You can learn a lot about who someone is by watching how they interact with others. The Gospel of John is largely the revelation of Jesus’ identity and character through the stories of His interaction with the people around Him. While Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the story of Jesus in hopes that the events of His life will convince us that He is God, John takes an entirely different tact. John begins by saying, Jesus is indeed God. The gospel begins with these words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John’s divinely ordained task was not to prove Jesus’ divinity but to reveal to everyone that would be willing to listen to and read these stories what God is truly made of, what He’s like, who He is in heart, mind and character. I don’t know if we realize it but on some level, in some way we have all been wrong about God. We have been lied to constantly by Satan, the world around us and the fear and anxiety within us and while we may not have believed every lie we have been influenced by many of the arguments. Psalm 50 speaks of God as the Judge of righteousness. In one place, near the end of the Psalm, God is speaking to the wicked and He makes an important statement, “When you did these things (specific sins listed in the Psalm such as adultery, deceitfulness, gossip, slander and theft) and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you.” Because God, in His character, love and judgment, is beyond our understanding and any example we have ever seen, we tend to apply our humanity to Him. We mistake His patience for compliance, His mercy for acceptance, His quiet for distance and His discipline for punishment. Even worse though is that because we think He’s like us, we end up blaming Him for things that we think He must have caused, created or allowed. God told Adam and Eve that disobedience would cause death and yet now, in some strange effort to give answers to questions we don’t understand we have attributed death to God’s will and part of His plan. As Jesus’ disciples were scolding Mary of Bethany for pouring her perfume upon Him rather than selling it to feed the poor Jesus quoted the book of Deuteronomy saying, “The poor you will have with you always” and somehow, we have concluded that the fight against poverty is not necessary because it somehow again, fits in God’s plans and so it’s out of our hands. We have talked about this many times but it bears repeating because most of us have learned that the knowledge that leads to belief requires repetition, all suffering was caused by sin. Had there been no sin there would be no suffering. Sin didn’t just cause the suffering of death it created the reality of dying. Sin caused sickness and disease, division and prejudice, hatred and murder, deceit and greed, pride and poverty, lust and abuse and sin caused every false belief about God, which in my mind is the cause of a great deal of our emotional, relational and spiritual suffering. If we don’t know who God truly is then how can we ever be confident we are loved by Him, that He is pleased with us or that we can trust Him enough to follow Him? How could we learn to be like Him and even more, why would we want to be like Him if we don’t really know Him? Jesus came, above all else to reconcile man to God. To do that He had to live the perfect law, die to, for and as sin and then rise from the dead with the keys to hell and death, but all the things He did were simply so that He could redeem and reconcile us back to the relationship that sin had separated. This morning I want us to take a very simple verse and allow it to show us the heart of God through the life of Jesus. I pray that in the time we have together that we will discover that God is not who we thought He was, He’s greater, kinder, more patient and more gentle than we could have ever imagined, but even more than that, He’s not afraid of difficult places or put off by difficult people because while God does not sow seeds of difficulty He is willing and able to reap some of His greatest harvests from the most difficult fields.