Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Could You Be Wrong About Jesus? | The Gospels | John 7:45-52

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Are you approaching Jesus with curiosity or certainty? Could your assumptions about God be keeping you from seeing him clearly? And what happens when we become more committed to being right than to discovering the truth? In today's episode, Jensen shares how John 7:45-52 invites us to approach Jesus with humility instead of pride. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: John 7:45-52

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jensen Holt McNair. No one is more confident than a toddler who thinks they are right. The reality is that when my toddler says something with confidence, she is most likely, completely detached from reality. She'll explain how something works or tell my husband a detailed story of what we did while he was at work, All the while, I'm sitting there thinking, this chick is completely incorrect. But she is stubborn. She is confident.

You can ask her questions. You can try to help her see truth. But she believes that she is right. She does not waver. She, more often than not, digs her heels in and stands firm on her own version of reality. And honestly, I don't think she's that different from adults. We aren't quite so bold in our lives as my toddler is. and we may not always believe that we're speaking about things incorrectly.

I don't know that Florence always knows when she's wrong, but we, like Florence, can easily persuade ourselves that we are right. Our way of seeing things is correct, and we live our lives through that lens. We judge others, make decisions, grow frustrated when people disagree or go against our beliefs, try to convince us that we may be misunderstanding something. And I think sometimes that we're so baked into our beliefs about how the world works, who we are, who God is, that we even approach the Bible with the same attitude. The attitude that believes we know what's right. We know truth. We know how things work and how they should be. We love to be right. We love for others to think the way that we think. We love to be agreed with. And so when we come to the Bible, when we read the Bible, we read our own beliefs, our own worldviews, our own agendas,

and prerogatives into scripture. And this is dangerous business, because if we are constantly running scripture merely through our own belief system, maybe skipping over what offends us, explaining away parts that condemn us, focusing on the things that bolster our own preconceived notions, then we end up with a warped view of who God is. We miss out on knowing, on trusting, on following a real Jesus. We end up with a Jesus that looks like us, talks like us, thinks like us, or we end up rejecting the false Jesus we've built in our heads because he doesn't feel worth following. In our passage from John 7 today, we enter into the middle of a story. Jesus has just made some big claims about himself. He said whoever believes in him would have rivers of living water

pour from his heart. And the people immediately begin to discuss what this means. debating whether he's the Messiah or not the promised one from the line of David. Now, this kind of claim stirs up some feelings. The chief priests have already commanded the temple guards to arrest Jesus, and now he makes this claim, and the crowds are riled up. And expecting that the guards would arrest him, we open with verse 45. Finally, the temple guards went back to the chief priests and the Pharisees, who asked them, why didn't you bring him in?

No one ever spoke the way this man does, the guards replied. The Pharisees, they expect an arrest. This man, Jesus, is claiming to be the son of God. They've ordered an arrest, and yet the guards come back empty. So they interrogate them. Why don't you have him? And the guards, they reply with a statement that insinuates belief, even if a small amount. No one speaks like him.

Could he be the one? Could the crowds be right? Could you maybe be wrong? The Pharisees have their ways. They have their structure. They have their expectations for who the Messiah would be. Not someone who pokes holes in their rules. Not someone who calls them out on their beliefs.

But someone who would come and be like them. So when they hear the hint of belief in the guard's statement, they lash out. You mean he is deceived you also? The Pharisees retorted. Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? No. But this mob that knows nothing of the law

there's a curse on them. You can hear the anger, the insinuation, the self-righteous belief that they alone are right. You've been deceived. The crowds know the mob of people. They know nothing of the law. Their words insinuating that they know everything. They know the law. They know what to look for. And you're believing them? You're citing with the mob of uneducated, cursed people? You can hear the indignation. You can hear the same hints of stubborn confidence I hear in Florence's voice all too often that we echo in our own hearts. Their supposed knowledge, their pride, their beliefs are keeping them from seeing Jesus as the crowd see him. And instead of wrestling with what is before them, instead of wondering, what kind of man would keep temple guards from following their orders would cause crowds of people to follow

and believe? Instead of doing that, they tell themselves a narrative that makes the world make sense to them again. These people are part of a mob. They are uneducated. The guards are being deceived. They're all cursed. You see the mental hoops that they jump through to make their picture of who God is, the right one. And in doing so, they miss out on seeing who Jesus really is. Now, in the next verses, one of their own, Nicodemus, someone we've already seen be open to the idea of Jesus. He has already approached Jesus, asked questions, wondered. His heart, it's not hardened like the others. He may not have true faith yet, but he isn't so sure that he's absolutely right.

Well, Nicotemus, he interjects. Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing? And instead of the fact that one of their own, that's what the passage says he is, one of their own is asking them to consider that in their haste to disregard Jesus, they may be wrong. They may be actually disobedient. They may be bending the law. may be the ones deceiving, not Jesus. Instead of pausing and considering, they begin to lash out

at one of their own. They replied, are you from Galilee too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee. No one is safe, not even an educated Pharisee. They insult him. Being from Galilee, it's not something that you would want to be true of you. And instead of realizing it isn't just the mobs and the guards who are listening to Jesus. They manufacture an insult to insinuate that Nicodemus might look like them, but he must actually be like the crowds, uneducated from a backwater town, unworthy of his position. They don't have to listen to him.

And then they blatantly lie about scripture. They say that prophets do not come from Galilee, further smearing the name of Jesus. And yet, Jonah was from Galilee. There's evidence that Elijah and Naham were possibly all. also from Galilee as well. See, these Pharisees, they're willing to distort the scriptures to fit their own belief system about Jesus, about who God is. Nothing could get in the way of them following the way of God as they see it, not even the word of God himself. We can see their stubbornness clearly, the way they twist scripture, the way they explain away, the way they

cut off, push out, and silence anyone who disagrees with them. The Pharisees are so, so clearly and obviously the bad guys to us, the ones in the wrong from our point of view, as we read scripture. But they were so convinced that they were right. And while we may not want to consider the possibility because of what we know to be true about the Pharisees, I think that oftentimes we do the same thing that they did. We want to be the one in the crowds recognizing that Jesus is the Messiah. We want to be the temple guard willing to disobey orders because they're in awe of the way that Jesus is speaking, teaching about what he's saying. But how often in our lives do we actually reflect the stubborn confidence of the Pharisees, the pride, the indignation,

the unwillingness to listen to the people and words that challenge us? Maybe we aren't to the extreme of the Pharisees in this passage. Maybe we don't explicitly lie about Scripture, but if we ignore our tendency to ignore certain parts of Scripture, to imagine a Jesus that fits our hopes of who he is to block out the parts about him that make us uncomfortable, then we will end up missing out on Jesus entirely, just like them. We'll end up following a false version of him, or we'll end up rejecting him entirely because we think he's just a guy saying things that don't mesh with our belief system. He's not worth following. But that couldn't be further from the truth. See, the Pharisees, they missed out on who Jesus was because they were so

convinced that they were right. They saw him as unimportant, someone they could arrest, kill, and then move on with their own empire of belief. But Jesus wasn't just a guy telling you how to live your life. He wasn't just a teacher or a guy peddling a new way of thinking that you could try out see if it worked for you. No, Jesus, he claimed to be the son of God. He claimed to be the only one who could transform you into who you were made to be, could give you life, could grant you the power to change. He claimed to be the only one who could resurrect your bodies to eternal life. To reject him or to miss out on actually following Jesus because you're too stubborn, too prideful, too unwilling to believe you may be the one deceived? Deceived by your own version of what is good,

what is worthy, what is valuable, deceived by the things the world tells you to pursue. Deceived maybe by your own belief that you know better. The worst thing we can do is approach the Bible with a confident and prideful heart to filter it through our own agendas and belief systems. We will only deceive ourselves and miss out on truly knowing and following Jesus. Instead, we need to approach it like the crowds, like the temple guards, willing to ask questions, to consider, am I wrong? Does God maybe have a better way? Maybe the Pharisees were right and the crowds were uneducated. But their willingness to approach Jesus and say, I don't know it all. I don't have all the answers. Jesus, will you teach me? Will you show me the way? The

the humility of the guards to say, I've never heard anyone like him. It allowed them to see Jesus for who he was, utterly different than anyone who had ever come before. And just maybe, someone worth following. Don't cling to stubborn pride. Don't cling to your need to be right, your belief that you know better, you know more, you have it all figured out. Don't be deceived. Because you might just miss out on knowing Jesus on the living waters and abundant life that he offers to those who surrender to him. Those who accept they don't know it all. Those who run to Jesus and ask the questions. Those who learn and seek and get to know who Jesus really is. Dig in and surrender to him today.