Sabbath: Epilogue: Knowing Jesus and His Word

Daily Lesson for Sabbath 21st of December 2024

Image © Pacific Press

Read for This Week’s Study: John 21:1-25; John 11:9-10; John 8:42-44; John 4:46-54; 2 Timothy 3:16; John 15:1-11.

Memory Text:

“ ‘You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me’ ” (John 5:39, NKJV).

John’s Gospel, like Mark’s, ends with a meeting in Galilee. This final lesson on John deals with that meeting but integrates it with the theme of how we know Jesus and the Word of God—a concept that runs through the fourth Gospel.

Though they were with Jesus more than three years, the disciples were still greatly unprepared for the Crucifixion and Resurrection, even though Jesus had told them again and again what would happen.

Unfortunately, they didn’t take Him at His word.

We today can be in danger of doing the same thing: hearing or even reading the Word of God but not listening to it, not abiding in it, and not obeying it. That is, not accepting it as the light that should guide our thoughts and actions. This, unfortunately, is where, perhaps unwittingly, too many Christians are.

In this, our last week in John, we will look at some of this Gospel’s key points, which can help us move beyond the mere head knowledge of Jesus to, instead, knowing Him better and more closely abiding in Him and in His Word.