He Stinketh, We Doubteth, God Still Moves

Death shows up like a wall; Jesus meets it like a door. Walking through John 11, we sit with Martha and Mary in raw grief, hear Jesus name Himself as “the resurrection and the life,” and watch a stone roll back on four days of finality. Pastor Carl wrestles with the ache we feel when God seems late and the deeper truth that love sometimes waits so glory can be seen. We talk about tears that tell the truth—Jesus wept over sin’s wreckage and stubborn unbelief—and the risky obedience of moving the stone when everything in us wants to keep loss sealed away.

Together we explore what it means to trust God’s timing, not only for comfort but for transformation. This isn’t a story about avoiding pain; it’s a story about a Savior who steps into it, speaks to it, and calls us out of it. We draw a clear line between physical death and eternal separation, and we name the hope that holds in the darkest rooms: the crucified and risen Christ who judges and saves, confronts and comforts. The crowd’s doubts, the whispered “if only,” and the grave clothes around Lazarus all mirror our own moments of paralysis—and the same voice still calls, personally and powerfully.

We end by asking the question that shapes everything: “Who do you say He is?” A self-made Jesus cannot save. The biblical Jesus—eternal Son of God, crucified for our sins, risen in power—still opens tombs and hearts. If your faith has cooled, this conversation invites you back to simple, sincere steps: bring your honest prayers, obey in small risky ways, and keep your spiritual fervor. 

If this message strengthens your hope or challenges your assumptions, share it with a friend, subscribe for more teaching, and leave a review to help others find this conversation.

Come On Up is the radio ministry of The Mountain Cross in Waynesville North Carolina. To learn more about us please visit: TheMountainCross.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, and we shall walk in his paths.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to Come On Up, the radio ministry of the Mountain Cross in Waynesville, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

What does Jesus have to do to open our eyes, to break our hearts, and to cause us to repent from our sin and believe in the one who can make us clean, to make us right with God? For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting love. The Father loves us. The Lord loves us because of his love for us. He came and he laid down his life.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who sticks to their guns no matter what alternative facts you mention? They're completely mistaken in whatever stance they've taken, but refuse to admit defeat or that they're wrong. Today, Pastor Carl pleads with you not to do this with Jesus. Admit you're a sinner in need of a savior. Turn from your sin, which is present in all of us, and accept him. Don't miss the boat to eternity because you're too stubborn to see Jesus' gift that's right in front of you. And now, here's Pastor Carl.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

John chapter 11. John chapter 11, and this is the story of Lazarus and him being brought back to life. Jesus came and he arrived and he was talking with Martha. Martha came out to meet him outside of town, and Martha said something along the lines, Had you been here, Lord, our brother would not have passed. And then they had a nice little conversation together. Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again. Martha said to him, I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Martha knew her theology and she believed that there was a resurrection that was to come. And she believed in that and she took comfort in that, but still he's still gone now, you know. When we lose somebody and we know that they've gone home to be with the Lord, we look forward to seeing them someday, but they're gone now, and I miss them now. Do you put your hope in the resurrection? That's part of the gospel. Jesus came as a man, took our place, he identified with us, he died on the cross, took our sins upon him, and he rose again, that whoever would believe would be forgiven and have everlasting life. But the second part of that gospel is that he's coming back again and receiving us to himself, to those who are his own and who have been changed by him, and we will get new resurrection bodies. We will put off these old bodies of death and will receive new bodies that are built for eternity, the same body that the Lord will have for eternity. He has a resurrected physical body that we'll have for eternity just like ours. And then Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Yes, the resurrection is coming. Yes, I'm coming back. And Jesus is our blessed hope. We're looking for his return to take us home and to change us and make us like him. But he is in the here and now the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live. The dying is, you know, we've got to trade in the old and get the new. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. The death that he's talking about is eternal separation. Don't fear the one who can destroy your body, but fear the one that can destroy your soul, Jesus talks about. There's a difference between dying in the flesh and having your soul perish for eternity. The same one you need to fear that can destroy your soul for eternity is the same one who saves your soul. The same one who judges you is the same one who saves you if you believe in him, if you trust in him, if you surrender your whole life to him. And he says, Do you believe this? And she said, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who has come into the world. In another instance in Matthew chapter 16, the disciples were asked by Jesus, Who are all these people say, who do they say I am? And they gave all these answers. And then Jesus said to them, But who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter, his eyes were opened by the Father, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, Peter declared. And the same question should be asked of us. Who do you say that I am? Jesus. Who is he? How you answer that question will affect your eternity. Do you believe he is who he declares himself to be in the Bible? Or do you make some kind of image of a Jesus and worship that image that is not the same as the Jesus in the Bible? Any Jesus that is not the Jesus of the Bible is a false Jesus and cannot save, no matter how many nice and loving things that he does. Do you know Jesus as the eternal Son of God? Who we say Jesus is affects everything. What do you believe about Jesus? A lot of people say, oh yeah, I believe in God. Well, what about God do you believe? If you believe some pagan, some worldly philosophy of who God is, it's not a God that can save. There is one God. And one God man, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who can save. By his name, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord. The problem is many will do that after it's too late. Bow now so that you can be lifted up later. Well, as Martha had said these things to Jesus and made this great declaration, she went her way and secretly called Mary her sister. She bypassed all the crowds and she carefully went back to the house and was not noticed. And she says, The teacher is come and he's calling for you. The teacher is come, he's outside of town. I'll show you where it is, but shh be quiet. We need to go so nobody else notices. And as soon as she heard that, she arose quickly and came to him. And other people noticed. Now Jesus had not yet come into town, but he was in the place where Martha met him. Then the Jews who were with her in the house and comforting her when they saw that Mary rose up quickly and went out, following her, saying, She's going to the tomb to weep there. So she didn't get the clue that Martha was saying, Come, let's go quietly. And she just zoomed out there, and everybody noticed, and everybody followed him. Again, the Jews, a lot of times when John is mentioning the Jews, it refers to the Jewish leaders or people that are subjects of the Jewish leaders that have gone and have been sent to do something. They've been sent now to comfort this family because that's what religious leaders are supposed to do. You go out and you comfort the people who have lost somebody. But at the same time, they may have been in the way. And I don't know if you've experienced that too. Sometimes people need comforting, and you can come alongside when they've lost a loved one and bring them some good comfort. But sometimes just people need to be left alone sometimes to mourn. And now I'm trying to work through this, but there are all these people in my house trying to comfort me, and I'm not feeling very comforted. I wonder if that was some of the things that were going on in Mary's heart as she went out. And the people, of course, they're talking, what's going on? Where's she going? Well, she's going out to see the tomb again because she's still hurting and she needs to go weep and talk to her brother there. Then when Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Martha said something similar. I'm sure they were talking about this and they were all in agreement. If Jesus were only here, yes, if Jesus were only here, he would have saved our brother from death. And now she goes before the Lord. Her broken heart. She feels like she's been done wrong by the Lord that she loves. Lord, we we sent word and you didn't come. Lord, did you not hear our cries? Do you feel that sometimes when you're praying to the Lord? Lord, I've been praying. Did you not hear me? If you've only done this, then this wouldn't have happened. And of course, from Jesus' perspective, and he was trying to explain this to Martha, but I don't think she fully got the message that I'm doing something bigger here. Yes, if I were here earlier, I could have saved him from dying. But we seem to sometimes get so focused on our situation that we're in and where our heart is hurting, it's breaking. And yet Jesus is saying, I'm doing something bigger. I want to show you something larger here. Do you want to see the bigger vision? I know it hurts, but I'm doing something that's a lot greater than what you're asking for. Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews came with her weeping, some of them with sincere tears, and some of them with acting tears, because that's what you do. You feel bad for people. And if you don't really feel it, you act like it because that's what you're supposed to do as religious leaders and brothers and sisters in your faith. That's you just come alongside, even if you don't feel it, right? Something's missing there. We need to do things out of sincerity. We need to do things led by the Spirit of God, not just because that's the right thing, or that's the thing you're supposed to do. Even the right thing might not be the right definition there. That's the thing that's supposed to do. We've always done it that way. And then when he saw them coming, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled. I'm sure the Lord was going through all sorts of emotions at this point. And he said to her, Where have you laid him? And they said to him, Lord, come and see. He wants to see the grave, he wants to pay his last respects, he wants to honor his friend Lazarus, who has passed away. That's what they think he's doing. And then the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. Why did he weep? Then the Jews said, See how he loved him? They thought that he was weeping because his heart was broken because of the death of his friend, which I believe is probably part of it. But what else is going through Jesus at this in his heart at this time? We looked at a comparison between Lazarus of the book of Luke and Lazarus of the book of John. And Lazarus and the rich man was the parable, quote unquote parable that we looked at. And Lazarus was in Abraham's bosom, and the rich man was in Hades, and the rich man was calling out and saying, Can you just send Lazarus back and warn them? Because I've got to tell my family that this is real. There is a difference between heaven and hell. And this wasn't even heaven and hell yet. This is just a holding place, and not to be confused with purgatory, because that's a whole different subject in itself. But he said, it does matter what you believe, it does matter how you live. Would you go back and tell my family because they're on the wrong path as well? And Abraham said if they don't listen to the law and the prophets, how are they going to listen to somebody who comes back from the dead? And Jesus is about to raise Lazarus from the dead. And he realizes that many people are still not going to believe. What does Jesus have to do to open our eyes, to break our hearts, and to cause us to repent from our sin and believe in the one who can make us clean, to make us right with God. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting love. The Father loves us. The Lord loves us because of his love for us. He came and he laid down his life. His blood paid the sin debt of all mankind, and yet so many would not believe. Could that be part of his weeping? Could part of his weeping be, boy, I really see the results of sin in this world. Ever since Adam and Eve fell into sin and ate that forbidden fruit. It's been a downward spiral. Does that not break God's heart? To see the effects of sin? And death. Death wasn't part of the picture to begin with. Death is separation. Death is just, it's not natural. It's not the way it meant to be. And maybe that's part of what Jesus was going through too when he wept. Let's just suffice it to say it's the shortest verse, but it encapsulates a whole lot of emotion going on in our Savior at this moment. And some of them, of course, said, Could not this man who opened the eyes of the blind also have kept this man from dying? And what's the answer? Yes, he could have. There are so many things that we ask the Lord to do that he could do, and yet he wants something better for us. And it might not be better in the here and now. He wants something better for us for eternity. He wants something better for somebody else that he might use us to accomplish. See, the Lord thinks in ways that we don't think. And the problem with man-made religion is we come up with these things in our own logic, in our own fallenness, that in our own religion we don't acknowledge that we're fallen, that we're good people. Everybody is good. We just need to be taught how to live and how to get along. And those are all lies because we are all fallen. We're all suffering from the fall. We have sin. We're born into sin. We're sinners, and we sin because we are sinners. And we need a savior. And yet we can't see that except for the influence of God, unless the Holy Spirit comes and awakens our hearts and convicts us and reveals to us our sin and shows us our need for that savior. And many times that's very uncomfortable. When God is working to conform us to his image, it causes a lot of uncomfortable things in our lives. So so often we ask, Lord, you could have done this, but you didn't. And the answer is right, because I have something else in mind. Do you want me to align myself with your will? Or would it be better for you to align yourself with my will, says the Lord. And the Lord in his grace and his mercy, knowing what's good for us, says, it is better to go my way. Because I'm without sin. I love you. I'm not out to destroy you like the enemy. I'm not out to destroy you like yourself. You don't even realize that that's what you're doing, but you are. But I love you, and I've come for you, and I reveal myself to you. I reveal your heart to you if you're open to it. But if you got it all figured out, I can't help you. Let's be careful how we pray. Lord, may your will be done. Then Jesus, again groaning within himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and the stone lay against it. And Jesus said, Take away the stone. Wait a minute. We're just coming here to pay your respects, right? You don't want to open open the tomb. Martha, appealing to him, says, uh, Lord, by this time there's a stench, for he's been dead for four days. I think in the Old King James it says, he stinketh. He needs to take a showereth because he stinketh. Lazarus was really dead. And decomposition was starting to happen. When God works in a fallen world, it's not always clean. Raising someone from the dead involves some nastiness. It was going to be very uncomfortable and just not right. You just don't open the grave. What do you mean, open it up? And those that are, you know, standing there, you wonder what they're thinking. What is he doing? Are they really going to let him do that? And Jesus said to her, Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God? And his heart is breaking. You don't still don't understand what I'm doing here. This needs to be done. Open it up. And so they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said a prayer out loud for everybody to hear. He said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me. And I know that you always hear me. But because of the people who are standing by, I said this, that they might believe that you sent me. It's his heart that we would believe. It's his heart that everyone in that crowd would believe. But would they? Now, when he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. Now you just imagine what it was like with that crowd. What in the world? And Jesus just stands there after that. Stands there looking at the grave, the open, the open tomb. Waiting for Lazarus to come out. And probably even looking forward in the next few months when he's going to be in a tomb like that as well. And what came before that tomb was something he was not looking forward to. He knew that he would give up his life for you and I on that cross, that he would suffer great suffering, and not just physically, but spiritually, because he would become sin. And he would be separated from his father for a moment. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He's seeing a glimpse of all this, and it's just all overwhelming. But he also sees what it leads to life. What's about to happen to Lazarus is a temporary thing, but it's It's a picture of what's gonna happen when Jesus comes out of that grave. The first fruits, the first to be alive forever. And we who believe would follow after him forever. And ever. And as he's standing there between verses 43 and 44, we don't know how long it took. But I can imagine, well, try to imagine. What is it like for Lazarus in the grave, who has just been hanging out, probably with the other Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, waiting for the return of the Lord to set them free and bring them to heaven. And all of a sudden he's back. And he's in this place and he's tied up, he's wrapped up like a mummy, having a hard time breathing, but he's breathing again. That's amazing. He's realizing he's alive again. Then he hears the voice of his savior calling out to him, not only his savior, but his friend. He's okay, I'm back. And he told me to get up. How do I get up? I mean, just imagine if you're wrapped up and you're lying on this stone surface and you have to get your legs off of there and then stand up and then wobble out or something like that. How does that look? Does he fall over? Does he finally get him? And then so then it goes back to how long does it take? Could it be a couple minutes? Ten minutes? Half hour? Could it have been an hour? The last thing Jesus said was, Lazarus come forth, and then he just stood there, waiting. How uncomfortable that might have been for the crowd, huh? How long are we gonna wait here? He's really lost his mind, hasn't he? I can't handle this anymore. I'm out of here. How many of them left?

SPEAKER_00 24:07

You've been listening to Pastor Carl on Come On Up. We're in the book of John. John had been a simple fisherman before meeting Jesus. He was actually a disciple of John the Baptist before realizing that John the Baptist was just paving the way for Jesus to enter the scene. There were so many examples for John to observe, where Jesus made something out of nothing. He fed the 5,000, he brought about a boatload of fish when there had been no bites all night. These miraculous happenings were all around them, and John couldn't help but be enamored by Jesus Christ. What about you? Has the newness of knowing or following Jesus worn off? Are you apathetic about what God's doing in your life or how he's working and how he's trying to speak to you? Keep that spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. John lived a full life devoted to the Lord, and even though he was persecuted and tortured, he never swayed from telling people about the hope and faith he had in Jesus. After all, he had lived with Jesus for three and a half years and had learned much about the heart of God. A way for you to keep learning about the heart of God is by joining us on Sunday mornings at Smokey Mountain Cinema in Waynesville for Bible study. We also have a Faith Film Night the first Monday of every month. We offer quality Christian entertainment that challenges your faith and spurs good conversation. Learn more at themountaincross.com or search for Faith Film Night on Facebook. That's all for today. Come on Up is sponsored by The Mountain Cross, a Calvary Chapel fellowship.