Two Truths that are Better than Two Lies | Tim Henderson

All right, so it's a short little passage that Barbara read and there are two lies that you might draw from it that I want to combat this morning. The first lie is that you are more powerful than Jesus, that you are in some way greater than him. That is not true. The second is that Jesus is a genie in a lamp, and that your wish is his command. Those are both false.

And you may not have woken up this morning believing either one of those, but belief in them could flow, and honestly probably has flown from a surface misunderstanding and inaccurate read on our passage this morning. So today what I want to do is try to peel back that surface with you and take a look at what's really going on here, what Jesus means. I do not want you to be led away by a view that could lead to arrogant psychosis on the one side, or grave disappointment on the other. And in any case, it is always better to understand what Jesus actually means, because what he does mean is better than what our imaginations might fancy.

So here again, with those two lies in your head, is what he said:

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do and greater works than these will he do because I'm going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. And if you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. — John 14:12-14

Understanding "Greater Works"

The first lie, this bizarre notion that we are more capable or more powerful than Jesus, or at least that we might do greater things than Jesus can do, comes out of verse 12. So here that is again in isolation:

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do, because I'm going to the Father.

Now, I'm not calling Jesus a liar. I just think that when we read that, what we tend to do is drop off that last clause—"because I'm going to the Father"—and thereby entirely miss his point. That phrase may appear obscure to you, it may seem like it's a throwaway, and so if you just kind of assume it means nothing and you ditch it, then all you're left with is this statement that you will do greater things than Jesus did.

He raised the dead, maybe I'll raise a lot of people from the dead. He healed the blind, maybe I will heal a quadriplegic. He spoke to crowds of thousands, I will speak to crowds of hundreds of thousands. He died on a cross defeating Satan, redeeming sinners, and I don't even know what you could possibly imagine would be greater than that. But I'm telling you, if you lose the reason, then you lose the meaning and the whole thing will confuse you.

It is specifically and only because Jesus is going to the Father that his foregoing statement—that you will do great things—has any chance of becoming true. So here's what's going on. There is a comparison in this verse, in verse 12, but it is not a comparison between you and him. It's not like he's saying, "I'm great, but you're gonna be greater." That is not the case.

Rather, what Jesus is doing is he is comparing the present moment to a future moment, and he's saying that what I'm about to accomplish will change everything thereafter forever. You will do great things because of the great thing that I'm about to do. Things that were possible in the world prior to Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension to the Father—prior to his glorification—pale in comparison to what is possible now that he has accomplished his mission and returned to the Father.

So he's not saying, "Hey, you're capable of doing more things than I am." He's not saying, "You're capable of doing more spectacular things than I am." He is saying, "We are about to enter the moment when this whole thing blows wide open. When what you will do, what I will enable you to do, what I will ask the Father to do because you asked me to, is gonna absolutely boggle your mind. It will be even greater than the things that you have seen me do so far."

Here's how we know that this is what he means. The clear reason that he gives for the greater works to come is "because I am going to the Father." That is shorthand for: I am about to accomplish the task for which the Father sent me, and when I have done it, then I get to go home. I get to return to him.

That task, as you know, is to die on a cross atoning for sin, defeating Satan, and leaving the world an example that we should walk in his footsteps. And then to validate all of it by rising from the dead, defeating death and opening a way for all those who love him to defeat death as well. And then, and only then, to return to the Father. At which point his glory will have been fully revealed.

Prior to His death, His resurrection, His glorification, His ascension, Jesus was veiled, His glory was hidden and He appeared to many as just an itinerant preacher. Frankly, He looked to many like a nobody from nowhere. He was a flash in the pan. A nuisance to be sure and a threat, but a threat that is pretty easily dealt with. His opponents thought, listen, all we have to do is kill Him and then it'll come to nothing. His disciples will scatter and this whole annoyance will be put to rest. And what Jesus is saying in this passage is, yeah, we'll see about that. I see your death and I raise you resurrection. Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Here's Don Carson on this idea. Carson is a fantastic Bible teacher and commentator. He said this:

Both Jesus' words and His deeds were somewhat veiled during the days of His flesh. Even His closest followers, as the foregoing verses make clear, grasped only part of what He was saying. But Jesus is about to return to His Father, He is about to be glorified, and in the wake of His glorification, His followers will know and make known all that Jesus is and does, and their every deed and word will belong to the new eschatological age that will then have dawned. The signs and the works that Jesus performed during His ministry could not fully accomplish their true end until after Jesus had risen from the dead and been exalted. Only at that point could they be seen for what they were.

You guys, Jesus did all kinds of things. He healed dozens of people. But since the kingdom was inaugurated, Christians have built hospitals that have cured millions. Jesus was kind to children, He invited them to come to Him. But since His death and resurrection, the life-changing impact of what He accomplished—Christians in His name have built orphanages and have welcomed innumerable teeming orphans into their homes. Jesus discipled 12 and He drew crowds on occasion of a few thousand, but Christians in His name have made billions of disciples on every continent. And Jesus told parables, He taught like no one had ever taught. But Christians have taken His teachings and they have translated them into nearly every tongue.

I looked it up this week. At last count, we have translated the scriptures entirely into 795 different languages. You can get a Bible in 795 languages. Could you name 40 languages? What in the world are the other 755? In addition to that, we've translated the New Testament into another 1,815 languages. What in the world? And there are another 1,511 underway. We are almost done. There's still much to do. But we have translated the Gospel into thousands of languages, empowered by the Spirit, driven on by the mission that Jesus accomplished. We are at work for the Son of God lives through His Spirit among His redeemed people. And you guys, it was just not possible until Jesus had conquered death and the fullness of who He was had become available to us.

Jesus said, It's for your good that I go away because if I don't go, the Spirit won't come. But the Spirit of Christ, who the Father and the Son sent to live among His redeemed people, empowers us to continue to carry on His mission. It was not until He had conquered death that the fullness would be available. But that, and the giving of the Spirit to His people, would empower the call that everyone everywhere would stop what they're doing and make Him the absolute center of our lives. That is the world that we inhabit. It is because, specifically because, He has accomplished His mission and returned to the Father, that we are empowered to continue to carry on to enact the great work that He came to accomplish. You with me? We're not greater than He is. We're just living at a time that He has made possible by His death and His resurrection and His return to the Father.

And if you assume, if we can assume for the moment that that lands—that verse 12 was put in its proper context—then, and maybe honestly only then, are we really ready to look at verses 13 and 14, which I think have confused countless people through the ages.

The Promise of Prayer

Here's what He says in 13 and 14:

Whatever you ask in My name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it. — John 14:13-14

Taken in the abstract, taken out of context, that is a genie in a lamp kind of a passage, right? You could just read those two verses and think, oh, sweet, I'm Aladdin, and just rub the lamp, right? Your wish is His command. If so, I think it'd be very disappointing to you because it doesn't work that way. It is a great promise. It is a powerful promise. It's a significant promise. But Jesus' meaning there in those two verses isn't necessarily constrained by what He's already said. It is constrained to the context of His mission.

Now, in 1988, guys, John Piper preached a sermon.

So I graduated from high school in '88, and as I was going into college and really beginning to walk with Jesus, Piper had just preached this sermon called "Prayer, the Work of Missions" at a missions conference. I heard it when I was probably a sophomore in college, and I listened to or watched that particular sermon probably without exaggeration 20 different times. It would be in the pantheon of messages that I've heard among the most impactful in my life. There's a handful of talks that have been just so deeply impactful, I tend to return over and over again to those things. It is brilliant and it has really shaped the way I think about life and ministry and prayer for over forty years.

As I've thought about it, I don't think I've ever even cited it to you, which is insane to me. So I'm gonna make up for that right now and I'm gonna quote from it at length. So get comfy. This is Piper on prayer.

Piper's Wartime Prayer

The number one reason why prayer malfunctions in the hands of unbelievers is that they try to turn a wartime walkie talkie into a domestic intercom. Until you believe that life is war, you cannot know what prayer is for. Prayer is for the accomplishment of a wartime mission. It is as though the field commander, Jesus, called in the troops, gave them a crucial mission, go and bear fruit. And he handed each of them a personal transmitter coded to the frequency of the general's headquarters and said, soldiers, the general has a mission for you. He aims to see it accomplished, and to that end he has authorized me to give each of you personal access to him through these transmitters. If you stay true to his mission, if you seek his victory first, he will always be as close as your transmitter to give tactical advice, to send in air cover when you or your fellow soldiers need it. But what have millions of Christians done? They've stopped believing that we are in a war. No urgency, no watching, no vigilance, no strategic planning, just easy peace time and prosperity. And what do they do with the walkie talkie? They tried to rig it up as an intercom in their cushy houses and cabins and boats and cars. Not to call in firepower for conflict with a mortal enemy, but to ask the maid to bring another pillow to the den.

You guys, Piper is right. The example that we get in the New Testament is that prayer is first and foremost for the accomplishment of the mission to make his glory known throughout the earth. Acts 4 is a great example. I want to give a quick survey of prayer in the New Testament. We're gonna look at how Paul prays, the prayer requests that he makes, the prayer gifts that he offers.

In Acts 4, Peter and John have just been arrested for preaching the gospel, and then they get released, and they go back to their community, back to their church, and they huddle together and they pray. Listen to what they pray about. Listen to the spirit that animates their prayer.

On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. "Sovereign Lord," they said, "you made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David. Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and his anointed one. Against his anointed one."

That's Psalm 2.

"Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus." And after they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. — Acts 4:23-31

Because that is a wartime prayer. They were on mission and their prayer was breaking down strongholds for the advance of the Gospel.

Listen, Paul very often in his letters says, "pray for me, pray for me." Listen to the sorts of things that Paul prays for.

"Pray also for me that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly as I should." — Ephesians 6

Or:

"Pray for us too, that God may open a door for our message so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly as I should." — Colossians 4

Or Second Thessalonians 3: "Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored just as it was with you. And pray that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men, for not everyone has faith."

Listen to the way that he would pray for others. Very often in his letters, he would say, "I pray for you." He loves these people, he loves these churches that he's planted, that he's nourishing. And sometimes he would give us the benefit to know what is he specifically praying for them. This is Colossians 1:

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. We pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please Him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience and joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. — Colossians 1

Do you see the model of prayer in the New Testament? It is kingdom advancing, on-mission prayer. Break down strongholds. Give new insight. Fill us with the knowledge of your will. Enable us to live lives worthy of you.

Here's again, John Piper from that same sermon:

Prayer is the walkie-talkie on the battlefield of the world. It calls in for the accurate location of the target of the word. It calls in to ask for the protection of air cover. It calls in to ask for firepower to blast open a way for the tanks of the Word of God. It calls in the miracle of healing for wounded soldiers. It calls in supplies for the forces, and it calls in the needed reinforcements.

This is the meaning of the amazing word of the Lord in Matthew 9:

Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. — Matthew 9

Reinforcements come into the missionary enterprise when churches know they are in a war and when they bow down in their trenches with bullets flying overhead and get on their walkie-talkies and cry out for more troops. This is the place of prayer on the battlefield of the world. It is a wartime walkie-talkie, not a domestic intercom to increase the comforts of the saints. It malfunctions in the hands of soldiers who have gone AWOL.

Spot on. Piper is exactly right. That is what Jesus is talking about in John 14. "Ask me, ask me. What do you need? Ammunition. What do you need? Wisdom. Where do we go? What do you need to accomplish the mission?" This is chiefly and principally what prayer is for.

Correcting Misconceptions About Prayer

Now, I'm trying to correct a faulty belief about prayer that concludes that Jesus is a genie and your wish is his command. But there is a possibility that we could overcorrect it, and I don't want to overcorrect it and leave you with the impression that he does not care about your personal needs. Philippians 4 commands us to pray in every situation. Jesus models us praying for daily bread. James exhorts us to pray for the healing of the sick and the rescue of those in trouble.

The contrast that I wish to make is not between kingdom purposes and personal needs. It is between a recognition of yourself as someone who is engaged in the mission of Jesus because he is your undisputed priority and someone who simply sees Jesus as a dispenser of consumable goods who is at your beck and call.

You ask with the wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. — James 4:3

That right there is the genie-in-a-lamp mindset that I want to try to cut out.

Now, just to punctuate that, I want you to think about this. Probably for most of you, you were trained—maybe explicitly, maybe just by example—that there's a magical phrase that you should utter at the end of all your prayers. What's the phrase? "In Jesus' name, amen."

Now I don't know what you think that means or how you imagine that, but it might just be that you're like, "I don't know, that's just what we do, right? That's how we let Jesus know that like, it was us. It's this formulary that we might increase our effectiveness, right? Maybe it's a tag and like everything tagged in Jesus' name gets sorted to the top of the list and we get priority or something, right?"

It's not a tag. We pray in Jesus' name not to alert him or to compel him. We pray in Jesus' name to remind ourselves that when we pray, we are to pray under His authority and in line with His character and according to His purpose. We are to pray the same way that an ambassador speaks in the name of a king. We pray representing his interests. That's what it means to pray in Jesus' name. We're saying, "Yeah, this is stuff that Jesus cares about. This is exactly what he wants. I'm obedient, I'm on board."

And when we keep that in mind, yes, you can pray for the lump that you find in your breast. You can find...

You can pray about a job that you're searching for. You can pray about your prodigal child for whose salvation you long. We just need to do all those things even as we do everything submitted to his purpose, seeking his kingdom first and buoyed by a belief that he deeply cares about his own purposes and inexplicably, for reasons that absolutely go beyond understanding, he also cares about us. He loves you and he gave himself for you.

So, will we do greater things than he did? Well, yes. But is it because we're greater than him? Good grief, no. Of course not. Ridiculous. It's because we are living our lives in the eschaton. We live our lives in a time that his glory has been fully revealed. We live our lives in a time where he has poured out his spirit. He lives among his people and he has sent us on a mission to tell everyone everywhere how great he is so that they will know him too.

And what we are able to accomplish now is necessarily greater and greater and greater as his kingdom spreads. So you can invite your friends to church with a confident expectation that he's going to bring people. And when he brings them, he will open to them the beauty and the majesty of the Savior. You can attempt great things, ridiculous things to roll back the darkness. You could start a non-profit and reach a people that nobody else is reaching right now. You can bring them into your home. You can do all kinds of amazing things. You can ask him, you can trust him to provide you with an unreasonable amount of resources for the accomplishment of his mission.

A Personal Example

I want to give you just one example of countless times that I have seen this take place in my own life because our kingdom purposes and our personal needs are often braided together. Many of you know I've never been particularly shy that I spent a long time working with Crew before I came here, but for the two years between Crew and Church of the Holy Spirit, I worked for another organization at an Ivy League school in Princeton, New Jersey, at Princeton University. I oversaw ministries across all the Ivies and it was just the darkest, most miserable time of my life.

When I left, Todd Meyer, who used to be on staff here, was enormously influential in inviting me to come start this fellows program. I didn't even know what that was. We started this program in a town that I didn't live in, in a church that I'd never attended, and you guys, it was hard. It was really, really hard. I look back at myself and I'm like, why in the world did I have the courage to start this thing when failure seemed so likely? And the answer of course is that I was desperate. Desperation just drives things.

Blue Ridge Fellows was not only an opportunity to minister and serve others, but it was an escape plan. It was a rescue plan for me. So we began the work from Princeton and we had so many people here in town that were just so gracious and helpful. Quigg was enormously significant, Todd Meyer, Ben Motley was our first chairman of the board. And I had to recruit fellows into this program that didn't exist. Today, if you choose not to be a Blue Ridge fellow, you're basically an idiot. It's so great, everybody should do it. It's proven, it's phenomenal. But then, it didn't even exist.

We were making all these random phone calls to complete strangers. We had two Harvard grads in our first class of fellows. And why did these Harvard kids, you know, leave Boston, move to Roanoke to join this thing that didn't even exist? I look back and I'm like, this is just incredible that anybody came. I don't know why anybody came. I'm glad they came, but it's bizarre. It was divine mercy.

And then once you get fellows, you need to find places to live. So now I gotta ask all these people that, again, I don't know, "Hey, my name's Tim. Can some random kid live in your house?" And you said yes. Quigg and Annette welcomed a fellow into their home. The Broadons, the Firmans, the Austins, David Hankins—it was just unreasonable grace as the Lord went before us.

And once we got our fellows and once we had them homed, I needed to find them jobs. Finding a job is hard. Finding a bunch of jobs is really hard. Finding a bunch of jobs in a town where you know no one and have no connections is really hard. But I knew that Carilion was the biggest employer in town. So let's start there.

So you guys, I called a woman that I did not know, but I got her name. She worked in the human resources department and she was instrumental for all of Carilion's hiring. And I called her. It was random. My name's Tim Henderson. I'm starting this program. It's called Blue Ridge Fellows.

We've got a bunch of really sharp kids moving to Roanoke and we're trying to find them jobs. Would you help me do this? And as I explained the whole thing to her, she asks me a question: "Oh, I'm curious, is Blue Ridge Fellows anything like False Church Fellows? Because my daughter was a False Church Fellow."

Are you freaking kidding me? The one person in the world with whom I needed to find favor had—yes, it's exactly like False Church Fellows. And so she became instantly helpful. I went from having no credibility to this woman who was acting on her behalf, and she hired a bunch of our fellows that first year. And the Lord went before us.

Isn't that insane? I'm sure I must have hung up the phone and wept like a baby. Because I have no power, I have no resource, I have nothing. I'm simply desperate trying to do something that is good for the kingdom and good for people. And what lavish mercy. What faithful answer to kingdom-focused, deeply personal, desperate prayer.

Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. — John 14:13

Her name is Kathy. Turned out she happened to attend Church of the Holy Spirit. She's probably in the room right now. Kathy, God bless you. I think of you often.

The Lord goes before us. You can trust him. As you seek his face, he may bring supernatural healing. He may bring unreasonable provision, strength for a difficult task, wisdom at the moment that you need it. He may go ahead of you to break down strongholds. He may shock you with his outrageous, specific answers to prayer that you are far too weak to accomplish, far too stupid to plan.

Engage in his mission. Attempt great things for him. And friends, use the walkie talkie. Call him. Lord, go before us. Lord, shock us again. Would you open doors? Would you give us grace? Would you heal those among us who aren't presently fit for battle, that we might serve you with our whole being until the end of our days?

That your name and your glory would be seen, adored, treasured, reveled in. We long to see the day that your glory covers the earth as the waters cover the seas. Use us. We don't wanna simply watch the show. We wanna be in the show. Use us, Lord. We love you. Amen.