Creatively Orthodox

Call to Worship

To all who are weary and in need of rest

To all who are mourning and longing for comfort

To all who fail and desire strength

To all who sin and need a Savior

We, Moraga Valley Presbyterian Church, open wide our arms

With a welcome from Jesus Christ.

He is the ally to the guilty and failing

He is the comfort to those who are mourning

He is the joy of our hearts

And He is the friend of sinners

So Come, worship Him with us.

Scripture Reading & Reader

1 John 2:24 NIV

As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.

Post-Scripture Prayer

Pray.

Introduction to Sermon

Good morning, my name is Brandon Morrow and I serve as one of the Pastors here at Moraga Valley! So glad to be with you all, — before we get going, let give you a reminder of something we announced last week:

Today is the final Sunday where we’ll livestream to both our YouTube page and our Church Online platform. Starting next Sunday, we’ll be utilizing our YouTube page only!

We wanted to let our online community know that, and more importantly, we want to make the invitation to those watching online, that we value your presence in-person with us. If you’re able to join us, please do!

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And now… I am so glad that you’re joining us for our final week of our series that we’ve titled, Six Stones, a series on the Value Statements of our church.

With God’s help, we hope to be a Christ Centered, Disciple Making, Hospitality Driven, Responsibly Generous church full of Healthy Relationships, where we keep the main thing the main thing by remaining a Creatively Orthodox church.

Let me explain the idea of being a Creatively Orthodox church by bringing you in on the stated value of our church:

We will seek to be wisely relevant. This means we will become a risk-taking church without sacrificing the truth of scripture or capitulating to faddish American culture. We will move forward while anchoring in the historic Christian faith.

I said last week that we can’t make the gospel message relevant, it transcends all of the categories that we can come up with. It isn’t cool. It isn’t innovative. It’s the power of God for everyone who believes, but we can be wise and we can be appropriately contextual for how we share Jesus.

We can take risks to get people to Jesus, all while maintaining the truth of scripture, the integrity of the message of Jesus, and anchor ourselves in the best of the Christian tradition over the last 2,000 years.

The message never changes, but the mode, or medium, or messenger might — and we’ll exercise every single one of those options if it means getting people to Jesus.

We want to be Creatively Orthodox, exercising every opportunity of getting people to Jesus — who is the hope of the world.

The idea of being “creative” sounds like it potentially takes too many liberties, that we’ll toe the line too many times — the church, in order to see the present and future reached with the gospel, will need to become:

Discerning rather than dogmatic — searching for how the gospel speaks to tight cultural issues, and do it in a way that is Christ-exalting and redemptive, that brings forth the best of human flourishing, because in the Kingdom of God, life with Jesus, there is a better way for the world to live. Categorically calling something good or bad, or right or wrong, doesn’t give somebody the needed perspective for how Jesus truly is the better way… “creatively” says we’ve done the hard work to tell you how Jesus is the more abundant life that He says He is. John 10:10 says the “thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus says, “I have come so that you may have life and life more abundantly.” — A discerning, not dogmatic, person asks the question of, “where is the more abundant life that Jesus promised?”

Before we get into how we’ll do that, let me just beg us, to keep the main thing, the main thing… let’s keep the truth of Jesus, His death, burial, resurrection, at the very center of our life and community.

For that, turn with me to 1 John 2, and today we’ll be centering our time primarily on verse 24

1 John 2:24 NIV

As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.

Week to week we read our scripture from the NIV, or the New International Version, but the NIV doesn’t give us the fullest picture of what John is hoping to convey. Let me read our passage one more time from the ESV and I’ll point out a difference that’s important:

Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. (1 John 2:24 ESV)

The major difference between the two is repetition. Look at the second sentence in the passage, the NIV says, “if it,” and you just assume that IT is “what you heard from the beginning,” but the ESV explains, it reinforces that, “what we heard from the beginning” matters, it matters so much that if we let, “what we heard from the beginning live in us,” it keeps us tied into the Father and Son.

A quick tip for reading your Bible: repetition reinforces the urgency of the teaching. Repetition reinforces the urgency of the teaching.

The repetition is simple… John wants the message of Jesus to stay with God’s people, because if it stays with God’s people, they’ll stay connected to the Father and Son, and then they stay connected with the Father and the Son, verse 25 says, they’ll receive what they were promised: eternity.

We can be as creative as we want by getting the truth of Jesus to others, but we can never get creative with the truth itself.

The truth of God’s word, the message of the gospel, is meant to tether them to the Father and the Son for eternity.

And of course, when I mention truth, I mean the truth about Jesus: His death, burial, resurrection and the announcement of His unwavering Kingdom, and the Holy Spirit-empowered invitation to enter that Kingdom by faith.

The truth remaining in God’s people is vitally important, in part, because we’re susceptible to believe lies, which are often not-truths or half-truths concerning Jesus.

Liars run amuck in the world.

In 1 John, Chapter 2, John is addressing liars who have distorted the voice of truth, which is the integrity of the message about Jesus.

Before this, in 1 John 2:18 he says, “Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.” — Don’t freak out too much with the word antichrist, because he explains it in verse 22, 1 John 2:22 “Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son.”

These liars are anti-Christ because they deny that Jesus is the Saving King.

Christ, by the way, isn’t Jesus’ last name. He wasn’t the son of Mary and Joseph Christ, Christ is His title, as it is in many traditions. For example, if your last name were the Dutch name: Vande Hoef, it means “of the hoof,” likely that they made horse shoes… or if your name were Miller, that you worked at, or owned, a grain mill… Morrow, my last name, means something like Sea Warrior,.. Christ is the anointed one, the Saving King, Israel’s Messiah.

And there were a group of people who said, He is not the Messiah, not the Christ.

John’s logic is really sound in 1 John 2. If you deny Jesus, if you deny the Son, then you deny the Father, who as John 5:23 says “who sent him” into the world.

John just goes, “You can’t deny Jesus and then say you believe in God. It doesn’t work that way.”

Which is why verse 24 becomes so powerful for us today...

We have to hold onto the gospel as we heard it when we were first converted… the hope is that the gospel we heard, acknowledges Jesus as God’s Son… John 14:6-7 “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” — and to know the Son is way in which we know the Father, and to know the two is to have eternal life. This is how John ends his first letter, 1 John 5:13 — “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

The message of the gospel is central to life now, and life in eternity.

And John repeats this twice in verse 24… “keep what you’ve heard from the beginning,”

Let me share with us, the gospel, in case we have not heard the truth that we have to hold onto… this is what Paul wrote about the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, verses 1 thru 11

1 Corinthians 15:1–11 (NIV)

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

It is the announcement of Jesus and His death, burial, and resurrection. That Jesus died for our sins, was buried because of our sins, and raised by God the Father in spite of our sins — not because of anything we did, but because of the grace of God, a gift we could never deserve or afford, and because of this, the power and penalty of sin have no hold on us. No longer the consequence of sin, which is death, nor the compulsion of sin, which is its control — have a hold on the people of God any longer.

John says, “when the liar comes, remember this story… remember what the Saving King Jesus has done. What He has done for you, for your family, for the entire world. And if they miss that — then the liars have missed everything.”

We will tell that story a thousand different times, in a multitude of ways, creatively and passionately, and never lose sight of what Jesus has done. This is the “orthodox” part of our value. Keeping what is true at the center and never going left or right of center of the truth of the gospel.

The compelling voices will still come, though...

I want you to look at John 10 with me.

This is the part of John’s gospel known as the Good Shepherd Discourse, how Jesus brings the flock to Himself.

He says in verse John 10:1-5

John 10:1–5 (NIV)

“Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber.” Here Jesus says He is the only way to get in, the only way to belong to God’s people. He is telling them He’s the only way in. He continues, “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.”

Jesus is the only Way, and His sheep know His voice… He says, but they won’t listen to the voice of strangers.

There are lots of strange voices vying for the attention of the sheep… their shepherd get-ups are pretty convincing, I mean really high quality costumes, but they’re not Jesus. They’re not the Good Shepherd.

None of the strange voices have done what only the Good Shepherd can do, and so I want to give you a litmus test for how to tell between the truth of the gospel and the lies of strange voices...

“Does this point to the truth of what only Jesus can accomplish?”

And you answer this question about every strange voice in your life...

Your preferred news station, does Fox News or CNN, “point to the truth of what only Jesus can accomplish?” The answer is no. They’re strange voices — sometimes helpful, but not suitable for your life and hope.

Your preferred political candidate, “is this what only Jesus can accomplish?” No… There is only One Savior King for the church, He is enthroned in Heaven, not in Washington.

Let’s say you’re dating, or want to find a partner, “does this person point me to the truth of what only Jesus has accomplished?” It doesn’t matter how good looking they are, how much money they make, how flattering they may be, how great or little they satisfy your desire to be wanted — they will never be your Saving King.

It doesn’t mean that you don’t watch the News, vote for a candidate, or venture into the dating world — it just means that they’re not the source of hope and value for you.

In verse 26, 1 John 2:26, John says, “I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray.” — There is a battle for for your attention — there are lots of strange voices out there in the world that look good, they sound good, and shoot — they even make some pretty good promises too.

Martin Luther said, “Those who teach new doctrine rarely return.” There’s a level of severity here for what John is saying.

This is gospel-based discernment, choosing avenues that point me to the abundant life in Jesus Christ… we have to be wise in what we’ve heard, and John says, it’s urgent, urgent, urgent.

Over the course of the next handful of years, we might try a thousand different things to reach people for Christ… we might plant a church, we might start a new ministry, a new service time, introduce a new style of worship, upgrade our facilities, I might even get tattoos and where jeans every now and then — we might take every liberty with being creative, but we will never change the truth of our message.

John ends the second chapter of 1 John 2 in a similar way, in verse 28, he writes: 1 John 2:28 “And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.”

As creative as we may be, Jesus and His life-changing truth will always be our confidence.