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Guest (Female): Welcome to PowerPoint with Jack Graham. The selfless, sacrificial Savior shows us how to live because this love is unselfish. Only humble people can love like Jesus. On today's PowerPoint, Dr. Graham brings a message about what a life focused on Christ is really all about. Now, here's Dr. Graham with his message, "The Way of the Master."

Jack Graham: Right now, I want you to take your Bibles and turn with me to John's Gospel, the Gospel of John, chapter 13. We are going to go with Jesus into the Upper Room the night that He was betrayed before He went to the cross, hours before the crucifixion. Jesus gathered His disciples, His chosen ones, there to observe Passover.

On that dark night and in the shadows of that night, He taught us in four chapters what it means to live a Christ-centered life. Christianity is Christ in you. Christianity is not a code, a cause, a creed, or even a church, but Christ. It is wonderful to note that Christ is for us. God is for you. It's wonderful to know if you are a believer that Christ is beside you, walking with you. He is behind you, caring for you. He is in front of you, leading you. But the great truth is this: that God in Christ lives in us.

When we discover that Jesus is alive in us, the risen Christ is alive in us, then we learn how to live and how to give like Jesus. What is the mindset of this generation? This generation in particular is focused on self, living as though Jesus Christ never lived, never died, never rose again. This is the problem that we have in the world: such self-centeredness and lovelessness, such pride, and therefore so little love.

This is not only a problem for the community and the country and the world, it's a problem with many Christians because we are so distracted. Scrolling and screening, obsessed with many things, and taking our eyes off Christ and the focus that He is giving to us that we might walk with Him. We have no problem living selfishly, do we? In doing so, we often forget about the Savior and live our own way rather than living in sacrifice and service to God. We miss the fullness of the promises of God and the provision of God. All these promises that we're going to find here in the Upper Room with Jesus, we miss all of this if we live for self.

So the first lesson that Jesus is going to teach us from the Upper Room is about how to live a selfless life. I'm calling this message, "The Way of the Master." The way of the Master, the way of Jesus, is a life of love. Jesus has gathered these men, and what a group they were: Peter and James and John, Simon the Zealot who was a political revolutionary, Thaddaeus who you barely know. Judas was there initially in that Upper Room. They were all there.

As the shadows were falling on that Passover evening—it was Thursday night, as I noted, before the cross, before He is betrayed—Jesus shows them the way, the way of the Master. Verse 1 says, "Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come," Jesus knew why He had come to Earth, and His mission was to die on the cross for our sins. Always, that was His mission. Now the hour, the fatal hour, had come. The enemies of Christ were circling. The devil was moving. So this is the end of His earthly ministry and He no longer would speak publicly to the crowds, but He's now speaking privately to His disciples.

At this Passover meal, which eventually becomes the Lord's Supper, He realizes the hour had come. Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. What kind of love is a Christ-centered, Christ-like love, a Christian love? Let's define it. Let's define Christ-like love, Christ-centered love. He loved them to the end. That is, He loved them to completion. He loved them to perfection. He loved them faithfully and forever. He loved them to the end. What is true of those men is true of us. He loves you with an everlasting love.

There's nothing you can do to make God love you more than He loves you right now. There's nothing you can do to cause God to love you less than He loves you right now. He loves you with an eternal, everlasting love. This is the story of the Bible. It's the message of the Bible. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." God has loved you always. He always has, He always will.

Now, I'm reminding you of what many of you, if not most of you, already know. It's such a simple thing, but a sublime thing to say God loves you with an everlasting love. He loves you to the very end. He loves you through and through. He loves you unconditionally. The love of Jesus Christ is an unconditional, unforgettable love. Because He loves you like that, it's a simple thing, but we learned it as children, many of us: "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

I'm reminding you of this truth because so often we forget it. We get so busy and so distracted. We're on our screens or we're doing our thing without Him, and we forget how much we are loved. We forget to let God love you. I want to challenge you every morning when you get up to embrace the love of God in your life. When you go to bed at night, when you pillow your head on the promises of God, thank Him for His love and His grace in your life. It is an all-encompassing love and grace. I don't know of anything in life that people need to know more than the love of God.

This is His love, and it never lets us go. Paul reflected on this, wrote of this in Romans chapter 8. He said nothing will separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ. "Nothing" means nothing. He ransacks his own vocabulary trying to think of something that might separate us from the love of God, but he says height or death or length or breadth and things above the earth and things below the earth and things under the earth. None of these things separates us from the love of God. His love lasts and never lets us go.

You cannot fall nor can you fail beyond His love. This is the most important fact in your life. He dearly loves you, and He loves you to the end. Christ-like love is the very definition of love. Human love fails, but God's love never fails. What we have here, what we see here in the Upper Room with Jesus, just to start, is grace and humility on display. The selfless, sacrificial Savior shows us how to live because this love is unselfish and humble. Only humble people can love like Jesus. Proud people can't love like this. But love in its purest form, as in the presence of Jesus, love in its purest form is unselfish. Love is being willing to do whatever it takes to meet the needs that you see around you. It's thinking and putting others first. Paul describes this love in the great 1 Corinthians 13 love chapter when he says, "Love does not seek its own." It's what Jesus is doing here.

Guest (Female): You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, "The Way of the Master." Pastor, 2027 is going to be an amazing year and you've got an awesome trip coming up. Will you tell us more about it?

Jack Graham: Say, when was the last time something really truly changed your life? If that's been a long time, let me invite you to something that is absolutely life-changing, and that is to go to the land where Scripture comes alive. I'm personally leading a group to Israel, March 9 through 19, 2027, and we're going to be walking together, studying God's Word together, and growing in our faith together in the Holy Land.

From the shores of Galilee to the streets of Jerusalem, from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Garden Tomb, every step will deepen your understanding of God's Word and it will bring the Bible to life. I like to say that a trip to Israel with Christian friends is like a front-row seat to the Bible. This is truly more than a trip. It is a spiritual pilgrimage that will strengthen your faith and leave a lasting mark on your life. Because interest is very strong, space is limited, so I want to encourage you to register now. Register early. I would be honored to travel with you. Learn more and reserve your place at jackgraham.org/israel. Now, let's get back to today's message, "The Way of the Master."

It was common, it was important in the day of Christ that when you entered a home, the host rather would have someone there to wash the feet of those guests. People wore sandals typically or went barefoot, and so their feet get dirty. So if you were going to a dinner party or certainly the Passover, it would be important that someone be there to wash those feet. It was the lowest, most menial task at hand was to wash feet.

You would have thought that someone, just someone among the disciples would have realized that there was no one there to wash feet, and therefore would wash the feet of Jesus. But those guys, you know what they were doing according to Luke's Gospel? They were abuzz, they were arguing about who was going to be first in the kingdom. You see, they thought that Jesus was going to overthrow all their enemies. They were triumphalists; they believed the Messianic hope was in conquering all the enemies, establishing the kingdom, so they were all fired up about who's going to be first.

Nobody's washing the feet. So what did Jesus do? When nobody was washing feet, He got up. He took off His outer garment and He took a towel and a tub of water, and He began to wash those disciples' feet. This is a metaphor, if you will, a model of the Divine Servant, Jesus, and of Christ Himself, God Himself, coming to Earth in the incarnation, in the humiliation, in the condescension of Jesus from glory to Earth, from the glories of Heaven, the beautiful golden streets of Heaven to the dirty streets of this world.

This is a powerful picture of what Christ has done for us, and therefore He is the Divine Servant. I want you to go with me to Philippians chapter 2, and I want you to look at some verses that are illustrative of how we are to take this to ourselves. Philippians 2:3 and 4: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others."

How are we to do that? Verse 5, Philippians 2: "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Jesus Christ, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself." Now John makes it very clear in this passage that Jesus is God, that He came from Heaven, He was going back to Heaven, He came from God, mission accomplished, He would go back to Heaven. That's never a question here in the Upper Room.

Because Jesus, when He left Heaven with all of its glory and all of His glory, He laid aside His dignity, but He never laid aside His deity. He is always the infinite God-man. But in His humanity and His deity, He stoops and comes down and empties Himself of the prerogatives and the privileges of so much of His deity. And He took on the form of what? A servant. Being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of a cross, which was in that era the most shameful and horrible way to die.

So this is love defined as Jesus, the Divine Servant, stoops to serve. The love of God is immeasurable. The greatest sacrifice that is provided for us is the forgiveness of our sin. It's because of this that we are forgiven and this love is beyond comprehension. This love is in us. If you are a believer, you have been cleansed, your soul has been cleansed. Jesus came to cleanse us from our sin, to change our hearts.

And you now, if you are a believer, have the capacity to love like Jesus, for the fruit of the Spirit is love. But I want you to see how Christ-centered love is also denied. Look at verse 2. Verse 2 says, "During the supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray Him." Why is Judas still in the room? Right in the middle of this light and this love is this hate and a devil-filled man by the name of Judas.

Now, you wouldn't have recognized him most likely as a devil-filled man. In fact, Judas was the treasurer of the disciples. John said he held the bag, and he also commented—now they know—he was stealing from the offering plate, from the bag. So he was a thief. But they didn't know it. In fact, when Jesus said, "One of you will betray me," nobody that we're aware of pointed their finger at Judas and said, "That's the guy." No, instead they were all saying to themselves, "Is it me? Is it I? Is it I?"

Judas, imagine this: he had been with Jesus for three years. He had heard all those wonderful messages. He had seen the miracles. He was so close. He was right there even at the end. But Satan had filled his heart, filled his heart with hate to sell out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. And I'm asking myself, why is this in such a beautiful passage of Scripture? Why is this ugliness mentioned?

Well, a couple of reasons. One, it reminds us that you can be near Jesus and not know Jesus. So we see a contrast here, and it's also instructive in this way. You see darkness and hate side by side. You see Satan working in Judas's life to do the most horrendous, terrible thing to betray Jesus. And yet what did you see in Jesus? Love, on His knees, serving and sacrificing. You know, many times Christians, we wonder why is there persecution. So what do the people of hate do? They march in the streets, they burn down buildings, they create violence, mayhem, and murder. That's what hate-filled people do.

But what do Jesus-filled people do? We don't burn stuff down. We don't return hate with hate. We give love. We keep praying. We keep worshipping. We keep praising God. We keep sharing our faith. We keep serving people. Judas and his cohorts are filled with hate. Jesus and His followers are filled with love. And I believe that's why God put this right here in the Upper Room.

One final point I want to make: Christ-centered love defined, Christ-centered love denied—Judas denied it and he went to hell. But finally, Christ-centered love, this way of the Master, is demonstrated. It's demonstrated as Jesus is washing the feet of His disciples one by one. It was shocking. The room must have been silent, though there was a low buzz, maybe conversation going on, "What's happening?" until He gets to Simon Peter.

Simon Peter's always pretty much got something to say. So He gets to Simon Peter, and you know what Simon Peter says? "Stop! Stop it, Jesus. You're going to wash my feet?" And he uses some of the strongest language, it was extreme language. He said, "Never in eternity are You going to wash my feet." And that's when Jesus said to him, "Well, if I don't wash your feet, Simon Peter, then you're not clean and you're not a part of Me."

To which Peter then exclaims, "Okay! Head to feet, wash me." Jesus said, "You'll understand this later." And later when you read the writings of Peter in the books and letters that he wrote, you understand that he began to understand what Jesus was doing here. Jesus is talking about a spiritual washing. And He said to Simon Peter, "You are already clean." Peter had confessed Jesus. He had said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

When some were leaving the Lord, many were leaving the Lord when the sayings got hard, it was Simon Peter said, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Peter wanted to know God. He wanted a relationship with Jesus more than anything. So think about how wonderful it was when Jesus looked at Simon Peter and said, "You're saved. You're clean. You just need your feet washed because we all live in a dirty world where our feet get dirty and we get polluted by the world."

So as Christians, when we're saved, we need to make sure that we keep our feet clean by a daily sanctifying washing. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. But how great is this: that Jesus would look at you like Simon Peter and say, "You are clean. You are saved. You are saved because you are Mine." Then I wish Jesus would say that to me.

Well, as a matter of fact, 1 John 5:13, John reminds us that He already has. He says, "These things are written to you who believe on the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life." So what does this mean? Well, it means that if we're going to live a Christ-centered life, then we live out the love of Jesus. We wash feet.

How do we do it? Meet needs, no matter how menial. This means primarily our brothers and sisters in Christ, our own spiritual family, but we are to encourage one another. That means sometimes you just shoot a text. That could be a simple thing, "I love you and I'm praying for you." It's a visit to a widow. It's welcoming a stranger, someone from another country that lives across the street from you. How can you serve them? How can you wash feet for people that aren't like you? This is what Jesus did. And I want to invite you to join me in committing to do it ourselves until Jesus comes.

Guest (Female): You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, "The Way of the Master." Right now, every gift you give to PowerPoint Ministries will be doubled through a generous $150,000 matching grant. Helping reach even more people with the hope and truth of Jesus Christ.

Every day, people burdened by fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are discovering the peace found in God's Word through this ministry. Your support helps make that possible. As our thanks for your gift of $10 or more, we'll send you Dr. Graham's brand-new book, *The Lord is My Shepherd*. In this encouraging study of Psalm 23, Dr. Graham shows how the Good Shepherd provides, guides, and stays with you even through life's darkest valleys. Text SEPTEMBER to 59789 to have your gift doubled and receive your copy today. Again, text SEPTEMBER to 59789. Did you know that you can join Dr. Graham for his daily devotion? It's a study of God's Word that will help you grow in your faith, encourage you in your walk with Christ, and show you how to navigate through the challenges of life. To sign up, text DEVO to 59789 and begin receiving Dr. Graham's devotional every day. Again, text DEVO to 59789. Pastor, what is your PowerPoint for today?

Jack Graham: Probably sometime this week, someone is going to need something from you that's inconvenient, messy, beneath what you think your time is worth. And in that moment, you'll either reach for the towel or you'll walk past. That's really what this comes down to: not a theology lesson you file away, but a posture you choose to live in. Jesus didn't tell His disciples to feel humble. He told them to do humble. There's a difference between admiring a servant's heart from a distance and actually kneeling down. So don't just be moved by a story about feet and water from 2,000 years ago. Look for your towel. Maybe it's a phone call you've been putting off. Maybe it's forgiving somebody who doesn't deserve it and serving them anyway. Maybe it's showing up for someone whose life is genuinely messy right now when it would be so much easier to just send a card and move on. You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to fix everyone's problem. You just have to be willing to get low, because that's not a lesser way to live. That's actually the way of the Master. That's the way of Jesus. And when you live that way, blessed, truly, deeply satisfied is what you become. So this week, don't just believe this. Do it. Pick up the towel.

Guest (Female): And that is today's PowerPoint. And join us again next time as Dr. Graham brings a message about what it is that identifies believers to a watching world. That's next time on PowerPoint with Jack Graham. PowerPoint with Jack Graham is sponsored by PowerPoint Ministries.