Knowing Jesus Personally: Faith That Lasts Through Pain

From the sermon preached on May 10, 2026

Knowing Jesus personally means more than knowing what he can do for you. In John 4:43-54, the story of a royal official whose son is near death presses every reader toward a single, searching question: is your faith centered on what Jesus gives, or on Jesus himself? The answer, Pastor John Starke argues, changes everything about how faith holds, or fails to hold, when suffering does not go away.

There is a kind of faith that works well when life cooperates. It brings you to Jesus when the crisis is large enough and retreats when things settle down. This is what Pastor John Starke called "symptoms-based faith," and the royal official in John 4 embodies it when he arrives at Cana asking Jesus to come down before his son dies. The official has resources, status, and access to physicians. None of it has worked. Jesus is his last option, and what the official wants is proximity: "Sir, come down before my child dies" (John 4:49). He wants Jesus present in the room. He wants the symptom fixed.

Jesus does not go anywhere. He speaks a word across seventeen miles and the boy lives. But before he heals the son, Jesus addresses the crowd: "Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe" (John 4:48). The Greek word for "you" there is plural. He is not correcting only this father. He is addressing everyone who has come for the miracle and would leave if the miracle did not come.

Organizing life around Christ means something more durable than organizing it around outcomes. Pastor Starke described two men from his pastoral counseling years who lost their jobs at the same time, both facing real uncertainty and pain. One stayed in his community group, asked for help, and held on. The other grew bitter, pulled away from God, and became spiritually numb. The difference was not personality. The difference was what each man had centered his life around. One had organized his life around Jesus, his presence, and his promises. The other had organized his life almost entirely around his job and the security it provided. When organizing life around Christ is genuinely true of a person, the first order of suffering (the loss, the pain, the fear) does not automatically generate the unbearable second order of suffering (I wasn't enough; life is meaningless). It reorients it.

Sit with this for a moment before moving forward. Ask yourself honestly: when things fell apart in your own life, did you move toward Jesus or away from him? The honest answer to that question reveals more about the actual center of your faith than anything you might articulate about your beliefs. Take one small step today: identify one thing you have been organizing your life around that is too fragile to carry its weight.

The second movement in the story is quieter, but it is where the text does its most honest work. Jesus says to the official, "Go; your son will live" (John 4:50). In the original Greek, the verb is present tense: your son is alive, right now, already done. The official cannot see this. He cannot verify it. He has a seventeen-mile walk back to Capernaum ahead of him with nothing but a word to hold. And yet, the text says plainly: "The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way" (John 4:50).

Believing without seeing is not a spiritual achievement. It is the ordinary posture of every person who has received a promise from Jesus that cannot yet be confirmed by anything visible. Think about the promises that Pastor Starke named from the pulpit: your sins are forgiven, and you will never have to pay for them. Jesus delights in you. Your body will be resurrected into glory. Not one of these can be verified by any material evidence. No chalkboard shows your sins erased. No mirror shows you glorified. And yet these are the words that Jesus speaks to you and about you, and the question is whether you believe them.

This is what believing without seeing looks like in practice. It is waking up under the weight of shame and choosing, slowly, to let the voice of Jesus speak louder than the internal voices that say your shame is greater than his love. It is clinging to the promise of resurrection even when your body is giving out. First John says: when our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything (1 John 3:20). He knows more about you than you know about yourself, and still there is no condemnation. Believing without seeing means letting those words do actual work in your life, not merely holding them as ideas.

The practical step here is concrete: choose one promise of Jesus that you have been holding at arm's length and read it slowly every morning this week. Let it be addressed to you specifically, not to Christians in general.

Here is where the text turns. In verse 50, the official believed the word and walked home. That is already significant. But then in verse 53, after his servants meet him on the road and confirm that his son recovered at the exact hour Jesus spoke, it says: he himself believed. The word "believed" appears again as though something new has happened. And something has.

In verse 50, the official believed what Jesus said. In verse 53, he believed in Jesus. The object of his faith has shifted from what Jesus could do to who Jesus is. He is no longer using Jesus as a means to an end. Jesus has become the end. This is the movement the whole passage has been building toward, and it is the movement that faith through suffering is uniquely capable of producing in a person who does not walk away.

Pastor Starke drew this parallel from his own life. When he came to New York City fifteen years ago to become a pastor, the reasons that drew him were good ones: the desire to teach, to preach, to lead, to give counsel. Those reasons have not disappeared. But fifteen years in, what keeps him at Apostles Church Uptown is not the same thing that brought him. What keeps him is the people he has come to love, the friendships, the shared years of prayer and tears and jokes that did not land as well as he hoped. What brought him and what keeps him are different things, and that difference is the shape of a deepening.

This is what faith through suffering can produce when it does not collapse. The apostle Paul says it plainly in 2 Corinthians 4:8 and 4:17: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair... For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." Faith through suffering reorients the second order of meaning. You are still perplexed. The pain is still real. But what you are organizing your life around is stronger, more durable, more permanent than anything you are losing. And over time, that reorientation does not just change what suffering means. It changes who you know.

John Swinton, a professor at the University of Aberdeen who has written extensively on mental health and Christian theology, argues that shalom (the biblical category for wholeness) is not the absence of illness but the presence of God. His central claim is that true health has to do with learning what it means to encounter God's presence even amidst unrelieved suffering. That is precisely what this text is pressing toward: a presence-based faith, not a symptoms-based one. The question is not whether the circumstances change. The question is whether you know the one whose word crossed seventeen miles and brought a boy back from death's edge.

Ask yourself today: what would it mean to press more deeply into Jesus, not into what he can give you, but into him? Start there. Read John 4 slowly, and let the question sit with you through the week.

John 4:43-54 is the second of seven signs in the Gospel of John. Each sign is not simply a wonder; it is a signpost pointing beyond itself to the nature of Jesus and the kind of faith he produces. This sign points to the reach and power of Jesus's word, which can cross seventeen miles and act on the border of death. It points to a faith that does not require proximity, proof, or resolved circumstances. It points toward knowing Jesus personally.

The questions this sermon raises do not belong to any single neighborhood, but they land with particular weight in a city where achievement, proximity to power, and the management of appearances are ambient pressures. Whether you are in the Upper East Side, East Harlem, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, or the Upper West Side, the same searching question applies: what are you organizing your life around, and can it carry the full weight of your life? Apostles Church Uptown gathers on Sunday mornings at Regis High School to sit with these questions together, not as people who have resolved them, but as people who are learning to press more deeply into the one who is, as John 1 says, life itself.

Knowing Jesus personally is not a threshold you cross once. It is a direction of movement, a press toward something deeper than what first drew you to him. What brought the official to Jesus at the beginning of John 4 was desperation and the hope that Jesus could fix his son. What kept him with Jesus by the end of the story was something he could not have predicted: the discovery that the word of Jesus is alive, that it crosses distances, that it reaches into death and speaks life. The question this text leaves with us is not whether your faith is perfect, but whether it is pointed at the right thing.

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