Calvary Evangelical Free Church
The Practice of Sin
Kuvaus
THOSE WHO ARE A NEW CREATIONS IN CHRIST, WHO ARE BORN AGAIN BY THE GRACE OF GOD, WILL LIVE IN REPENTANCE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. THOSE WHO ONLY CLAIM TO BE CHRISTIANS, BUT ARE NOT ACTUALLY TRANSFORMED BY GOD’S GRACE, WILL BE EXPOSED BY THEIR SIN. Well, I’ve talked to a lot of you who have become part of Calvary in the last few years. And sometimes I’ll ask, what made you decide that Calvary was the place for you? And almost to a person, the answer has something to do with how carefully and seriously we handle the Bible. And I’m glad we’re known for that. I’m glad this. This church is known for its handling of Scripture. I, for one, think it would be a huge waste of time to come to church or to go to Bible study and not hear the Bible plainly taught. It’s God’s word. It is the tool that the Holy Spirit uses in his hands to form us and to shape us into Christ likeness. I don’t want to be shaped by human opinion. That’s not what I want to be shaped by. You don’t need my top three ways to have a great life this week, right? You don’t need that. What we all need is to look fully and honestly into the mirror of God’s Word. See who we really are. See our need for God’s grace in Christ, and learn to apply the gospel so that we are transformed by it. You need that. I need that. We all need that. That’s what we need. Keep that in mind this morning. Remember that we all agree that that’s what we need. Because today we’re looking at a passage of First John that teaches the weight, the origin, and the soul crushing devastation of sin. John teaches this to a group of Christians who might be tempted to think that sin is not that big a deal. And we live in a time in church history, the United States, 2026, when people who would claim to follow Jesus also treat sin like it’s not that big a deal. They don’t see the acceptance of unrepented sinful patterns and practices in their lives as evidence that they don’t actually know Jesus. They have learned to excuse and tolerate and even embrace their own sin as something that is just part of who they are. They’ve incorporated a certain amount of sinful behavior into their walk with Jesus, never even considering that if you’re engaging in unrepentant sin, you can’t be walking with Jesus. This morning, John is going to sort people spiritually. I believe this passage is going to sort us spiritually as well. Those who are a new creation in Christ, who are born again by the grace of God, will live in repentance and righteousness. Those who only claim to be Christians, but are not actually transformed by God’s grace, will be exposed by their sin. I had a weird prayer this week and a strange prayer for our church. I prayed that a lot of you would be exposed. Not by me, not by my preaching, but by the Word of God that we have all gathered here this morning to hear, because we all agree to take the Bible seriously. We’re in First John chapter three, beginning in verse four this morning. This passage is filled with statements of fact, all of them intended for us to self-diagnose the state of our own soul. And I have framed this passage into four statements about sin. And the first statement is simply that sin is lawlessness. Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness. Sin is lawlessness. Now, the first thing we need to do with this verse, and with the rest of this passage, is make an important distinction between committing a sin and making a practice of sin. You can see that the ESV translators here use the word practice twice: a practice of sinning, practices lawlessness. If you look up in your Bible to chapter two, verse 29, you’ll see that these phrases here parallel a phrase there that says everyone who practices righteousness. Now that word practice is a translation of the word does. Okay. The word is does, this person does righteousness, does sin, does lawlessness. And by adding the word does to sin, it gives it sort of a prolonged or ongoing meaning. He’s talking about a chosen direction, what we might call a lifestyle. He’s not talking about a sin committed by a Christian that is followed by confession and repentance and reconciliation with others, and restored fellowship with God. That would actually be part of the practice of righteousness. John is talking about someone who commits sin habitually without repentance, regardless of whether that person calls himself a Christian or not. That is the practice of sin. And this is a very helpful distinction. As long as we remember that there are many sinful lifestyles. Okay. It’s fine to think that way, but we got to remember how many there are. We tend to use the phrase sinful lifestyle only to describe things like LGBT matters or sex outside of marriage or criminals, or things like that. But let me tell you, church, being an angry and controlling person is just as sinful a lifestyle as any of that. Seething bitterness toward another person is a sinful lifestyle. If you don’t believe me, if you think, well, that doesn’t sound right, look down at verse ten in this passage. Just glance down at verse ten right there. John says, you’re a child of the devil if you refuse to forgive and not love another person in your life. A neighbor, a brother. Controlling others and demanding your way always is a sinful lifestyle. Emotional manipulation is a sinful lifestyle. Gossip and slander, disobedience to parents, greedy accumulation of wealth without generosity, all these things and so many more can be sinful lifestyles if they make up the content of the unrepented practice of your life. I’ve heard people say that there’s no such thing as a practicing homosexual Christian, and that’s true. But it’s also true that there’s no such thing as a practicing, spiteful Christian. Or a mean Christian, or sarcastically hurtful Christian, or the Christian who doesn’t care about the suffering of others. These things are also not part of the walk in the light with Jesus. And we need to keep this in mind throughout this passage so we don’t make the mistake of thinking that this applies to everyone else and not to you and me. The reason sin is so egregious is because it is lawlessness. Now, John is probably not talking here about the Mosaic law, specifically. He’s talking about criminality against a lawful God. It’s crimes against God. Sin is an act of rebellion against God. And here I want to quote the late, great R.C. Sproul, who in his book The Holiness of God, described sin as cosmic treason. It’s a great phrase, cosmic treason. Sin is a violent act of rebellion against our creator. Here’s the quote. What are we saying to our creator when we disobey him at the slightest point. We are saying no to the righteousness of God. We are saying, God, your law is not good. My judgment is better than yours. Your authority does not apply to me. I am above and beyond your jurisdiction. I have the right to do what I want to do, not what you command me to do. Church the reason we don’t take sin seriously is because we don’t understand it biblically. Okay? We don’t define it the way the Bible defines it. The only reason we could ever think that sin is no big deal is if we’re ignoring what God says about it. Because he has said sin is lawless rebellion against me. Criminals don’t look at the judge and say, sure, I’m guilty, according to you, but I don’t see it that way, here’s what I think. Right? You can say all you want while they’re slapping the cuffs on you, right? You’ll have plenty of time to mumble about what you think sin is because you’ll be sitting in a cell. Sin is lawlessness. Sin is cosmic treason against God, and no amount of redefining or excuse-making on our part will change sin into something that it’s not. And I have to say, one of my greatest fears for our wider Calvary community is for those of you who intellectually know and understand the gospel, but you’ve not been made new by it because you love your sinful lifestyle and you think God will just forgive your sinful lifestyle while you make a practice of it. And if that’s you, please listen to these next verses. Please listen to what John says in these next verses, because that what I just described, that is not Christianity. Here’s our second statement. Sin has no part of Christ or Christians. You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning. No one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. If you want to know how bad our sin is, just look at what was required to forgive it. God himself stepped into his own creation. He suffered and died a horrific death on the cross, just so that he could take on himself what our sin deserves. That’s what our sin deserves. No one could possibly accept the gospel accounts of the crucifixion and go on thinking that sin is no big deal. Now, you could ignore those accounts. You could disregard those accounts, but you cannot accept and believe them and maintain a light view of sin. But notice how John phrases this. You know, he could have just said that Jesus is the substitute for our sins. In fact, that is what he says up in chapter two verse two. But here he says that Jesus showed up to take away our sins. This has the idea of removing them from us, right? Separating them from us. Like when you turn around to the back seat and you separate your kids from each other, right? You put the armrest down. You don’t want them to touch one another, right? Jesus didn’t forgive our sins so that we could continue to engage in them while presuming upon his grace. He came to remove, to remove our sins. In him there is no sin. That means obedience to Jesus, which causes me to become more like Jesus. Leads me toward sinlessness. If sin isn’t part of Christ, then it can have no acceptable role in the life of a Christian. Which is why John can say the next two very sobering statements. And this is where I really want you to dial in here, church, because here’s where all the excuses stop. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning. Let that settle on you for a moment. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning. No person who is truly connected to Christ continues in a sinful, unrepentant direction. You say, well, I am saved by Christ. I love the Lord. Fantastic. That is fantastic. Part of what that will look like then for you is rooting out the sinful thoughts and actions, feeling the weight of conviction, turning from those sins and toward faithfulness. And if that is happening in you, if that’s what’s going on in your life. Fantastic. Because that is evidence of your abiding connection to Christ. That’s part of the living connection we have with Jesus through his indwelling Holy Spirit. If, however, what is actually happening in your life is that you are simply claiming Christ while continuing on in your sin, secretly or without any interest in being obedient to your Savior and your King, then you are not connected to Christ. My dad was a customer engineer with Hewlett Packard, and that meant he traveled all over his region fixing computers for most of his career. And I asked him one time, how many of your calls are for computers that are simply not plugged in? And he said, far more than you’d think, far more than you’d think. A surprising number of computers simply just not plugged in. If your life exhibits sin and there is no conviction in your heart over that sin. it’s because you’re not plugged into Christ at all. You’re not connected to him. See, because Jesus ministry removes sins. So if you continue on in your sinful lifestyle, if you’re unwilling to change, resistant to repentance, that’s because you’re not actually abiding in Christ. Which is why John can turn the logic around in his second statement. No one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Notice how seen and known here are both past tense while perpetually sinning, keeping on sinning is now. It’s in the present tense. So if you’re engaged in ongoing sin right now, no matter what your testimony from the past sounds like, you don’t know Jesus. Now this can get a little bit fuzzy. This can get a little bit fuzzy because sometimes we can be blind to our own sin. Sometimes we just don’t know what we’re caught in, right? And it’s difficult for us to see. And what we need is for someone else to come and show us, or for the gospel to show us the Bible, to show us and expose some things. But let me ask you, when that exposing happens, what happens in you? What happens when it’s pointed out? What do you do when your sin becomes evident to you? Do you excuse it or ignore it? Do you just move on unaltered by it? Do you harden yourself against conviction? Do you get mad at other people for judging you or pointing out your flaws? Are you the victim and not the criminal? Then you don’t know Jesus. You don’t know him. Another thing that can make things fuzzy is that we’re all prone to greater temptations for certain sins. We’re built differently, and so certain sins are more tempting than other sins. But you know that about yourself. Let me ask you, what are you doing about it? What are you doing about that sin that’s so tempting to you? You know this about yourself. What’s your strategy for victory over the sin? Or have you surrendered to it? Has it found a role in your secret life that you hide away from other people? Are you just resigned to the idea that this is who you are? And God will just have to be okay with your sinful lifestyle? If that’s true, then you don’t know Jesus. You don’t know him. See, God knows that we struggle. But church, it’s a struggle, right? He knows that we struggle, but it is a struggle against sin. Our fight against sin is to the death. We don’t lay down arms against it. We don’t come to terms with sin. We don’t reside alongside of sin amicably. I run into this attitude of secrecy and surrender and excuse a lot when I’m talking to men about pornography. There’s this attitude of defeat in them which could be a good starting spot for repentance and moving forward, but often in the place where there should be resolve to overcome this sin, there’s just excuses. Loads and loads of excuses. I say, well, if the problem is your phone, well then let’s just get one that doesn’t have internet access. Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. I need it for work. I need this phone for work. You might need calling and texting for work, but you don’t need an internet-capable phone for work. So I gotta have these apps. These apps are so important to me. Okay, well, there probably is a way to work around that. There’s probably a way to walk in victory here if we just change the technology a little bit. I can’t do that. I can’t do it. And I say, okay, well, let’s get some accountability software on there. You know, let’s, let’s shed some light into this darkness. Let’s open this up. Let’s put it on all your devices and make sure that everything can be seen by your wife or by whoever your accountability partner. Let’s just throw the light of the gospel on this so that it’s exposed. Oh, well, those cost money. That’s too much. I can’t spend money on that in this economy. I just checked this week, Covenant Eyes, which is a fantastic software for this. It costs $18 a month, $18 a month. $18 is one serving of salmon eggs Benedict at Canadian Honker, one serving. What is your sexual integrity in the state of your soul worth? Is it worth more than breakfast? Tell me it’s worth more than breakfast. Tell me it’s more than the cost of eggs. Can we all agree that the battle against sin is probably going to require sacrifice on our part? No war is free. Sin is powerful and resourceful, which means that we will have to draw on the greater power of the gospel, and that we need to use every resource necessary to keep our hearts and minds away from sin. And if we are unwilling to do that for the sake of Jesus, that means we don’t know Jesus at all. And if that’s you this morning, if that’s you, I’m praying that you will repent and throw your whole life on the mercy and forgiveness of Jesus. He will forgive you. Jesus will not accept your sinful lifestyle, but he will forgive it, and he will give you the power to leave it behind. The last two statements on sin cover the topic from two different angles, and the first is the origin of sin, and that’s that sin is of the devil. Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil. For the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. Once again, John alerts us not to be deceived on this topic, because there are plenty of people who would like to combine and confuse the categories of sin and righteousness. False teachers do this all the time, and John is telling us to be on guard, not to let that happen. And to do that, we need to understand the different origins of sin and righteousness. The logic of verse seven works backwards to the source. He says, whoever practices righteousness is righteous. So righteousness in this context is moral goodness that comes from being obedient to the Lord. It’s like when in the sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that a good tree bears good fruit. You can’t look at a tree that doesn’t have fruit on it and know if it’s a healthy tree or not. But once you see the fruit, you know if the tree is healthy. If your commitment to the Lord has love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control flowing out of you, then you know that you truly are in a state of righteousness before the Lord, right? You can see it by the action. And again, this is not something you do to earn a righteous standing before God. This is evidence that you already have a righteous standing before God because of God’s grace to us in Christ. And working backward one more step, right? So the righteous things we do shows we’re in a state of righteousness, but that shows that we are connected. It’s evidence that we have the connection to Jesus, who is himself perfectly righteous. That’s the source. Let’s put it into terms of using a tree, what I’ll call a spiritual identity flow chart. Okay, so commitment to Jesus with all of its good works and repentance and worship and passion for Christ and compassion for people and, and faithfulness to God’s Word, even when it’s hard. All of that demonstrates a person who is in a state of righteousness before the Lord. And that state of righteousness is only possible for a person who is rooted in the one who is righteous, Jesus Christ. The opposite is also true. Verse eight works backwards in the same way, except that John assumes the middle component. He doesn’t talk about the middle part there, right? He says that the person who makes a practice of sin is of the devil. He just goes right straight to the source. You see how he skips that middle there? He simply…unrighteous fruit means you’ve rooted yourself in the devil, not in Christ. Sin is of the devil. It is behavior that is rooted in, and that flows from the leader of the opposition to the Lord himself. To lead a life of unrepentant sin, then, is to serve the devil and to do his bidding. It’s to work in his favor and toward his goals. Jesus came in opposition, to destroy and to undo all that the devil has done in this world. How can anyone claiming to be serving Christ at the same time work for the opposing army that is trying to destroy Christ? You can’t. You can’t. It’s not possible. And here’s why it’s impossible. It’s our fourth statement. And that’s that sin is evidence that you are not a new creation. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep sinning because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil? Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. So when a person is saved by Christ, a transformation of heart and mind takes place. That’s so powerful. You become a new person. Jesus called this the new birth. He said, you are being born again into the world. Paul described it as becoming a new creation in Christ. He says, the old you has passed away, and the new you has now come. Here, John uses the phrase born of God, and he says that this person who is born of God has received the seed of God that’s planted in him, which I believe is a reference to the Holy Spirit who comes into the life of a person when they turn and trust in Jesus. They become a new creation. And the Holy Spirit’s presence is there. And for someone who has truly become this new creation, John says he cannot keep sinning. He cannot. The word is unable. It is not possible for this person to make a practice of sinning. For the person born of God, sin is so irritating, it’s so condemning, it’s such a burden on the heart and mind that he can’t go forward in it. He has to rid himself of it. She has to get it out of her life. Do you know why James tells us to confess our sins to one another? People don’t like to do this. People really don’t like to confess their sins to each other because they think that they’ll be embarrassed or they’re going to feel badly about themselves, so they don’t like to confess their sin. But do you know? Do you know why we’re told to do it? It’s because for the Christian, the confession of sin is releasing a burden. See, that’s pulling sin into the light so it can be exposed for what it is and killed, because the sin for the Christian is the burden, not the confession of the sin. That’s not the burden. The sin is the burden. And if that’s not how you feel about your sin, please listen to John this morning. Please listen to the words that he is writing to the church. If you’re content to walk out of here today without making changes to the sin that you enjoy. You do not know Jesus. You have not been transformed by him. You have no reason to have any confidence in your salvation. You’re trusting in a salvation that you don’t have because you can’t have it, because it cannot exist alongside your practice of sin. You cannot wage war against God openly and without repentance, and at the same time trust in the grace that covers you. You can’t do both those things. You’ve probably noticed that I have said the word evidence as we’ve been working through the this letter, First John. That I’ve said the word evidence quite a lot. It comes from verse ten here. By this it is evident. By this it is evident who are the children of God. That word means visible, viewable. You can see it. This is how you see yourself. Okay? This is how you can know yourself and see yourself plainly. It’s also how we see one another. It’s, to the best of our ability, it’s how we see the spiritual state of other people. See, because I can’t see your soul and you can’t see mine. I can’t see the thoughts of your mind, the commitments, the passions of your heart. I can’t. I can’t see those things. None of us can. What we can see is what’s expressed from those thoughts and passions. We can see the actions that you take, the commitments that you make, the love that you show to other people. We can hear how you talk about your struggles with sin. We can see if you are waging war against your sin because of the peace that you have with God in Christ, or if you’re making war against God because of the peace that you have made with your sin. And we can hear you talk about Jesus. We can hear your confession of sin and your profession of faith. We can see the fruit that comes from genuine new life in Christ. It’s all evidence. It’s all evidence. And it’s evidence so important that it determines the difference between children of God and children of the devil. There’s a phrase for you. Children of the devil. We’ll say children of God, right? We’ll say children of God without hesitation. The world likes the phrase children of God. That is not a problem for anybody. But I don’t hear children of the devil even in church. I don’t ever hear that phrase. But remember, we all agreed to be biblical this morning, right? I once knew a man who was highly respected in his church, highly respected. He served faithfully. He led Bible study. His wife was a very godly woman. He was put forward by his church as an elder candidate. In every way he was esteemed within the church. And if he said, follow me as I follow Christ, everybody would have said, yes, we believe you. And then one day, his wife happened to be on his laptop and found evidence of what turned out to be an adulterous relationship that had spanned years with another woman who was also married. And soon after he was exposed for that adultery he admitted to another adultery that spanned years before that. And his wife was suddenly thrown into turmoil as she realized that decades of her marriage had been stained with the awful reality that while she was looking up to this man as a leader and the great love of her life, he was totally unfaithful to her. And one of the most distressing things for his wife was what to do with her memories. This was one of the hardest things that we worked through. What to do with your memories. See, because every time she had a happy memory of her marriage and a happy memory of her family from the past, it was suddenly overlaid with the reality that she was being deceived and violated at the very same time that all of this was taking place. And the only reason that this came to light was because this man was caught. He didn’t come forward with his sin. He was caught. Let me ask you, church, if he hadn’t been caught, do you think that situation would be no big deal? Do you think that would be no big deal? See, this man had placed a huge mental barrier between his sinful lifestyle and his outward display of godliness. Can he do that? Is that possible? Is there a category of spiritual reality that is acceptable to God, where this man can live both lives and it’s no big deal? I used such an obvious, powerful and difficult example because I want you to feel how utterly ridiculous that sounds. I want you to see how utterly ridiculous that is. Of course it matters. Of course it matters that this man was violating his marriage vows. Of course, his confession of faith was false at that time. I can tell you that only by the grace of God at work in this woman’s heart did that marriage stay together. He confessed. He repented. And as far as I know, their marriage is still healing today. That man was heading for eternal destruction if his sin remained hidden. It was God’s grace to this man that God broke him in half, destroyed his life. God destroyed his life with the truth so that it could be rebuilt in Christ. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God. But let me remind you of what John said earlier in this letter back in chapter one. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Pastor Jamie is going to come and lead us in a final song, and that song is entitled All Sufficient Merit. It’s a song celebrating the work of Christ who takes away our sin. And the chorus goes like this. It is done. It is finished. No more debt I owe. Paid in full. All sufficient merit, not my own. It’s a song celebrating what John wrote about in verse five today. You know that he appeared in order to take away sins. To take them away from us. To free us. That is Jesus ministry. To come pay our sins with merit that we don’t have. We don’t merit it. Jesus got it for us. Jesus paid the price for us. To take them away from us, so that we’re no longer under the condemnation of our sin. But as the song says, stand accepted before the throne of God. Let me tell you what it takes to sing that song and mean it, okay? Anybody can sing that song. Anybody can. You can stand up and sing that song. Anybody can stand up and sing that song today. Here’s what it takes to stand up, sing that song and mean it. For this song to reflect your reality, you have to reject your sinful lifestyle. You’ve got to reject it. You can’t wage war of cosmic treason and also claim to the unmerited gift of Jesus Christ. You can only be on one side or the other. Children of the devil cannot be children of God. So before we sing this morning, Pastor Jamie is going to lead us in a time of confession. I am pleading with you. Church I am pleading with you this morning to confess your sin. Confess what you’re hiding. Refuse to lie to yourself and to other people anymore. Turn away from that. I also invite you to reach out to me or to one of your pastors if you’re going through something. That’s what we’re here for. We want to walk with you through this. We want to see you have victory over your sin. And I promise you, I promise you, Jesus is faithful and just to cleanse you of anything. You are not too far gone. The gospel fixes everything. Would you pray with me?
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