"Come and See" (John 1:35-51)

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're examining the Gospel of John to learn about the words and work of Jesus. In our world today, we're constantly bombarded by advice on what to do to become more healthy people. Seek after physical health or emotional health. Set better goals. Be more disciplined. Eat better. Sleep more. Take up this perfect self-care routine. Keeping up with all of it can be exhausting. But what if the health and wholeness we're looking for comes not by not by pulling ourselves up by our own effort, but by following the lead of a loving teacher who is calling us to deeper enjoyment of him and fruitfulness in the world? And what if we're not meant to grow ourselves, by ourselves? What if there is a loving teacher who is gathering a community around him that will grow us into the people he intends for us to be? What if it's not all up to you? That’s what this passage is about– how God gathers his people to learn and grow in community with others. And John wants us to see – when we find Jesus, we find rest from our striving, because in the end, he has been seeking and finding us all along. QUOTES: "It is significant that [in Genesis 3] human beings separated themselves from God by hiding in the trees. But God did not separate himself from sinful human beings; he came searching for them. And the God of creation did not attack the hiding sinners, he asked them that gracious "first question" of all questions. This is the kind of God we meet in the New Testament Messiah as well. Are not the first question of Genesis and the first question of John rather alike: Genesis: "Where are you?"; John: "What are you looking for?" Is not a question itself, almost by nature, a kind of grace? Especially when it comes from the Lord or his Lamb? I believe the most thoughtful "evangelism" (which is a scary word for many of us who have been wounded by its misuse) is simply and sincerely to ask people who are seeking us out, as Jesus now thoughtfully does with his first seekers, "What are you looking for?" (Notice: Jesus did not come up to them, uninvited, and ask this as an evangelistic question. Jesus' evangelism is much more human and humane, as we will learn over and over again throughout the Gospel.) "-F. Dale Bruner “(I)n Friendship…we think we have chosen our peers … But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say ‘You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.’ The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.”- C.S Lewis