John: All About Jesus
By: Oasis Church Birmingham
Tags: Bible, Resources, Faith, Jesus, Christianity

John: All About Jesus

Recordings, notes and application questions

Each week, we produce notes, discussion points and application questions for the Sunday talks — helping you go deeper into everything we’re looking at together and resourcing our Small Groups during the week. Use the embedded player to listen to the talk, or click here to visit Soundcloud and download it on a PC. You can also subscribe to Oasis podcasts on Spotify, iTunes or Podbean for listening on the go, and you can find the accompanying Powerpoint presentation for this week’s talk here.

Key Passages

John 20:30–31

John 21:24–25

Notes

John’s gospel is at its heart a proclamation of the “good news” about Jesus — the story of his life, death and resurrection which has changed everything for John. Through the story, he is inviting us to an encounter with Jesus that will change everything for us too.

He’s really clear about his motivations for writing — he wants you to believe in Jesus, and find the abundant life that he offers to each and every one of us. Each of the gospel accounts provides a different angle on Jesus’s life; none are any less truthful, but each emphasise different aspects of his character, his mission, and his place within Israel’s story, in order to reach out to different audiences and speak truth into different situations. John’s gospel, in particular, is written with a smaller number of more in-depth, extended encounters with Jesus, compared to Matthew, Mark and Luke. He isn’t trying to tell us lots of stories about what Jesus did. Rather, he is giving us a few carefully selected portraits that we are invited to sit with, ponder, and delve more deeply into. Ultimately, that’s because of his goal; he isn’t trying to get Jesus’s life into books, he’s trying to get Jesus’s life into you!

Because of that, he has structured his gospel around a number of portraits of Jesus’s encounters in different situations — most of which have a link to Jewish cultural symbols, or Jewish festivals. In doing so, he provides a pointer to how Jesus reshapes and reinterprets all of these as being about Himself, his life, death and resurrection. That’s the point. In each of the stories, we are invited to meet Jesus again, and answer his question to us: “Who do you say I am?”

It’s also important to note that John was writing in the midst of community. His community pop up in Chapter 21 to put their stamp of authenticity and authority on his work, but the whole book is written to be known and enjoyed by us together. So it’s okay when we don’t understand everything about it — none of us has all the answers, and all of us are going to be confused by some of the confusing things Jesus sometimes says! That’s okay! We are instead invited into mystery and depth as we explore them together.

So let’s join this adventure together over the next few months — an adventure to discover who Jesus is afresh, to allow him to come and meet with us and to reshape and redefine everything we think we know about his identity, and what that means for us, our community, the whole world, and beyond. Are you ready? Here we go!

Application Questions