Here For It: Wk 5

Intro Illustration:

This has been an awesome fall so far. It has been so good to be back with y’all and have so much fun together on Sundays and Wednesdays! One thing that has been uniquely fun this year is having Eden at everything. I love how much you guys love Eden and enjoy having her here. But it’s also awesome to see how much she loves to be here with you all! Like, when we walk around the rest of the church she is happy but she gets kind of nervous, shy and overwhelmed with people. But up here with you guys she is so excited! You guys are yelling and running by her and she’s just so happy! It’s awesome. She really is at a great age though. Jenna and I were saying how this is probably one of the best and easiest age in a lot of ways. So, think about it, she can finally communicate what she wants and needs, but she also fully trusts us as her parents. So, she is excited and happy to do what we ask her to do. Like the other night I was feeding her dinner and she was so excited when I got excited to feed her each part of her dinner. (Chicken nuggets, hushpuppies, and a pouch by the way!) But she was saying more and pointing to things, I would give them to her and we’d both clap and say good job! She’d say “WATER” and I’d give her water. And for like 30 minutes straight she was just talking and eating and happy to do everything I asked her to do!

It was a really cool, really fun time, of her enjoying everything I was giving her and doing what I needed her to do! But we all know that won’t last forever. It probably won’t even last that much longer. She will soon start to say no, and develop a will of her own and start to see what happens if she disobeys us and does stuff her own way. But for now, we are just soaking up this sweet time of her loving to do what we want her to do for the most part.

Transition:

It is this sweet type of relationship that I believe our passage is going to be pointing us to tonight. We are in the last few verses of 1 John 2 and the beginning of chapter 3. John is picking up right where he left off last week with the idea of remaining in Christ, abiding in Christ. But now he will talk about the results of a life of abiding in Christ. What is the benefit for us that do remain in Jesus like that? Well, as we will see, we get the right to be called Children of God.

And, if you are taking notes, our main idea tonight is that The Children of God love to live like their Father!

If you haven’t already, turn to the very end of 1 John 2 with me and we will dive in tonight! Again, it’s good to remember John is lovingly writing to the early church in Ephesus to encourage them to remain faithful to Jesus in the midst of division, false teachings, and suffering in their church setting.

And now, like a caring father writing to his children, he will really remind them who their true father is. Let’s see what he says starting in 1 John 2:28.

1 John 2:28–3:3 CSB

So now, little children, remain in him so that when he appears we may have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you know this as well: Everyone who does what is right has been born of him. See what great love the Father has given us that we should be called God’s children—and we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it didn’t know him. Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.

At the center of John’s main idea here is a key view of our identity as Christians. We are Children of God.

There is a wrong idea that I always grew up with and heard from both christians and non-christians. It was the idea that all people should be nice to each other because “We are all God’s Children”. And I think their point was that God made us all and loves us all, so we should treat everyone fairly and love each other. And yes, God created every single person, and yes God loves everyone and we should view all human life as equally valuable and love each other. But we can’t actually say everyone is a child of God in the world. The Bible ONLY uses this term to talk about people who have been saved by Jesus and belong to him now.

This is actually a big deal. It gets into a theological topic called adoption.

Now, as I have shared before, I was adopted at birth. I don’t know all the details, but my biological parents were in a situation where they could not properly take care of a child and so they put me up for adoption. Before I was even born I was matched to my parents and they began the process of adoption. Then, when I was born, I was immediately in their custody. But I wasn’t officially theirs, I wasn’t officially a Puig family member until almost an entire year later when a judge at the courthouse finalized the adoption once and for all! That day, October 4th, 1996 is the day that I had a new family that I belonged to, I had a mom and dad, and I received their last name.

Spiritually, this is how the Bible describes what happens to a person when they decide to turn from their sins and follow Jesus as Lord. We are officially made members of God’s Family, He gives us a new life, a new home, a new purpose, a new inheritance to look forward to…a whole new life!

Our Heavenly Father is the one who tells us who we are, how to live, and he gives us everything we need to do so!

The Problem: But here’s the problem, where we get off track, Sometimes we forget who our Father is and what He is like.

When we forget who our Father is:

We drift back into living like we aren’t children of God and we believe lies about our value, our purpose, or our gifts.

We listen to what other people say about us, or follow the lies of this world instead of the truth of God and then we act confused by how our lives turn out. We are like wait, I am a christian, how could God do this to me, Why would he let me get to this place… well probably because You were living like He wasn’t your father and you got yourself into this mess.

But we also get in trouble when we forget what our Father is like:

Many of us didn’t grow up with perfect earthly fathers who look and act just like Jesus. Many of us maybe had absent fathers, or abusive fathers, or insecure fathers. And even those of us who were blessed with great fathers, they made mistakes and messed up at times and we all face the constant temptation to take what we saw in our flawed earthly fathers and map that onto our view of God as our heavenly father. This is why so many people have trouble turning to God at all. They literally can’t imagine a good father, so how could God be good and worth trusting?

But this is not how we are meant to live as Christians. WE are meant to turn to God as our loving father because in Christ, we have become His children. John says is amazement- OH WHAT LOVE the Father has for us that we can be called His children and that’s what we are!

One commentator put it this way:

“This is what is amazing about God’s love. It is a divine, initiated love that is active, for it seeks to bring sinners into the family of God.” - Daniel L. Akin

We must start there to get to the rest of the passage as John unpacks the blessings and results of being a child of God. So, maybe tonight you have a messed up view of God because of what you have seen in people here on earth. Can I just beg you to try to break free of that tonight. Let go of how People have failed you so that you can experience just how much God loves you! A perfect, holy, awesome God loved you so much that he sent his son to die for you, so that YOU a messed up sinful, unholy person could become his Child and reap all the benefits of life in His family! That is incredible. Don’t let your dad, or anyone else keep you from experiencing that love, or hold you back from living in it!

Now, let’s go back through this passage quickly to see how John says children of God are able to live based on their new family status!

1 John 2:28–29 CSB

So now, little children, remain in him so that when he appears we may have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you know this as well: Everyone who does what is right has been born of him.

The first thing we see as children of God is that we:

1. Wait faithfully.

We wait faithfully for the day that Jesus returns.

As God’s Children we hold onto God’s promises, and one of the most significant that we hold onto is that Jesus will return one day to bring the fullness of His Kingdom and bring an end to the reign of sin and death forever! Now, this is one of those topics that can be met with mixed emotions and it should be. Anyone who is not in Christ should be worried about that day because it will be a day of judgment. But John reminds us as Christians that we do not have to worry, because on that day, if we are in Jesus we will be able to stand before him with confidence and not ashamed.

This is getting at the fact that everyone in Christ has been forgiven for their sins and can stand before Him on the day of his return knowing that we will be counted as righteous because of Jesus! And that is our confidence and hope for the future. But it is also our motivation to do the second thing John mentions.

2. We live righteously.

Again, abiding in Jesus prepares us for jesus’ return. Being in him is our confidence, and knowing that he is coming back is our motivation to live a righteous life.

IYKYK

You guys know what these letters mean? What? Yeah, if you know, you know!

John actually uses this phrase in this passage. 1 John 2:29 “If you know that he is righteous, you know this as well: Everyone who does what is right has been born of him.”

IYKYK

Holiness relates to God’s separateness; righteousness, to His justice. Righteousness has to do with law, morality, and justice.

Charles Caldwell Ryrie

To live righteously means to live rightly according to God’s law, morals and justice. And we know we can’t do that perfectly, Jesus did it for us. But then It is living according to the way of God’s Kingdom instead of the way of this world.

Remember, Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3:3 “Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.””

We must be born again by Jesus through His Holy Spirit in order to see and experience the Kingdom of God. We can only live as Jesus calls us to, we can only do anything good, if we are given new life by Jesus. When we come to Him to be saved we are filled with new life, and we are born again, this time as children of God. Now we learn like newborns how to walk and talk like our Heavenly Father who is perfect and loves us perfectly!

Anyone who lives righteously has been born again by Jesus!

It all begins with faith in Jesus- if you know Him and His righteousness- a personal relationship with Him, then you know your life will display his righteousness as we live rightly!

As John Stott said:

“A person’s righteousness is thus the evidence of his new birth, not the cause or condition of it.” - John Stott

As God’s Children we love to live like our Father!

He gave us new life, and we learn to live it as we trust and follow our Father!

So, we wait faithfully and we live righteously. But both of those are effects of being children of God. We don’t actually do anything for either of those, it just simply IS true about us because we are His children- we have confidence in Jesus’ return and we are counted as righteous by God because of Jesus.

Lastly, John gets to the part that we GET to participate in!

1 John 3:2–3 CSB

Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.

He says again, we are God’s Children and God’s love is transforming us daily! We don’t even have the full understanding or picture of what we will become when Jesus returns and fully frees us from the effects of sin and brings us into his kingdom forever.

But we do know, when Jesus comes back we will become like Him because we will finally be able to fully see Him as He is. Again, it is hard to see God properly because of our messed up experience here on earth. But one day we will be free from the brokenness and see God as the perfect loving father he is and we will be fully changed forever! We will be like Jesus, the Son of God because we can see as he sees.

So, because of this we do what? WE purify ourselves because he is pure.

3. We purify our lives.

We know what is to come one day, we wait faithfully now and are able to be righteous because we are God’s Children. So, now, as we we live we purify ourselves because our Father is PURE!

What does this mean? It means we follow Jesus and as he changes our desires and shows us our sins, we remove the things from our lives that don’t look like him and don’t make us more like Him.

Eden can’t decide what is good for her and bad for her for herself yet. That is why we have to protect her and do everything for her, but one day she will have to decide for herself and we can only model for her the types of decisions she should make. She will either trust us and make good decisions, or she will try her own way and have to learn from mistakes.

Our Father is good and pure and has given us Jesus to follow and the Holy Spirit to Guide us. SO, when things come up in our lives that are not good, when He shows us sin that is in our lives, the joy of following Jesus is that we get to turn away from those things, remove them, and walk in a pure life.

The only way to be purified is through constantly exposing ourselves to God’s Word and God’s Spirit as we talked about last week. God’s Word is like a mirror that shows us our sin and God’s Perfection so we can turn away from the things that are not good in our lives.

A quick story as we close:

When I was in middle school I signed up for a week of baseball training one summer that was led by a former professional baseball player. I won’t say his name because of the way the rest of the story unfolds. But anyway it was me and my best friend Worth that went to this camp but it started off poorly. Right off the bat this professional player sat us all down and just talked about how great he was and how he knew everything there was to know about playing baseball but then he told us all to go out to home plate to run the bases. Now, I had played baseball my whole life and some of you may know, my dad also was a professional baseball player before I was born. So, I knew how to run bases. One thing about running bases is you hit the bag with your inside foot so you can push off and run to the next base. But this guy, told everyone there to hit the base with your outside foot. Well, like I said I was in middle school and I wasn’t really following Jesus yet, so I blatantly disobeyed him, I ran the bases and hit it with my inside foot every time. And every time he said no, use your outside foot. And I, surely as a respectful middle school boy said no, I think you’re wrong. TO which of course, he said, you are a kid and you are telling me how to run the bases? DOn’t you know I am a professional baseball player? Now, most kids at that moment would be like yeah, you’re probably right and I am probably wrong, but I didn’t. I said you have no clue what you are talking about, MY DAD played professional baseball too and He and every other baseball coach in the world says you should run the bases this way. At that point he made me and worth run laps until that day was over. And needless to say, we never went back that week.

Now, why did I, a 13 year old kid have so much confidence against a full grown professional baseball player? Maybe because I was just a little jerk yes, but actually- because I knew who my dad was, and in my head he was an expert, a professional baseball player who had trained me in how to play the game well! And no one could ever convince me that he was wrong. I knew my dad and trusted him.

Students, Children of God love to live like their Father. But we have to know who He is and trust Him as his children, then we can live like HIM!

Then, as His children we can wait faithfully for his return to make all things new and that motivates us to walk in the righteousness that we have in Jesus and purify our lives as God himself is pure.

But again, you have to realize you are no longer a child of this world, you are a child of God. You are no longer a slave to sin or fear or shame, you are a child of God! So walk in righteousness and purify yourselves like your Father is Pure!

Bow your heads with me tonight.

Matt can come back up.

Let’s Respond with an exercise together:

I know it may be weird for a minute but it’s important. Imagine for a minute that Jesus returns the second we finish this service. What would your reaction be? How would you feel? Would you be confident or uncertain about your standing before him? Would you be ashamed of anything present in your life right now? The response he wants from you in that moment is the confidence of a little child running and jumping into their dads loving arms! He doesn’t want you to have any reason to feel like you need to hesitate or hide in shame.

If you are here tonight and you are not saved, you will not have that moment with Jesus. Your sin is separating you from God now and it will separate you forever from him on that day. You can’t live rightly now and you will be judged for your sins then. But God loved you so much that He sent Jesus to die in your place and raise from the dead so that you could be saved, forgiven and brought into his family. Stop running away from God and run into the perfect Father’s arms tonight. Is there anyone here who needs to be saved tonight and become a child of the one true God tonight? Raise your hand so I can see you and pray with you!

For the christians here:

First, do you realize you are God’s child in Jesus? You must understand this status because knowing your father and trusting Him as his child changes everything about how you do life. Spend time with Your father and let him show you how to live as his child.

Second, is there anything in your life that the holy spirit has revealed to you that you need to get rid of and purify yourself as your Father is pure? Maybe its music that isn’t pure, or a show you need to give up, or maybe even a relationship or a friend group that you know is impure for your life as God’s Child! Just confess it to Him and ask your Father in Heaven to cleanse you and help you live a pure life apart from that now.

Talk to me or a leader before you go tonight so we can pray for you and help you live a pure life if there is anything you need to get rid of! It is a lot easier with the help of other believers!

Let’s pray together.