Sin and Death

Years ago, back when Annette and I were still living in Portsmouth, we had a cat that adopted us one day.

We called her Fern, because we’d first spotted her hiding in a fern plant that we kept on the front porch.

We were never quite sure that Fern didn’t have a home of her own, and we already had two indoor animals — the main pet, my dog Inky, and an emergency auxiliary pet, a mentally challenged cat named Surkit — so we didn’t bring Fern into the house.

Rather, we let her come and go as she pleased, although she spent a lot of time in the garage entertainment room with us.

She was a sweet cat, and we loved her very much, and she kept regular hours with us, so when I realized one evening that she hadn’t been around for a few hours, I went out looking for her.

Perhaps you’re already anticipating the bad news. I certainly was. But even so, I was still unprepared for the emotional hit I experienced when I rounded the corner to the main road in our community and saw the lifeless body lying next to the sidewalk.

I still remember sobbing as I carried Fern back to the house. I still remember asking Annette if she was really dead. I was desperate to believe that I was somehow missing some faint signs of life, even though it was clear she was gone.

We weren’t believers at the time, but I still remember praying that I’d open my eyes and she’d still be alive.

And even though I wasn’t a believer then, either, I prayed the same thing as I stood beside my father’s lifeless body at Maryview Hospital on the day that a heart attack took him from us.

I suspect many of you have prayed similarly at the death of some loved one.

From our earthbound perspective, physical death seems to strike with such finality that even the promise that believers will be resurrected is of only limited comfort as we look at the gaping hole left in our lives by the loss of a loved one.

That’s exactly what was going on with the sisters, Mary and Martha, in John, chapter 11. Their brother, Lazarus, had fallen sick and died.

They’d sent for Jesus to heal his friend, Lazarus, but He had tarried in another place and didn’t arrive at their home in Bethany until Lazarus had been dead for four days.

You all know the story. When she heard that Jesus was on His way and nearby, Martha ran out to meet Him. She said, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”

She was upset. She was hurting. She was trying to understand why Jesus, whom she knew could have healed Lazarus, hadn’t come sooner.

And when Jesus replied, “Your brother will rise again,” Martha said, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

We see in this passage that Mary and Martha and Lazarus were all believers and that they had confidence in God’s promise of eternal life in resurrected bodies for believers.

And we see that Jesus seems to have understood and even shared the grief they experienced, even though they believed this promise.

But there’s something that’s easy to miss in what Jesus says in this passage, and I want to focus on that for a moment this morning.

Back in verse 4, Jesus had said that Lazarus’ sickness was not to end in death, but for the glory of God. And then, in verse 11, He said Lazarus had fallen asleep and that it was His plan to awaken him.

And when the disciples missed the fact that he was using a euphemism there, Jesus clearly said it: “Lazarus is dead.”

But He’d had already said Lazarus’ sickness wasn’t going to end in death. So, how could Lazarus be dead? Was Jesus wrong?

Of course not. He simply knew the story wasn’t over yet. He simply knew what God was about to empower Him to do.

“Your brother will rise again,” He told Martha when He arrived in Bethany.

And then, after telling the people to remove the stone that had enclosed Lazarus’ tomb since he’d been buried there four days earlier, Jesus began to pray.

And in verse 41, He says “Father, I thank you that you have heard me.”

Now, what’s significant about that is that these are the first words of prayer that we hear from Jesus in this matter. But clearly, He’s already been talking to God about the situation, probably from the very time He’d been told that Lazarus was sick.

And what we see in verse 41 is Jesus CONFIDENTLY approaching His Father in prayer. “I thank you that You HAVE HEARD Me,” He says. And then in verse 42:

John 11:42 NASB95

42 “I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that You sent Me.”

And then, He cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth,” and Lazarus came out of the tomb, alive again.

What I want you to see here is the confidence Jesus had in His prayers. He knew that God would do what He had asked, because He was coming to God without sin, He was seeking God’s glory, and He was praying according to God’s will.

And this incident seems to have made quite an impression on John the disciple, because we see him talking about the power of prayer again in today’s passage from the Book of 1 John.

We’re near the end of our study of this letter, and we’ll look at four verses from chapter 5 today, picking up with verse 14.

1 John 5:14–15 NASB95

14 This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. 15 And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him.

Now, it’s been a couple of weeks since we looked at it, but you may recall that John wrote earlier in this chapter that God testifies to the reality of who Jesus is and what He has done to save mankind from the penalty for our sins.

God testifies to this through the Holy Spirit, through the waters of Jesus’ baptism and through the blood of His cross. In other words, He testifies to the truth of Jesus through His short ministry here on earth and through the Spirit’s continuing ministry here.

And John has said that God’s testimony should give we who’ve followed Jesus confidence in God’s promise of eternal life to those who turn to Him in faith.

Indeed, as he says here in verses 14 and 15, God’s testimony about His Son should give us the confidence — the boldness — to approach Him in prayer the very same way Jesus did.

Jesus came to the tomb of Lazarus without any doubt that God had already heard Him and already answered His prayer.

All that remained was for the results of that answered prayer to be revealed to the people who surrounded the tomb on that day.

And it’s interesting to note that throughout that chapter in the Gospel of John, we never see Jesus wavering in His expectation about what God would do when He arrived at the tomb.

The sickness was not to end in death, He’d said, but for the glory of God. Lazarus was “asleep,” but Jesus would awaken him. Lazarus was dead, but something was about to happen to make people believe in Jesus’ authority and power.

“Your brother will rise again,” He said. “If you believe, you will see the glory of God,” He said. “Lazarus, come forth!”

Jesus had boldly prayed to His Father for the resurrection of Lazarus. He genuinely sought for God to be glorified in that resurrection. He prayed, as He did in all things, according to God’s will, and not His own.

And so, Jesus could stand before that tomb and call Lazarus out of the grave with the confidence that God had already answered the prayer.

And as John recalls this incident from Jesus’ ministry here on earth, he says in this letter that God’s testimony to the truth of Jesus as the resurrection and the life should give believers the same confidence and boldness in prayer that Jesus had.

If we follow Jesus, then whenever we go before God in prayer, if we’re praying according to His will — in other words, praying for the same things God wants — then we’ll receive those things.

Now, the tricky part here is praying according to God’s will, praying for the same things God wants.

WE want to be comfortable and have nice, easy lives. I want to have a nice, long vacation on a warm beach somewhere. And God may or may not be opposed to such things in our lives. But they are not His priorities for us.

What God wants for us is LIFE.

Whenever we are confronted by the death of a loved one — whether it’s a beloved pet or a close family member or friend — we all ask the same question: Why?

Why must we all grapple with the grief that Martha and Mary experienced when Lazarus died? Why is death the universal experience of all living things?

And the answer to that question is that it’s because of sin.

When God placed Adam and Eve into that perfect garden He’d created, there was no such thing as death. Everything He’d created was good, and they had everything they needed there for perfect contentment and peace, including fellowship with Him.

But He’d warned them that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would die.

And when they chose to eat from that tree — when they chose to try to take for themselves the authority to determine what was good and what was evil — they brought death into the world.

They were separated from God as they were cast out of His presence in the garden — this was spiritual death. And eventually their physical bodies died, too.

And ever since then, death has reigned on the earth. Sin brought the curse of death to mankind, and we know that there is still sin, because there is still death.

But God’s greatest priority for us isn’t our physical lives. It’s our spiritual lives. His greatest priority for us is that we have life IN HIM through faith in Christ Jesus.

His greatest priority for us is that we who were made to be in fellowship with Him can have a relationship with Him through faith.

Jesus said He came to give us life and that in abundance. The life He spoke about is the experience we who were dead in our trespasses against God have of being made alive with Him in Christ by giving our hearts to Him.

And the ABUNDANT life Jesus spoke about is life in fellowship with God and with Jesus through the Holy Spirit. This is eternal life — life the way it was always meant to be, in fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This eternal life is the promise followers of Jesus have of being with God in our resurrected bodies. But it’s also the present experience we can have in our earthly bodies to the extent that we are living according to God’s will for us.

And John has made it clear in this letter that THAT means believing in Jesus, living righteously, and loving one another.

I believe those two concepts — life and abundant life — are in play in the next couple of verses. Let’s take a look at them now.

1 John 5:16–17 NASB95

16 If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this. 17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death.

“Many Christians have failed to realize that sinning always leads to some type of dying, even among Christians. While it is true that no Christian will ever experience the second death (eternal separation from God), we do normally experience the physical and spiritual … consequences of our sinning.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Jn 5:16.]

Our sins as followers of Jesus will not cause us to be separated from God. They will not destroy the relationship we have with Him in Christ.

But they WILL damage our fellowship with Him. And they can damage or even destroy our relationships with others.

Those are the kinds of sins that, when we see fellow believers committing, we should pray for them. Those sins don’t lead to spiritual death, because they’re committed by people whose sins have been paid for by Jesus at the cross.

Instead, those kinds of sins destroy the abundant life that followers of Jesus have been made to experience.

And what John says here is that when we see a fellow believer committing sin — when we’re confronted with the evidence of sin in their lives — we need to pray for them, that God would lead them to repentance and restoration of fellowship with Him.

Folks, I’m going to tell you very frankly that this is a hard passage to understand. It’s one of several in this letter for which commentators have all different interpretations.

And I’m going to tell you that I haven’t figured it all out. I’ve still got questions.

But I THINK this is a reiteration of the promise of eternal life for those who’ve followed Jesus in faith. I THINK John is saying here that God will restore fellowship with the sinning believer, either in this life or in the resurrection.

Perhaps our prayers for such a person will result in their repentance. If so, then they’ll be brought back into fellowship with God in this life. And they’ll experience — even here — the abundant life for which they were created.

But even if they don’t turn from their sins here, God has promised that all who have turned to Jesus in faith belong to Him in Christ, and they will experience full fellowship with Him in heaven.

Whatever the case, we’re told to pray for them and to pray for them with confidence and boldness.

And it’s interesting to note that this is a command for the church. You see, your sin isn’t just your problem. Your sin is also the church’s problem.

And that’s because the church is composed of believers who are individually and collectively indwelt by the Spirit of God.

Whenever any one of us is caught up in unrepentant sin, we injure our fellowship with the Spirit. We become ineffective in our work for God. We become broken pieces of this Church that Jesus is building.

And so, the church has a vested interest in the repentance of its members for their sins as believers.

But remember that the churches of Asia Minor that originally recieved this letter had been dealing with false teachers who denied the truth of Jesus Christ.

I believe those are the people John talks about in the last part of verse 16, those who committed a sin leading to death.

Notice that he doesn’t name them or refer to them as brothers. And the fact that he says their sin leads to death suggests that they are still non-believers.

They have rejected who Jesus said He is, and they have rejected Him as their only way to be reconciled to God and their only means of receiving eternal life.

Now, John doesn’t say that we CAN’T pray for such people. Indeed, we SHOULD pray for the lost.

We should pray for them to turn to Jesus in faith that only His sinless life, His sacrificial death, and His supernatural resurrection can give us a way to be reconciled to God.

But those people were still dead in their trespasses and could do nothing to contribute to the LIFE of the church.

All the church could do for THEM — indeed, what we can do for unbelievers in our own lives — is to pray for their salvation, to pray that they would receive LIFE through faith in Jesus. They can’t have ABUNDANT life until they have life.

I’m very careful about how I pray for people I don’t think are followers of Jesus. I’ll pray for God to meet their needs, and I’ll pray for Him to reveal Himself to them. But I tend to avoid praying for blessings over them.

And that’s because it may very well be in their suffering and pain and even sickness where they finally meet Jesus. It may be that they will only turn to Him when they’ve reached rock bottom.

And for them to meet Jesus and turn to Him in faith is God’s priority for them.

THAT’S God’s will for them. And if I’m praying according to His will, then MY priorities for them must align with HIS priorities for them.

Look, I want everyone here to have the abundant life of fellowship with God in Christ. To that end, when I know of unrepentant sin in your lives, I’ll go to the Lord boldly and confidently on your behalf. And I hope you’ll do the same for me.

But if you’ve never given your heart to Jesus, then what you NEED is LIFE. What you need is the relationship with God that you can only have through faith in Jesus.

What you need is to admit that you’re a sinner and that nothing you can do can erase the debt that you owe God for your sins against Him.

What you need to do is to trust that Jesus paid that debt in full at the cross so that you can be forgiven and made alive in Him.

All sin leads to death of some type. But Jesus died and rose again so that He could bring you OUT of death and INTO life!

Will you turn to Him in faith today? Will you finally stop clinging to death and choose life?

Now, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. This observance is important to the fellowship of the church. It brings us together in a unique way and reminds us that we belong to one another in Christ Jesus.

It reminds us of the love that He has for us and the love we are called to have for one another.

Jesus commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him, as a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him, and as a way of reminding us what He did for us.

The Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests entirely on the sacrifice that He made on our behalf at the cross. It reminds us that our life is in Him.

And the fact that we share bread from one loaf reminds us that we are, together, the one body of Christ. It reminds us that we are called to unity of faith, unity of purpose, and unity of love.

And it reminds us that, just as He gave up the glory that He had in heaven, we who’ve followed Him in faith are called to give up any claims we might think we have to our own lives and follow Him.

It reminds us that, as we’ve been given the testimony of the Holy Spirit within us, we are to share OUR testimony of salvation by grace through faith.

If you are a baptized believer who is walking in obedience to Christ, I would like to invite you to join us today as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Now, this sacred meal dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.

The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today, but the significance was the same as it is today.

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; 28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”