The Beloved Disciple

by Beth Moore

  Beloved, there is no such thing as obscurity to Christ Jesus. The eyes of El Roi ("the God who sees me" Gen. 16:13-19) gaze approvingly upon every effort you make and every ounce of faith you exercise in Jesus' name. You have not been forgotten! You have no idea what may lie ahead! No doubt remains in my mind that God spent this time testing and proving John's character so that he could be trusted with the greatest revelation. The answers God is willing to give us in our tomorrows often flow from our faithfulness when we have none today.

  Chapter 20

  THE ONE JESUS LOVED

  His disciples stared at one another, at a loss to know which of them he meant. One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him. (John 13:22-23)

  I stumbled upon a quote in Culpepper's book on John that I can't shake out of my head. "Saints ... die to the world only to rise to a more intense life."' I've turned the quote over in my mind a hundred times, and I'm con­vinced it's true. John may be the perfect example. I believe God had some­thing so divinely unique to entrust to this chosen apostle that He had to slay the call of the world in him. Mind you, not the call to the world but the call of the world.

  I don't think John was so unlike Abraham or Moses. God chose these men but refined them for their tasks through the crucible of time and chal­lenged trust. The obvious difference is that God used John mightily soon after his calling, but I'd like to suggest that his latter works fall into the cat­egory we'll call "greater works than these." In terms of John's recorded works, the earlier and latter works were separated by critical years of further preparation.

  As God sought to kill the world in His chosen vessels and crucify them to their own plans and agendas, their terms in waiting were not emptied and lifeless. Rather, their lives greatly intensified. Our callings are not so different. We will never be of great use to God if we do not allow Him to crucify us to ourselves and the call of the world. Our consolations are exceedingly great, however! We trade in the pitifully small and potentially disastrous for the wildest ride mortal creatures could ever know. We don't just die to self to accept nothingness. We lay down our lives and the call of the world to receive something far more intense. The call of God! The time spent awaiting further enlightenment and fuller harvest are meant to bulge with relationship.

  Months then years then even decades may have blown off the calendar of John's life in biblical obscurity, but don't consider for an instant that they were spent in inactivity or emptiness. No possible way! Please do not miss the following point: During the interim years of biblical obscurity in John's life, one of the most intense relationships in the entire Word of God developed. Please turn up the volume on this entry and read the italicized words again because the point is so critical I'm typing this standing up!

  Yes, Christ used John to cast out demons, heal the sick, and spread the good news through word of mouth. But somewhere along the way God built a man to whom He could entrust some of the most profound words ever recorded on parchment. What kind of man writes, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"? What semblance of humanity is entrusted with the love letters of 1, 2, 3 John? And who in the world could ever be chosen for the penning of the incomparable Revelation? Yet all were indeed entrusted to a man once simply known as the "brother of James."

  Something happened, Beloved. Something big. Something intense. No one knows for certain the exact order of John's writings, but I am most comfortable with the theory of many scholars who believe the order was given to John in the order they appear in Scripture. Most scholars believe the weightiest evidences suggest they were all written within a matter of Years anyway. This time frame would fall in the A.D. 80s and 90s. If so, decades passed while John the apostle served in places like Jerusalem and Ephesus while the other disciples were each martyred one by one.

  Can you imagine being John as news traveled the miles like a newspaper landing with a thud on his doorstep with one obituary after another? Firm tradition places Peter in Rome in the A.D. 60s, where he and Paul were martyred under the reign of Nero. One was crucified. The other beheaded. How John must have grieved! But they were neither the first nor last. One by one each was translated through the crimson door of violent death to everlasting life until only one remained. What kinds of things do you imagine the apostle John felt as the solitary remaining apostle?

  We don't know much about what happened between Christ and John in those biblically obscure years, but one thing is certain. A thing so sig­nificant that I believe it was the single hinge from which hung the fulfill­ment of all the remaining works of God in John. Somewhere in the midst of those years and decades, John formed his identity as the beloved disci­ple. By the time the words of his Gospel were transferred by the Holy Spirit to him, this identity was intact.

  Do you realize that John alone called himself "the disciple Jesus loved"? Do you find that at all peculiar? If we believe the Gospel of John was inspired, however, then we also must accept that the detail of John's self-­identity was also inspired. Not because Jesus' love for John exceeded the others but because God purposed the reader to know how John saw him­self. At first glance we might be tempted to think John a bit arrogant for terming himself such, but God would never allow a man who received such revelation to get away with that kind of self-promotion.

  I'd like to suggest that John's evolving identity over the course of those decades came out of the opposite kind of heart. God is far too faithful not to have greatly humbled John before giving him such surpassing revelation. (See a parallel concept in 2 Cor. 12.)

  I believe quite possibly the heightened positions of Peter and Paul in the era of the early church coupled with the impending martyrdom of each apostle fed abasement in John rather than exaltation. Surely he struggled with terribly perplexing feelings of fear that he, too, was doomed to mar­tyrdom and yet fear that he wasn't. Does that make sense?

  When one person remains after all the others have been counted wor­thy to die and yet no profound purpose has been revealed, all sorts of inse­curities could arise. We don't even have to wonder if Satan was after him. Surely the devil saw the martyrdom of all the others as a victory even though in reality through their willingness to die, he was defeated. John no doubt became the bull's-eye on hell's target. Among plenty of other assaults, don't you imagine Satan taunted John with survivor's guilt? Believe me, I know personally how debilitating survivor's guilt can be.

  I have lived with a man for twenty-five years who lost his older brother and his younger sister and suffered terribly with false guilt for a time. It's a powerful deception.

  As the years went by and the virile, youthful fisherman grew old and gray, I am convinced John's weakening legs were steadied and strengthened on the path by the constant reassurance, "Jesus, You chose me. You keep me. And above all else, You love me. You love me. No matter what hap­pens or doesn't, Jesus, I am Your beloved."

  Perhaps the reason why this theory (which I didn't get from any book) is so plausible to me is because the times I have most identified myself as loved by God have without exception been the difficult times. Not the flourishing times. I went through such a terrible time of loss and attack while writing Breaking Free, I could hardly stand it. I survived a two-year period of tremendous difficulty by repeating over and over, "Oh, God, I am so thankful I am loved by You. You love me so much. I am Your beloved. The apple of Your eye." Isaiah 54:10 became my absolute lifeline. "`Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,' says the Lord, who has compassion on you."

  Psalm 90:14 began my mornings because I couldn't face the day with­out it: "Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, / that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days." The lines of my journals through those difficult months are replete with confessions of love. Not so much mine for God, mind you. But God's for me!

  I grabbed at His love like a starving refugee scavenging for fo
od one day and like a selfish child snatching sweets the next. Not only was I des­perate; certain circumstances had made me desperately insecure. I was so needy that all my loved ones could have done was throw a bucket of water in a cavern. I needed more love than a person could spare. I needed the mammoth love of God.

  Beloved, you and I are not on love rations! At this particular point in your life, are you desperate for a surplus of love and acceptance? Human nature seeks to get-one way or the other-what it feels it needs most.

  How do you try to grab on to an extra measure of love and acceptance?

  Have you already discovered that your need exceeds mortal fulfillment? I've learned the hard way that when I am in a crisis of insecurity or pain, no one has enough of what I need. The attempt to retrieve it from human resources will ultimately result in my despising them and their despising me. God is our only source. He will never resent us for the breadth, depth, and length of our need. I love the quote in Deuteronomy 33:12: In the promise to Benjamin, Moses said, "Let the beloved of the LORD rest secure in him, / for he shields him all day long, / and the one the LORD loves rests between his shoulders."

  We will all have seasons like I'm describing because their divine pur­pose is too vital. Much of our identity is developed right there. In the aloneness. In the search for purpose. In the fear of being passed over. In the terror that somewhere along the way we crossed the line of no return.

  We learn who we really are in times when we're faced with the prospect of believing God loves us even if He never greatly uses us. Do we believe He proves His love by His blatant use of us? If so, had any of us been John during the years conspicuously silent in Scripture, we might have given up. Or at least dropped into a lower gear.

  Not John. He knew two things, and I believe he grabbed on to them for dear life. He knew he was called to be a disciple. And he knew he was loved. Over the course of time, those two things emerged into one ulti­mate identity. "I, John, the seed of Zebedee, the son of Salome, the brother of James, the last surviving apostle am he: the one Jesus loves." Beloved disciple. Somewhere along the way, John, that Son of Thunder, forsook ambition for affection. And that, my friend, is why he was sitting pretty when some of the most profound words ever to fall from heaven to earth fell first like liquid grace into his quill.

  Part 5

  RECEIVING HIS

  FULLNESS

  I had a blast studying the highlights from the Gospel of John that you have before you for the next ten chapters. When I first began my research for this journey, I knew we would consider John's Gospel, but I had no idea how I would ever choose which aspects to emphasize. His Gospel is unique in so many ways and provides endless insights. As I approached this part of the study, I felt over­whelmed by the task of picking and choosing one text over another. God mercifully and clearly spoke to me through His Word and told me exactly how to approach it in order to meet our study goals. I'll explain our approach in chap­ter 21. In each of these chapters, I learned something that I believe will mark my walk. I hope you do too!

  Chapter 21

  MORE LIFE

  The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

  We have arrived at the blood-pumping heart of our study. We now turn our attentions on the Gospel of John. We will comprehend little about the man who wrote the brief epistles of 1, 2, and 3 John and the incompara­ble Revelation if we don't grasp the emphasis of the inspired apostle in his unique Gospel. John's Gospel is like his spiritual EKG-it reveals the state of his heart.

  As I stated earlier, I am more convinced by the evidences of the later dating of John's writings during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, placing them between A.D. 81 and 96. If I'm on target, decades passed, as did the lives of the other apostles, until John was the only one with feet still planted on planet Earth and not without purpose. We dis­cussed in our previous lesson how John's relationship with God only swelled with intensity through the obscure years. I believe we discovered something that will prove pivotal to us in our journey: John forsook ambi­tion for affection. To love and be loved became his lifeblood.

  The more I study John's life, the more I am convinced that intensity breeds extensity. The more intense John became in his relationship with a then invisible Jesus, the more God extended the boundaries of revelation. God broke the sound and sight barriers of this apostle and allowed him to experience a length, breadth, and depth that others never saw. We will see evidence of both intensity and extensity as we behold the concepts that mold John's Gospel to such a unique shape. Our purpose, however, is not only to marvel over John's beloved relationship with Christ but also to be indelibly marked in our own. The same Spirit, the same Truth, and the same Lord also work in us.

  John 1:16 introduces a key concept that will carry us through this vital part of our journey. I want to encourage you to memorize it! "From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another." If you will receive what this verse is saying to you, you won't be changed just for the course of this study. Your entire life experience with Jesus will be transformed.

  The original word for blessing is charis, often translated "grace." This explains the King James rendering: "And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace." Charis means "grace," "particularly that which causes joy, pleasure, gratification, favor, acceptance, . . . a benefit, . . . the absolutely free expression of the loving kindness of God to men finding its only motive in the bounty and benevolence of the Giver; unearned and unmerited favor."'

  Based on John 1:14, 16, and this definition, I believe we can accurately draw the following conclusions:

  1. Jesus is full of grace and truth. He's the One and Only.

  2. All of us get to receive from His fullness! Not just John the apostle. Not just John the Baptist. Jesus is full and overflowing with every­thing any of us who believes could possibly need or desire, and we get to receive from it!

  3. These grace gifts flowing from Christ's fullness are not only beneficial, but they are expressions of God's favor that cause joy and pleasure!

  It's high time I made a blatant confession. I am a Christian hedonist. Have been for years even before I knew what the term meant. I wish I had better words for it, but let me just say it like it is: Jesus makes me happy! He thrills me! He nearly takes my breath away with His beauty. As seriously as I know how to tell you, I am at times so overwhelmed by His love for me, my face blushes with intensity, and my heart races with holy anticipa­tion. Jesus is the uncontested delight of my life.

  I never intended for this to happen. I didn't even know it was possible. It all started with an in-depth study of His Word in my late twenties and then surged oddly enough with a near emotional and mental collapse in my early thirties. At the end of myself I came to the beginning of an inten­sity of relationship with an invisible Savior. No one had ever told me such a relationship existed. Now I spend my life telling anyone who will listen.

  I thought I was just weird. I knew so many believers who wore Christ like a sacrifice that I thought I missed something somewhere. Don't get me wrong. Plenty of believers in the world make huge sacrifices in the name of Jesus Christ, but I'm not sure American believers can relate.... and we can be a little nauseating when we try.

  By far the biggest sacrifices I've ever made were times I chose to pursue myself and my own will over Jesus and His. I'd be a liar to tell you Jesus has been some big sacrifice for me. He is the unspeakable joy and love of my life. In crude terms, I think He's a blast.

  While still in the closet, I began stumbling on other Christian hedo­nists. Perhaps Augustine is the most blatant historical example. Of his conversion in 386, Augustine wrote, "How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose! ... You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter
than all plea­sure."' My heart leaps as I read words that I, too, have lived!

  Jonathan Edwards was another. In 1755 he wrote, "God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those who see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it."

  C. S. Lewis was also a fine Christian hedonist. He wrote:

  If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half­hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.4

  Meditate on John 1:14 and 16 again. Grace is God's favor looking for a place to happen! From His favor we can receive one blessing after another! Beloved, I don't care who you are or how long you've known Jesus, I am convinced we have hardly scratched the surface. So much more of Him exists! So much more He's willing to give us! Show us! Tell us! Oh, that we would spend our life in furious pursuit! That's exactly what John Piper has done. He's my favorite example of a holy hedonist from the early twenty­first century. Although you could almost pick any of his works for evi­dence, he draws his hedonistic conclusions best in one statement: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him."