Larger Than Life - Shade Tree Scholar

Hi, this is Mike. Thank you for being a part of what God's doing at the Heights Fellowship.

We hope you enjoy this message. We know it's not the same thing as being here in person,

but we pray that God would move as you listen and as God applies this to your heart.

I grew up watching some of those old TV shows a lot of us did.

You know, the Gilligan's Island and the Hogan's Heroes and, you know, Petticoat Junction and all of those.

And I began to notice something, and I don't know if you paid attention to the way they do screens and scripts

and all those kind of stuff, but they put together and you listen to the critics,

they call them an ensemble cast. You know that?

I mean, look at some of these. These are a little bit more current.

I mean, you look at something like the Big Bang Theory, which had a pretty successful run for, you know, 12 years or so.

And you get all these varied kinds of characters and personalities.

You've got beauty queens and nerds and scientists and waitresses and all those kind of things.

You look at shows like Gilligan's Island. I mean, that's a pretty wide range.

You've got movie stars and millionaires and scientists and people from the Midwest, you know, good normal people.

And then you've got the crew who are out for a three-hour cruise.

A three-hour cruise.

A three-hour tour.

Anyway, then you've got Seinfeld, which has all the basic personality types in them.

I mean, you've got Jerry, who's Pooh Bear. I mean, right.

You've got Elaine, who's basically a rabbit.

If you're thinking about the Pooh stuff, you've got George, who's basically a Pooh.

I mean, not a Pooh, he's an Eeyore.

And then you've got Kramer, who's a Tigger.

And you've got them all kind of put together, these wide kind of varied personalities.

You've got George.

And then you've got shows like Friends, where you have all these different...

You've got OCD people like Monica, and then you've got Joey.

And you've got Phoebe, who's like a space cadet, and all that kind of stuff.

And you've got Unagi, and all that kind of stuff.

And then, of course, my favorite of all time, the greatest of all time, which is MASH.

Anybody who's under about 40 when I don't even know what that is.

So, anyway, find it sometimes and look at it.

When you think about that and then you kind of lay over the disciples to them, it's the same thing.

Our screenplays and our scripts are just mimicking what God does in real life.

Because all of us are so varied and different, right?

I mean, in the disciples, you got Peter who's this kind of shoot from the hip, impulsive braggart who's got feet of clay.

He's got a lot more braggadocio than he's got backup.

You've got James who's ambitious and driven without a whole lot of diplomacy.

Then you've got his brother John who's a lot like him, but he's a little bit of a manipulator.

I mean, God is mom to come ask Jesus for a promotion.

John, that's a bad look, dude.

That's a bad look.

But he's willing to let other people.

Take the fall for him.

And then we've got Andrew who's a leader who prefers not to.

You know, he just, he's always letting somebody else step up.

He's comfortable with that, but he's got all the skills.

And then you got the guy we talked about last week, Philip, who's one of the greatest guys in the world, but he's a little bit thick.

He's just a little bit slow to get it.

And Jesus takes all of these people.

And there are lots of personality differences.

We're going to find out today, geography comes into play, where you're from comes into play.

And he makes a community out of them.

He's foreshadowing what the church would be.

He's foreshadowing what your life group would be, what your small group would be like.

So all of this stuff is there in front of us as we look at this.

Well, today we're going to talk about another guy, a guy by the name of Nathaniel, who's always passionate.

And we're going to talk about how he compared with Philip.

And here's the thing about Nathaniel.

His identity is something of a mystery.

We're not even sure what his real name was.

Nathaniel, we're told in John.

Bartholomew, we're told in the synoptics in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

All we know about him, we know from two passages.

There's a pretty deep passage in John chapter 1 we're going to look at.

It's the same passage we looked at with Philip last week.

And then there's...

A mention of him in John 21 when they go fishing after the resurrection.

Here's the one we want to focus on today.

John chapter 1 beginning in verse 45.

So Philip, Jesus is called Philip.

And Philip, the very first thing he did, we talked about this last week, he went and found Nathanael.

And he said to him, we had found him of whom Moses and the law and also the prophets wrote,

Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

And Nathanael said to him, can any good thing come out of Nazareth?

Now, I made some jokes about New Mexico and some of those places.

And so to all of the New Mexicans who are in the room, I love you guys.

I just, you know, it's just stick, all right?

Just, you know, we don't hate New Mexico.

We love New Mexico.

So Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him.

And he said, behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile.

Nathanael said, how do you know me?

And Jesus answered and said to him, before Philip even called you,

when you were alive.

Under the fig tree, I saw you.

Now, remember that phrase.

That's important.

And Nathanael answered, Rabbi, you are the son of God.

You are the king of Israel.

And Jesus answered, because I said I saw you under the fig tree, you believe?

Really, that's all it took with you, buddy?

Truly, I say to you, you're going to see greater things than these.

You're going to see the heavens opened up and the angels of God ascending and descending

on the son of man.

That's a really cool picture when we get there.

In this.

So here's what we know about Nathanael.

The synoptics call him Bartholomew.

John calls him Nathanael.

They are never connected together.

He's never called Nathanael-Bartholomew or Bartholomew-Nathanael anywhere in Scripture.

And so there's some debate.

For years, there's been raging debate about who this guy is.

There are some people that actually connect him and say, well,

actually, that's just another name for Matthew.

There's no biblical reference or precedent for that.

There are some that try to make him the groom at the wedding in Cana where Jesus turned

the water into wine.

I think I have a slide that says that somewhere in this presentation.

But he's never, Nathanael and Bartholomew are never connected.

We're going to connect them today.

And I'm going to tell you how here in just a minute.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke include a disciple by the name of Bartholomew.

John.

John includes a disciple in the same spot by the name of Nathanael.

Another way that we know we connect them is this, that Nathanael in John is always connected

with Philip.

In the synoptics, Bartholomew is always connected with Philip.

And so we conclude they must be the same person.

Now, this shouldn't be that hard of a jump because we have Simon, who's also called Peter.

Right?

So it's not like we don't have people with different names.

We have James, the son of Alphaeus, and Judas, the son of James, referenced among the disciples

as well.

But here's the easy, this is why this is a pretty easy jump.

Nathanael is his given name.

It means gift of God or given from God.

And Bartholomew, just like, you remember when Jesus called Simon, Simon Barjona?

Barjona.

You remember when we called Joseph Barnabas?

Bar means son of.

So this is just his family name, his surname, if you will.

He is Nathanael, the son of Tomai.

So that's his full name.

And you read all the gospels, you get the full picture of who he is.

We know this from John 21, that his hometown was Cana.

This is why some people...

Some people have tried to say, well, he was the groom at the wedding in Cana.

We have no biblical precedent, no historical precedent for that, just some tradition that

points that out.

But Cana is located about 12 miles west of the Lake of Galilee, the northern part of

the Lake of Galilee, and about eight miles north of the town of Nazareth, where Jesus

was from.

These guys, so many of them are from the same place.

His family is unknown other than that he is the son of Tomai.

And then we presume, because of Jesus, that he is the son of Tomai.

In John 21, he goes fishing with Peter and the guys, that he probably had a fishing background.

He probably had been a fisherman at some point in his life, but that's who he was.

Now, there's some weird legends about him.

Ladies, you're going to like this one.

Nathanael supposedly was the most handsome disciple.

Just some tradition about that.

I'm sure that he's nowhere near the fashion icon that the great Alan Carson is, but he

is very much the most handsome.

Alan, you're in this room.

There you are, right over there.

There you are.

Just shaking your head.

You knew I was going to say that.

But he's the most handsome disciple.

There's another legend that he was royalty, that he was the son of the king of Gesher,

which is northeast of the Lake of Galilee.

But again, no biblical precedent for that.

There's just a lot of weirdness surrounded this guy, and probably because we don't have

a whole lot of biblical narrative.

about him.

Here's what we do know.

I've got three things I want to show you this morning that we do know that should impact

your life a little bit.

Like Philip, Nathanael was deeply searching the scripture.

Of the two of them, he was the harder sell.

He was the one who was more skeptical.

He didn't just, I'm not so sure about that.

Philip was all in early.

But Nathanael maybe was a little bit more jaded, a little bit more...

Whatever.

But he was more skeptical than Philip was to grasp.

But when he did, he was very, very decisive, as we'll see as we read on.

But I want you to think through some of the dots that Philip and Nathanael are trying to

connect.

Think through some of the truth.

As they look through the scriptures, you go, okay, if I'm witnessing to somebody, or I'm

sharing with somebody about Jesus, and I'm trying to connect Old Testament and New Testament,

where are some places, what are some things that I could look at?

I'm going to give you just a handful of them this morning.

One of them, specifically about Messiah, would have been in Deuteronomy 18.

Moses said this, that the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me.

Now, think through what a prophet like Moses meant.

He would have been a deliverer.

He delivered his people.

He brought them out of some kind of slavery, like Moses did.

He guided them across and through.

He guided them through the wilderness, the journey, if you will, of life, if we want

to spiritualize it.

But God is going to raise up a prophet like me from among your fellow Israelites.

He's not going to be an outsider.

He's going to be from the inside.

He's going to be from the family, from the lineage.

And you must listen to that prophet, so he's going to be prophetic.

I will raise up a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will tell that

prophet what to say.

In other words, I will speak my words to him, and he will speak my words to you.

You remember, that's what God did.

He did with Moses as he led the Israelites in the Old Testament, and he will tell the

people everything that I command them.

Now, I want you to fast forward to the New Testament.

This is later on, but this was fulfilled, and Jesus actually said this in the text we

looked at last week in John 14, when he says, don't you believe that I am the Father, or

I'm in the Father, and the Father is in me, and the words I say are what?

They're not my own.

God is giving me these words, and I'm giving them to you.

But my Father, who lives in me, does his work through me.

Jesus was telling the disciples in the upper room, right before the crucifixion, listen,

don't miss this.

I am who I said I was going to be, and I am who the scripture said I was going to be.

So this is what Philip and Nathaniel are looking at as they're doing their personal Bible study,

you know, at each other's houses.

Over in Matthew chapter 2, Matthew makes this mention, and I want to mention this now, because

I'm going to come back to it.

I'm going to come back to it here in just a minute.

When Joseph, this is the father of Jesus, heard that Archelaus, who was the son of Herod

the Great, who had massacred the babies when Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary had moved

to Egypt to get out to find safety.

When Joseph heard that Archelaus was now reigning over Judea, Herod the Great has died, Archelaus,

his son, is now the ruler, in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there.

He didn't want to go back to Judea.

So what did he do?

Being warned by God in a dream, he departed for the regions of Galilee.

How did Joseph and Mary end up in Nazareth?

God told them not to go to Judea, not to go to Bethlehem, go to Nazareth.

And so he resided in a city called Nazareth, and what was spoken through the prophets might

be fulfilled, saying, he shall be called a Nazarene.

Here's what's interesting about that prophecy.

It's nowhere in the Old Testament.

We don't have it in the Old Testament.

When Matthew writes...

Matthew is referencing a prophet we don't know.

We don't know who that is.

Historians, archaeologists, none of them have found this prophecy in anything yet.

But I'm going to show you something here in just a minute that may give us some insight

into it.

But Jesus was going to be called a Nazarene.

Probably Barnabas, not Barnabas, Nathaniel and Philip knew what that other prophecy was

that we don't know.

And they were trying to figure, well, how can he be a Nazarene and be from Bethlehem?

That's a key thing.

Here's what the Old Testament says.

Then a shoot will spring up from the stem of Jesse.

There will be somebody coming from the line of Jesse, the father of David, and a branch

from his roots will bear the fruit.

Remember that verse.

It's going to get really cool here in just a minute.

Okay?

Don't be bored yet.

Let me get to the punchline here.

And the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength.

So they're looking for somebody who evidences these qualities.

The Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, and he will delight in the fear of the

Lord.

Okay?

As I'm looking for Messiah, which is what this is about, I need to look for somebody

who has these characteristics.

Then Isaiah 53, which to the Jews is the forbidden chapter.

All right?

They don't talk about this.

They don't read this a lot.

For he grew up before him like a tent.

Remember that.

And like a root out of parched ground.

He has no stately form or majesty that we look at him.

Jesus wasn't a pretty boy.

Jesus wasn't in a boy band.

He didn't have that cool vibe.

He was just the average guy.

That was what he physically looked like.

Nor his appearance that we should be attracted to him.

You were never attracted to Jesus because he was the most handsome man on the planet.

You were attracted to Jesus because of his spirit, because of his demeanor.

That was the first thing you did.

That was about him.

He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

And he was like one from whom men hide their face.

He was despised and we did not esteem him.

There was nothing that made Jesus the most popular kid in class.

But you have a thoughtful, seeking, searching Nathaniel.

He was the one who was contemplating these.

I suspect that Philip had all these wild ideas and Nathaniel was always the one that grounded

him.

He was like, now hang on now, why can't we think that?

I had a really cool, my daughter's in Scotland right now.

She and two of her friends are traveling Scotland.

It's kind of a bucket list trip for her.

And she texted me yesterday afternoon and this is hopefully how you're training your

kids too.

When you're looking at churches, you're looking for churches, you want to know what does a

church believe, what I'm about to get into.

You look at their statement of beliefs.

Hopefully you've done that.

By the way, for those of you guys that are doing connection with us, that's one of the

things that we're going to talk about in connection tonight at six o'clock over in the summit.

So anyway, she sends me this deal and it's a screenshot from this church website in Scotland.

And she's highlighted some stuff.

She said, what the heck's this?

And so I had to say, listen, this is not great theology.

This is somebody trying to take a portion of scripture and make a theology out of it.

That you shouldn't.

I said, you always got to be careful about that.

And so she's like, okay, thank you.

And so Philip is the one probably saying, hey, what about this?

What about this?

And they just go, wait a minute.

The scripture says this.

So he was the contemplative one of that dynamic duo.

So the next thing you're going to see, not only was he searching the scripture, I'm getting

to my punchline.

Trust me.

His openness to truth is a little bit stained.

By his prejudice.

And we see it in what he says to Philip.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

And all Philip says is just come look.

That's what we would say.

If you're here and you're a skeptic, you don't trust religion, you don't trust church.

I would say this.

Look at Jesus.

That's what we're going to try to put before you every time.

Look at Jesus.

Just look at Jesus and tell me what you see.

If you don't see what he says, then something's wrong there because he is who he says.

And we're trying to portray him.

To you.

But MacArthur says in his biography of Nathaniel, of the disciples, he has a great line about

him.

He says, you know, here's his prejudice.

Prejudice is an uncalled for generalization based on some feeling of superiority.

So from Cana, I look eight miles down the road and I go, oh, Nazareth, those guys are

the worst.

My pastor, the last pastor I had in my church, a guy named Charles Murray, he helped plant

the heights.

He was.

He was kind of the father of all of that.

Father, father, Charles was, he would love that.

Charles was raised in Meadow, just west of here.

And, you know, Meadow and Ropes are kind of, back in the day, were really rival communities

and they're about eight miles apart.

So it's about that distance.

And Phillips, or Nathaniel's kind of outlook on Nazareth was the same as Meadow and Ropes

kind of are to one another.

It's like, oh, no.

Those guys.

They don't, they don't have it going on at all.

You can't do that.

Here, here's why.

Nazareth was a very, very familiar place and you're like, nothing special can come out

of there.

You got to go, you got to somewhere, got to somewhere, got to go somewhere exotic like

Jerusalem to have that.

He's got to come from New York City.

He's got to come from the West Coast.

He's got to come from Harvard or Yale or one of the Ivies.

He can't come from a community college.

You see, we do the same thing.

You got to have all those credentials and pedigrees and Jesus from Nazareth is not one of those.

That doesn't rise to that level.

The other thing is that Nazareth was located in a valley about 1,200 feet above sea level,

which you know the Galilee and the Jordan River all are both below sea level.

And so this is elevation-wise quite a rise.

But it was the same idea as we look at somebody from maybe Kentucky.

Or from West Virginia.

And why do we say, I'm not trying to offend any of you guys.

I just saw people start looking at each other.

We say they're hillbillies.

You can't, you can't, the Messiah cannot be a hillbilly.

Come on, man, the whole teeth thing, that, that ain't happening.

But that was another possible reason.

And then there was this, that Nazareth housed the Roman garrison, the Roman troops that guarded

and, and...

police that part of the Galilee. So the constant exposure to the Romans was a negative.

And then finally, there's this, because of its proximity, it was kind of on the trade route.

And so Nazareth got a lot of foreigners in and out, and to a good Jew, to a pure Jew,

well, that was unconscionable. You didn't want to relate or have anything to do with those people.

So Nazareth, really, it was a backwater. It was a place that you didn't want to be from.

And so when you hear that Messiah is Jesus of Nazareth, uh-uh. I'm not going with that, Philip.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? And then there was this, that from his study,

Nathaniel knew that Messiah was not going to be from Nazareth. He was going to be from where?

Bethlehem.

That was in the record of the prophecy. So it's not the right location.

Micah 5.2 says that Messiah would be from Bethlehem.

And so Nathaniel has all kinds of questions. By the way, the questions about Jesus' origin,

about where Jesus was from, was not just limited to Nathaniel.

This was something Jesus had to contend with throughout his ministry.

Over in John chapter 7, people are talking about Jesus. Others said he is the Messiah,

still others said he can't be, because Messiah won't come from Galilee.

The scriptures clearly state that he would be born of the royal line.

Man, you know what it is? I watched the first quarter of the tech game last night,

and it's totally jacked me up, all right? I can't even think right.

For the scriptures clearly state that the Messiah will be born of the royal line of David in Bethlehem,

Bethlehem, where King David is.

King David was born. Well, Jesus was, but he had moved to Nazareth,

and a lot of people didn't know that. Here's the punchline, though,

that he will be called a Nazarene. Why would Matthew say that?

Why would Nathaniel and Philip struggle that Jesus would be from Nazareth?

Here's kind of a resolution, and this is pretty cool.

In that Isaiah 11 verse that we read, remember I told you, remember this,

remember this, remember this? A shoot will spring up from the stem of Jesse,

a branch from his roots. Jeremiah 23, 5, here's another one.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch.

I want you to get the branch, the stem, the root, all of that stuff,

and he will reign as king and act wisely. In Zechariah 3, 8, another one.

Joshua the high priest, you and your friends who are sitting in front of you,

indeed, they are men who are a symbol for, behold, I'm going to bring in my servant, the branch.

Messiah became known as the branch or the sprout.

From Jesse. Shoot, branch, sprout. Nazareth means sprout.

Isn't that cool? Is that punchline as good as I think it is?

Because I think it's really cool. They didn't get it, and afterwards,

I'm sure there was this aha moment, like, oh, man, that's so good.

We didn't get the connection. That's what Nazareth means.

It's from the Hebrew word netzar, which means,

sprout. So, it was the sprout town. The branch came from there.

The sprout came from there. And so, Philip comes and says,

hey, Nathanael, we found him, Jesus of Nazareth. What? That doesn't compute, dude.

And so, he's turning this over as he's approaching Jesus,

and here's where it gets really good, because Jesus recognized Nathanael for what he is.

Now, if you started in computers and spreadsheets and those kind of things back in the day,

I'm going to use a term that some of you guys may recognize,

woozy wood. You know what that means? What you see is what you get.

So, you had a computer program, and they would say, it's woozy wood.

That was a big deal back in the dark ages of computing, because that means you got to see a

screen. Now, it all looks like that, but back in the day, it wasn't like that at all. It was

woozy wood, and that means Nathanael was what you see, that's what you get. Jesus looked at him

and said, ah, behold.

An Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile. When Jesus said, indeed, that's alethos in the

Greek, that literally means real deal. An Israelite that's real. He's the real deal. He had the right

spiritual DNA. You say, what DNA is that? Well, that's the DNA that the Bible talks about when

Paul said, listen, not just because you're born of the physical line of Abraham, are you a good Jew?

That's not the criteria. The criteria is you have the right...

Right.

Faith. Paul says this, for you are not a true Jew just because you were born of Jewish parents or

because you've gone through the Jewish ceremony of circumcision. Stop here for just a minute.

Parents and grandparents, generations hear me. Too many times, we equate being a Christian with

being born into a Christian family. We equate being a Christian as, well, I was raised in church.

That doesn't make you a Christian. The old joke is, any more than going to

McDonald's makes you a hamburger. It doesn't work that way. You're not a Jew just because you're

born of Abraham or you've gone through the Jewish rites. You're not a Christian because you're born

into a Christian nation and you've gone through the religious rites of going to church. Maybe you

were baptized as an infant or you've gone through some sort of catechism or something like that.

That doesn't make you a Christian. That doesn't give you eternal life. That

doesn't make you a child of God. Paul says, no, a true Jew is one whose heart

is right with God. And a true circumcision is not a cutting of the body. It's not about

mutilating your body, but a change of heart, a circumcision of the heart produced by God's

Holy Spirit. Whoever has that kind of change, whoever's gone through that transformation,

seeks praise from God, not from people. Another place in the same letter he wrote in Romans

chapter 9, he said, for not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Not all who are descended

from Christian parents are Christians. That should terrify us because a large predominance

of our country believe they're Christians simply because of geography or family association.

Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary,

it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. Isaac was the child of the promise.

He was the one, the line and the way that God promised Abraham, not Ishmael. The God

of Islam and the God of Judaism and the God of Christianity are not the same God. These

are not three ways to the same God. They're not the same God. They're not the same God.

They're not the same place. There is one child of promise, and that was Isaac. God

had told Abraham that. And so he must come through that line. And the trust is in God's

provision. That's what Isaac was, not through man's provision. That's what Ishmael was.

Ishmael is the father of the Arabs and ultimately the father of Islam. Isaac is the child of

God's promise. And that's what Paul is saying here. On the contrary, it is through Isaac

that your offspring will be reckoned. In other words, it is not the natural children who

are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's

offspring. Are you choosing to follow by an act of will the offspring of Isaac who would

be Jesus? That's where Jesus came from. Are you choosing to follow Jesus? That's what

makes you a true Israelite. That's what makes you a true child of God. That's what makes

you a true child of God. That's what Jesus is saying to him. It's what Psalm 32 later

on would say in that, blessed is the man who sinned, the Lord does not count against him

in whose spirit there is no deceit. That is a true Israelite, or that is a true Christian.

That is a true follower of the Lord. Is that you is the question. So you got Nathaniel

who's a woozy-woo. Man, he's what you see is what you get. He has no guile, Jesus said.

What does that mean?

That's not a word we use a lot. You hear poets use that, but we don't use that in popular

language a whole lot. Here's what Jesus meant by that. The word dolos in the Greek means

a decoy. Now, I know it's dove season because I get to hear you guys hunting all around

me all the time. By the way, come to my neighborhood. They are everywhere in my neighborhood. You

got to deal with the neighbors, but man, they are everywhere. They found sanctuary in my

neighborhood right now. But I know when it comes duck hunting season, you put decoys

out. Don't you?

What he's saying is you're not trying to hide anything. You're not pretending. You're

not playing. He's an Israelite in whom there is no decoy, no guile. We would say he has

no pretense, no agenda. We would use words, and this is one of the kind of the pillars

that we value here at the Heights. We value transparency and genuineness. We don't ever

want to be accused of playing church, of playing Jesus, having some sort of plastic faith.

We have that in every one of the scriptures. I'm not James Hill who is trying to take money

on these crédits. The Lucanian plan says that you're not supposed to act Tea tour.

Now, thisׂn is in the lexicon over time. You just keep trying to sell me and building

this love that I kept onIMienza a few weeks ago, those videos

and making it much better, and this is what you're trying to do. You're trying to buy

and buy minutiae and you get thisvorak giant. Now, why are we living under a special plan?

Well, the common life looking out is a relationship that you need to have with God rather than

to fight. Especially that little hope that God exists to do anything or anything to go

right. Please listen to what I'm about to say into the coming days. This certain into something

that they can see. Don't hemisphere that with so many understanding and householder certain

We've never met.

And Jesus makes that great statement before Philip even called you.

See, he knew Philip had called him.

He knew where he was.

He knew what he was doing.

He said, I saw you under the fig tree.

Now, what's the point of that?

We're told by historians that nearly every home that could would plant a fig tree in front of their door.

And that fig tree, we just came from that area, and fig trees get pretty big.

And they become shade trees.

And in the heat of the day, when your house would have been hot from cooking or whatever, just because it's enclosed,

you could go out under the fig tree, and that would be like an extra room.

It would be like a patio.

And he was out there, and that's where Philip would go and read.

That's where Philip would go and contemplate and study and pray and search out God and seek God and pray and ask.

And I don't know exactly what he asked, but Jesus did.

And I suspect that Jesus was specifically mentioning an event or a moment that had happened recently with Nathaniel.

And so when he said, I saw you when you were concerned about this.

I saw you when you were searching for me.

I saw you when you were looking and studying and contemplating and wrestling all these scriptures and trying to connect the dots and put them together.

I saw that.

I know about that.

And Jesus gives him a glimpse.

It's his omniscience that he knows everything.

He knows everything about us.

Nathaniel wouldn't have lost that.

It wasn't lost on him at all.

When he said, I saw you under the shade tree studying and praying and thinking and meditating,

Philip knew what Jesus was saying, and his response was perfect.

He said, you're the son of God.

You're the king of Israel.

He spoke.

He spoke Jesus' true identity.

Let me ask you something.

How many people in our world, how many people in our country, how many people in our town or your family or your neighborhood,

when you ask them, who do you say that Jesus is,

you're going to get a lot of good teacher, fine example, great moral illustration of how we should live, he was love, all those kind of things.

But do you recognize him as the son of God, the one sent from the father to take away the sins of the world?

Do you recognize him as the king, as the ruler of God's people?

See, that's key.

You're not a Christian if you don't get those two things.

You're just a seeker or a pretender.

Nathaniel got them both.

He got what Psalm 2 had said.

Undoubtedly, this was one of his passages that he had studied.

You have set my king on my holy hill of Zion.

I will declare the decree.

The Lord has said to me, you are my son.

Today I have begotten you.

That's a Messianic prophecy.

So Jesus responds now to Nathaniel's faith.

And he says to him, because you said I saw you under the fig tree, that's all it took with you, bro?

He said, you're going to see a lot bigger things than this.

You're going to see the angels ministering up and down on the son of man.

And the question was, okay, what was Jesus talking?

Right there.

And it's a really cool story.

Ultimately, he's telling Nathaniel, if you follow me, you're going to see a lot bigger things than just that.

You're going to be impressed with a lot more than just that I knew you were under the fig tree.

In Genesis 28, there's a really cool story.

Jacob has left home.

He's been run out of his house.

His brother's trying to kill him, and he's fleeing for his life.

And he stops for the night to rest.

Do you remember the story in Genesis 28?

He takes a stone.

He uses it as a pillow.

It's a very uncomfortable bed because he's fleeing.

And it says that at sundown, he arrived at a good place, and he set up camp, and he stopped there for the night.

He camped out.

He found a stone as a pillow and lay down to sleep.

And as he slept, he dreamed of a stairway.

Now, from the old King James tradition, it will say a ladder.

But it's the same idea, same word.

He dreamed of a stairway that reached from earth to heaven.

Right?

And he saw the angels of God going up and down on that stairway.

And at the top of the stairway, he saw a vision of God.

He saw God at the top of the stairway.

And so this dream that he has is a picture of God ministering from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven.

That God's presence is there, and the angels are going up and down on this stairway.

Now, so Jacob wakes up the next morning.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

The term for stairway, I got to give you this.

In the Hebrew, it's the word sulam.

We spell it kolam, but it's pronounced sulam.

Meaning something that mounds up or mounts access up.

Okay, remember that word.

The point is that there was access from heaven to earth.

That God was doing something from heaven to earth.

So when Jacob wakes up the next morning, he says,

Surely the Lord is in this place.

And I wasn't even awake.

I wasn't aware of it when I got here.

And he said,

What an awesome place this is.

It is none other than Bethel, the house of God.

That became the site of the town of Bethel.

And that's what Bethel means.

Beth is house of.

El is Elohim, or God.

So it's the house of God.

And then he says this,

The gateway to heaven.

Notice that.

Now, fast forward to the New Testament.

Let me make this connection.

John chapter 10.

Jesus says this.

And Nathaniel's there.

I am the gate for the sheep.

Those who come in through me will be saved.

The word gate in the Greek, dura, is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew sulam.

What Jacob saw in Genesis 28, Jesus fulfilled and said, I'm that gate.

I am that way.

the bridge between heaven and earth, between man and God. And only

by coming across me, through me, will you be saved. Isn't that

cool? It's the old bridge illustration if you've ever shared

that in faith sharing. That Jesus is the

way, the truth, and the life. And he was telling Nathaniel

you're getting to see the angels moving

up and down from heaven and earth. Descending up and down based upon

my life, my sacrifice, my being.

So cool. So what do we learn from Nathaniel?

Thing number one, God knows where we come from and he reaches

out to us. He knows what you're dealing with, what you think, what you're

wrestling with, what you're struggling with. He says you're an Israelite

of whom there is no guile. He recognizes that. Second thing

that he responds to honest seekers. Listen, if you're honestly

seeking God, he says you will be found by me. That has

never changed. Are you honestly seeking God or are you just kind of

playing at it? Third thing, God is refreshed.

Jesus was energized when Nathaniel came to him

without pretext. Nathaniel was amazed. How did you know

that was me? Well now I know because you are the king. You are

the Messiah. And we correctly, as we

correctly recognize God.

He deepens what he shows us. You're going to see a lot more than that Nathaniel.

As you trust and follow Christ, you're going to get an insight and understanding of God

that you didn't have when you first started. That's the promise.

So how did it end for Nathaniel? We don't know for sure.

There are a lot of traditions. There are two

pretty established traditions

I guess from church history. We know that Nathaniel was

at the resurrection.

He saw Jesus multiple times. He was there in John 21. He was in the upper room when Jesus

appeared. He was all there. He saw Jesus ascend in Acts chapter 1. He was at

Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. He was one of those persecuted in Acts chapter 5.

But there's a strong tradition that after that, possibly

after the persecution that arose when James, the apostle James was

martyred, that he left Jerusalem. He shows up in two

places in particular. He is the patron saint of the region of Armenia

between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

He also shows up in India.

And that's probably the more substantiated one.

When they got there in the second century,

they found out that some Christian had already been there.

And as they were going through his stuff,

they found a Hebrew manuscript of Matthew written in Hebrew.

And the Indians, people from India, told them,

well, that was from this guy.

And so we think that he was, that was probably Nathaniel,

and he had a copy of Matthew's Gospel, and he went to India.

Now, how did it end for him?

There are three versions, and none of them are good.

The first version, that he was beaten unconscious.

He was tied into a sack and thrown into the sea and drowned.

Another version has him beaten and crucified upside down.

A third version is the most horrific, has him skinned alive,

flayed alive, and then crucified.

Either way, it didn't end well from a human standpoint,

but from a godly standpoint, he fulfilled the ministry and the mission that God gave him.

He was faithful until the very end.

And so this morning, as we kind of wrap it up,

that QR code is there for you to respond to us.

So let me just ask you three questions.

First of all, how do you respond to the evidence of who Jesus is?

That he's not just a good example or a fine teacher,

but he's really the promised one of God

who came to take away the sins of the world.

That's the first one.

To save you from the sins of the world, to save you from your sins.

How do you respond to that?

Have you trusted that alone?

You're not trying to trust being raised in a Christian family

or a Christian nation or going to church,

because that doesn't compute.

Have you trusted Christ?

And it's a personal, individual decision.

If you haven't, we're going to pray in just a minute,

you're going to have the opportunity to do that.

Secondly is this.

What thing or characteristic or belief stands in the way of you?

First of all, what is your belief?

First of all, coming to faith in Jesus.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth, really?

Come on, man.

What's standing in the way of you coming to faith in Christ?

Or secondly, if you're a believer,

what's standing in the way of you living out your faith in Christ?

And then the last question is,

to what are you looking to answer all the deep questions

you have about your faith in life?

Are you looking to self-help books?

Are you looking to pop culture?

Are you looking to music or drink or relationships?

What are you looking to?

There's only one answer.

Come to the Lord.

Come to the scriptures.

And let God begin to deal with your life.

That QR code, again, is made for you guys to respond to us.

You can take a picture.

He sends us an email.

We get it immediately.

We'll have it before you're out the door.

So let me pray over you this morning,

and we'll be out of here, okay?

Seventhly, Father, we thank you for the life of Nathaniel.

Father, the guy who was what he was,

that's what we would say.

Father, he was a real deal.

He was seeking.

He was looking.

He didn't have all the answers.

He wasn't so prideful that he was letting his heritage

or his family or what the traditions were in his culture

dictate God to him.

He let God dictate God to him.

Father, there's one here this morning

who's never trusted you.

I pray that he would trust the sacrifice of your son,

Jesus Christ, on the cross.

It's the perfect provision,

the absolutely perfect provision for his sin.

Father, he would step away from his sin and say,

okay, Lord, you take it.

I'm not going to try to do this my way anymore.

I'm going to do it your way.

Father, you would give him eternal life.

You would put your spirit in them.

You would mark them as yours, as the real deal.

Father, I pray that you would help those of us

who are believers not to be looking on the outside

for things to give us your answers,

but we would look to you to give us your answers.

But thank you for this illustration of Nathaniel,

the guy that we don't know a lot about

or hear a lot about,

but there's so much profound in the things that we do see

that challenge us and encourage us along the way.

Give you glory in Jesus' name, amen.

Well, thank you for being a part of what God's doing

here at the Heights Fellowship.

If the Lord led you to make a decision

or you have a question or a need,

we want to hear from you.

Send us an email at the email listed below,

info at theheightsfellowship.org.

And we will join you in praying

as you take a step forward on your journey with God.

Amen.