OHC Sermon 7 05 2026

Okay, I'm just going to take a moment and age myself. I remember the Bicentennial. Anybody else? Yeah.

I remember it because my parents told me. No, I was there. They decided, my parents made it a big deal.

Our summer vacation was to South Dakota for 1976 and my dad grew a mustache for the first and only time in his life because apparently it was a thing in 1976 to grow a mustache for the Bicentennial. So we spent the Bicentennial summer going to Mount Rushmore and seeing and learning about history and growing and understanding, even at a young age, my parents putting into me what an important thing it is to understand the history of our country and who we are and what freedom means and how that can impact our lives and how that can open the door to us becoming who we are called to be. Now with that, my favorite amendment is not to have the freedom of press, which is okay.

These days it's sometimes a little odd to have the freedom of press because can you imagine growing up these days and not having the, knowing whether you hear it on TV or you read about it, whether it's true by what's supposed to be trusted and reliable sources and to know that there is so much opinion and wanting to skew things. And they do it on both sides. But they want to skew things to make it look like this side is evil and they don't know about who we are.

And it's tough. You see, the truth is that as we approach the 250th, as we are now at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there are some things that we have within what we are with the Bible and where we are that culture kind of tries to drive out of us. In fact, culture often, even in the United States, tries to treat the truth like it's the plague.

Like if we air the truth, it's going to ruin everybody's life. Well, the truth is, the truth is contagious. I mean, can you imagine not knowing whether something you read or something you see or you hear someone say is the truth day in and day out? And then they can come to know the truth.

And the truth makes all the difference in the world. The truth is contagious, but it's healing, it's not harmful, and it changes lives for the better. In fact, the founders worried that if America ever lost their faith, that the Constitution would fall.

So we are going to look, as we continue in this series on the good contagion, knowing that faith is caught more than it's just taught. I mean, we can teach and we can say things, but we want people to catch it. We want them to catch something within us that the world needs, and the world is craving integrity and honesty and things that are way beyond opinions and wanting to skew everything in a direction.

Will you stand as you are able? Our scripture this morning comes from John 8, 31 through 38. So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. They answered him, We are the offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.

How is it that you say you will become free? Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever. The son remains forever.

So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are the offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with the Father, and you do what you have heard from your Father.

The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

You may be seated. Jesus, in this passage, Jesus is just walking through line by line, basically saying, You have heard this, but I'm going to tell you the truth. You have come to believe this, but I'm going to tell you the truth.

And in fact, he's saying that without me, you don't know the truth, and you don't really know freedom. In the United States, we might not know exactly what freedom is. We think freedom means I can do whatever I want to do.

And, you know, to an extent, there's a lot of truth to that, except unless it steps on somebody else's feet, harms someone else, all that other stuff. The United States is not a theocracy. We don't say, You have to worship this way.

It is, you know, that's in that clause it says, There will be no government establishment of religion, as in government doesn't tell you how to worship. How many of you are wishing right now the government could tell us how to worship, because we don't know how to do stuff without the government. But Jesus is confronting people, and in fact, we think of Jesus, or we think of Christianity being, if you're going to confront someone, you confront someone that doesn't believe in God, and you give them that truth, and you talk to them, and you share it with them, and that's true.

And Jesus has been talking to the crowds, and at the end of the section, right before we start, in verse 30, it says, And some of them came to believe him. Well, praise God. But that doesn't mean it's all easy from this point forward.

They came to believe him, and then in verse 31, it starts with, And to those Jews who had believed in him. Who's he talking to? Believers or non-believers? Believers. They believe Jesus is the Messiah, but they don't know everything about Jesus.

He says, To the believers, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples. What does it mean to abide in Jesus' word, and how does that make you truly a disciple? Well, you don't follow someone unless you do what they say. That's pretty clear.

It's pretty straightforward. It doesn't say, You are truly my disciples if you deconstruct my word, and make it so it's something everybody can be palatable for everyone. He doesn't say, You can hear my words, and whatever sounds good to you, just pick those things out.

He says, Abide in my word. Now, the word abide is huge. Gerald Borchardt says, Truth is academic knowledge, but it is also knowing truth with a capital T. Now, I had turned in a paper when I went to seminary.

I told you I got in trouble once in a while when I was in seminary. And I was having fun with this paper, and I got in, and I sat down in front of the professor, and she said, You've got to be careful about how you use the word truth. And I said, Oh, what do you mean by that? She goes, Well, some people mean it in a different way.

And I said, Help me understand. And she said, You're saying truth here, and it sounds like you're saying it's the only truth. And I was like, Where am I? And so she tried to straighten me out so I wouldn't use truth like a capital T, like there was no real truth.

How do you have faith if you don't believe there is a truth? How do you have faith if you don't believe that Jesus is the truth? I mean, talk about abiding in Jesus' word. He said, I am the way and the truth and the life. So without the truth, we really don't have freedom.

Abiding is something that we are called to do in him. Borchert goes on to say that truth includes that Jesus didn't just challenge those who resist, but he challenged all of them. Verse 32 says, If you abide in my word, if you abide in the truth, the truth will set you free.

Now, he doesn't say to the believers that you are free. Does that make sense? It sounds counter-cultural to say, You may have received me even as a Lord and as a Savior, but if you don't abide in the truth, then you're not free. The only way to be free is to abide in the church.

Now, the word abide is a very tough word. If you abide by something, you're consistent with it. You live by it.

Abiding is living. It doesn't just say, I believe this. It says, I will follow you.

Show me where I'm messing up. And any part of us that Jesus said is not of the truth, we better be listening. Because the truth is where we get our true freedom.

That even as a follower of Jesus, until we abide in Jesus' word, we trust in the truth of who Jesus is and what his words are, then we're still slaves. It sounds weird to say that, even to Americans. It's very illegal for any kind of slavery, even though underground, it still exists, unfortunately.

Now, in verse 33, Jesus is saying, Hey, you've been told you're free, but I'm going to tell you the truth. Verse 33, they respond by basically saying, I don't think you get it, Jesus. We're descendants of Abraham.

We're his offspring. We have the blood of Abraham running through us. And you know, the covenant says that we are God's children.

And they also say, we have never been enslaved by anyone. You know, after Abraham, down the road, they ended up in Egypt. And they saw a lot of slavery.

And they experienced slavery. And they were freed from that. And they're thinking, once we were freed from that, we in our lifetime have never experienced slavery, so we are free.

Now, that is all a little bit questionable when you're under the Roman Empire. Are you free? Have you ever been enslaved? Do you have freedom of religion? Well, we're practicing Jews. Well, you do know that Rome put someone in a palace right by the temple who has to tell you what to do.

And when you're getting out of control and be Rome's advancement. And so you might kind of have freedom of religion. Do you have freedom of speech? Do you have freedom of speech? Can you go out there and say, Caesar smells like rotten eggs.

Not advisable. You can do that once. The freedoms that are given are limited in their culture.

And the culture wants us to think that we don't have freedom to air the truth because they think it's an airborne virus. They think it's going to ruin the world. They think everything's got to be little t truth so I can have my own truth.

Well, that's okay if that's true for you. But here's my own truth. And that means if we all just have our own truth, who is our God? Who's our God? Ourselves.

Or if we don't know, we'll just tell the government to take care of it for us. The truth is that if Jesus is our Lord and Savior, then we believe in that truth. We abide in his word and we follow him and that is how we use freedom.

Now, I love to use this almost every Fourth of July, but my favorite quote by Pope John Paul III is when he gave a speech on the Fourth of July one time, he said, Freedom isn't necessarily about being free to do whatever you want. Freedom is the freedom to do what you ought. See the difference between those two? You ought to love your neighbor.

You ought to care about other people. You ought to love God. You have the freedom.

You have the freedom to love God. We are not oppressed to the point where we can't love God, where we can't share Jesus Christ, where we can't release the truth and air it out to a world that needs God's love and God's grace and the truth of Jesus Christ. We still have that freedom.

And even if we didn't technically have that freedom, we still need to air the truth. In whatever situation. In fact, Christianity in the history of the world has thrived even more in places where the church is underground, where it's illegal, where you're not supposed to worship God or in countries today, they have churches, but those are government-sanctioned churches that are watered down.

So the truth is whatever the government allows. Christianity thrives under pressure. And if we don't take advantage of what we have right now, we are choosing not to have freedom of religion and trust in God.

Jesus responded to them after they said, we're children of Abraham. Jesus answered them, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. Now he changes that.

Orchard also talks about how in the Jewish culture, the rabbis would tell them, you know, because of your genealogy, you're good with God. And the rabbis would tell them and the rabbinic texts outside of the Bible would tell them that truth is that they are free. You know, we're not under Rome's thumb on everything.

We still practice Judaism. Jesus challenged the rabbinical concept of truth. He says, you've been told this.

Now hear the truth. The truth is that you're a slave to sin. So how many of you, the day you received Jesus, were free from all your sin? Well, that means you were entirely sanctified from the beginning.

When you receive Jesus, you have the opportunity to be free of your sin. The sanctification process says, okay, here's where I am weak. Now I need to rely on Jesus.

And Jesus can put that truth in us. But when we sin, anytime we sin, that shows a place where we are still slaves. Now Jesus came, the Messiah, the rabbinic text says the Messiah has come to free us from any oppression that Rome has over us.

And the Messiah will overthrow the Roman Empire. And Jesus came and he said, here's the truth. It doesn't matter if I overthrow the Roman Empire, if you're still a slave to sin.

So we want to give up that slavery. We want to trust it to God. And we want to move on and grow and know that.

Remember again that Jesus is talking to believers. These believers, Jesus is saying, you're a slave to sin. And it gets a little tougher.

He starts talking to them. In verse 35, it says the slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever. Again, challenging the rabbinic text.

Saying as long as we're a son or a daughter or an heir of what the covenant is from Abraham, then you're good to go. Jesus is saying that the rabbinical context of inheritance, sonship, being even a child of God, he's saying here's the truth. A slave to sin is not a legal child.

Do I have any part of me, God, who is still a slave to sin? Destroy it. Wipe it out. Break those chains, those bonds, and help me to trust in you.

Set me free, God. Set me free so I have no more there. And then Jesus tells them this truth.

So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. Do you believe that? That the freedom Jesus offers to set us free from sin is even better than freedom from Rome, than overthrowing Rome. It's a freedom that brings life.

It's a freedom that we have in Jesus. It's a freedom that makes us free in an air of salvation. The son of God, the truth, is who sets us free.

The truth is what happens in all of that. And with that truth, we have so much. Now he's basically saying the son, who is the son of God? Jesus.

And he starts a really, really friendly non-political argument about how. I've talked to my father. You don't know my father.

You know your father. And again, he's talking to who? Believers. Anytime we have sin, who is the master of that sin in our lives? Who's the master of that sin? It's Satan.

It's our fallen nature working within us. And Jesus is saying, when we have that sin, then we are not listening to God. I hope we can agree on that, that the sin is not God saying, hey, just go for it.

I know it goes against Jesus' word, but just go for it. The son sets us free, and so in that, we become a true heir. That if we believe in the son, if we abide in his words, we become adopted children of God.

We remain in the house forever with Jesus. Does that sound good to anybody? Remain in the house forever with Jesus. The truth is, you and I need to be freed from sin, and only the son can do it, so you are no longer a slave, but adopted in the family of God.

That's the truth. That's what we need. That's the greatest freedom we can accept in this world.

If we look at verse 37 and verse 38, Jesus says, I know you are the offspring of Abraham. I know you are his offspring. I know the Abrahamic covenant, yet you seek to kill me because my words find no place in you.

I speak of what I have seen with my father, and you do what you have heard from your father. And Jesus goes on. I think it was in the text Dana read that he says the devil is the father of all lies.

And that's your daddy. My dad's God. This one you call God, he's not your father when you're a slave to sin.

What blocks us from abiding in God's word? Think about that for a second. What blocks us from abiding in God's word? Pride, unforgiveness, brokenness, stubbornness. Is anybody stubborn? Comfort, fear, lack of faith.

I could just keep going. There are so many things. As soon as we walk out the door, there are things that bombard us and try to distract us from abiding in Jesus' words, try to distract us from the truth that he gives us.

But Jesus said, I speak of what I have witnessed from my father. In 39 through 47 that we read earlier, Abraham abided in God's words, so you should abide in my words, Jesus is saying. Basically he goes down to saying the father with capital F versus the father with the little f. Your father is whatever the culture tells you.

Your father is whatever your heart wants you to do. Your father is whatever you feel like. Your father then is the devil and we need to take that stuff and lay it in the cross and trust God with it that Jesus says in these words that our father is either God or our father is the devil.

And all the stuff in us that is still impure, still of a sinful nature, we need to turn over to God and trust in him because we either are living by, abiding by the truth or we are abiding by what? Lies. Truth or lies. Jesus closes with this truth when you get to Abraham, when you get to John 8, 58.

He said, Jesus continues this argument with him and they think he's got a demon and he's possessed because he doesn't understand his own people and he said, Hey, Abraham looked forward to the day of my coming and he saw it and he praised God for it and then they're going, well now we know you're crazy. We know you're demon possessed because you're just a young man and yet you say you know Abraham and he saw it and Jesus pushes it a little further and he says, Before Abraham was, I am. Now if you're a grammar teacher, you might go, Jesus, that's not proper grammar.

You're getting your phases, your timing mixed up. Before Abraham was, I am. Now Jesus is doing two things there.

When the Jews hear that, they are thinking of Exodus 3, 14 when God called Moses through the burning bush and Moses said, Who should I tell the people who is calling me and God says, Tell them that I am who I am. I will be who I will be and Jesus says in Greek, Before Abraham was, I am. Me, I am.

They heard before Abraham was, Yahweh. So they wanted to kill him. Could you imagine how tough he was being on them? And sometimes we need to hear Jesus' words and we need to trust in Jesus' words and know the truth is that he's not just a great teacher, he's not just a great philosopher, he's not just someone who came and was a nice guy and tried to include everybody, but he was the one who when people believed, said, You're a slave to sin when you sin.

Give up your slavery.