the Passover meal in this room. And yet, Jesus was betrayed.
If you've ever been in life and walked through life and betrayal happens, we get to see how Jesus responded in love in this moment.
And the first thing we see is that there was this prophecy that was fulfilled. Verses 18 and 19, we have to understand that this betrayal did not take Jesus by surprise.
Jesus knew this was gonna happen, Jesus knew that these things were gonna happen, and he quotes a passage of scripture in Psalms 41 verse nine, and this is what it says, he that eats the bread with me is gonna lift his heel against me.
Now, Jesus is quoting this from the book of Psalms chapter 41 about David, and David is writing this about his son who is going to betray him.
His name was Ahithophel. And David knew that Ahithophel had began to turn and betray him from the inside out and said that there is this one who's going to betray me, he's gonna lift his heel against me. Now, David's greater son,
Jesus, that's the son of David, he's from the line of David, is now quoting that there is one that's around me that's going to betray me just as David was betrayed.
And this person is Judas as we see through this passage, and he's saying, I'm saying this because scripture has commanded that there's gonna be one that betrays me. Now, the scripture was settled the first thing we look at. The scripture here was settled. This was not an accident.
This was not a miscalculation. Some people say, well, this is a weakness of Jesus. Jesus didn't really know.
He wasn't all knowing in this moment, and if he really knew, would he have brought someone in?
Divine Sovereignty and Human Choice
Jesus choosing Judas was a fulfillment of divine promise and divine prophecy in this moment.
Now, what I want us to understand in this moment is just because Judas was chosen and Judas was gonna betray him, it does not excuse the human responsibility in this moment.
We have all sinned, we have all fallen short of the glory of God, and we all must repent of the things that we've done wrong. God was sovereign, but man still has an accountability, and they run side by side.
I tell people all the time, there are guardrails on the side of the roads.
If you're riding through the mountains, if you're going up into the Wilkes Mountains and you're going through Boone, there's a guardrail on this side, which is God's sovereignty, and there's a guardrail on this side, which is human responsibility.
We live in between those two things, and we go through life, and we go through this dealing of life of knowing that God is sovereign, but also knowing that we are responsible for our actions.
Judas in this moment was responsible for his actions just as God was sovereign to know that these things were going to happen.
And I'm good to know, and it's great to point out that the betrayal by Judas didn't derail the plan that Jesus had going for us.
Jesus came into this world to seek and to save that was lost, and his betrayal was part of the plan of the Father that was put down into plan before the foundation of the world.
When we can look at it, and we can see, and we can say, how was Judas able to do that? He saw Jesus.
He saw the miracles. He saw the works of the Savior. How was he able to turn his back on him? And we may not never know what exactly was the reason behind it, but I want to give us sort of an illustration to help us out.
My grandmother, she was a seamstress. She was a beautiful seamstress. She made wedding dresses. I've shared before, she made Dallin Hart, senior's wedding, or his wife's wedding dress. She made wedding cake. She made my wedding cake. You can say that
Dale Jr.'s wedding cake and my wedding cake were made by the same person because they were. And so there's some history here. But I would go into my grandma. We called her Nana.
We would go into her house, and she would have these mannequins up, and she taught sewing. She taught different things, and she would do different type of stitching.
And I can remember as a kid going and seeing these things and thinking, man, how did you do this? How did you able to embroider these things?
But I remember as a little kid going into a room where she had sewn some things, and she had something that was sort of against the wall, and you could only see the back of it.
And I said, Grandma, you made mistakes. I said, Nana, look at what did you do over here? And I just saw the back of it, and it was all the knots and the strings hanging down. And I said, Grandma,
this is the worst thing I've ever seen you make. I mean, you remember a six-year-old? We just say what's on our mind. Have you ever been around a six-year-old? And so I point this out. I'm like, Grandma, what is this? You destroyed this thing.
And she said, no, no, you're only seeing it from one side. And she walked over, and she took it off the wall, and she had turned it around, and it was this beautiful masterpiece. I don't even remember what it was. It was just beautiful cross-stitching and this beautiful image.
And oftentimes, that's how else we're looking at what is going on from the backside.
And God says, no, no, wait till I turn it around.
Wait till I take this image that you think is hard, that you think is betrayal, that you think is nothing, and I turn it around and I see the beauty of what God has for us in our life.
Oftentimes, when something hurts us or when someone hurts us, all we see is the chaos that's around. All we see is the hardness and the bitterness and the difficulties,
but are we trusting God enough to know that He's crafting something more beautiful than we'll ever imagine?
Oftentimes, it goes through the hard times that God is using those things to develop who we are and what God has developed in our life. And that's what it is saying here as Scripture is saying that this was settled in heaven, that this was going to happen, that Christ must be betrayed.
It was so that Scripture would be fulfilled. In verse 19, we see that the Savior was sovereign. It says this, that when His time had come, that you might believe that I am He. He uses the statement, I am He.
Now, in the English, we add the word He here. In the Greek, it's just I am.
And He is using this to echo the divine name that Jesus, that God uses when He meets with Moses. And He says, I am that I am.
As we go through Scripture, when it says, I am the Lord, Jesus is quoting this to say, listen, I am declaring that I am deity, that I am the Son of God, that I am coming so that this can be fulfilled, so that you don't lose strength when difficult times come.
I'm telling you this beforehand because if you weren't told beforehand that someone was going to betray you,
you may say, well, if He knew He was going to be betrayed, why didn't He say something beforehand? He said, so I'm going to tell you this beforehand.
Someone's going to betray me, and it's going to be someone in this room. And Judas and all of them begin to look around, and he says, I am. I am the Son of God. I am the one that created everything. This betrayal and this prophecy of betrayal was meant to build belief.
And only through Jesus do we have this faith, this building up of salvation that we can have, that we can trust that He is the I am in our life.
Not all circumstances and not through the relationships of life and not through the loyalty of friends are we built in this salvation, but it's only through Jesus and only through what He has done through the forgiveness of His
Jesus' Sympathy in Our Struggles
sins, through our sins, through His sacrifice, do we have this confidence in Jesus.
You see, you're going to go through hard times in life. You're going to go through betrayal. Many of us raised our hand in here. The betrayal in life should build us and anchor us in the confidence of who Christ is.
Christ isn't going to betray us. Christ isn't going to turn His back on us. Christ is there for us. As we looked last week, again, this is a progression. Christ is washing the feet of the man that's going to betray Him. So when we go through betrayal,
He sits there and He says, I know what you're going through. I can relate to you. I know what it's like to lose a friend. I know what it's like to lose a loved one. I know what it's like to go through the things that you're going through because I went through them.
He doesn't sympathize with us as someone who doesn't know these things.
As Hebrews says, He says that He sympathizes with us because He experienced these things and went through this. The question I have to ask us is when we go through these hard times, and specifically betrayal in our life, has betrayal made us bitter
or has it driven you to deepen your relationship with Jesus and who He is? Because oftentimes, this is what happens, right? Betrayal comes.
God, how dare you do this to me? God, why are you doing this to me? My mind always goes to Job in this, right? Job loses everything.
He loses his children. He loses his wealth. He loses his servants. The only thing he's got left is his wife, right? As I said this morning, Allison's not here. I feel like I'm halfway here today. His wife then comes to him and goes,
Job, what are you doing? Just curse God and die. Come on. God's forsaken you.
There's no one here for you. And he looks at her and says, woman, what are you doing? How can you even say that? The Lord gives. The Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. And oftentimes, we are like Job's wife in the story.
We get mad. We get bitter. We get angry. That's the human emotions that come out of us. And Job is saying, listen, he is sovereign. He is over all things. And God is,
through his son, showing us that when we live and dive deeper into who Jesus is, we grow in this relationship, though, that we understand that he is the Lord over all things.
And then we transition to verses 20 through 30, the second half of this portion of scripture. And he begins to prepare his disciples for what's coming.
I talk like this, to prepare for his coming hours. Jesus is going to go through some of the darkest moments of his days. Jesus is going to go through some of the hardest moments of his days. The disciples as well are going to go through the darkness.
And it was going to begin to rise. And it was going to be able to go through all this. And before Jesus, before Judas leaves,
John wants to remind us of something that I spoke about last week. Verse three says this, Jesus knowing that the father had given all things into his hands. He uses this little phrase called all things.
Now, if you were with me last week, I told you how I'm not an English major. I don't like English. I don't like the different verbs and adverbs and all the fun things. But every once in a while, the Lord has to push me and he has to push me to go deeper.
And so I pulled out this little phrase, all things in the Greek. And in the Greek, it's a simple word called panta, P-A-N-T-A. And what that simply means is everything.
Now, I want you to understand like this, John is intentionally placing this statement here to show that total authority and total control are in Jesus. And when he says that all things and everything is in the hands of Jesus, he is simply saying this, nothing happens outside of the control of God.
I want to illustrate like this to you. Nothing happens outside the control of God. There's a old little song we used to sing to little kids. He's got the whole world in his hands. You remember that song? He's got the whole world in his hands.
He's got the whole world. This is what it's saying. He is in complete control or he is in control of everything and his control is complete.
Trusting God's Control
Everything is in his hands, even Judas. Judas. When he chose Judas,
he knew that Judas was going to betray him. He knew that Peter was going to deny him three times and was going to forsake him in his deepest, darkest moment. He knew that.
He knew that every one of his disciples was going to turn their back on Jesus and only one, when he's on the cross and he looks down from the cross, only one disciple comes back to the cross.
And it was John who wrote this book, who came back and was standing there beside his mother Mary, but every single one of his 11 closest friends
was going to turn their back on him and was going to betray him. And in this moment, Judas, even Judas,
was in the hands of the Father, was in the hands of Jesus. I want to give us some things that the Lord gave me this week.
When someone mistreats you and does wrong things to you, remember he's got the whole world in his hands.
When someone comes against you and maybe causes you to get fired or something happens in your job and something difficult happens, remember he's got the whole world in his hands. When you lose a friend,
when you go through life and someone turns their back on you, he's got the whole world in his hands.
Parents, this morning, when your kid grows up and turns their back on Jesus and walks away from their faith, as hard as that is, as difficult as that to look at and to say, God, what did I do wrong?
What was it on me? Know that he's got the whole world in his hands. When death comes to us and death begins to mock us and takes away a loved one that was close to us, remember the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians,
O death, where is thy sting? Jesus has the whole world in his hands and Jesus is the one that's helping us walk through our life. When life seems out of control, you are never more secure than you are in the hands of Jesus.
When life seems crazy and chaotic, as the disciples were on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus was sleeping underneath the boat and the winds were crashing and the waves were coming and they went down and they woke up Jesus and they said, Jesus, do you not care that we're perishing?
Jesus woke up and looked at him and said, do you have any faith?
Where are you at right now in your life? Do you not know that even the winds and the waves listen to my command? And he said these three words, peace, be still. And the winds and the waves stopped completely and he said, I am in control.
Why don't you have faith? This is how it is in our life when we go through uncertainty.
As long as we're in the hands of Jesus, everything is going to be taken care of. I just was on a 12 hour, 13 hour flight to Israel and back and listen, long flights like that are not for the faint of heart.
They are difficult, they are long and you can't go anywhere, you're trapped in a little tin can.
And there was one time as we were on our way back from the Israel trip on the eight hour flight where we hit some turbulence and the light came on and said, make sure you're in your seat and buckle up and I'm not going to lie, I got a little nervous.
I'm 11,000 feet in the air. I'm a couple of miles up in the air and all of a sudden the plane's going crazy and the pilot came over and said,
listen everybody, it's going to be okay. Just remain calm.
I'm thinking, how can you remain calm right now? I'm about to go down. This plane's going down. I'm going to die. I'm not going to see my wife and kids anymore. Like these are the things that are going through my mind. But he as the pilot knew more than I did.
He could see out the front window. He could see where he was going. He knew the destination and he knew what was going to happen. I didn't.
And Jesus is looking at us this morning and says, trust me as the pilot of your life. Don't panic when times get hard.
Know that I'm at the table. Know that I'm there with you. I'm the pilot and I'm going through life. Just understand that these are the things that you're going to have to go through.
Do you believe he's in control only when life is calm?
Or when storms come and you're sitting at the table and you say, God, I don't know how I'm going to pay this bill. God, I don't know what I'm going to do for my kids right now.
God, I don't know how you're going to take care of these things, but I'm still going to trust in you. Are we able to trust in his control and his completeness even when those things are going on?
Number two, we see here in the second part of this passage, we see that his compassion was clear towards Judas.
Now this part, as I'm telling you, as I studied through this, this part of the passage, I guess I always just had this, you ever come into scripture or come into a story that you know and you sort of had these
preconceived thoughts like Judas was this devil sitting in the corner and everyone knew he was the devil.
He had the horn sticking up like he's the bad guy and you're like, yeah, go get Judas. Like you're going to go after him. Like this is what I sort of had. But notice how Jesus handles Judas. The Bible says that he dips his bread and gives it to him.
This would have been a gesture in the Passover meal that was an honored guest.
You would serve the honored guest, the most important person in the room first. And Jesus in this moment dips the bread and gives it to Judas saying, this is the most important person in the room right now. I am going to sow so much compassion to him.
I'm going to give him so much grace in this moment that he is going to be overwhelmed by the amount of grace that I give him.
Even in his betrayal and even knowing that Judas was about to leave the room, he gave him more kindness than sometimes we show the people that love us. One commentator said it like this, Judas leaves not because he was forced, but because he rejected the love that Jesus was trying to show him.
How often is it in our life that we show love to other people and they reject that love and we take it as a rejection of us when God says it's not a rejection of you, it's a rejection of me, the Father who loves you and you're loving them.
And now you're showing them this love and you are now showing them the love that Jesus has toward them.
I want you to notice something very peculiar in this passage and we don't have time to go to the other Gospels, but in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew, it talks about this interaction that the
disciples have with Jesus and it says in one moment that Peter even looked at the disciples and says, is it I? Am I the one that betrays Jesus?
One of the Gospels, I believe it's Luke, Judas actually says to one of the disciples, is it I? Am I the one that's going to betray him? In almost this mindset of false humility that we can have. But notice that Jesus never treated Judas ever any different than the other disciples.
Imagine it like this. We're walking down the road. They didn't have cars. They're walking down and Jesus is giving a command and he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Judas, get into the back, man. What are you doing? Like you've had, I've been a youth pastor for 14 years. You've got those teenagers that you're like,
man, can they just get to the back of the bus and just, can they get as far away from me as possible?
And sometimes, I've got a loving wife and she'll say, James, you're not treating that person right. You need to love them more. Right? Jesus never had to be told to treat Judas better than the rest. No one in the room ever suspected Judas as being the betrayer.
No one in this room said, oh yeah, I remember how Jesus treated Judas that day. I remember when he rebuked Judas and he didn't rebuke Peter. I remember, no, they never had this question in the entire ministry that Jesus had. The entire time that Judas was with Jesus, he never
once treated him any different than the other disciples. How many times before this night did Judas harden his heart before Jesus?
This wasn't the first night. We know that this was a plot in his heart that he had began to scheme. Some commentators think that it was because Jesus wasn't doing the things that Judas wanted to set the kingdom up now and to overthrow Rome.
There were some people that wanted him to be the authoritarian.
There were some people that think that he should have done more with money raising and Judas was the carrier of the money so he thought he should be raising more money and there are lots of speculations. We have no idea why Judas did this.
The only thing we know is that he hardened his heart toward the Lord. And this is what I want us to take away here today. How many times have you hardened your heart?
How many times have you resisted the correction of the Holy Spirit in our life and resisted changing for the sake of the gospel and changing so that we can become closer like Jesus? Right?
Jesus is telling him Judas I love you I care about you Judas I'm going to treat you as the most honored guest in the room I'm going to wash your feet I'm going to show you the most amount
of compassion that I can show you so that your heart will be changed. And Judas stepped into
complete darkness as we're going to look at in a minute. How often is that us?
How often is God coming to us and he's saying James would you just turn your heart back to me would you just do these things to love me more and we look at him and we say no I'm going to do my own thing God.
No Jesus I know you did these things but I prefer my own things over the ways that you have for me. We look at this very last verse verse 30 verse 30 I believe it's probably one of the
most sad verses in this entire passage that we've looked at so far. The Bible says and after receiving the priest of bread he immediately left and it was night.
The darkness was deep here. The darkness was so deep in this moment as you look at the verses and the words that John wrote as John writes this
biography of what's going on this historical event of what's going on one thing that you'll notice if you look at the book of John is John never wastes a word.
The Bible says at the end of the book of John he said that if all of the deeds and miracles and works that Jesus did were to be put to pen the paper the books of the world would not be able to contain them.
So we know that when John writes down a word he's writing it down for a specific purpose and when he writes down this word and it was night he was relating to three specific things. He's relating to the physical night. It was beginning to be dark outside
but there is a spiritual context as well there is a spiritual nightness that fell upon the room that when Judas left the entire mood of everything was there and then the prophetical night John was looking at this from
the past and saying the night of Jesus is murdered the night of Jesus is death for all of humanity happened in this moment. Throughout the gospel of John light and darkness are compared. Listen to a couple of verses Nicodemus came to Jesus
at night. There's a reason why he came to Jesus at night because he was afraid to come in the daytime he was afraid to come in the light and for people to see him and he was ashamed so he came to him at night.
The Bible continues on in the book of John it says that men love darkness rather than light. Jesus said this.
Jesus said that men would rather be in the darkness and do their deeds in the darkness than be exposed in the light time. And he also says that Jesus is the light of the world.
And in this moment in the bottom part of this passage these four little obscure words Judas is now stepping out of the light out of the light of Jesus and he's stepping into the darkness of sin
and as the Bible says as we look at this into permanent darkness a darkness that he will step away from and he will leave the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and step into an eternal darkness of torment because he could not turn his mind to Jesus.
His heart was so turned away from Jesus. Once Judas leaves we begin to walk through this next passage and I challenge you to read a little bit ahead and prepare your hearts and prepare your minds for this but once Judas leaves the tone begins to shift.
The true disciples remain but yet the cross is coming up.
You begin to see the tone of Jesus the imminent of Jesus in saying the clock is ticking disciples listen to what's going on this is what's going to happen to you this is what's going to go through this
is how you're going to go through life and now the tone of the entire message begins to change.
When you walk away from Christ church this morning your life only gets darker your life only becomes more and more despair and darkness the further away from Jesus we can get.
There's a story of a man who lived in a lighthouse and he had worked on this lighthouse his whole life and there was a storm that began to come in and as the storm came in he got nervous
that the lighthouse wouldn't hold and so he evacuated from the lighthouse and went further away from the lighthouse and the story goes that the further he got away from the lighthouse the more destruction came to him because the
lighthouse was the safety that he was in and he got nervous that the lighthouse wasn't going to provide safety and all of a sudden when he got further and further away more and more destruction happened.
This is what happens in our life when we get further away from the light when we get further away from the safety of Jesus Christ where again remember everything is in his hands. The darkness of the light the deception of Satan begins to come into our life.
What area in your life are you slowly stepping away and stepping into the night and stepping into the darkness of this world.
As Terry comes I want to leave you with just a couple of things. First thing I want to leave you with is how to live in betrayal. Sort of simplify everything I've said in the last 30 minutes. How do you live your life when betrayal happens?
Lessons from Betrayal
This may be something that you can write down. First is this trust the plan that God has for you. Know that God is not surprised by anything.
He doesn't look down from heaven and go oh my goodness I can't believe Jade is wearing a shirt today that has her name on it. I can't believe this is going to happen today.
Nothing takes God by surprise and when we go through difficulties when we go through hard times as difficult that can be know that God's plan is perfect. Second thing is this trust in the person.
There's a man whose name is Jesus who came into this world to die for each and every one of our sins to pay the price for our sins and he stands and he says I am he. I am the one that came to redeem you of your sins.
I am the one that has come to give you life eternal.
Trust the power that Jesus has. As I said he's got the whole world in his hands and all things are still in his hands.
It's not that once he went up to heaven and ascended into heaven and said hey while you're down here on this earth I'm going to just not have my hand on things. No we're still in his hands.
The last thing I'll tell us to do is this is guard your heart. Don't let betrayal make you like Judas.
You see when betrayal comes we respond one of two ways. We get bitter. We get mad. We turn against things
where we do what Jesus did. Jesus looked and he loved Judas and he said I don't want you to do these things. I'm sorry that you went this way. I'm going to continue to love you. I'm going to continue to do these things but there is a responsibility on that other person.
You see betrayal can make you do one of two things. It can make you hard. It can make you harsh and it can harden your heart.
Or it can make you like Jesus. It can make you humble. It can make you holy. And it can make you understand that what happens in your life is still held by the father. And that's what Jesus responded with. Jesus responded in humility.
Jesus loved Judas until the very end. He cared about Judas just as he cared about all twelve of his disciples. And Judas responded with hardness,
harshness, and this amount of hardening in his life that he couldn't stand to even be around Jesus anymore. And so he had to step outside of the light in order to do this. Jesus was betrayed but he was never beaten by that betrayal.
His betrayal led him to the cross and led him to the forgiveness of all sins in this world.
Closing Prayer and Invitation
And I'm here to tell us today that if you've been betrayed, if you've been hurt in life, neither are you beaten by this betrayal. We have the forgiveness of sins.
We have this man who lives who came and lived in this world to die for us so that we could have eternal life. If only we would trust in him as Terry is playing this morning. Only trust him. Only trust him.
Father, I pray that you would help us this morning to only trust in you. Father, help us to know that you're our Savior.
To know that you're the God who loves us, who cares for us, even when we make mistakes. Even when we do things that are wrong, you're still there with open arms and loving arms and saying, just come back to me. As Peter denied Jesus three times,
and yet he was still able to come back and he was able to be used in the entire book of Acts to set up the foundation of the church.
Lord, you're giving us grace and mercy. If only we'll turn to you. Father, I pray that you help us in this time of invitation to trust in you. In your name we pray. Amen.
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