Christ Our Advocate

Children of God

TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES BETTER, OUR FUTURE BETTER, AND OUR GOD BETTER, WE MUST ABIDE IN THE LORD. WHY ABIDE? BECAUSE JESUS IS COMING BACK!   Well, good morning church, and good to be with you today. I was having a chat. He doesn’t know I’m about to say this. I was having a chat with my friend Philip recently, and we were talking about this truth. Parents of young children, I listen up, I want to help save you some money. Your kids don’t care where you travel in the world, so long as there’s a pool. Right. See, when I was growing up, my dad was a teacher and therefore had, you know, a modest salary. And look, my, my parents gave us a lot. And it was wonderful. And when we were older, we did some of those more exciting trips. You know, we did the Disney thing. We even did Europe when I was in high school. Super cool. So I’m not, I’m not in no way am I disparaging. What my parents provided for me was amazing. But I’m going to be honest, one of my favorite family memories was when we got in a conversion van with my grandparents, my sister and I and my parents, and we drove 30 minutes away to a mid-range hotel and spent the weekend eating peanut butter and jelly and swimming in the pool. And what I mean is like, I’m not talking the fancy pools, you know, with the slides and the splash pads. Like some of y’all. It’s too fancy. Do you know what I mean? We’re talking like a 20 by 30 pool in a Comfort Inn. You know what I’m saying? And it’s honestly one of my greatest memories as a child. Like, why is that okay? So maybe when you’re six, your world is kind of small. You know, you don’t have big expectations for vacation. Fine. But I think there’s something deeper going on there. It’s because I didn’t need thrills. I didn’t need roller coasters. What I really wanted was to spend time with my people. I just wanted to swim with my dad and sit next to my mom in a restaurant and talk with my grandparents and belt out Disney songs in the back seat with my sister. You know, a whole new world. Okay. Anyway, that was not in my notes. Just kind of happened. Here’s the idea. We just wanted to spend time together, or to use the phrase that we’re going to see in this passage today. But also we’ve seen earlier in this letter from John that we have. I just wanted to abide with them. I just wanted to dwell with them, spend time with them. That’s what I wanted to do. So what is abiding? We’ve encountered it a little bit throughout the letter, but here is one commentator’s definition. To abide is to stay, remain, live, dwell, abide. To be in a state that begins and continues, yet may or may not end or stop. To abide in Christ is to follow his example of a life obedient to the will of God. As we look back into this letter of First John that we’ve been traveling through a little bit, we see abiding used in several different ways and referring to several different ideas. John is using this repetitive language, presumably on purpose to make a point. Let’s look at some of this repetition briefly in verse ten. He says, whoever loves his brother abides in the light. So he’s talking about abiding in the light. Then in 14 the Word of God abides in you, or in 17 the will of God abides forever. These are all different forms of abiding. Twenty-four, what you heard, the gospel, let it abide in you. And. And if it abides in you, you too will abide in the Son and the Father. And then last week we heard about this anointing that you received abides in you being the Holy Spirit being within you. And then right at the end of 27, you see John make this turn. He says, so I’m going to give you an imperative. Now, if you are abiding, abiding in all of these things and all of these things are abiding in you, then what are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to abide in him. And that’s what we’re going to see moving forward here. There’s a second contextual piece, though, that we need to understand before we jump into our passage for today. And that’s the idea that I need to make sure it’s very clear, because we’re going to talk about being a child of God here. And I want it to be understood that not every human who walks the face of this earth is necessarily a child of God. Now that gets confusing because God as creator made every human. So in that way, he’s a father. And that does make sense. But that’s not the way that John is using it here in this letter. He is defining who is in the family of God and who is out of the family of God. Or as my systematic theology professor used to say, who are the innies and who are the outies? Knowing whether or not you are a child of God is essentially important to your life, to your future, and your eternity. And so what John’s been doing throughout the letter so far is he’s been making a claim about who’s in and who’s out. In chapter one, verses seven through nine, he says, those who walk in the light are in the family of God. Those who confess their sins are in the family of God. In chapter two, verse three, if we keep his commandments, we may be in the family of God, and we need to walk in the same way in which he walked. We need to behave like he behaved, like Jesus behaved. In chapter two, verses nine and ten, we see whoever loves his brother abides in the light. But if you hate your brother, maybe you’re not in the light. We’ve spent some time over the previous weeks defining how to enter the family of God and what it means to enter the family of God. In today’s passage, he’s describing what someone should do as a child of God. And so wherever you sit, if you’re a child of God, we’re going to talk about how we should behave today. If you’re not a child of God, this is what’s being asked of the children of God. And that’s something you can consider and reflect on as well. So here’s what I’d like us to draw from our passage today and focus in on. To understand ourselves better, our future better, and our God better, we must abide in our identity as children of God. As children of God. We need to get really comfortable with that. So here’s our passage for today. We’re in first John, continuing in chapter two, beginning with verse 28. And now little children abide in him, so that when he appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from him in shame at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him. See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God. And so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. So three things we’re going to look at self, future and God. Things that we can learn from this passage. Now abiding in our identity as children of God helps us to understand ourselves better. That’s true, but that almost sounds like a trap because Scripture isn’t about me, and it’s not about you. It’s not about us. It is about God, isn’t it? And so a focus on self could feel like it’s somehow anti-gospel. But it’s not here. Because what we’re doing is we’re trying to understand ourselves in relationship to God and understand ourselves based in the truth of Scripture. And in that way, it’s a very good thing and an important thing to do. And so the first thing I want to hone in on is this, is that when we abide in him, we can have confidence in our identity. And we see this bore out in verse 28. Little children abide in him so that when he appears, we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming. We see this moniker of little children. It’s one that John has used before in this letter. He’ll use it again, and it’s setting us up to understand this Children of God idea. And I just want to be really clear here. This is not a title that is in any way meant to be negative or pejorative. This is not like stop being such a child. You know how we use it sometimes. No, this is something entirely different. This is a title of great honor. It’s not immaturity, it’s possession. It’s identity. It’s belonging. And I think it’s important that we just we just sit in that reality a little bit. If we meet those earlier criteria we mentioned, if we truly trust and treasure Jesus, what an honor it is to be counted among those who can call themselves a part of God’s family. What a beautiful thing that is. Based in that identity then, John identifies expectations of the children of God in response and behavior. What is it that these little children are to do? Well, it’s a clear imperative. They are to abide in him. They are to act like they are a part of the family. They’re to be close with him. And this makes sense, right? Children in a family, in a family home. They’re not outsiders. They’re not strangers. They’re not guests. They’re a part of the family. They’re supposed to be there and they should act like they’re supposed to be there. They should go banging around in the kitchen and letting themselves eat whatever food they want, because it’s their house. There should be a level of comfort here. You can tell who lives in a house and who doesn’t when they’re in it. And so the question is begged here by John, are you willing to accept the acceptance of God that abiding requires? See, this really has to do with how you view God, right? If you view God as like a cosmic police officer who’s sitting there with his radar gun waiting to see if you’re speeding, sinning, right? Ha ha! Sin! Like if that’s how you see God, you’re going to have a hard time with this idea of abiding. But if you see him as a good and loving father, it’s easier to abide, isn’t it? You don’t need to perform for that. Hopefully you grew up in a house where you didn’t have to perform in order to receive love. Hopefully, you received love as a child simply because you belonged in the family. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that’s certainly the way that God treats us. If you’re in his family, you have his love. If we abide, we accept our identity as children of God, and we can have confidence related to our identity in him. We are welcome where he is. We can have confidence, as the verse says, and not shrink away because of our belonging. Let me be clear. The confidence isn’t in my performance. It isn’t in how good I’m behaving. The confidence is in the relationship. It’s not in the behavior. It’s in the relationship. It’s just in the family belongingness, as it were. Now, it would be easy to miss this first little phrase, too. The verse also points out when someone should abide. They should abide now. Now, little children. Abide now. Don’t wait. Don’t wait to do that. In this sentence, the word abide is in the present active imperative tense. It’s not something that happened back then, not just a decision that you made once upon a time to join the family of God. It’s not something that you’re waiting to happen someday in the future, hoping that you know you can pray the right prayer before you get hit by the semi truck or however you go out. No. It’s present. It’s active. It’s imperative. Abide in the Lord right now. Be in relationship with him. And there’s such an interesting tension here, right here in this verse because it’s saying we should do it now because Jesus is coming back. We should do it now because Jesus is coming back. Well, why would we do that? Because we have to practice. We have to be ready for his return. Jesus is coming back. We got to be ready for it. And when he comes back, what he wants to see, what he desires to see in his people is deep and active dependence on him. So the right time to depend on him, to actively lean on him is both times. It’s right now, and it’s later when he comes back. The implication is that it’s always, it’s always the right time to be abiding in the Lord. It’s not just now. It’s not just then. It’s always. We’ll say a little bit more about that later. But before I step away from this point about family identity, I want to take the moment to say this. Parents and especially dads, your kids need to know how much you love them and how much you’re proud of them, no matter what. It is essential. And I’ll just say, just from my own perspective of somebody who’s been working with young people for a very long time, when children have the confidence based on the love of their parents, they are less likely to rebel. They’re less likely to be promiscuous, they’re less likely to seek attention in destructive ways. They’re less likely to choose bad friendships. It’s a big deal. So parents don’t miss the chance to show what a loving parent looks like, what an unconditional love from a parent looks like. Don’t miss the chance to make them know that your love is based on the fact, not of their behavior, but it’s based on the fact simply because they are yours. And there doesn’t need to be any other reason. Because that’s how God loves us. The second way abiding in the Lord helps each of us understand ourselves better is this. When we abide in him, we behave more righteously. If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practice righteousness has been born of him. We see it here again, born of him, a child, a child. His child is just another way of saying in the family of God. And what he’s saying basically is you can recognize God’s kids because they behave in a way that honors him through obedience and righteousness. And let me be clear, we are not saying is that good behavior is how someone becomes a child of God. Of course not. That’s nonsense. Righteousness doesn’t create sonship. It only reveals it. That’s all it does. We can’t earn our way into God’s family. No child gets to earn their way into a family. But they might reveal who they belong to in the way they behave. There’s two important ways, I think, to look at this. One is that righteous living is the way a child of God is supposed to behave. Maybe you’ve encountered this before with like a sports team in the Bill Belichick Tom Brady era. It became very famous to talk about the Patriot Way. It was a shorthand way of saying this is the way we do things here. And by the way, it leads to championships. There’s a certain way of doing this. It’s a shorthand explanation of a set of behaviors expected. If you are one of us, so to speak. Children of God live in a certain way and in shorthand we call that righteousness or obedience. It’s what’s expected. It should be the culture of the children of God. The second point is this righteousness is a part of the identity of the child of God. It doesn’t just speak to behavior, it speaks to identity. What I mean is that we are most what we are meant to be when we act in righteousness. We are most what we’re meant to be when we act in righteousness. Walking in righteousness is about obedience, yes, but it’s also about being what you were always meant to be as a child of God. A paintbrush was designed to paint stuff. It wasn’t designed to knock nails into a board. It’s not what it was made for. You were made as a child of God to live in righteousness. You were not made for something else. It’s part of your identity. If you feel like you’ve failed to look like the child of God that you are, don’t worry. There’s good news. The way we become more righteous is to abide more fully in the Lord. As we abide in him, as we dwell with him, as we spend time with him, we grow to be more fully like him. And we abide with him in all the ways that you already know. In prayer and study of His Word and being in, you know, Christ-centered community and worshiping together and encouraging one another to love and good works. This is what abiding in him is, and abiding in him leads to more righteousness in our lives. Not magically, but certainly. Now, the next part of the passage reveals two more key abiding truths about ourselves and one about our future that we’ll kind of circle back to. But as we round the bend into chapter three, we see this. When we abide in him, we understand that we are deeply loved members of the family. I love the poetic language John uses here. See what kind of love the father has given to us that we should be called children of God. And so we are. Right. John repeats this phrase in truth because it bears repeating. We’re God’s children and we need to be reminded of that. But in this verse he adds more than a status. He also adds a condition. Not just we are children, but that we are loved children. Here’s the thing no child gets to decide to become a child in a particular family, whether it’s a biological process or a legal adoption process. I’ve done both. The child isn’t the one doing anything to make himself a child. No, it’s the love of a parent and the work of a parent that makes the child a part of the family. A father’s love is the pathway to sonship. A mother’s love is the pathway to sonship. But John also adds a qualifier here. God’s children are not only his children in theory or in technical legal status. Look, we’ve all observed, you know, fathers who are deadbeats, absent, emotionally distant or whatever. We’ve all seen people who have that title but didn’t wear it very well. But John clarifies that that’s not the kind of father we’re talking about. We’re not talking about a deadbeat dad here. And he does it with one word: beloved, The loved ones, the ones who are deeply loved. The ones who, by the way, are deeply loved by the Lord, not in flowery language or good intentions, but by incredibly sacrificial actions on the cross. It’s not a nice sentiment, only. This belovedness was bought with blood. This isn’t just words. It was paid for with pain and suffering and deep, deep love for his children so that you could have access to be in his family. What kind of love does the father have? A deep, real sacrificial love. That’s the kind he has. And it’s a love that creates sons and daughters. And what that love does for us is it creates us a new status. We get to be a part of his family. Now, as the passage continues, this sort of this interesting thing that happens. There’s the point that John makes here is that not everyone recognizes a child of God when they see one. When we abide in him, the passage argues, we look unfamiliar to the world. It says it really clearly here. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Well, so why do the children of God not look familiar to the world? Like, what’s the deal here? Well, they don’t look familiar because the world doesn’t know their daddy. If they don’t know what he looks like, they don’t know what they look like. And why don’t they recognize God or his people? It’s because they aren’t abiding in the Lord. They don’t know what it’s like because they’ve not been there. It’s kind of like this. I have never been to the country of Burkina Faso. Okay. Some of you are like, there’s a country called Burkina Faso. Yes. It’s one of the least-traveled-to countries in the entire world. And so somebody walked up to me and they showed me a picture of Burkina Faso, and they were like, does this look like Burkina Faso to you? I’d be like, I have no earthly idea what it looks like in Burkina Faso. Or maybe they would show me a picture of people from Burkina Faso. They’d be like, do you think these people look like they’re from Burkina Faso? And I’d be like, I don’t know what people from Burkina Faso look like. I mean, look, I have some vague ideas about. They don’t look like this, you know what I mean? Like it’s different, but, I don’t know. I don’t know what they look like compared to any other country or. I’ve never been to Burkina Faso. I’ve never been to a country that neighbours Burkina Faso. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a person from Burkina Faso. And I had no idea that I would be saying that name of that country that many times in this part of the sermon. But here we are. There’s a point here, though. You can’t understand somewhere you’ve never been. Abiding in the Lord means a closeness and intimacy with him that leads to greater knowing. Yes. But it also leads to a transformation and a transformation that someone who has never been there, who has never been in relationship, could ever understand. Abiding in him may make us unfamiliar to the Lord or to the world. Excuse me, but contrast that with the familial connection and deep knowing that God has with his children. Here’s the point John’s making. Who cares if the world doesn’t recognize you if you’re known by the Lord? Who cares. If you have the love of your father you don’t need the love of the world. That’s a beautiful thing. So yes, this passage helps us understand ourselves better in the Lord, but it also helps us to understand our future better if we’ll let it. See, when we abide in him, we are assured of our future sanctification. We see that here in verse two. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him. The great news about being in the family of God, being a child of God, is that it’s no small thing. It’s a good thing, and we can have confidence in it, as this passage points out. But maybe you’re like me, and if you’re a child of God and you know that’s your status and you know that’s where you belong, sometimes you feel this huge tension. If I am a child of God, why is it so hard sometimes to behave like it? Why is it so hard to live in righteousness? Clearly, I’m not the only one who struggles with this, right? The Apostle Paul speaks to this very well in Romans chapter seven. In verse 15, he says, for I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. And then continuing on. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. I don’t know about you, but there are some days when this feels like my life verse. Like this just describes what I’m going through. There are sin in all of our lives. We do things we don’t want to do that we know we’re not supposed to do. We sometimes behave unlike the children of God we claim to be. And that feels really frustrating. But I think this passage is meant to be encouraging to us. Abiding with the Lord should help with that here in this life. But there’s a greater encouragement yet too. Our abiding means the difficult parts that seem to never be fully sanctified someday will be. Someday will be something better. Not because of our efforts, but because of his grace. Not because we deserve it, but because Jesus earned it for us. Jesus will redeem us and make us something different and better, something more like him, even if it takes death for that to happen. In fact, it’s amazing that the promise is that when we abide with the Lord, when we treasure him and trust him with our lives, the reward we get is an eternity of abiding with him. What a beautiful thought that is. We’re practicing for heaven when we abide with him. That’s what we’re doing. The next way that we see our future made better by abiding is this. When we abide in him, we are preparing for his return. See in verse two here it says, and what we will be has not yet appeared. Part of our future is that Jesus is coming back. You’ll encounter him at some point again here. He will appear again. And this is part of our future because it will require a response from all people. When you encounter Jesus again, it will require a response from you. And there will also be consequences based on your abiding. Revelation 22 talks about it in no uncertain terms. Jesus is speaking here and he says, let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy. But then he says, behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me to repay each one for what he has done, to repay each one for what he has done. Don’t get it twisted here. This isn’t Jesus looking at a list of sins. This is Jesus looking at whether or not you’re abiding. And those who abide will be seen one way, and those who do not will be seen another. But if we take the whole verse we’ve been looking at, the whole passage we’ve been looking at today in context, when he returns, there will be some who are ready for his return. His children will have confidence in what will happen next when he returns. When these consequences come to bear, his children can have confidence and not shame because they know what happens next, because they have confidence in their status. But there will be some who are not prepared for his coming, and both groups will be repaid for what they’ve done. When Jesus returns, we know that not everyone will understand or see Him as He is meant to be seen. So if the children of God are there to witness his glorious return, they will know that it is Jesus they are seeing. It’s not someone or something lesser like the beasts in Revelation that others will worship unknowingly. No, those who abide in the Lord, who have spent enough time with him to know who he is and what he looks like, they won’t make that mistake. When we abide in him, we’re preparing for his return, and abiding helps us prepare for the future. Similarly, I ask my boys to do something. My boys are 13 and 11 and they have three older sisters and a mother. And when we go out and about and go into a restaurant or whatever it is, I require them to hold the doors open for their sisters and their mother. And I do that, because I want them to hold the door for their wife someday. I want them to prepare for this next thing. They’re practicing now, preparing for the future. Another truth about our future is revealed in this passage as well. When we abide in him, our hope is properly placed. Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. When I first read this, it felt a little strange. What do you mean? If you hope in God it purifies you? How does that work? Well, it’s not some kind of incantation. It’s not some kind of formula. I can’t just call on the name of Jesus and, like, poof, everything’s better. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Purity here is the idea of being of one thing. When we hope, we have to hope at something. Hope is always directional. In the same way, you can’t throw at nothing. You have to throw at something. You have to hope at something too. And so what John’s calling into question here is how pure is your hope? What are you directing your hope and your future on? Pure gold, pure water. Right is only gold. Only water down to the cellular level. But see if your heart is divided. If it’s more than one thing, if it’s pursuing and desiring more than one thing. God and the world. God and sin. Then there’s confusion. Your heart is divided and you’re not pure. Let me see if I can demonstrate this. Thank you to Francis Chan, who I saw do this many years ago at a thing. Okay, so let’s say this lemonade that I got from Kwik Trip is pursuing God, right? Like, this is the pure life of having my hope in the Lord, right. And you just, you know, it’s kind of hot today. You get that little bit of sweetness, that little bit of sourness. Lemonade is good, right? This is life with God. This is a delicious thing. And if you’re just sitting here drinking your lemonade and that’s all you’re drinking, like you’re going to enjoy it, right? Lemonade is delicious, but maybe your heart is divided. And instead, you also have sin in your life represented here by coffee, which is disgusting. And. Right. So, okay, so here’s the thing. Like, I can’t believe I’m doing this for you guys. Just so you know, this proves that I love you. Okay, so this is sin. Oh, okay. And sin is terrible. Okay. It’s disgusting. But you know what makes it even worse? Is if you drink the lemonade first and you got that nice sweetness, and then you taste the awful bitterness. Oh my gosh. It’s so much worse. And here’s the thing. Some of you sickos, if you only were drinking this, you’d be happy, okay? And if you were only drinking this, you’d be happy. But if you’re trying to drink them both at the same time, your heart is not pure. You’re pursuing two different things at once, and it’s disgusting. And if you’re wondering what this tastes like, it’s like when you brush your teeth and then drink orange juice. Same idea. Okay, like two contrasting things, and I’m going to take it a step further. And I’m really going to call some of you out. Some of you have acquired a taste for this garbage drink. And don’t we do that with sin? Don’t we sometimes get so comfortable with it that it begins to actually taste good to us? That’s not what we’re supposed to do. Our job is to pursue the Lord and him only and have the pure, wonderful taste of I have to drink this last because guys like that’s so bad. I don’t understand you. The pure, wonderful taste of pursuing a life with God. John is telling us that if we properly put our hope in the Lord and in him, only if we put aside our desires to walk in the darkness and tolerate sin in our lives, we make ourselves pure by pursuing the goodness of God and rejecting the ways of the world, the flesh, and the devil. And just to be clear, we should not pursue purity to become children of God. We pursue purity, goodness, because we already are God’s children. The last point here is that, in addition to understanding ourselves and our future, abiding makes us understand better who God is. When we abide in him, we see him clearly because we shall see Him as He is. As John writes, my dad is low-key, one of the most famous people I know. Here’s what I mean. My dad has been a teacher for over 50 years. He’s been a coach and a theater director and a student council advisor. And if I go anywhere, anywhere in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with him, we will run into someone he knows, someone he’s taught or coached or something, Mr. Martin. And they, you know, whatever. And it goes beyond that. I mean, in Green Bay, sure. I have been at a museum in Chicago when we ran into somebody he knew. I have been at Disney World when he ran into someone he knew. Friends. I was at the Eiffel Tower, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the real one, and he ran into someone he knew. What is this? He’s kind of famous. But here’s the thing. I know him better than all of those people. I know him better because we’ve lived together. I have known him for my entire life. We’ve lived in the same home. We swam in the same mid-tier hotel pool together. Because our many years of co abiding means I know him better than almost anyone else. I see him more fully and more completely. I see him for what and who he really is. And why do I know him better than them? Because I didn’t just take a class from him. I abided with him. And that’s all the difference. To understand ourselves better, our future better, and our God better, we must abide in our identity as children of God.

Abide

SINCE GOD HAS ANOINTED US WITH HIS HOLY SPIRIT, WE MUST REMAIN OBEDIENT TO THE INSTRUCTION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, AS HE LEADS US WITH THE UNCHANGING GOSPEL, SO THAT WE’RE NOT DECEIVED BY ERROR.   Earlier this year, a leader in a progressive, theologically liberal so-called church denomination was speaking at an event for their group. And she made headlines because in her speech, she paused and said, this is a very dangerous thing I’m about to say now, which is helpful, because what she was about to say is near the top of the list of the most heretical things that can be said. It was dangerous. It’s nice when heretics give heresy a trigger warning, right? So it’s nice when the wolf doesn’t even attempt to put on the sheep costume. She lists off some things that she doesn’t like in the Bible and then says, “first, I’m of the opinion that we need a third Testament because the Bible has become problematic”. Yeah, that was her announcement. And then after that, after saying some things that are in the Bible that she doesn’t like, she says, “and people will say, well, it’s in the book. And I said, then we need to pull that page out”. Yeah. She then goes on to state plainly that the Bible is words about God, not the Word of God. She says, “no, it is not the Word of God”. Now, to clarify what she’s saying, there is that the Bible is not God’s word in essence, because, in the sense that it is breathed out by God as is described in second Timothy chapter three. She’s saying that what the Bible is, is just dated words full of errors, in need of an update to suit the palate of the world today, which is why she’s calling for a third Testament, which I’m sure she would be happy to write. Now, I am firmly convinced that here this morning that the vast majority of us here at Calvary can hear how utterly ridiculous that all sounds. You probably aren’t here this morning at Calvary if you thought that sounded like a good idea. I mean to use her logic, if you wrote a Third Testament, wouldn’t that also just be words about God that would have no authority on what came before it, the first two Testaments, right? Just using her logic. I’m repulsed by false anti-gospel teaching coming from so-called leaders in the church. But this one rises almost to the level of parody in my mind. I laughed out loud when I heard this. Wouldn’t that be strange if I said, you know, those blank pages that always come in the back of your Bible? What if I had you turn there right now and just say, hey, everybody, we’re going to write another Bible this morning. The third Testament to add on. Right. You’d rightly leave. Even her own audience did not clap when she said this. They just stood there in stunned silence. These were her people. And they hadn’t even heard something like this before. That’s what happens when leaders start down the road of twisting the Bible and introducing errors into it. People will follow for a time, but what happens is the cognitive dissonance that they feel in their hearts eventually becomes overwhelming. And so they either return to truth or they leave the church altogether, which is why the progressive churches are dying today. Let me say, if you do feel drawn to that sort of thinking, maybe not quite as shocking as that, but you are somewhat drawn to that sort of thinking. I’d be happy to talk with you about it. I would like to speak with you because there are really good answers to these sorts of thoughts. But since you’re here at Calvary this morning, I’m going to guess that you’re not tempted to write your own Bible. I bring it up, though, because of what I found to be the most intriguing part of the speech. Right in the middle, right before she says that the Bible isn’t God’s word, she says this. She says, quote, now I’m a believer. My whole heart. I trust God with my whole heart. I wake up in the morning talking to God and God talking to me. This is the one time in the whole speech that she tries to put on the sheep costume. See, look, I’m one of you. I’m with you guys. It’s far too late for that, of course. If you’re going to rob a bank, you got to put the mask on before you enter the bank, not after you’re already in the vault. Right. We’ve already seen you. But she tries, and I want you to hear her argument, because there’s a very subtle deception within it that our passage today corrects. And while I don’t think that you’ll be writing your own Bible, this argument could be a bit persuasive. She says she wakes up talking to God and then God speaks back to her. What does she mean by that? Well, the truth is, I don’t know exactly what she means by it. But I do know what she doesn’t mean. She doesn’t mean that she hears God from the Bible. Because, as you’ve already heard, she doesn’t think that the Bible is God’s word. So what she’s saying is that fresh revelation from God, who speaks to her directly, comes each day. Now, most people who say things like this are just assigning their own thoughts and feelings to God, and then saying that God said them to themselves, so they’re basically preaching their own thoughts back to themselves. I don’t know if that’s what this woman is doing, but whatever she means, she thinks it gives her a license to create her own religion under the label of Christianity. That is what false teaching is. That’s why I bring it up with you this morning, because that is the definition of false teaching. False teaching is created when a person claims to have a new source of revelation from God that gives information that is contrary to the Bible. As we saw last week, John is now warning the church directly about a coming wave of false teaching that has the potential of misleading the church away from the truth of the gospel that they already know. They are coming with a false message that will contradict what was taught to them by the apostles and confirmed to them by the Holy Spirit. And this is not just a first-century problem. This is an every century problem. This is an every year problem. This is an every moment problem. That speech that I just told you about that happened in April. False teaching can be found throughout our world and would be happy to make inroads into our gospel-centered, Bible-believing churches. So we need to know how to face it. What do we do? And that’s what John is going to begin telling us this morning. Since God has anointed us with His Holy Spirit, we must remain obedient to the instruction of the Holy Spirit as he leads us with the unchanging gospel, so that we are not deceived by error. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 26 and 27 this morning. Just two verses. We’re going to start with the goal of the false teachers. And we’ll then we’ll look at the way to prepare ourselves to identify and resist false teaching, which John describes in two parts. The Holy Spirit abiding in us and us abiding in the Holy Spirit. So let’s start with the goal of the false teachers. I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. Now, this is a standard transitional sentence that anybody might use to take a topic in a new direction. I’ve written these things to you for this reason, now let’s go here. That’s basically what he’s doing here. But there’s something in this little sentence that I find fascinating. He says he’s writing because these people who are coming are trying to deceive you. Is that what they’re doing? Is that what these people are trying to do? The phrase those who are trying to deceive is all one word in Greek. It’s a participle. You take a verb and you turn it into a noun, right? So it’s a verbal noun is what it is. And the verb is to lead or to deceive. So this is a correct translation, what you have here. And most of the translations do something like this. Those who would deceive, those who would lead astray. What I find interesting is that this can only be said from John’s perspective, or from the perspective of a person who’s faithful to Jesus. That the people who go out from the church do not believe that they are coming to deceive. They believe that they’re coming to help. Do you guys like card tricks? I’m going to show you a card trick here this morning. Actually, no I’m not. Wouldn’t that be fun? Like, everybody lean in, I’m going to show you…pick a card. Right? That wouldn’t work very well, I suppose. But I do enjoy learning card tricks. I’m not really very good at them, so don’t ask for one later. But part of the fun of card tricks is that the illusionist is trying to trick the audience. He’s trying to do that. He wants to trick them. He wants the audience to think that a card magically appeared or that these cards magically ordered themselves or that he accurately predicted your card. But here’s the thing. He knows that’s not the case. He knows it’s not the case. He wants the audience to think something that he knows is not the reality. False teachers are not trying to deceive in that same way. They’re not trying to lead somebody into a reality that they know to be false. Now some do, okay? Some do. There are people in the world of Christianity who prey on weak people for their own benefit. Frauds do exist in ministry. I think they’re usually pretty easy to spot. Far more dangerous, though, in my opinion, are the false teachers that John is warning us against, who in a sense believe the trick. They believe it. They’ve bought into the lie. They have a worldview that has taken parts of Christianity but gone in a new direction with them. You’ll remember last week, John gave us some insight into the false theology that he was dealing with there in the first century. He said, who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? So these false teachers are coming and they have bought the lie. They believe the trick, and they are now bringing you the lie that Jesus is not the Messiah that we’ve been waiting for. That he’s not the Savior. He’s something else. They are deceivers, as John says here, that is accurate. But the reason they are deceivers is that because they are themselves deceived. They’ve put their own confidence in a worldview that contains lies, and they’d be glad if you adopted that worldview, too, because the more people who believe it, the more confident they can feel in it. There’s a book I love to give graduates. This graduate season here now, and I love to give graduates a book that was, if you’re heading off to college, it was written by a guy named Michael Krueger, one of my favorite New Testament scholars, and it’s a book called Surviving Religion 101. And the book is about how to make it through religion classes that are taught at secular universities, where Bible scholars try to undermine the Bible. That’s their whole goal, is to undermine what the Bible has to say. And he’s basically writing to say, how does faith survive and flourish in an environment like that? One chapter is entitled, my professors are really smart, isn’t it more likely that they’re right and I’m wrong? This is a good question, actually. In that chapter, he does a great job of describing how these professors can have so much knowledge about the Bible, but also come to the conclusion that it can’t be trusted. And he argues in that chapter, I think very effectively, that it’s not about facts. It’s not that the professors need more information, that they’ve missed something, that there’s just more facts that need to be shared with them. He says it’s not about the facts. It’s about the preconceived worldview that you bring to the Bible when you read it. And what that worldview allows you to accept as a fact. For example, if your preconceived notion is that there is no God, you will read the Bible as a skeptic. You will just dismiss all those parts that talk about God. If you believe that there could be no miracles, then you’ll dismiss anything miraculous. Even if it comes from eyewitness accounts, you’ll dismiss it as fiction. Or as in our earlier example, if you decide that the Bible is just words about God and not God’s word, then you’ll treat all truth about God as something man made, including your own ability to make God into whatever you like. And that’s what these professors have done, Kruger explains. They pick and choose the facts that they accept based on their own pre-decided worldview. So in in their case, no appeal to the message of the Bible is going to change their minds. But here’s the thing, church. According to Scripture, we are all born with a sinful nature. As Kruger puts it, we are all hardwired to reject Christianity. That’s our natural human state. We are born as rejecters without any intervention from God we are all like those professors. We are simply sorting facts into categories based on our preferences. We would be like these false teachers that John describes, who pick and choose what we want to believe about God, twist the gospel into something that we prefer and then hand that onto other people. So what makes the difference between a person who believes the truth that God has revealed about himself, and a person who is deceived and then becomes a deceiver? Well, John says the difference is the mutual abiding that we have with the Holy Spirit, where the spirit abides in us and we abide in him. But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. Now, if you want to know why I felt that an entire sermon should be dedicated to two verses in this letter, this sentence is the reason. Okay? This is the reason here. We have arrived at the anointing. What is the anointing? Is John opening up some new mysterious concept within Christian experience that stops us from even needing teachers in our lives? And if he is, I’m not sure why you’re listening to me right now. What’s the point? In fact, I’d go further than that. I’m not sure why you’d listen to John, who’s teaching you about the anointing. What is he talking about? Well, some branches of the church have run wild with this word. They’ve gone crazy with this word anointing. Some think that it refers to a second filling of the Holy Spirit. Some think it refers to special gifts so that we can say that’s anointed preaching, that’s anointed prophecy, that’s anointed prayer. They’ve created a kind of two-tier Christianity where some Christians have the anointing from God, and others don’t have the anointing from God. One online guru that I read this week gives instructions on how you can increase your anointing, which is a concept so foreign to scripture I’m not sure how anybody would fall for it. There’s nothing about that in there. So what is John talking about here? What does he mean? Well, if you were hoping for something mystical this morning, you will be sorely disappointed. What John is saying, though, is very vital to our spiritual growth. This word anointing is used as a noun only three times in the entire Bible. Two of them are in this verse. Okay. And the other? The other is in verse 20. Just a paragraph before this. So all of the uses of anointing are within this tight little passage of scripture. I know it looks like a verb. If you go up to verse 20 and you look at verse 20, it looks like a verb there, but it literally reads, you have an anointing from the Holy One. Now in verse 20, the anointing from God separates the true church from the false teachers, right? That’s what it’s doing there. It’s a reference to those who have received the Holy Spirit and are now therefore in Christ, as opposed to those who are anti-Christ, who are against Christ. The anointing is short for the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which is what a person receives at the beginning of their walk with Jesus. Second Corinthians chapter one clarifies this for us quite a bit. Let me read this for you. This is verses 21 and 22. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us His Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee. So the anointing of God is being saved and filled and sealed with the Holy Spirit. It’s not a special second thing that happens to you, okay? Anointing comes at the moment of conversion. So when when John tells his readers that the anointing that they received from the Holy One abides in them, he’s saying the Holy Spirit remains with them, and he will not leave. He will not leave you. That’s what the word abide means, by the way. If some if something abides, it remains connected. It does not leave. No matter what comes, it remains with you. That’s abiding. And the same is true of us. If you put your trust in Jesus, church, if you put your trust in Jesus, if you have been transformed in your heart by the gospel of Christ, then the Holy Spirit indwells you. And he’s not going anywhere. He’s not going to leave or forsake you. There will never be a moment when the Holy Spirit leaves you. This is the most foundational thing about you. If it is true, you are a new creation in Christ. You have been anointed by God’s Holy Spirit, who will remain with you always. And that means, according to John here, that means that you have no need for anyone to teach you. Now, before I preach myself right out of a job this morning, let me explain this. Okay. As I mentioned earlier, John is teaching them these very words, right? This whole letter is instruction to the church. So he’s not saying to Christians, no one can teach you anything if you have the Holy Spirit. That’s not what he means. The Bible is filled with passages that tell us to find good teachers and to be good teachers of the gospel. That’s what I strive to be for you. Here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying church, here comes a whole wave of false theology. It’s on its way towards you. Guys are about to show up at your door with new insight, new insight that says that Jesus isn’t the Messiah, and that you can walk in sin and still be in the light and things like that. They’re going to claim authority that they don’t have. They’re going to they’re going to have a new way of relating to God that you haven’t heard about yet. And they’re going to try to teach you this as if you don’t have enough information. That’s the teaching that you don’t need. You don’t need that teaching, church, because we already have the gospel in full. We have the whole thing. Now we need to plumb the depths of this gospel that we have received. There’s more to learn about it, but we don’t need to be taught another gospel. And the beauty of being saved and filled with the Holy Spirit is that he will give us discernment to know when we are hearing gospel truth and when we are being peddled a third Testament. As John says in chapter four of this very letter describing the same truth here, he says this, little children, you are from God and have overcome them. For he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. Right? God is at work in you. He has given you the gospel. He has filled you with the spirit. He is greater than all of those false gospels that are going to be coming at you. So first of all, how do I know I can confidently stand up to all the deception that the world wants to offer me? The first thing I need to remember that I’m in Christ. I got to remember who I am. There is no additional, hidden, mysterious truth about God out there that I need other people to come and to teach me about. I have everything that I need in the gospel that I already know. And the Holy Spirit will help me to discern the difference as I listen. That’s the first abiding. Okay. That’s the first. Here’s the second. But as his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as it taught you, abide in him. One of the earlier readings we had today in our service was from Jeremiah 31, where the prophet tells God’s new covenant that’s coming. God will have a new way of relating to his people once Jesus comes and fulfills his ministry and saves us by dying on the cross for us. Instead of knowledge of God being passed from person to person, and then relating to God only through a system of priests and sacrifices, God is going to fill each of his people and write his law directly onto their hearts. That’s what Jeremiah explains, and it’s an allusion to the coming of the Holy Spirit. See, in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit did fill people, but only on occasion. Certain people, certain leaders for certain moments, certain times. But under the New Covenant, he’s going to be with all of his people all of the time. As the Lord puts it in Jeremiah 31:34, no longer shall each one teach his neighbor, and each his brother, saying, know the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. That is the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and that anointing is true, John says. It’s not a lie that took place. It is the reality of God’s relationship with us. And so if you trust in Jesus, your primary teacher is not me. And it’s not the books you read and it’s not the videos you watch. Your primary teacher is the Holy Spirit actively at work within you. Now, does the Holy Spirit give us new, fresh information about God when he teaches? Does he talk to us every morning apart from God’s Word? I want you to listen to Jesus explain what the Holy Spirit will teach. Okay, we have great scripture on this question, and this is Jesus telling us what the Holy Spirit is going to do. He says, this is John chapter 14, verses 25 and 26. Jesus is speaking. He says, these things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. So Jesus says this to his apostles. Then the apostles wrote our New Testament, which contains both the teachings of Jesus and the application of Jesus teachings to the church. So when John says that our anointing, the Holy Spirit teaches us about everything, he means what Jesus meant. That the Holy Spirit is going to point us to all the truth that comes from God’s Word. God’s unchanging word can be fully trusted and the Holy Spirit will teach it to you. He will illuminate what it says. When you’re reading your Bible, you’re going to see the scriptures through the lens of one who’s been transformed by Christ. You’ll be hearing your shepherd speak to you, and the Holy Spirit will help you discern other sources in the world, whether or not they should be trusted because it matches up with, or does not match up with, what God has said. In other words, the Holy Spirit will help to shape your biblical worldview. Have you ever been listening to a sermon or some teaching? Who someone is teaching and they claim to be teaching from the Bible, but you get the sense that what you’re hearing isn’t actually in there? Hopefully you’re not getting that sense right now. Right? But you experience that before where you get that sense. That’s your teacher, the Holy Spirit, actively guiding you. You shouldn’t ignore that. It should drive you deeper into the Bible. Now, it might be that you get into the Bible and you find out that that is what it says, and you need to change your mind about it. That’s also the Holy Spirit at work in you. Either way, you should not ignore that sense, right? But you can ignore it. And that’s what John is writing here. You can ignore it. You can become spiritually lazy and undisciplined. And if you do that, you’re going to wander off into all sorts of nonsense. And this is why John explains that while the Holy Spirit remains in us, we must also abide in him. We should, as Paul puts it, walk in step with the spirit. There should be a very close partnership with the Holy Spirit within each of us, so that the Word of God shapes and directs us. Now, we don’t struggle today with claims that Jesus is not the Christ. It’s not a typical Midwestern evangelical Christian threat to be vulnerable to the lie that Jesus doesn’t fill the office of the Jewish Messiah. Okay. That’s not a big thing for us. But that would have been a very big deal back in the first century when Jesus identity was still being learned. You have to understand this lie that’s coming at them. They are vulnerable to this lie. It would have been a very new development for Jewish people to have made the connection between the Messiah that they had been waiting for and the man, Jesus Christ. Right. And so these false teachers were bringing deception that could potentially have a big impact on this particular body of believers. We’re not so vulnerable to that lie. But what lies are we vulnerable to? See, that’s what we have to ask. What lies could be heading our way that are so tempting that it would prompt the Apostle John to write us a letter, to remind us to abide in our Holy Spirit anointing, and to listen carefully to us as he teaches us God’s Word. I suppose the answer to that question would be slightly different for all of us, given that we are all different people, we have different vulnerabilities. We’re uniquely vulnerable to a different set of lies, different ideas that are out there. But I can suggest a few that might be coming our way. And let’s stay highly theological here at first. How about the lie that Christ is a way to God, but he is not the way to God? This has been quite a popular way of seeing things in the last 20 years, especially as globalization has impacted our world and brought a lot of different ideas from all over the world together. Or how about the doctrine of eternal judgment that’s been softened within the Christian church? It really has been. I dealt a lot with that one about 15 years ago, when Rob Bell started writing all of his materials and had a lot of Christians searching for the truth, or turning to cultural influences. How about the way that society’s view of sex before marriage or cohabitation and divorce have impacted how Christians engage in relationships? Or how about the way we are being encouraged to elevate our political views above the gospel so that we openly champion those parts where our politics match the gospel, but we refuse to be critical of our own team when they don’t. And that’s both sides of the aisle, by the way. There are so many lies. There are so many lies. It would be highly naive of us to think that we’re not vulnerable to deception just because we don’t feel vulnerable to the kind of deception that we see in First John. But the mutual abiding that we have in the Holy Spirit, this this mutual spirit in me and me in the spirit, this mutual abiding who points us to God’s unchanging word, should see us all the way through those lies. That’s what we’ve been told. It’ll see us through the lies. I want to leave you with an image that comes to my mind when I think about the mutual abiding that we should have with the Holy Spirit. This spirit in me and me in the spirit. When I think about that, I like to think of pickles. If James can bring a chainsaw on stage, I can show you pickles. Okay. I like to think of pickles. Right. You have the brine and you have the cucumber. Nothing salty or tasty about a raw cucumber. I don’t know why you people are eating them. Doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Disgusting. But when you put it into the brine. Right. Eventually it becomes fully saturated. The brine is in the cucumber because the cucumber is in the brine. The brine infuses itself into every part, so much so that you cannot eat any part of it that doesn’t taste like the brine. Now one does not become the other. They are still different, but they’re so interlaced, they’re so thoroughly infused together that they can no longer be separated. That’s mutual abiding. Church, I want you to be pickled in the Holy Spirit. I do, I do. We need to be soaked in. We need to be soaked in the gospel of God’s Word by our teacher, the Holy Spirit. We need to be saturated with his leading. We need to be attuned to his guidance at every step, because as he abides in us, which is a promise from God, and as we abide in him, which is a command from God, we will be able to handle any lie, any deception that comes our way. Would you pray with me?

Wolves in Shepherd’s Clothing

JOHN SHOWS HOW TO DEAL WITH FALSE TEACHERS BY BROADENING OUR COMMON CONCEPTION OF THE ANTICHRIST, REASSURING BELIEVERS OF THE SUPERNATURAL REALITY OF THEIR FAITH, AND BUILDING A FRAMEWORK FOR DISCERNMENT OF FALSE TEACHERS.   So I’m going to read from 1 John chapter two, verses 18 to 25, which is what we’ll be discussing today together. I say discussion. It’s a sermon. Don’t answer unless it’s rhetorical, especially goes out to my children, who out of force of habit, will no doubt talk over me at some point. And security, if you could just keep an eye out for them, actually. Carry them away at the slightest misdemeanor. Children, it is the last hour and you have heard that the Antichrist is coming. So now many antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that they are all not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ. This is the Antichrist, he who denies the father and the son. No one who denies the son has the father. Whoever confesses the son has the father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard in the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the son and in the father. And this is the promise he made to us eternal life. Children, it is the last hour. The Apostle John writes these words with the heart of a father. He is both tender and fiercely protective. Like any loving parent. He speaks with both love and with discipline. He addresses his readers as children, not because they’re immature, but because he cares for them the way a parent cares for sons and daughters who are growing up in a dangerous world. He lovingly cautions them against anything that would pull them off the godly path that they’re on. He reminds them of the truths they learned when they were young, in the faith. Truths that were simple enough for a child to grasp, yet deep enough to sustain them for a lifetime. And he does all of this with a ferocious protectiveness that will not let them be led astray by smooth-talking deceivers. Now John writes in a densely poetic manner. It’s as if he cannot merely convey the information. He must also express the awe he feels towards God. And that leads him into rich and mysterious and weighty and sometimes actually quite difficult passages. His language is evocative, even lyrical at times, because the reality he is describing is bigger than words can easily contain. Yet even in this mystery, John is not trying to confuse us. He wants to clarify, to equip. And in this particular passage, I want to suggest that we can break it down into three clear and applicable points. First, he broadens the typical conception of the Antichrist from a singular entity who has or who will directly oppose the church. And instead John takes that idea, that spirit of deception, and he pluralizes it. He tells us that many antichrists have already come. These are not necessarily the headline-grabbing monsters that we might expect. They’re individuals who subtly corrupt the faith from within. They use false teaching. They look like insiders. They sound familiar. They once sat in the same gatherings we sit in. This broadening of the concept of Antichrist is quite disturbing, but also very helpful. Secondly, he reassures the believers that their faith is a supernatural reality. These antichrists haven’t discovered some brilliant new revelation. And in fact, they’re woefully adrift. They’re not enlightened. They’ve not seen something that the rest of us missed. The true believers have been anointed by the Holy One, the Holy Spirit, and their faith therefore rests on something solid and something eternal. Thirdly, through all the passage, John builds a practical framework for discernment. He shows us how the Holy Spirit attests to the reality of the gospel message rather than generating new revelation. So with those three things in mind, let’s draw out the themes from the text, and let’s let John’s words sink in deeply. This isn’t just ancient history. This is as useful today as it has been in every age. Perhaps even more so. Children. It is the last hour, and as you have heard, the Antichrist is coming. So now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us. Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist. He who denies the father and the son. These people, it’s clear, were once part of their community. They shared the same meals, the same buildings, perhaps even the same public confession of faith. And then they left. But when they left, they didn’t simply disappear into private disbelief or heresy because some leave the church quietly, but some leave the church evangelistically. John’s letter is focusing on this second group, those who exit from the church but continue to try to teach or corrupt or evangelize to it. Right after the passage we’re studying, John makes his purpose crystal clear. In verse 26, he says, I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. These antichrists weren’t content to go their own way. They wanted to pull sheep after them. And that raises the stakes dramatically. So that’s the first thing to note. John is not talking about every single person who ever leaves the church. He’s speaking of a specific group known to him and his first readers. Some people leave quietly and we grieve for them, and I want to stress that point. We grieve for them. We pray for them. We long and rejoice with the Heavenly Father at the return of prodigal sons and daughters. But John is focusing on this other group. They represent not merely personal tragedy, but an active danger to the body of Christ. This is couched as a warning, not a lament. These people parallel the false prophets that Jesus warned about in Matthew seven passage that we read at the start. Jesus said, beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. John is describing something similar, right? This false prophet leadership. In his commentary on that Matthew passage, John MacArthur points out something interesting. The sheep’s clothing that Jesus is speaking of is not necessarily a disguise of an ordinary sheep trying to blend in with the flock. It can be the woolen robe of a shepherd pretending to be the one who leads the sheep. He stands up front. He teaches, he influences. He exerts ongoing authority. He’s not merely leaving to go out alone. He’s trying to draw other believers into his way of thinking. So this raises a crucial Christian skill, which is implied throughout the passage, even if it’s not mentioned outright. We see it in the language of people going out from us. We see it in John’s careful discernment, in distinctions between the true believers and these antichrists. The skill is discernment, and it’s distinct from church discipline. There are times, of course, when discipline is necessary. Jesus teaches himself in Matthew 18 that removing unrepentant members from the church is something that should happen. But there’s a distinction. There’s a difference here. You can’t excommunicate an idea. You can’t vote out a false teaching. John knows these dangerous ideas are already floating around inside the community. His concern is that they do not ruin the whole body. He’s describing chemotherapy for bad ideas. He wants to keep the patient, the church, alive. But to remove the thing which is poisoning it. That’s why this passage, and indeed the whole letter of John, is so relentlessly focused on these discernments and these distinctions. But John does not leave us fearful and anxious of these imposters. In fact, far from it. After warning of them, he immediately turns to two kinds of reassurance. Do not be troubled by those who have left. And remember the iron core of your faith. But they went out that it might become plain that they are not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you have all knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. So we shouldn’t be overly troubled by these false teachers who have departed. Truth is not decided by majority vote, or by who stays or who leaves. We don’t believe by consensus. Our confidence rests on something far more solid. The Holy Spirit himself affirming the gospel message that we have heard. Our trust in Jesus is this pincer movement. Hearing the historical message of Jesus, his life and death and resurrection, and the Holy Spirit confirming that within our hearts. Together they keep us steady in the truth. John is therefore emphasizing how firmly our faith has been established, because ultimately it’s been established by God. We’re not somehow clinging to driftwood amidst a storm, hoping that we’ll survive. We’re rooted. Our foundation is solid. God has built a castle which we inhabit. The walls are not made of our own cleverness or briefly coherent feelings. They are built by the Holy One himself. So John is doing more than just calming our nerves. He’s actually inviting us to draw a kind of relief from their departures. When he says that it might become plain they’re not of us, He’s pointing to something clarifying and even purifying in the church. The fly has climbed out of the ointment. The counterfeits teachers have been exposed. Their leaving does not weaken the true church. Actually, it strengthens it by making the difference between true teachers and false teachers, a true gospel and a false gospel. That’s why John draws out the key distinction in verse 20. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you have all knowledge. By implication, these false teachers never knew the Holy Spirit in the first place. Their departure reveals what was already true. Therefore, it’s not a change of status, but a revealing of it. So John is then developing two things in his audience. First, reassurance. The apparent loss of faith by others should not diminish the confidence of believers. And secondly, discernment. He’s training them and us to recognize the difference between truth and error. I want us to leave here with both of those things today. This reassurance and improved skill of discernment. I want us to know what it really means when someone leaves the church, because they have embraced a fundamentally different message from the gospel. And I want us to grow in the skill that John is building, the ability to test everything against the unchanging truth of Christ. Now, I’d like us to consider the way John builds a framework for discernment. But first I want to make a case for why discernment is vital. I want to begin with the why of discernment before we get to the how. And would you indulge me a youth pastor moment? Just a minute. I’m not leaving. Was this on anyone’s bingo card? I used to be an arborist a long, long time ago. Sort of my first proper job when I finished high school. If you look at a chainsaw, there’s a little line here. It’s quite small, but it’s very important. This is your felling line, and this line points where your tree is going to fall. Assuming it’s straight. But that’s too complicated to get into. Now when you make your cut at the base of the tree, this line is what you can sight across, which is where your tree is going to land. And it’s really important to get that pretty precisely lined up. And the reason for that is that, okay, you might be an inch or so off-center down here, but when you exaggerate that error with 50, 80, maybe 100 foot of tree, that could be the difference between a destroyed house or a dead colleague. Right. Everyone laughed at that one. The last sermon as well. There wasn’t meant to be a joke. It’s really serious. The discernment that John is advocating for is predicting this kind of problem. Right? These kind of mistakes. Okay, it’s 100 foot of trunk an inch or so down here can make a huge difference, right? And so it is with the lack of discernment in our life can mean that our mistakes are exaggerated across a lifetime or across a lifetime of a church, right? The heresies that we think John is dealing with in this letter persist to this day, right? The false teaching affects believers for hundreds of years thereafter, and even up to our present day, the stakes are significant. So that’s the why of discernment, right? It’s not a mistake today. We can’t just gloss over those subtle perversions of the gospel or of Jesus’s identity, because they last for a very long time. So John uses a simple test, a simple tool to invite us into an infinite reality. He gives what looks like a very simplistic method for distinguishing true believers from antichrists. Confess that Jesus is the Christ. That’s it. Admit that Jesus is the promised Messiah the defined son, the Savior. The reason this is extraordinary is because it’s simple enough for a child to understand and yet complex enough to spend a lifetime unpacking as we mature in the faith. Would you indulge me a very English metaphor? In the United Kingdom, we have a beloved television show called Doctor Who. The doctor travels through space and time in something called the Tardis. I see a few excited nods in the audience there. Thank you. Anglophiles. So this Tardis from the outside looks like a very normal English telephone box, right? It’s about eight feet tall. It’s about this wide. You could fit two people in it if they were close friends, perhaps. But once you step inside, it’s this vast, mysterious spaceship. It’s almost infinite, with endless rooms and corridors and wonders. And so in Britain, we have this phrase, ‘it’s a bit of a Tardis’, to describe things that look much smaller on the outside than they are on the inside. You know, a little cottage that you go in and suddenly it’s airy and spacious. We’d say it’s a bit of a Tardis. This is what confessing Jesus is the Christ is like. On the outside it’s a neat small package, which is simple enough for a child to proclaim. But once you step into that truth, you discover a cavernous reality. There are endless rooms of wonder. You can explore the depths of his deity, his humanity, his atoning death, his victorious resurrection, his kingly rule, or his coming return. The truth abides in us, as John says early in the letter, and we grow more and more familiar with its riches. And Jesus is always a sticking point. That’s why John’s identification of the Antichrist, those who rejected Jesus, is such an enduring litmus test for false teaching. In our own day, for example, it’s culturally repulsive to many people to see Jesus as king and judge. Jesus himself was unswerving in his commitment to sorting true believers from those merely jumping on a bandwagon. Much of our theology of hell comes straight from Jesus own words. Yet in our culture, we often discard him as the authoritative King and Savior we need by ignoring his role in judgment as well as salvation. The identity of Jesus becomes corrupted and we invent a Jesus who is our spiritual buddy. Always affirming and never convicting. In John’s day, the distaste for Jesus was his physicality and his full humanity. In our day, the distaste is often for his authority or his holiness, his exclusive claims. In drawing his reader’s attention to Jesus as the Christ, John evokes not just the person to which we are loyal, but the person whose life we emulate, whose commands we obey, and whose promises we believe. So we’ve considered how John identifies these antichrists with this simple test, and he contrasts them with true believers. Let’s look at what we can learn from this passage about some of the detail of discernment. Well, firstly, John gives us quite a dramatic context for this discernment. If we look at the passage as a whole, children, it’s the last hour. And he repeats it’s the last hour. And then at the end of the passage, and this is the promise that he made to us eternal life. In doing this, John brackets this passage with two themes. It’s bracketed by urgency and by eternity. Discernment then sits between these two. There’s the urgency of making your decision quickly. You can’t waste time. There are people being led astray. And yet he stretches out our vision to eternity, the eternal consequences for good or for ill. We have to keep these two things in mind, knowing that what we decide has consequences, but that we do not have an eternity to make that decision. Even if the consequences may well become eternal. So urgency inspires speed, and eternity inspires caution. That’s what makes discernment an art. It’s balancing between these two. It has to thread a needle. When I was an EMT in the UK on blue light driving courses, we’d have this phrase right drive to arrive. You’d think it might be get there as quickly as possible. But the trainers knew from experience that actually rushing meant that you may never get there at all. But equally, we couldn’t just drive as safely as possible 20 miles an hour, observing all the speed limits, their stop lights, stop signs. Actually, there was still an emergency to get to. So if we just have urgency or we just have eternity, we often don’t discern. So John keeps these things at the forefront of our mind. What we often do instead is we hurry without thinking of the consequences, or we procrastinate hoping a decision doesn’t yet have to be made. So we find ourselves gripping these two realities, neither of which John allows us to release. Even if they pull us in opposite directions. But as we cling to these opposing forces, our discernment develops strength and vigor. But how does this look in everyday life? How do we make decisions, especially about teaching and truth, when the stakes may be lifelong or even eternal? How do we avoid getting lost in overthinking? Interestingly, when I look back at my own life, some of my biggest decisions and the most far-reaching ones were made relatively quickly. But they were on a foundation that had lasted years. Take my wife, Imogen, for example. I don’t know if she knows I was going to use this example. Sorry, darling. It’s nothing embarrassing, maybe of me, but. I’d known her for some time. We had some mutual friends. We had a, you know, I knew her reputation well enough, and she knew mine well enough. But the actual decision was pretty quick, right? I sat in my parents house thinking, I like her, I think I think this is good, I think God is in this. And then deciding. I didn’t spend a long, long time thinking about it. It seemed foolhardy, right? I was 18 years old, but what they didn’t see was the years of preparation that had come before it. Believe it or not, when I was 13 years old, I decided I wanted to find a wife. I don’t know what got into me. I think the Holy Spirit was redeeming a desire to date girls into something more honorable and enduring. And I was about as successful as you’d expect for a 13 year old boy, especially when you consider my main criteria was pretty and my second criteria was Christian. But by the time I was 18, I knew what I was looking for. A woman of commitment, a willingness to let Christ into every part of her life. So when I met Imogen, I had already front-loaded this long-term perspective. It meant that when urgency came, and it was urgent, because she’s a real catch and I couldn’t just leave her on the market. I could respond with clarity and with speed. I had looked far enough down the road to know where I was going. We can bring the same attitude to testing, teaching, and recognizing false teachers. John keeps bringing his back, bringing us back to the message they heard from the beginning. Why is he doing that? Well, that message must be our daily focus. We should talk about it, remind one another of it, read books about it, encourage one another, challenge one another. And then when a novel viewpoint arises, we’re prepared, right? We can make those decisions with the urgency that they require. So after emphasizing the importance of weighing these false teachers and the eternal consequences of doing so, John gives us a focus for our efforts. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. What you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the son and in the father. Therefore, these efforts at resisting false teaching are not mainly negative. They are a positive effort to abide in the simplicity of the good news about Jesus. Summarized as luck would have it most succinctly by John in his gospel. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life. Now this part of the letter that we’re studying today, the letter of one John, sits at the point where John labels those who have been corrupting the congregation, calling them antichrists. Right. Fierce criticism. The letter may have been written in response to an early form of Gnosticism. This was a derivative of a culturally dominant philosophy in Greece. It held that the physical world is somehow bad and perishable. But a mere representation of a somehow truer, purer spiritual world. And many in the history of the early church attempted to reconfigure Christianity along these lines. This especially impacted the view of the incarnation. The scandal and the surprise of God taking on flesh took on a new significance to people who were used to denigrating the body and conveniently justifying sin as action in what was an insignificant vessel, the body. One John is full of clues that John is refuting this way of thinking by reiterating that Jesus was indeed physically present. John describes himself as seeing and touching Christ, and he also affirms that true believers see sin as serious and love of others as paramount, practical love of others as paramount. Additionally, his refrain here in the passage and elsewhere in the letter that his audience should hold to what they heard from the beginning, indicates a novel philosophy was threatening the gospel. Therefore, a key part of John’s framework for discernment is maintaining an awareness of prevailing cultural trends, which are prone to pulling us off course. I want to outline one of those now, but I want to explain with a metaphor first why it’s important to be aware of cultural trends when we are discerning false teaching in the church. About why we don’t just look at the gospel, but we’re aware of some of the invisible forces that might be impacting that. Who here has navigated by a compass before? And you must be the good ones, because I guess the ones who weren’t very good at it are still out there somewhere. So you think it’s simple, right? A compass points north, and then you can work out if you’re going east or west or north west or north east. Actually, compasses don’t always point north, right? So your map has a north on it, but that north changes over time. The Earth’s magnetic field isn’t completely aligned with where we’ve drawn our maps or even how the earth spins. And so you take account of something called magnetic declination, which is the difference between your magnetic north and what you might call true north. And it can be as much as 180 degrees. If you’re up in the poles in somewhere like Alaska, it can be 50 degrees. Here it’s only about five, right? But you need to take account of where locally your magnetic north isn’t quite accurate. Cultural trends do something similar. They give us a false reading of True North. C.J. Mahaney puts it this way. Today, the greatest challenge facing the American evangelical is not persecution from the world, but seduction by it. Not persecution by the world, but seduction by it. So, like John, we need to be fiercely perceptive of what is going on in the wider culture and be able to articulate the Christian life and message and how it’s different. To that end, let’s look at a couple of authors briefly who I think are quite good at articulating the magnetic declination in our present age, the way our culture is subtly adjusting our navigation. In his book The Big Ego Trip, British psychiatrist Glenn Harrison covers the shift towards a high self-esteem, towards high self-esteem as the proposed foundation for all human flourishing. It’s a critique, really, from a Christian standpoint and a chronology of how we got this way. In the book, he captures the mid-century tipping point 50 or 60 years ago quite well. It took George Lucas’s Star Wars, sorry to disparage Star Wars, I’m just quoting. But it took George Lucas’s Star Wars movie to capture the final ascendancy of the self. Arriving at the finale, our two heroes are seen walking proudly through this vast cheering crowd of admirers. Now, having learnt to trust their feelings, they’re about to be awarded with the highest prize of all, the claim of the people, the approval of their peers and the worship of the masses. The self has triumphed. It’s no longer simply part of a greater story. The self is the story. And here, receiving the acclaim of its peers, it may be found at the very pinnacle of where it wants to be. However, our self, our emotional core, our feelings, our deep desires brought to the surface by introspection and carefully built through a process which Karl Truman calls expressive individualism, is not the final piece or the ultimate piece of your life, and that can be painful to hear. Right? Star Wars has a message which sits gently within the culture, doesn’t it? Discover yourself. Trust your feelings. There’s greatness inside of you. There’s bad people out there that corrupt you. But once you can get rid of them, the true you will rise up and be a blessing to the world. So it can lead us to wonder, where’s this thinking going to lead? And I think we have a very strong magnetic declination, a very strong cultural pull to elevate self as the as the focus of human flourishing. The idea that who we are inside is inherently good, that loving and expressing our authentic self is how we will bless the world, not just flourish personally, but then we open to Philippians two, verses 6 to 8, and we see a very different picture of human flourishing. Jesus, who though he was in the very form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. The contrast. Right. The expressive individualism as the way that I will flourish personally and the way I’ll really bless the world versus Jesus, creator of all things. The one who really only ever, and certainly most ever, deserved honor. Being humble, becoming a servant. Therefore, we must be ready for people to depart from us. We do hold as biblical the idea of the perseverance of the saints that God will sustain true believers to the end. But what is not biblical is the idea that everyone who ever calls themselves Christian truly is one. In the Matthew seven passage that we began with, Jesus words are sobering. Many will say to him on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And he will say, I never knew you. In a close friends church in the United States, a sizeable group left because they believe the gospel was mainly a tool for political change and felt that that was not being emphasized enough. We must be prepared, even in this congregation, to see people step away when the real Jesus becomes too costly, or a mere instrument to achieve a different goal and begin to change the gospel to align with that. Now, John implies that it’s often difficult to tell who those people really are until the moment of departure. So we don’t live with a paranoid suspicion of is it me? Is it them over there? Instead, we take the same difficult but sober piece that John advocates for. When people step away from the gospel, they haven’t changed their status, they’ve simply revealed their status. I want a light briefly on something else as well as we think about discernment in the present age. We also face brand new arenas where discernment is suddenly required. Consider generative artificial intelligence that can produce large amounts of text on any topic. This is not the AI that simply sorts ripe plums from unripe plums. This is AI that can generate theological discourse, Bible studies, or pastoral advice. I got caught out by this a few weeks back. I was looking for kind of good theology for young people on Amazon. Or perhaps it was the first mistake. And I read some reviews on this great systematic theology for teens. Author seems respectable chap, got the book, was going through a lot of hyphens in here. He’s weirdly repetitive and found out partly through kind of an expose that we’d done on this kind of theology book that had become popular, that this book was AI generated, and the author wasn’t even a real author. Right? He also had an AI generated photograph. He did look unusually handsome and even an AI generated bio. Right? It’s not a real person. It’s not the kind of weighty wrestling that happens when you try to come up with theology. And I’ve found even using it in my master’s studies, you know, perhaps you’re trying to understand a dense medieval theologian, densely written, not it’s not a comment on their intelligence, or you’re trying to locate a good source, right. It can be quicker than Google sometimes, but I found repeatedly that it subtly shifts away from the gospel. Most commonly and most glaringly, it drifts towards a workspace gospel. It might describe prayer as something that contributes to your salvation. Most insidiously, it often carries at its core, the same common cultural message that reality should shape itself around you yourself, your expressive individualism, because really it treats you as its master and it treats your feelings as your master. So we’re living in a strange moment in human history where lies can be generated not only by humans, but by the machines the humans have created. We must now test the tools and voices that shape our thoughts in ways previous generations had only ever imagined until very recently. So how do we balance all of this? Well, I want to suggest that we walk a tightrope, and that seems to be the kind of idea that John is getting at. The gospel is a reality which is stretched taut between Jesus’s birth, life and resurrection. And at the other end, his second coming. In the grand story of God, it’s simply the most visible expression of a straight line that stretches from before time began and into eternity. The story of God’s unfolding plan of salvation. That straight line doesn’t deviate with a culture. It doesn’t change course with a new revelation. But it’s not simply a case of us walking that tightrope. We need to balance as well. John reminds us in this passage that the Holy Spirit illuminates the good news. It’s like the balance bar a tightrope walker holds to keep them centered. As verse 20 puts it, we are anointed by the Holy One and you have all knowledge. But the tightrope is tiring. We grow weary. We want to step off and rest in the comfort of majority opinion. We want to deny the parts of Jesus our culture dislikes to shape him into a culturally congruous gospel. But John points us to a greater rest, a greater rest in that final sentence. And this is the promise that he made to us – eternal life. There’s a story of a missionary, and the source is unclear, but it goes like this. After decades of difficult but faithful service in Africa, the missionary returns home to New York. By coincidence, he arrives on the same boat as Theodore Roosevelt, who’s coming back from a safari. Thousands have gathered at the airport. Ticker tape parades, paparazzi, a band. The president stepped off the boat. The weary missionary felt a pang of discouragement. He whispers to God, why don’t I get a welcome like that when I come home? In the quiet of his heart, he sensed the Lord’s reply. Because you haven’t come home yet. One day the true king will return. Every false Christ, every seductive lie, every wolf dressed in shepherd’s clothing, will be exposed for what he is. The sheep who know his voice will hear the words that we all long for. Well done, good and faithful servant. And we will finally be home. Let’s pray.

Do Not Love the World

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REMAINING FIRM IN CHRIST OR BEING SWEPT AWAY BY SIN IS DETERMINED BY WHAT YOU LOVE, SO YOU CANNOT LOVE THE WORLD. Well, we’re getting to the point in our series in First John, when you will start to see some of the preaching team up here on Sunday mornings. And I am excited for you to hear the sermons that these guys have been preparing. We got together yesterday for our second workshop to share outlines with each other. And it was just a great time of learning together. A couple of months ago, we used the passage that I am preaching this morning as a group exercise. So we all broke down the argument together. And then they helped me develop the outline that I’m using today. So if this sermon is any good, you can thank them. And if it’s bad, feel free to blame them, actually. It’s fine. It’s totally fine. No, I’m very excited. Next week, Pastor James will be preaching his first Sunday sermon here at Calvary. And as part of that service, we are going to have a prayer of installation for him at all three of our services. So, please come and support him. I got to hear his sermon yesterday in full and you are not going to want to miss it. As I mentioned last week, the Apostle John is now directly addressing the people in the church who love Jesus. He’s writing this letter to them to remind them of who they are in Christ. He’s telling us about our own identity. He’s saying, don’t forget this. You’ve been forgiven by Jesus. You know the eternal God. Sin has no actual power over you anymore. You’re in the father’s family. And he’s doing this because he’s concerned. False theology is on its way. If it hasn’t arrived already. Lies are going to try to work their way into the hearts and minds of these people that he loves so much. And so this letter is an attempt to anchor the people in the gospel that they already know, so that they can stand up against the waves that are coming, that will try to drive them away from Jesus. And John has one very simple, straightforward command for the church. This is the first command in the letter. John is going to use an imperative or a command seven times in this letter, but this one is the first. Do not love the world. Do not love the world. Now that requires definition and qualification. We have to know what we’re talking about here. But I want you to hear right up front this morning, church, the difference between remaining firm in Christ or being swept away by sin is determined by what you love. So you cannot love the world. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 15 to 17. Today we’re looking at three verses. John first gives us the command, and then he gives us three reasons why we need to follow it, which all have to do with how the world relates to God our Father. It’s a simple structure, but there’s so much packed into these short verses. Let’s start with the command. Do not love the world or the things in the world. This is one of those seemingly simple phrases that becomes more complex the more you think about it. It’s like when Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself. That seems simple, right? Love your neighbor as yourself. But then at the time Jesus said this, a lawyer piped up and said, okay, hey, not so fast, who exactly is my neighbor? And I might add, and how do I have to love him? And of course, Jesus defined his terms beautifully with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which effectively closed any loopholes that someone might use to hold on to their bias or their hate. In our passage this morning, we also need to define the terms. First of all, what is this world that we are not to be loving? Every college and NFL end zone I have ever seen has a guy holding a sign that says John 3:16 that he’s hoping that I will then turn to it in my Bible where I will read, for God so loved the world. That’s in John’s gospel. Same author here. So John says, God loves the world, but then he says that we are not to love the world. What is going on here? Well, the word world in the Bible has a variety of different meanings, so you always have to look carefully at how it’s being used. John himself, earlier in this chapter, in chapter two, said that Jesus is the propitiation for our sins and that not only of ours, but of the whole world. So there in verse two, he’s clearly referring to the fact that Jesus is the one Savior for all people, no matter where they live in the world. That is very close to what John means in John 3:16. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. The people clearly are in view when he says the word world there. And just as clearly John is not telling us here in chapter two, verse 15 not to love people. If you look at the next verse, you’ll see that sinful desires and pride are listed as things in the world. So when John says, do not love the world, he’s referring to those things in the world that dishonor God, that pull us away from God. Now, I love the fact that he expands on this by saying, don’t love the world or the things in the world. See, what he’s doing is he’s making us look at the whole. But then he’s also making us look at the parts. And the reason I love that is so that we don’t we don’t do the thing that all of us are inclined to do, which is to reject certain worldly things that we don’t like while secretly embracing and coveting certain sins that we find enjoyable or convenient. For example, someone might say that they hate the injustice of our world. I hate the injustice of our world. They want to see the end of the mistreatment of people. But at the same time, they also kind of want to bend the definition of God’s love to include the acceptance of ungodly sinful relationships or lifestyles. Or maybe someone wants to champion the rights of the unborn, but not the immigrant or the poor, or some other group that the Bible calls us to champion. Or maybe someone can rightly claim victory over sins in a particular area of life where they don’t struggle too much, but are very comfortable and happy with other areas of their sin, so long as they can keep them hidden and nobody brings them up. By saying the things in the world, John is drawing our attention to all the various individual sins that can become objects of our love. We can’t give ourselves a passing grade for not loving the world if there are certain sinful values and activities that we continue to love. It would be far better for us, church, far better this morning for us to listen to what John is saying and search our hearts and identify those areas where we need to end our love relationship with worldly things. And I’ll tell you this church, we can be sure of one thing. The world wants us to love it. The world wants us to love it. John is telling us not to love the world precisely because the world presents itself as something desirable, as something to love. If the sin of the world around us didn’t feel desirable to us, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. If yelling and arguing and winning didn’t give you a sense of satisfaction, you wouldn’t do it. If gossiping about other people didn’t give you a sense of superiority over those people, you’d avoid it. Listen to how lust and sexual sin is described in Proverbs chapter seven. This is verses 21 through 23. Listen. Listen to how it’s described. With much seductive speech, she persuades him. With her smooth talk she compels him. All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a stag is caught fast till an arrow pierces its liver. As a bird rushes into a snare. He does not know that it will cost him his life. You see, seductive speech persuades. Smooth talk compels. Earlier in Proverbs, this same sort of talk is described as dripping with honey. It’s sweet. It tastes good. The sin of the world does not present itself as undesirable, because if it did, we wouldn’t all struggle with it. We wouldn’t have a problem with it. The real problem is that worldly sin is compelling. We can make an argument for it. It can seem right to us. Last week I went to my daughter’s soccer tournament. And if you if you’ve never been to a soccer game before, here’s how it works. All the parents sit on the same side of the field. The teams are on the other side. We’re all on one side of the field, And then the parents of one team sit on one side of midfield, and the parents of the other team sit on the other side. And when I arrived to this game, there was already this huge crowd of people there and just filling the sidelines. And so I was looking for a familiar parent and I saw Jeremy Moreland already seated there on the sideline. And Jeremy and I had, the day before, we had sat next to each other and Jeremy and I thought, okay, Jeremy’s part of cavalry. He’s actually right there. So you can all look at him. And, and so here we are. We’re sitting on the sideline. And by the way, I’ve already informed Jeremy that the cost of hanging out with me is that you might appear in a sermon illustration. So I go over, I go over, and I sit my chair next to Jeremy on the sideline. And we start watching the game. And I began to notice that every time our team did well, Jeremy and I would cheer, but nobody around us would cheer. And every time the other team scored, people started cheering wildly. And I realized Jeremy had misled me to the dark side. We were surrounded by the enemy, and we started laughing because our natural inclination when everybody around you is cheering is to start cheering. You’re like, yeah, oh, oh, no, no, actually that’s bad for us. That’s no good. And then the very opposite thing happens when you know our team does well. We start cheering and nobody around us is clapping. We’re like, ah, we should probably stop, right? Cheering in that moment meant something bad had happened. And as we sat there experiencing this very backward moment, Jeremy says, this is just like the world I want to cheer when I shouldn’t. And I leaned into him close and I said, you just made the sermon. See, when the world cheers, we want to join, don’t we? We want to join when things or people are excited about stuff and they’re embracing stuff and they value things. We want to cheer with them. Why can’t we love Jesus and love the world too? Why must we reject the impulse to participate and celebrate and value what the world finds commendable? Well, the first reason is that this love is incompatible with God’s love. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. This is one of those helpful, self-discerning sentences that John loves. We’ve seen this plenty of times so far in this letter. If your passion is to affirm and accept and embrace those things in the world that the Lord calls sin, that is evidence that you don’t have love for the Father. He’s not saying that you won’t profess love for the Father. He’s saying that you don’t actually love the Father, and you can profess all sorts of love for God. You can give yourself any label that you like. You can hang out with Christians. You can be around the church, you can participate in ministry. But if at the same time, you also love the sins of the world, that God tells us to reject and avoid, and you unrepentantly walk in that darkness, you don’t actually love God at all. Because those two loves are incompatible. They can’t co-exist in the same heart. There’s an encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees, and it’s recorded in John chapter eight. He’s debating them over whether they’re Jewish background makes God their Father, and it’s a long and detailed argument. You should read it carefully sometime. It really is quite rewarding. But I’ll just point out one point of it. One part of this, this debate. At one point, Jesus explains why the Pharisees are rejecting him and he says this: If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God, and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s will. So Jesus says, you are either in one family with one father, or you are in another family with a different father. And the way to know which family you’re in is by looking at your own will and determining which father’s desire you want to do. In other words, who do you love? Who do you love? You can’t have two fathers. You can’t be in two households. You can’t be obedient to two different leaders. It’s not just that it’s hard to do that, he’s saying you can’t do that. You cannot have a passionate desire to love God the Father and also love your sin. If you love your sin, any talk of loving your heavenly Father is just that. It’s just talk. Which means and this is the sobering part of this. Just like the Pharisees who thought they had God as their father but actually served their father the devil, there are a whole lot of people in the church today who don’t have the father that they think they do. There are people who sit in church every week who are actively looking forward to the sinful things that they’ll do with the rest of their week. There are people who feel confident that God is on their side, who also take that religious mask off the moment that they’re ready to do the sin that they actually love. And if that’s you, if that’s who you are this morning, hear what John is saying to you. You don’t love God at all. You don’t love him. The true God is not your father the way you think he is. You’re in a different family. Let’s look at the second reason not to love the world. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. So this short list of categories is how John sums up the things in the world. John says that these things are not from the Father, they are from the world. This means these things do not come to us as heavenly gifts from our good Heavenly Father. They are not sourced in him. They’re not given by him. In the sermon on the Mount in Matthew seven, Jesus says that God the Father gives good things to those who ask him. In James chapter one, verse 17, James writes, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights. So when the Bible describes what God the Father gives to his children, it’s always for their blessing and good, and it always leads to to growth and flourishing in Christ. In other words, the things that God gives lead us to godliness. And that’s true even of corrective discipline. In Hebrews 12, it says the Lord disciplines the one he loves. He chastises every son whom he receives. So correction is even part of the good gifts that God will give you. And we know this is true. Good parents give good gifts and good guidance to their kids to see them flourish, right? Our Heavenly Father does the same thing. In fact, he does so perfectly. He gives us exactly what we need. Good parents give good gifts. And so we will know a good gift from God when we see it, because it will lead us to become more like Christ and will be enjoyed for his glory. That’s how you know something is sourced from the Father. This list here in verse 16 is the opposite of that. He gives us three categories of sin that are all sourced in the world. When something fits into one or more of these categories, you can be sure that it is not given to you by God. Okay, this is not a gift. If it fits in these categories, it’s not a good gift. And any attempt that we make to rationalize something from these categories is a is just a lie that we’re telling ourselves. We call it good. You’re just using a lie to rationalize something that you want. The first category is the desire of the flesh. What we’re talking about here is the sinful, God rejecting, God dishonoring bodily cravings. That’s what it’s talking about. What your body craves. Now, God designed our bodies, right? God designed us. He knows what we crave. He knows that we crave things like food and affection and friendship and happiness. The problem is that sin has broken our willingness to find all that we crave within the good creation that God has designed. Those things the way God has designed it. We’re designed by God to find all of our happiness, all of our fulfillment for life in him, in a relationship with him. But we’ve rejected God. And so the happiness that we’re meant to have in him, we now search for in other things. Having rejected God the Father as our source, we need a new source, right? We need something else to give us the things that we’re looking for. And the world is happy to provide us with those things. The world provides us with all sorts of substitutes. But maybe the most diabolical thing of all is that Satan doesn’t own any stuff. Satan doesn’t have his own things. Our enemy can’t create anything. He’s not a creator. All he can do is get us to use the stuff God created in a God-rejecting way. So for example, sex is designed by God to be enjoyed in a God-glorifying marriage. He made that Satan has no ability to give a good gift or create a good gift, like sexual intimacy or the institution of marriage. He can’t make those things. And so his only tactic is to tell us the lie that sex would be better if you separated it from marriage. That’s right. That’s why he’s called the father of lies. It’s all he’s got. All he’s got is words. And so he uses the words to break apart the things that God has made. And so we take that lie. We take that lie from him, and we make it part of worldly wisdom. We say, yeah, you know, we don’t have to keep these two things together. We can break them apart. God is trying to limit our happiness by keeping these things together. So that’s what we do with all of Satan’s lies, and then we shape a world around our own design that says sex and marriage have nothing to do with each other. And we break God’s mold thinking that our reformation of God’s stuff, our reconfiguration of all the things that God has supplied us, we think our packing it together in our own way is a better formation of God’s stuff. And the result of that? The cheapening of sex, hookup culture, the slaughter of millions through abortion on demand, no fault divorce destroying the home, single moms and absent dads, the degradation of women, pornographic addiction, body image, depression, human trafficking, sex tourism, the rise of pedophilia, rape, the MeToo movement. I could go on and on and on and on. One lie. One lie. One lie that leads to thousands of splinters of sin, resulting in endless heartache. And by the way, the world knows this. The world knows this. Even if they won’t admit it. Even those who don’t know the Lord would look at this list that I have just rattled off here, and they’d say there’s so much in there that is evil and must be changed. I mean, how many worldly people look at human trafficking of girls and cry out against it? How many applaud when pedophiles are caught and arrested and put away? So many people, right? So many people. And yet many of the same people balk at the idea that these awful things are sourced in the same lie that says sex outside of marriage is permissible and good. And what they want to do is they want to arbitrarily draw a line between what they consider to be good and evil desires of the flesh, not even seeing the irony that the fact that the believing that they have the authority to draw that line is itself a desire of the flesh. And then there’s the desire of the eyes and the pride of life. And I’ll do these together briefly, because there really is a lot of overlap between these different categories. The desire of the eyes is just like it sounds. I see something I want, I covet it, I don’t care if it’s mine, I don’t care if whether God wants me to have it. I just I just want it. And the pride of life is the stuff I already have. It’s the things that I have accumulated for myself and I privately hold on to them. I say I display these things, I enjoy these things. And for both categories, it’s not just tangible things, right? It includes things like cars and houses and money that we might sinfully gain for ourselves. But it also can include honor and status and power and authority. And if you combine all three of these categories. What you get is a is a kind of sinful progression. My cravings cause me to look for the things that I want to accumulate for myself, stuff that will give me happiness apart from God. And here’s where that progression is going. It’s the third reason not to love the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires. But whoever does the will of God abides forever. Why can’t we love the world? Well, you can, but it’s a sinking ship. People who follow their own sinful impulses to build a life of happiness apart from the good design of God, will eventually find out that they have charted a course for their own destruction. The sinful world is passing away. John here is talking about the final judgment at the return of Christ. When Christ returns, sin will be vanquished for good. Satan will no longer have any power to lie or to mislead us, and the sinful impulses and desires themselves will be exposed for what they are. Truly paths that lead to destruction. The words won’t drip honey anymore. They won’t sound good to us anymore. They will no longer persuade us or compel us. But there will be a whole bunch of people who will have built their life on, made entirely out of cravings and impulses, and they will receive the same final judgment, along with the rest of the creation that has rejected the creator. Those who will come through this judgment and into eternal life, John says, are those who do the will of God. Now John is not saying, do enough of God’s will and you’ll make it through the judgment. There’s a reason he phrases it this way. The key word here is will. This is the only time in this this letter that this word is used. Making it stand out. Making it be pretty important. God’s will is what God desires. It’s set against all the other desires in the passage here. So John is saying all the desires in this world and all the people who have those desires and used them to make a life apart from God, they are heading for death. But those who have desires that align with God’s desire, God’s will, will remain. Or in this case, abide, forever. They’re going to be saved through that judgment. So what is God’s will? What does he want? What does he command of us? Well, this word will summarizes everything up to this point in the letter. It is God’s will that we would know him who was from the beginning, Jesus Christ. It’s God’s will that we would see our sin and our need for a Savior. It is his will that we would confess our sin and trust in Jesus as our substitute sacrifice, our propitiation. It’s his will that we. That we would then abide in Christ by walking in the same way that he walked. It’s God’s will that we would walk in the light as he is in the light. It’s God’s will that the love of Christ would bind us together and that we would love each other. So what that means is our will must be God’s will. Our passion must be God’s passion. We should love what God loves. So what do we do with our impulse to love the world? What do we do with that? Because we’re going to leave church here this morning. You can’t stay here, by the way. Lights are going out eventually, right? You can’t stay here indefinitely. I mean, isn’t it great to have a church community where we can come together on Sunday mornings and connect with one another and commune around the gospel and connect with those who love Jesus and have the same spirit. And we’re filled up and we grow. That’s a wonderful thing to have. But it cannot happen always. Joel has to go home eventually, right? But even if we could gather all the time, even if it was possible for us to do that, we shouldn’t. We have been sent on a gospel proclaiming mission to a world full of people who we are called to love, and they live in a world of sin that we are not to love. So, in a sense, what we do on Sunday mornings, what we do in our shepherding communities and in our Bible studies, is we fill our tanks with God’s love so that we can take it to a world that needs it. And so that means very soon we will all be once again on the wrong sideline. We’re going to be surrounded by people who are loving and cheering for things that we are called to reject. How do we keep our love for the Lord strong when the things of the world crowd in and try to capture our love? Well, I’d suggest that the answer is as simple as this. If Christ is your greatest treasure, if he is your greatest treasure, the most prized possession that you have, then you’re going to do everything you can to be near him, and you’re going to reject anything that would take you away from him. The more your love grows for the Lord, the more your joy and delight in this world comes with walking in his light. The more that is the source of your joy, the more you will hate the darkness. If Jesus is your greatest treasure, if you prize him above everything else, then you would protect his central role in your life at all costs, and you would want everything good in your life to come from him. That’s where you would receive your joy, your goodness. You’d be looking for God’s gifts in your life, and you would use those gifts to honor him and everything that comes at you that draws you away from him. You would fight against that. You would take up arms against that. If anything tried to abduct you away from your greatest love, you’d do everything in your power to destroy that enemy and be with the one you love. Friends, that means that we don’t need a list of rules for what we need to do this week. You don’t need a list of commands to make sure that you can live your life you’re supposed to, according to the rules of Christianity. What you need is for Christ to be your greatest love. You need him to be the greatest love of your life. If you’re struggling with sin, you might need some barriers and disciplines in your life. That would be a very wise thing to do. You need some people to come around you and help you to make some better choices in your life. No question about that. But what you ultimately need is for greater love in your heart for Christ. How do you grow in love? How do you do that? How do you do that with anyone? Well, you have to spend time with them, right? You need to cultivate the relationship with that person. If you want to know Christ in communion with the Father, so that he’s your greatest love, so that God is your greatest treasure, it’s going to take a lot more than a than an hour-long service 2 or 3 times a month. I’ll tell you that, right? You don’t love anybody and then just see them sometimes. Right? You don’t grow in your love and then just check in every once in a while. You commune with, you walk with through life. Spiritual disciplines that develop our hearts delight in the Lord is a different topic for a different sermon. We can’t go into it all this morning, but I want to leave you with this. If you want to walk daily in the light of Christ, you will need to develop your relationship with him daily. It’s going to have to be a daily thing. Yes, come to church. Glad you’re here. Glad you came this morning. Yes, go to Bible study. But you cannot rely entirely on others to help you develop your love for Jesus. You’re going to need to be in relationship with him daily on your own. And that means you’re going to need to know his word. And that means you’re going to have to be in prayer. And you’re going to have to cultivate, commune with the Lord on your own every day. Seek him as your greatest treasure. Love him as your greatest companion. Would you pray with me?

This Is Who You Are

AS FOLLOWERS OF JESUS, WE HAVE A NEW IDENTITY IN CHRIST. IF YOU TRUST JESUS, THIS IS WHO YOU ARE. There will not be a sing-along this week. I was asked if we could do the whole album this week. That would be something, wouldn’t it? I think the elders would want a word with me if we did the whole album. No, we will not be singing this morning in the sermon. But strangely, we will be looking this morning at the portion of First John that is most like a song. For the last four weeks, we have been carefully exploring John’s magnificent instructions for determining the state of your own soul. His statements on light and darkness have challenged us to think deeply about our true standing in the presence of God. He has helped us to expose our own hypocrisy, not to judge us, but because he loves us. It’s unloving not to tell somebody the truth, to let them just go on walking in spiritual darkness that ends in judgment. John wants us to know Christ and to know that we know Christ. He’s rattling our confidence so that we can establish our confidence. Friends, I don’t want you to just think that you know Jesus. I want you to know that you know Jesus. I want you to walk confidently in the knowledge that your sins are covered by Jesus sacrifice, and that you are in Christ and that Christ is in you. And then from that confident standing before God, you get to live for him. You get to live that out. You get to find true joy in him. You get to love people the way he loves people. You get to share the gospel with him and help save their lives. Up to this point in the letter, we’ve been challenged to examine ourselves closely. That’s what he wants us to do. Today, John, is shifting perspective. This time, instead of calling us to question whether we walk in the light of Christ, he’s just going to speak to those of us who do. He’s going to talk to us directly. The churches that he was writing to were filled with people who love Jesus. He probably knew these people personally. It’s possible the original readers were in churches that John had either visited or perhaps even planted. He might have been the one who started these churches. We don’t know a lot about John’s ministry following the early chapters of the Book of Acts, but his letters show us that he was a major leader in the early church. So I think that he knew these people personally, the way Paul considered himself a sort of spiritual father to the churches that he had planted. So John knows these people. He has watched them confess Christ. He likely led many of these people to the Lord, which is why he knows the content of the gospel that they heard from the beginning. Remember that which you’ve heard from the beginning, right? You’ve known these things from the beginning of your walk. He was probably there. So he knows the gospel that they heard. Beginning at this point in the letter, John starts talking to the true church community who walks in the light. And this is the perspective that he’ll carry through to the end of the letter. And he starts this part of the letter with six sentences that form a kind of poem, or song, or saying, or framework, or colloquialism, or something. Okay? Let me just bring you right into my study this week. Church. I’m not sure what our passage is today. I don’t know what it is. I know what it says. I know what it says. And that’s the most important thing. It’s a very encouraging passage filled with statements that build our confidence. I know what it says. I’m not sure exactly what it is. There’s some different ideas out there about the form of what we’re going to read. But I got to tell you, church, I’m not sure which one is correct or if any of them are correct. Here’s what I do know. John wants us to know who we are. As followers of Jesus we have a new identity in Christ. If you trust Jesus, this is who you are. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 12 to 14 today. I do encourage you to open your Bibles and follow along, because I’m going to read the passage all the way through here to begin with. And then after a word about the form of this, we’re going to go back and look at each of these six lines that describe our identity in Christ. Here’s the full passage. I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. You can hear how different that sounds from the rest of the letter. Can’t you? Is it a Limerick? It’s probably not a Limerick. It has poetic elements, though. There’s poetic elements in here. Things like parallelism, repetition, key words. So it’s likely a kind of poetic style that John happens to like so that he can help with memorization. Something along those lines. There are a few features that I want to point out briefly, because they’re obvious in this, and they may or may not be helpful. The first thing to note here is that it seems like John is speaking to three groups, but I actually think that he is speaking to one group with two subgroups within that group. So children or little children is John’s name for the whole church, as we’ve seen already. And we’re going to continue to see this throughout the letter. If you if you go back to the very first words in this chapter, you’ll see what I mean there. He loves to call the church his little children. It would be odd if he meant something different here in this passage. He then breaks that down into younger people and older people. So he’s not here talking about the spiritually mature and the spiritually weak or new or anything like that. He’s talking, when he says this, he is talking about age. And as is my policy here at Calvary, I leave it to you to self-select into your category. Okay. I am not about to make that mistake this morning on Mother’s Day. Right. So he says, he says everybody, then he says fathers and young men. Okay, so fathers and young men here are used to address the whole church. So this would also include mothers and young women. It’s just he’s using the male words to talk about the whole group. That’s the first thing to note. The second thing that stands out to me as I, as I look at this, is that change right in the middle from I am writing to I write it’s a verb tense adjustment. It moves from the present tense things that are happening right now to a completed action. And John keeps that tense, that completed action tense throughout the rest of the letter. I think this is just a stylistic change. I think that’s all that is. There’s nothing really to glean from it because it doesn’t change the meaning of anything here. But I’m pointing it out to you because the repetition makes this so prominent. You might think, well, does that matter? Does that mean something? I don’t think so. I think it’s just stylistic. But that repetition is the third feature. Why does John keep repeating himself sometimes word-for-word in here? One person I read about this, thinks that John had two drafts of this part and couldn’t decide between them, so he just included them both. That doesn’t sound like a thing human beings do, though. Really? It’s not how we write. I think the simplest answer is the correct one. He’s doing it for emphasis. We do this all the time. We repeat things all the time so that we can emphasize. So we say something in a slightly different way than we said it before. And I believe John is telling us that what he’s saying in these verses is vitally important, especially for everything that he wants to say after these verses. So that’s the framework here. John is saying everyone, older people, younger people. And then for emphasis, he repeats it. Everyone. Older people, younger people. So let’s look at what he wants us to know about who we are in Christ. I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. So first and foremost, John is writing so that we remember that our sins are forgiven because of what Jesus has accomplished. For his name’s sake means on account of Jesus. And so this is a reference back to the earlier in the chapter in verses one and two, when he described Jesus sacrifice, and that that is what makes us right with God. The whole list of sins that you have ever committed or ever will commit have been erased by Jesus, if you trust in him, if you follow him, there is no judgment waiting for you because Jesus has already taken your sins full punishment on the cross. When Jesus said it is finished from the cross, this is what he’s talking about. And we know that Jesus sacrifice fully exhausts God’s wrath and transforms our standing before God. Because as John put it in verse two, Jesus is the propitiation for our sins. And by not qualifying that in any way, John must be referring to all of our sins. He doesn’t just say he’s the propitiation for your past sins, implying that your future sins are not covered by it. He doesn’t say some sins, as if other sins are too awful to be covered by Jesus sacrifice. Our sins have been forgiven, all of them, because Jesus paid for all of them. And we trust in Jesus. That’s what’s happening. Now the reason this is the first statement in this line of statements is because everything else that follows it is only true because the first statement is true. In other words, you can’t be an older or younger person in the next two subgroups until you are included in this large group. You must have your sins removed and that can only be done through Jesus. You’re about to hear me say some very encouraging things. I find this to be a very, very encouraging passage. And it’s so encouraging about our relationship with God and what that looks like. But if you have not trusted and given your life to Jesus, none of the affirmations I’m about to make are true of you. Okay. You’re outside the house right now. You haven’t trusted in Jesus. This first statement doesn’t apply to you. You’re outside of the house right now. You’re peering in. You’re looking at this group, but you’re not yet inside. But the door is unlocked. God is quite ready and happy to receive you into this group. If you will lay your burden of sin on Jesus through confession and repentance. And then you receive the good news of God’s gracious forgiveness to you in Christ. And all of these next things become true of you at that moment. All of this can be true if you trust in Jesus and He forgives you of your sins. But there’s another reason. There’s another reason that this is the first line. I want you to notice something. It might be a little bit subtle, but notice this. He’s telling believers that their sins are forgiven. He’s telling people he knows are believers that their sins are forgiven. They already know this. They know this. They are little children precisely because their sins are forgiven by Jesus. So why does John start by telling believers the most fundamental thing about themselves? Well, it’s because we all need to be reminded of this all the time. We need this to be put in our eyes and in our hearts and in front of us all the time. Even as a man who has followed Jesus for 28 years, I need to be reminded of the gospel. I need to be reminded of what Jesus has done for me and who I am in Christ. Some of you have been following Jesus for 50 years of your life. Do you know what you need? You need the gospel. You need the gospel preached to you over and over again. You need to be reminded over and over that you are who you are because of what Jesus has done for you. Because the human mind is frail. It is very weak. I am prone to forget God’s grace and to fall into temptation and become worldly in my thinking. And in those gaps of forgetfulness, worldly wisdom and false teaching and the work of Satan, they’re quick to fill in with doubt. Right? That’s what he’s coming with. Doubt about my true standing with the Lord because of Jesus. I don’t just need the gospel at the start of my spiritual journey. I need the gospel driven deep into my heart. I need the truth of Christ’s accomplishment on the cross to be brought to my mind daily. You know, there’s a reason that Jesus told us that every time we eat the bread and drink the cup, we should remember his death until he comes back, because remembering the cross is vital to the spiritual growth of a Christian at every age and every stage of life. Okay. So with that established, he now turns to the older crowd. I’m writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. Okay older folks, and again, you know who you are. No eye contact from me, right? Okay. You know who you are. John is writing this letter to you because you know Jesus. That’s why he’s writing to you. Him who was from the beginning is a reference to earlier in this letter, chapter one, verse one, which is a reference to the beginning of John’s gospel, which is a reference to the beginning of the Bible. So, Jesus is the eternal God who was with God and who was God at the beginning of time. That God, the Word of God, took on flesh and came to live with us. He took on a human body. That’s Jesus. So when John says, you know him who was from the beginning. He’s saying, you know, Jesus, who is God. So what does it mean to know Jesus? What does that mean? Does it mean simply knowing who he is and what he’s done? Well, certainly not because Satan knows Jesus in that way, right? Satan knows about Jesus. Satan knows what Jesus has done. That’s clear. They met before when Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. It cannot be just having factual knowledge about Jesus because plenty of people have that outside the church. People met Jesus face to face and still rejected him. People today have theological degrees. They are loaded to bear with Bible knowledge, but they don’t know Jesus the way John is talking about here. So what does it mean to know him who was from the beginning? Well, it’s pretty important because John says it twice. This is word for word the same thing he says about older people in the church in the second round of children, fathers, young men. Word for word, the same. So it’s very, very important. The word know here is sort of a loaded term. John introduced it earlier in the chapter in verse three. All the way up to that verse he had been delineating between those in fellowship with Jesus and thus in fellowship with the Father. And those who didn’t have that fellowship, didn’t have that connection. And all of that, all of that connection is summed up in the word know. So if you know Jesus, you have all of that connection, all of that fellowship with God’s church and with Jesus and with God the Father. You have all of that. If you know Jesus, your life will emanate the light of Jesus. The love of Christ will come pouring out of you onto others. In other words, to know Christ is to have Christ at work in you. That’s how you know him. He’s residing in you by the Holy Spirit. Now, why does John direct this to older people? I mean, this is true of all believers, right? Of course it is. But the longer you walk with Jesus, the more you have seen this spiritual connection alive in you. That’s what it is. That’s why he says it. You’ve seen more stuff the longer you walk with Jesus. You’ve seen more. Your relationship with Jesus is more sweet. It’s more sure in your mind and in your heart, because you’ve walked with him much longer than the new believer. The younger believer simply doesn’t have the experience of a lifelong relationship with Jesus. They haven’t put in the time because there hasn’t been time yet to put in. Now, this is not to say that all older believers are mature. Some come to faith as older people, so they’re actually immature in Christ, even as a mature person. But John is speaking generally here. Okay. Generally speaking, generally, older Christians will have walked with the Lord longer and thus have a more mature faith. And the point is, older believers need to remember this. If you’re an older believer, you need to remember this, especially in the face of changing times and false teachers and false messages that are that are proliferating our world. Remember the unchanging Christ that you have had from the beginning, from the time that you came to know, and that you came to walk with him. You have known this God who is from the beginning, from your beginning in him. The gospel hasn’t changed since mom read you those Bible stories at your bedside 60 years ago. We don’t have a different gospel now. It is the same gospel we know and serve the same Jesus that your grandpa read about in that dog eared paper Bible back when it wasn’t on our phones. Okay, it’s the same book. It’s the same Jesus. Nothing has changed. And you know Jesus. And you know, you know Jesus. That is who you are. Turning to younger people, I’m writing to you young men because you have overcome the evil one. So to the younger believers in the church, John says, I’m writing you this letter because you have overcome the evil one. The evil one here is undoubtedly a reference to Satan and all that Satan is attempting to do in the world. First Peter chapter five tells us a little bit about Satan’s tactics and desires toward believers. It says that he prowls around like a lion looking for someone to destroy, somebody to devour. And Peter says that our response to that should be to resist him firm in our faith. And we should. We should do that. But John says something just a little bit different here. He says to the younger believer, you have overcome the evil one, right? It’s a completed action. So Peter seems to suggest that the battle with Satan is still being waged. And John is saying that the battle is over. How can both of those be true? Well, this is not a contradiction. Here’s how it works. Peter is telling us what to do. John is telling us why we can do it. Peter is saying, here’s the battle you need to fight. And John is saying, here is why you will win that battle. Why will we be successful in our resistance of Satan and his temptations? Why will he fail in destroying any true believer of Jesus who is firm in his faith? It’s because Satan has already been defeated and sin has no power over the person who trusts in Jesus. Let me say it again sin has no power over the person who trusts in Jesus. Now you may be sitting there as a young believer and saying right now, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true. You look at your struggles with sin as proof of sin’s power over you, or as evidence that it’s still alive and at work in you. And you say, well, I can’t help it. I feel defeated. Listen to me. You are not defeated. You are not defeated in your sin. On the contrary, sin has been defeated. Romans six 9 to 11 says this. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all. But the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. So sin has been defeated by Jesus death. It has no power because Christ has conquered it with his resurrection. And if you are in Christ, Paul says that you now must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. And you’ll say to me, well, I can try to consider myself that way. But is it true? Is it true? Am I just considering myself that way? Or is it true that that’s the case? Does sin truly have no power over me? And I say to you, absolutely. Absolutely it doesn’t. Skip down to verse 14 in chapter six of Romans, Paul writes this. It’s just a little further down. Same argument. He says, sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law, but under grace. Dominion is reign. Okay? It’s like a kingly reign. You are no longer under Satan’s reign and compelled to do his bidding. You are under new management. Okay. Have you ever been to a restaurant that is under new management? You walk in there, right? Old building. Totally different experience. They don’t serve up the same old slop out of the kitchen that they served before, right? It’s completely new inside. Old management has no authority to do anything under the new management. Why do the young people in the church need to be reminded that Satan is defeated and has no real authority over their lives if they know Jesus? It’s because newer Christians are just starting out in the process of being sanctified and they need to remember that sin has no real power in their life anymore. Of course there’s temptations. Of course there are. Before Christ you couldn’t help but sin. You could only sin. Now that you are in Christ, you can truly walk in righteousness. That is available to you. But younger people don’t have the mileage with Jesus. And so they’re prone to think that the sins that they’re struggling with can’t be defeated. That maybe their confession of faith in Jesus didn’t take root or something. Or maybe it didn’t take or it’s not true of me somehow. And I see this a lot. I see a lot of this struggle with young people in areas, things like pornography or sinful relationships or ways of joking or and ways of treating people. And a younger believer claims Christ but sees defeat in these various areas and starts to question whether their sin is truly defeated and whether they are truly forgiven by God’s grace. Listen to me, young people. Listen to me. Satan would love nothing more than for you to walk around discouraged, thinking that you’re not good enough for God. He would want nothing more than for you to walk around down on yourself, feeling discouraged all the time because you think you’re not good enough for God. Let me be clear for you. You are not good enough for God. You’re not good enough. Good enough isn’t the gospel. Good enough isn’t the standard by which God accepts you. Good enough isn’t your status before God. I welcome the thought that I am not good enough, because I can immediately flip that thought judo style into remembering the one who is truly good, right? I can remember the one who was good enough for me, whose righteousness covers me. Not my own righteousness. Not my own way of building myself up to try to be good enough for God. Jesus was good enough. When Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward, I look and see him there who made an end to all my sin, right? Young people, newer believers, John is reminding you that you are not captive to the power of your sins because your enemy is defeated. You’re set free. You’re set free from the power of sin and death. You serve a new master who saves you by his grace. And the more you remember this, the more victory you will see as you punch Satan in the face and walk in righteousness. This is who you are. Okay, second time through, a little faster. This time we’re in the emphasis round. I write to you, children because you know the Father. Everyone. Everybody. We know the father. If you have Jesus, you know him. Remember what John said in First John 2:1, beginning of this chapter, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. So because we know Jesus, we know God the Father as well, and Christ is our connection to him. We have fellowship with the Triune God because we trust in Jesus. Someday we will stand before him, but not as our judge. He won’t be our judge in that moment because our sins have already been set aside. They’ve already been paid for. We will come home to God, like a father, because he’s our Heavenly Father, and you know him, and you know that he loves you in that moment. Do you remember coming home to see your dad? I know this is a difficult thought for some of you because of your relationship with your parents, and it’s strained or terrible or in some cases, non-existent. But in the same way that marriage is an imperfect picture of the relationship between Christ and His church. Our dads are imperfect pictures of the relationship that we have with God our Father. God is perfect in his love toward his children. He sacrificed himself. He prepares a place for us. We get to spend eternity in God’s family if we have Christ. And John is saying to all of us, all of his children. He’s saying, don’t forget that. Don’t forget that. I’m writing you this letter because you are all in the family of God. This is who you are. And then he goes back to the two subgroups. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. Okay, we’re back to the older folks here. If you are younger, turn to an older person right now, give them a high five and say, this is who you are. Go ahead, do it. Come on. High fives all around. Chaos. Mother’s day chaos. Same exact wording here. Okay. Same exact wording. Why double down without elaborating? I don’t know. Back to the young people. I write to you, young men because you are strong and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. Older people turn to a young person right now, pinch their cheek and tell them this is who you are. Go ahead, go ahead. You can even use your spit to fix their hair right now. I give you permission to do that. I know you moms are wanting to do that so bad and it seems fair in this moment. So here John does elaborate. Okay, here he does elaborate. But we’ve already talked about it. He’s writing them this letter for three reasons. But it’s all really one reason. First of all, they’re strong. They might not feel strong, but they are strong. Why? Because the Word of God is strong and they abide in the Word of God. Here, the Word of God is not referring to the Bible. It’s a stand in for Jesus who is the Word of God made flesh. So Christ abides or is spiritually connected to them in their heart and their mind. And that’s what makes them strong in their faith. And because of the strength of their tie to the abiding Christ, John says that they can be confident that they have overcome the evil one. They don’t need to be overcome by their own. You know, they don’t need to be overcome by Satan anymore. They have overcome. Their status is with Christ. He’s connected to them. In other words, because they have Jesus, all these other things are true of them as well. This is who you are. Church, when I bring all these statements together, when I consider all six of them together as one, one concept jumps to mind, that I think is very important for us today, especially for us today. And that’s the concept of identity. Who am I? Who am I on my own? And now who am I in Christ? The social landscape we live in has left people with something of an identity crisis today. People long to know who they are. Because if they can figure it out, if they can figure out who they are, well, then they can make some sense of this world. Because if you have an identity, you can rest in it. You can rest in your identity. You can say, I found my people and my place and my values and my way of thinking. The problem with that search, and by the way, that’s a search everybody does. Everybody’s trying to figure out the world they’re in. The problem with that search, though, is that it depends on some truth. And that truth has to be external to that person that’s out there for them to discover. It’s inadequate to ask, who am I? And then go about constructing something out of your own ideas and passions. I mean, what is that? That’s just wandering around in the dark. And deep down, every person knows that a self-made identity doesn’t answer the big questions. What is this world, really? And who am I really in it? What we need is for the God who made us to tell us who we are. And here in this passage, this is what he has said to us. You are sinners, but I have forgiven you if you have Jesus. You don’t know me, but you can know me if you have Jesus. There’s evil in this world, but you will overcome it, not in your own strength, but through the resurrecting power of Christ at work in you. Church. That’s who we are. That’s what we are. As Gerald Bray describes it in his excellent biblical theological work, God is Love. He says this: we know God because we are the sheep who have responded to our shepherd’s voice and have experienced his love at work in us. That’s who we are, church. And if that’s not who you are yet, if you’re listening to this saying, I don’t think that’s me, I’m not part of that group. The invitation for you is there. All of these things can be true of you as well. The door is unlocked. Just put your trust in Christ and come inside. Would you pray with me?