Andy Stanley says, "One of the great irony’s in life is our propensity to resist God." All of us have done it during some stages of our lives. Some of us are doing it now. We have the audacity to say, "No!" to God! There are several reasons why we resist God.

1) We don’t want to give up control of our lives, as if we are really in control.

2) We’re afraid that if we don’t resist God that He is going to mess with a portion of our life, a relationship, a habit, our money, etc.

3) We are mad at Him. He didn’t do this one thing that I asked Him to do. We don’t know if He caused the pain in our lives or if He just allowed it, but we don’t really care because if He is God He could have done something about it and He didn’t.

I’d like to introduce you to a character from the Bible who said, "No!" to God. Os Guiness in his book, The Call, says, "…Recognizing who we aren’t is only the first step toward knowing who we are." Looking at how Caiaphas resisted God shows us how we may be resisting God and help us to take the steps to align our hearts with God and what He is doing in our life circumstances.

Caiaphas may look familiar to some of you. You may be married to this individual or you may be this person. He was the ultimate negotiator, the ultimate politician. He was able through his connections, relationships and his ability to manipulate to end up in a position of ultimate power. He would probably be someone who today would be greatly admired for all of the power that he had attained. He was a man who had figured out how to get to the seat of power and he would do everything it took to remain there regardless of what it cost.

Caiaphas was probably the most powerful Jewish person in the early first century. His resume was decorated with prestige and influential roles that he held. He was the most powerful because he was the High Priest. He was the Jewish people’s representative before God. He was the one Jewish person who could enter what was called the "Holy of Holies" and ask God for forgiveness for the nation’s sins. As High Priest, he had been appointed by Rome, who ruled the world then. The average career for a high priest was 3 to 4 years. Caiaphas filled those shoes for 18 years, which was a tribute to his ability to negotiate and keep the Romans happy at the same time satisfy the religious community of the Jews.

As High Priest, he was also President of the Sanhedrin. This was a group that consisted of 70 chief priests, elders and teachers of the Law. They were the high court of the Jews. They wielded a lot of power in Israel. These were the lawmakers the lawyers of the day. Caiaphas was the "go to" person for Rome so he was exceedingly powerful.

Caiaphas was a member of the religious group known as the Sadducees. They were an affluent, wealthy and sophisticated party. They were a political party with a twist of religion thrown in. They were small in number, but exerted tremendous political and religious influence.

Fifteen years into his reign, he met his match in a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth.

When Jesus came on the scene, He immediately gathered a following. People began to flock to Him and word about Him spread like wild fire. Whenever Jesus would heal someone he’d say, "Go show yourself to the Pharisees." There would be a knock on Caiaphas’ door and it would be another healed person by this man – Jesus of Nazareth. Day after day this would happen to Caiaphas and his cohorts, and it would remind them everyday that there was a man out there preaching and teaching a completely different message about God. Not only was he healing these people and sending them to the religious leaders, he was also making claims to be the Messiah. It’s all over the pages of the gospels. He was doing this because the job of the Pharisees was to represent to the people who the Messiah was. They were to go out and discover is this really the Messiah. That’s why when John the Baptist came on the scene they went out and asked him, "Are you the Messiah?" John said, "I’m not the one, but one is coming so keep your eyes open."

As days went by, Jesus’ followers began to grow in numbers. His influence began to grow, and as the days passed by, Caiaphas and the other religious leaders slowly began to feel their own power and influence drifting away. Jesus became a threat to everything that they controlled and found security in. Early on, they would question Jesus about his teachings and his theology. He answered every question. As his influence began to grow, their motives became more evident. Every time they tried to quiet him, his popularity and his following grew.

Finally, Jesus performed a miracle that served as the straw that broke the camel’s back. It forced Caiaphas and his group to expose their real concerns and what their real intent was. Their problem with Jesus wasn’t his teachings, theology, or his heritage, though that is what they had said. Their problem with Jesus was that he had become a threat to what they valued most – their power, their place and their position. And they did what any of us would do; they used their influence and power not for the sake of the kingdom, or for the sake of the people, but for their own selfish ambition.

John Chapter 11 is the account of that ultimate miracle. Jesus brought a man back from the dead. Lazarus was a very famous man in the community. He was known in the community. He was a wealthy businessman who had died four days earlier. So that everyone would know this was not a mistake, Jesus stood at the grave, and in front of all the mourners, he called a dead man out of the tomb. Lazarus came out. When this happened, some of the skeptics said, "We believe! We know the Pharisees say he is a false prophet, but if this guy can bring a dead man back from the grave – we’re with him. Forget the Pharisees."

A buzz began to go through out the community about the latest miracle Jesus had performed. Could this be the Messiah? Could He be the one? Word went out everywhere about Jesus and about what the Pharisees would do. We get a glimpse of what is really inside Caiaphas from John’s account: John 11:45 says:

"Many of the people who were with Mary believed in Jesus when they saw this happen. But some went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the leading priests and Pharisees called the high council together to discuss the situation. "What are we going to do?" they asked each other. "This man certainly performs many miraculous signs."

Why don’t they believe? There was something in them, and it is probably in me and in you, that started doing things that they never thought they would in order to control outcomes. And then they exposed what they are most afraid of:

"This man certainly performs many miraculous signs. If we leave him alone, the whole nation will follow him, and then the Roman army will come and destroy both our Temple and our nation."

"If we leave him alone…" One translation says, "If we let him go on like this…" As if they were the ones who were allowing Jesus to do these things in the first place. Their fear was that they were about to lose their own following and their real fear was that ultimately the Romans would come and remove them from power and bring about the demise of the nation and the temple.

Finally, our man, Caiaphas speaks up:

"And one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said, ‘How can you be so stupid? Why should the whole nation be destroyed? Let this one man die for the people.’"

Sadducees were known to be rude in their discourse with their peers. My guess is that Caiaphas had learned the art of negotiation, manipulation and if necessary bullying his way through to achieve his objective, to get what he wanted. "Don’t you realize it is better for you that one man die for the people than for the whole nation to perish?" They all had to consciously decide, "Is this what it will take for me to keep what I have built?" It’s here where Caiaphas’ story intersects with our world.

At some point in your life following Jesus will cost you something. Something is going to come along that will rock your world. It may be God, it may be circumstances, and it may just be life. Somewhere along the way something will come along and in that moment you will decide am I following Jesus or am I going into damage control and abandoning my beliefs and morality and values and ethics and I’m going to fix and control and maintain what I have worked so hard to build. Maybe it’s your health, your marriage, a relationship, your business, your income, or your retirement. When it begins to slip away, and you have to decide if you are going to follow Jesus, even if it feels like you are going to lose something if you do not take control.

Caiaphas was at a crossroads along with the Sanhedrin. All of their power, their perks their tax- free living, their prestige, their following, was all being threatened by this carpenter from Nazareth. It’s in these moments, critical moments that reveal what is in a man or woman’s heart. For Caiaphas, this moment revealed his desire for power was the true thirst in his life. He was not going to let anything get in the way of what he had achieved, so he was determined to stay in power the same way he had figured that he had gotten in power. His desire for power had been attained by control, so he shifted into control mode and through his influence convinced everyone else that the best thing to do to keep our power is to kill an innocent man.

John 11:53 says, "So from that time on the Jewish leaders began to plot Jesus' death."

They mistakenly thought that their control would provide for security: job security, economic security, and security of their position in society. And eventually they had Jesus arrested on trumped up charges and convinced Pilate to have him crucified so that they could keep there place and position.

If you were able to scratch a little deeper into the heart of Caiaphas you would find that all this stemmed from a combination of pride and fear. There is an air of arrogance around Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. They had probably dealt with difficult things before, but not quite this threatening. So the fear that they could lose everything was very real, and they had to do anything it took to stay in power.

We can read this account and say, "Those were bad people; those guys were evil." But if we live out our lives thinking that everything I own, everything I have, the status I’ve achieved, who I am and what I control is the result of me, of my hard work. Then when any of that becomes threatened, and it will at some point, the only person you have to rely on is yourself. If your attitude and approach to life is: "I am what am is because of me," then your natural knee jerk reaction to any threat will be, "Whatever it takes, whatever it costs to maintain what I have, I’ll do it. That drive in us has the potential to drive us to all kinds of unhealthy extremes.

God is in Control. His will, will not be thwarted and to resist is futile. At the heart of a champion is trust. Our trust in God grows when at a heart and life level the champion obeys. Jesus said, "Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him." When we follow God’s plans for us, the promise is that we will experience Him; Jesus says I will show myself to you.