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Sermons

Subject 16 : The Gospel According to JOHN

[Chapter 6-12] Believe in Jesus Who Came from Heaven as Your Savior in Your Heart (John 6:41-51)

Believe in Jesus Who Came from Heaven as Your Savior in Your Heart
(John 6:41-51)
“The Jews then complained about Him, because He said, ‘I am the bread which came down from heaven.’ And they said, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that He says, ‘I have come down from heaven’?’ Jesus therefore answered and said to them, ‘Do not murmur among yourselves. No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me. Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.’”
 
 

The Lord Is the Bread of Life

 
In today’s Scripture passage, our Lord said that He came down from Heaven. It was to give us eternal life that the Lord came down from Heaven. He came from Heaven to become our bread, to feed us this bread of life, and to thereby save the souls dying from sin. Our Lord Jesus is not of the earth. He emphasizes the fact that He came down from Heaven in obedience to the will of the Father. The reason for this is because He is not of the earth, but He is the Son of God the Father in Heaven. 
Therefore, we must recognize that Jesus, the only begotten Son sent by God the Father, is our Savior and Lord, and we must believe so. Indeed, we should never think of Him merely as one of the four great sages or just a founder of a religion. Our Lord said that He is the bread that came from Heaven. It can’t be emphasized enough just how important it is that He came down to this earth from Heaven according to the will of the Father to save us sinners from all our sins.
There are two types of faith among today’s Christians: Some believers mistakenly believe in the man-made doctrine of prayers of repentance, while the people of the right faith believe in the gospel of the water and the Spirit proclaiming that Jesus came down from Heaven and saved us from the sins of the world. Every Christian adheres to either one of these two types of faith. The former believers have made up their own doctrine of salvation and believe in it as they like, but they can never blot out their sins from their hearts no matter how ardently they might believe in Jesus, and therefore they will be cast into hell in the end. We should never follow their way.
Our Lord said clearly, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven” (John 6:51). The Son of Man is the bread that came down from Heaven. Even though our Lord was born on this earth through the body of a woman, He is the Savior who came down from Heaven. He is God Himself who, in order to become our true Savior, came to this earth incarnated in the flesh of man. That is the gist of today’s Scripture passage.
All of us must believe in this passage. The Lord does not want us to believe in Jesus just as a matter of religion. Why did Jesus say to these Jews that He was the bread that came down from Heaven? Why did He repeatedly underscore the fact that He had come down from Heaven, that He was now speaking according to the Father’s instruction, and that He had come only because He was sent by the Father? It was to make it clear to you and me that Jesus is the God of salvation who came down from Heaven, and to make us believe in this. That is an absolutely indispensable Truth that cannot be emphasized enough.
Jesus, in whom we believe, is not just a slightly better man than us, who are all equally human, but He is the Creator God Himself who is incomparably more exalted than us. He is the One who created the universe and everything in it, and He is the One who came to this earth as our Savior. In other words, when we had fallen into sin deceived by Satan’s temptation and were suffering, when we were sentenced to hell for eternity and placed under the curse, the Lord came down to this earth forsaking His throne of glory in Heaven and saved us from the sins of the world. Jesus is the One who truly came down from Heaven, and He is our Savior. We are saved from our sins when we believe in what Jesus from Heaven did for us on this earth. It is absolutely indispensable to have this kind of faith.
Our Lord said in John 6:43-44, “Do not murmur among yourselves. No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.” As a matter of fact, we find grace only if God the Father leads us to Jesus. Unless God leads us to be saved by knowing and believing in the gospel of the water and the Spirit, no one can believe in Jesus as the Savior. Jesus, who made the universe and everything in it, also reigns over our salvation, our life and death, and our fortune and misfortune. As well, Jesus is the Triune God together with God the Father, who is His Father and our Father, and the Holy Spirit. It is this Triune God who has led us to meet Jesus, believe in Him, reach our salvation, and put on the glory of Heaven.
This world is indeed full of countless Christians. Yet even though there are many Christians professing to believe in Jesus, what is the state of today’s Christianity? Those who believe in Jesus properly within the Word of Truth are extremely few. To blot out our sins, Jesus came down from Heaven by being born through the body of the Virgin Mary; at the age of 30, He was baptized to shoulder all the sins of mankind; He then carried the sins of the world to the Cross and was crucified to death; in three days, He rose from the dead again; and now, He is sitting at the right hand of the throne of God the Father. Few Christians believe in Jesus with such understanding. In fact, even though every Christian should have this kind of faith, there are far many more Christians who lack it than those who have it. 
What kind of faith exalts God? It is the kind of faith that does not seek to establish one’s own righteousness, but instead believes entirely in what God has done for us to save us, thanks Him, and gives all glory to Him. This is the kind of faith that God wants from all of us.
Every Christian must believe infallibly and unambiguously that Jesus came down from Heaven. We must believe in Jesus who has become our Savior by coming from Heaven, exalt Him, and give our thanks to Him. We must believe that He took upon our sins by being baptized; we must believe that He carried them to the Cross to bear the terrifying punishment of crucifixion; we must believe that He gave us new life by rising from the dead again; and we must believe that He has given us the Millennial Kingdom and the everlasting Kingdom of God that will come soon. To believe in all these things clearly and based on the Word is the right faith. God wants us to have faith in what He has done for us. We must believe in His righteousness and exalt it. God is pleased to accept precisely such people who know, praise, and exalt His righteousness, love, and salvation. I admonish all of you to become this kind of people who believe in the glory of Heaven that God has prepared for us and thank Him for it. 
To explain the purpose of creating us mankind, the Bible says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:3-6). God made the universe and everything in it, created mankind, and placed you and me on this planet earth, as well as everyone else, all in order to reveal just how exalted He is, how merciful He is, how full of love He is, how He has given such perfect salvation, and how many blessings He has given to us mankind—to thereby make us praise the glory of His grace with our faith. 
I thank God for enabling us to praise Him. His love truly knows no bound, His power is truly amazing, and His mercy is truly fathomless. He is indeed marvelous. Our Lord is saying that it was because He wanted to receive such praise, thanks, and prayers from us that He made us born on this planet earth, and then born of the gospel of the water and the Spirit one more time. 
 
 

We Must Have Faith in the Gospel of the Water and the Spirit

 
We must now become the kind of people who praise and exalt the righteousness of God. We must believe that Jesus, God Himself, came down to this earth from Heaven in order to save us from our sins; that He was born through the body of a virgin incarnated in the flesh; that He took upon all our sins at the age of 30; that He was condemned for all the sins of the world on the Cross; and that He has made us God’s everlasting children. You and I must grasp the status of Jesus, our Savior who came down from Heaven, exalt Him accordingly, thank Him for saving us with our wholehearted faith, and receive the blessing of salvation by this pure faith. The Lord is pleased by our faith and wants to receive our praise and glory. You and I both need this kind of faith.
Jesus emphasized repeatedly to the Jews that He had come from the Father. He did this so that they would reach an understanding of His divinity. However, the Jews rejected Him to the end. God wants everyone to believe that Jesus is God Himself and the Savior who came down from Heaven to save mankind from its sins. In other words, Jesus does not want us to know Him merely as one of the great men in human history. Therefore, it cannot be allowed that anyone should consider Jesus just as one of the four famous, great sages of world history. God told us to believe in Jesus who came down from Heaven. Jesus is the Savior who came from Heaven to save you and me from our sins. The Lord wanted us to know what He had done for us, and to thank and praise Him from the depth of our grateful hearts. That’s because He had made us mankind in order to be glorified through us.
If you want to have the right faith, you must believe in the gospel of the water and the Spirit wholeheartedly. You must not regard Christianity only as one of the many religions of the world, nor believe in it as such. You should never believe in Jesus as if you were choosing just one religion from many. God will be disappointed and enraged if you believe like this. We have to recognize Jesus as God. Jesus created the universe and everything in it. He made not only the mountains, the seas, and the rivers, but He also made the galaxies in the universe, and everything invisible as well. My fellow believers, is this how you believe?
Yet despite this, too many Christians today think that Jesus who came down from Heaven was born of the earth. Having misunderstood Him like this, they believe in Him mistakenly. Just how gravely wrong is this? My fellow believers, if the Jesus in whom you and I believe were merely a highly influential and respectable man on this earth, then He could not have become our Savior. That’s because the status of the One who can save all of mankind on this earth bound in sin and destruction must be not of someone born of the earth, but it must be that of God Himself. Only when God Himself comes can our salvation be perfected. My fellow believers, do you believe like this? You must grasp this and believe so.
God is really frustrated. He is not frustrated at you, who are righteous, but at the Christians of this world who still have not been born again. That is because even though God loved the world so much that He sent His only begotten Son, and even though Jesus, God Himself, forsook His throne of glory in Heaven and came to this earth to save us sinners from our sins, people still do not recognize this Jesus who came from Heaven and only think of Him as someone born of the earth. This is the same sin that the Jews in today’s Scripture passage committed by refusing to believe in Jesus, saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that He says, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (John 6:42)
My fellow believers, not to believe is sin (John 16:9). When someone says that he believes in Jesus but not as God Himself, his faith is fundamentally of his own making, and therefore he may be pious when it suits his heart, but if something goes wrong, he is bound to display his true color by renouncing his life of faith. This kind of capricious faith, one that embraces Jesus only if needed and forsakes Him when no longer needed, is not true faith. 
It is precisely because Jesus, who came down from Heaven, is God Himself that He is our Savior, our Shepherd, our Judge, and our everything. That is why we should never believe in Jesus in whatever way we want. He is the Creator who made us, and our Savior. How could we believe in the Creator just arbitrarily, when our everlasting life and all heavenly blessings depend on Him? 
In the ancient Roman Empire, its emperors were regarded as gods. In ancient China, the Zhou dynasty called its king “the son of the heavens,” which is another way of calling him the son of God. In modern-time Japan also, its king was called the “heavenly emperor,” deifying him to the status of a divine son, and this deification united the country and led to the rise of Japanese militarism that eventually launched the Pacific War. Do you infer from this that Jesus ranks somewhere among such emperors? No, Jesus is the very God who created the universe and everything in it, irrespective of whether you and I believe so or not. 
When some angels in the realm of His creation rebelled against Him, Jesus drove them out and created mankind in the image of God. And as God loved the world so much, He made you and me be born on this earth to make us His children, and sent Jesus His only begotten Son. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit had planned to make us God’s own children by saving us, and fulfilled it all. The One who came from Heaven according to this will is called Jesus. Coming from Heaven, He has saved us through the water, the blood, and the Spirit (1 John 5:6-8). This Truth is written in the Bible so clearly that no one can refuse to believe in it.
 
 

Whom Does God the Father Lead to Jesus?

 
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who mourn over their sins, who are poor in spirit, and who cannot find satisfaction from the things of the earth—these are the people whom God leads to Jesus. Such people’s hearts are naïve and honest like a child before God, even though they may have no possession or knowledge. In other words, if there are people who, even though they do not know Jesus that well, suffer because of their hearts’ sins, and therefore are desperately looking for the Savior, then the Father leads such people to Jesus. That is why the Lord said, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” If you have now met Jesus by believing in the gospel of the water and the Spirit, it is because the Father has led you that you have come to know this Jesus and believe in Him.
However, there are way too many Christians on this earth who exalt their own righteousness rather than the righteousness of God, even as they profess to believe in Jesus. They keep raising themselves up high, claiming, “As I prayed earnestly to God, I saw a vision in my dream, and I was saved. I was empowered when I fasted and prayed.” In the end, they are claiming that they met the Lord all because of their own merits, thanks to their own piety and godliness. 
That is not what true faith is like. True faith exalts God and praises Him. God Himself came down from Heaven, and to become our Savior for us, He was baptized, crucified to death, and resurrected from death. To believe that Jesus has become our true Savior through the gospel of the water and the Spirit, to thank Him with this faith, and to revere and believe in what God has done for us—none other than this is the right faith. 
We just sang praise a short while ago. When we praise, Jesus saturates our hearts and our thoughts. Through our praise, the salvation of Jesus and His love and absolute power completely imbue our souls, as sponge is soaked with water. In other words, what He has done for us fills our hearts while we sing praise. Why? Because it’s an undeniable fact that He has saved us perfectly, and we recognize this completely with our hearts. That is why while we praise, our hearts are filled with thankfulness and reverence for God.
To praise is to commend. Commending God for loving us, saving us from sin, and blessing us is to praise Him. This is how we actually believe, and we want everyone else to also have the same faith. However, for those who think that they met Jesus through their own righteousness, whom should they praise? Such people should praise themselves. They should sing, “♬I’ve met the Savior through my piety; ♬I’ve been saved thanks to my self.” To be more precise, such people should not even praise the Lord at all, since there is hardly anything that the Lord has done for them, and if anything was achieved at all, it’s all because of their own merits.
Jesus said in John 6:45, “It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.” God the Father wants everyone to hear and learn His Word, and to come out to Him by believing in His Word. God wants the pure souls who, suffering from the sins of their hearts, are looking for the Savior to meet the righteous who have been saved through the gospel of the water and the Spirit, come to know the real God through them, find Jesus in the Word, and reach their salvation. That is why the Bible says that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). What about you then? Have you also learned about Jesus and reached your salvation through those who have truly met Him, those who have truly been saved?
From whom you learn is critically important. In the Old Testament, the one whom God abhorred and hated the most was Jeroboam. After the passing of Solomon, king of Israel, his son Rehoboam succeeded the throne. At that time, Jeroboam and the people asked Rehoboam to lighten the heavy burden that his father Solomon had placed on the people. Jeroboam was originally an officer in King Solomon’s court favored by the king. However, as King Solomon came to worship pagan gods, God had prophesied that He would tear the people of Israel into two and make Jeroboam king of ten tribes, and because of this prophesy, Jeroboam had fled to Egypt to escape from Solomon’s persecution. 
With the death of Solomon, Jeroboam was now back in Israel, pleading the new king to lighten up the yoke imposed on the people. However, King Rehoboam ignored this request of Jeroboam and the people, and he also ignored the advice of the elders from his father’s court. Instead, he listened to his devious friends’ advice, and deciding to oppress the people even more, he said to them, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges” (1 Kings 12:14). As a result, the people turned against the house of David, and ten of the twelve tribes of Israel, excluding the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, crowned Jeroboam as their king and founded another kingdom. Israel was now divided into north and south, like today’s Korea.
Jeroboam became king completely unintended. After assuming the throne, Jeroboam thought about his situation, and he reckoned that since he had become king even though he was not of the royal family, it was undeniably an act of high treason. So fearing potential backlash in the future, he came up with a cunning scheme. What was most important for the people of Israel was the sacrificial system enshrined in the Tabernacle and its priests. Jeroboam thought that every year, on the tenth day of the seventh month, the people would go up to the Temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices, and since Jerusalem was under Rehoboam’s control, the people might turn their hearts back to Rehoboam the king of Judah and rise up against him. So, he made two golden calves, placing one in Bethel and the other in Dan, and made the people worship them there. Not only this, but Jeroboam also changed the date of the Day of Atonement that was set for the tenth day of the seventh month to the fifteenth day of the eighth month, and he even appointed ordinary people to priesthood, when the priesthood of the Tabernacle was open to only Levites. It is from then on that lawlessness came to prevail in Israel, and the people’s faith was ruined.
Jeroboam ignored the Word of God and changed the statutes established by Him all on his own. God abhors the most this sin of corrupting the Truth deviously by changing it ever so slightly. In other words, God hated Jeroboam’s sin the most. That’s why He put Jeroboam to death. As Jeroboam’s son followed in his father’s sinful ways even after he succeeded him, God put him to death as well. In fact, most of the succeeding kings of Israel walked in the way of Jeroboam, and as a result, they bore the same wrath of God that was brought upon the house of Jeroboam. 
It is so important from whom you learn, and under whom you lead your life of faith. Jesus said, “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me” (John 6:45). The Lord wants you to believe and learn from those who have heard and learned the Bible according to how God the Father has taught, and for you to also teach others as you have learned. That is why our Lord, having completed everything on this earth, said the following upon His ascension: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). This means that only the born-again disciples of Jesus can truly bear yet more disciples. The Apostle Paul therefore also said to Timothy, “But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them” (2 Timothy 3:14).
God our Father wants every soul to understand and believe in Jesus properly. In other words, God wants the believers who have learned from the Father to teach the lost properly, and for the lost to also believe properly. God demands such faith from us. You and I are very fortunate. We believe in Jesus who came down from Heaven, and we believe that He has become our Savior by being baptized, dying on the Cross, and rising from the dead again. As we have been saved by this faith, and as we are now preaching this Truth of salvation, God is truly pleased with us. 
We are spreading the gospel all over the world. God is helping us in many ways to proclaim His gospel throughout the whole world. By allowing the 2002 FIFA World Cup to be hosted by Korea, God made my country known across the world. As the Korean team reached the semi-final against all odds, my country made a lasting impression in the minds of people all over the world. We are preaching the gospel of the water and the Spirit throughout the whole wide world, and God has strengthened and fostered an ideal environment for us, so that no one may ignore us. I believe that God has done these things because He is pleased by us believing in and preaching the gospel of the water and the Spirit, and to make it possible for us to spread this gospel of Truth further and wider across the entire world. I am so thankful for this.
More recently, we have printed stickers and name cards of our mission in several languages to introduce our website all over the world. Our coworkers in each country are now sharing these name cards and stickers with their people. Through this, the weary souls who are looking for the Truth will visit our website and find the way of life. Although many people have already visited our website, their number will increase exponentially in the days to come.
Before closing, let me share with you just one more verse here from John 6:46. “Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father.” Jesus said here that only He who is from God has seen the Father. There is no one who has ever seen God physically. Only Jesus has seen the Father. However, He also said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). We the born-again therefore have seen Jesus, and therefore we have also seen the Father. Indeed, among all Christians, only those who believe in the gospel of the water and the Spirit have seen the Father, and only they are able to share His love and salvation.
Today, there are so many people professing to believe in Jesus. Yet many of today’s Christians front their own righteousness, and still others take pride in their own denominations. Furthermore, they make no mention of the gospel of the Truth, that Jesus has come by the gospel of the water and the Spirit and saved us humans from all our sins. Many pastors preach the Word of God just a little only as a dressing, and their sermons mostly invoke the congregation to offer more church donations. They raise someone who is slavishly faithful to his own church and pastor through his own piety and righteousness, and make him testify his zealousness so that the congregation would serve the church like him. This kind of faith is a false faith. The correct faith is to believe in what God has done for us, not to front one’s own devotion or righteousness. There also are some Christians who blindly claim to have no sin even as they have no clear foundation of the Word, but such people’s faith is an arbitrary faith that deceives themselves (1 John 1:8).
What kind of faith should you and I have then? He who came down from Heaven has saved us through the gospel of the water and the Spirit. He fulfilled all His promises of salvation to perfection, exactly as He had prophesied. We the born-again believe in every Word of promise and in the next world of glory to come that God has promised to us. That’s why we live our lives with thanksgiving and glorifying God. It is when we have faith in the God-spoken Word, not our own arbitrary faith, that God is pleased. Even though we are too insufficient and weak before God, by believing in this God of utter perfection and unsurpassed majesty, in what He has done for us and will do in the future, and by commending Him, we can still put on all His grace. That is how we can offer our praise to commend Him. God has given this kind of grace to you and me. And He wants us to spread this grace all over the world. 
Even though you and I are insufficient, God Himself came down from Heaven, and He has clothed us in His heavenly grace and glory. That is how we have come to live our lives filled with blessings and gratefulness, all by believing in Him. And that is how we have also come to attain everlasting life. My fellow believers, do you believe that God has given you eternal life? Eternal life means that you will never die but live forever in happiness.
God had promised in the Old Testament that He would save us from all our sins, and when the time came, our Lord came to this earth and saved us perfectly through the gospel of the water and the Spirit according to His promise. Likewise, God will also fulfill His promise to give us paradise on earth. So we wait in hope. Sooner or later, you and I will reign over this planet earth for a thousand years. After we reign the Millennial Kingdom for a thousand years, the Lord will then resurrect the dead—that is, those who did not believe in the gospel of the water and the Spirit—into immortal bodies for the last judgment, cast them out into hell, and forever seal the lid. And the righteous who are born again of water and the Spirit will enjoy eternal life with God forever in His everlasting Kingdom.
Because we believe that the Lord has given us such blessings, we have hope. Because of this faith of ours, we are filled with happiness day after day. Born again through the gospel of the water and the Spirit, you and I are now preaching this true gospel whenever and wherever. Even though we are insufficient, we thank God with our faith, and we gladly carry out this work with satisfaction. If we only look at our circumstances, there are many things that frustrate us; however, when we ruminate on all the blessings that the Lord who came down from Heaven has given us, we are able to live with forever grateful hearts. I give all my thanks and glory to God for giving us such blessings. 
 
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