He is Pure

Scripture: 1 John 3:1-7

1 John 3:1–7 NIV

1 See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. 4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. 5 But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. 6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him. 7 Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.

4/14/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Mission Moment

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 2: Mission Moment

Opening Prayer:

Lord Jesus, thank you for calling us here today to be your people. We praise your name and honor you with our worship. Send us your spirit and help us to live in a way that brings glory to You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

He is Pure

Teachers

Teachers are essential to passing life lessons on from generation to generation. Traditionally, we remember teachers and students at the beginning of the school year. We also celebrate the hard work of graduating students at the end of the school year. However, these last few weeks can sometimes be the most challenging for those teaching in the school system or homeschooling children. With summer in sight and warmer weather each day, it is more difficult to keep everyone focused enough to finish well, and a lousy finish can ruin years of hard work.

Teaching is essential to sharing Jesus and passing on His teaching to others. It is more than a spiritual gift that some have, and others do not. It is a command for us all found in the Great Commission, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” - from Matthew 28:19-20.

Because the gift of teaching is so important, different teachers use different methods to teach many things. Last week, I mentioned Socrates and his student Plato. Socrates taught by lecturing to his students and debating his rivals in public. Plato continued his work by writing his teachings down and sharing them with others. One of my favorite examples of teaching is the fictional karate mentor, Mr. Miyagi, from the Karate Kid movies. He represents those teachers of physical skills and trades who train their students through physical discipline and repeated motions so they can perform almost unconsciously when needed. John the Baptist was a teacher who taught a generation of disciples before handing them to Jesus. He did not lecture or debate like the Greek Philosophers or train his disciples in physical tasks. He modeled a life devoted to God daily and called others to join him.

We can all share our faith and teach others to grow in a relationship with Jesus. It is tempting to think about our style of teaching first, but if we want to succeed in passing our faith on to others, we must begin with the right content. It is easy to let things that are not God’s will interfere with our work in sharing Jesus with others. We learned last week that Jesus is the light. In our passage today, John tells us that Christ has no sin and calls us to leave our lives of sin and find a new life in Him.

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He is Pure

In his poetic style, John wrote that Jesus was the light and that we must live in the light if we follow Him. He warns against anyone who teaches otherwise, calling them antichrists in chapter 2 and gives us a sign to determine who is truly in fellowship with Jesus and who is not: purity—spiritual purity.

John’s Jewish readers would have understood the idea of spiritual purity, and probably many non-Jewish readers would have understood. The closest thing our culture can compare it to is innocence. But we compare innocence with a sheltered life and its opposite, guilt, with getting caught doing wrong. Jesus is without sin. We believe everyone does something wrong sometimes, and as long as you don’t get caught doing it, you are considered ok. For God’s people, though, doing wrong always mars the image of God instilled in us, whether we get caught and convicted or not.

Rather than comparing purity to innocence, we should compare it to being clean. That is the Old Testament understanding of purity and holiness, after all. Purity is vital to our lives because only something pure can clean something impure. You cannot clean clothes or dishes with dirty water, and you won’t get clean taking a mudbath. When you go to the hospital, how clean do you want the surgeon’s hands to be before they try to get in and bring you healing?

John tells us that Jesus is pure. He is entirely clean. That allows Him alone to clean up us and others because it takes clean water to wash away the dirt and mire, just as Jesus takes our sin upon Himself. But then, after He has washed us clean, He also calls us to live free from sin.

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Sin is Impurity

Sin is a choice, even if it does not always seem so.

From a young age, we are taught that we should behave and can be rewarded if we act right. As we grow, we witness and experience other people misbehaving. So we feel the power of temptation to sin ourselves, and we see that others around us give into temptation and sin around us, sometimes against us. And then we see them get away with it without the promised punishment.

As we grow older and learn more about the bible, we read that all have sinned, and, as John writes in this passage today, anyone who says they do not sin is not being honest. All have sinned, which is why God sent Jesus to the cross. Jesus is the only one without sin, and He accomplished that because He was God in the flesh. As we continually distance ourselves from Jesus, we begin to see Him more like an angel from another world than a person we can ever relate to, and we become frustrated by the whole thing. This point is where most people stop in their understanding of sin and the role of Jesus because it is easiest to confess our sin as an inevitable problem and just be grateful that Jesus is taking care of it, paying our way to heaven.

The whole Bible is a testament to this practice of sin management. We sin, there is a sacrifice made for us, God forgives us, we get up and sin again, and the cycle continues. But John knew Jesus personally, and Jesus transformed his whole life. So, let’s compare the cycle of sin with another certainty in our lives: food poisoning.

It is a fact of life that you will eat food that has gone bad at least once in your lifetime. Mold and bacteria start as invisible spores you only see or taste too late. You can take many precautions to protect yourself from them, but nothing is 100% guaranteed. It is bound to happen. However, just because it is bound to happen at some point does not mean you have to eat bad food every day. You can always take precautions or avoid food you know has gone bad. Often, if we eat bad food, our body reacts to it, and we won’t want anything to do with that kind of food ever again. If we get sick enough, we often stop being attracted to bad food.

Taking those steps to avoid food poisoning sometimes means not getting what we initially wanted or not eating that meal at all. We have a choice whenever we go to the fridge or pantry to find something to eat. How much mold or bacteria are we willing to eat today?

John learned that God has a better plan for our lives. He teaches us that Jesus does more than cleanse us with His sinless purity. He calls us to choose each day to live a life free from the poison of sin. Because Jesus is pure and sinless, He can cleanse us of our past sins and allow us to choose a pure life from this day forward. And He teaches us to live that way.

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Children of God

Our season of Lent was like the disciples’ first three years as students of Jesus. Each day, He gave them more training on How to follow Him after He rose from the dead and ascended back into Heaven. The tools we learn in Lent are not just things we do six weeks out of the year. They are like basic training in the military or training camp for sports. It is an opportunity to sharpen our spiritual skills and use them throughout the year in our daily lives.

Like Socrates and Plato, learning to think differently, Jesus taught His disciples to read and understand God’s Word in a new light, empowered by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and let it instruct them instead of using it to justify their desires. Jesus teaches us to let God’s Word change how we view God, ourselves, and the world around us and continue to dig into it as a spiritual discipline.

Just as Mr. Miyagi taught the Karate Kid to develop new physical responses by waxing his car, Jesus taught His disciples to respond with love when others threatened or harmed them. He taught them to stand firm in their faith and not fear what little the world could do to them and instead use their heavenly authority to cast out demons, bring healing, and be witnesses of God’s grace, even at the cost of their own lives, until they were able to do it themselves. Jesus teaches us to pray constantly, trusting in His wisdom rather than our understanding, and to allow our minds, transformed by His Word, to lead us to redemptive responses rather than the rash reactions we learn from the world around us.

Like John the Baptist, Jesus is always our model. He practiced what He preached right in front of His disciples. When they did not know what to do, they looked to Jesus and did their best to imitate His words and actions. When we find ourselves trying to figure out a way out of a troubling situation, doing our best to find a way forward without stepping into sin, we can ask ourselves, “What did Jesus do?” and we can look to the way Jesus is working in one another for help and guidance as well.

As the Church, our goal is to allow the Purity of Jesus to shine through us. If we grow lazy or prideful and let the impurities of our sins remain in our lives, we will not pass on the purity of Jesus to the next generation of believers. We will wash them with filthy water so they will never know what it means to be forgiven and cleansed from their sins, and they will have no models of how to live a holy life. The sins we tolerate in one generation will be considered normal in the next and then celebrated as part of our identity in the lives of our spiritual grandchildren.

In other words, if we truly want to give others Jesus, we need to give them Jesus - pure and simple - not our own version of Jesus. To do that, we need to stay connected to Who Jesus is and allow Him to shape us into the pure and holy people we are in Him.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, You are the shining example of holiness that lights our way and washes us clean from the sins that entangle and pull us away from life. There is no one we can depend upon like You, and we need You to help us grow into the children of God we were created to be. Thank You for loving, forgiving, and redeeming our broken, sinful lives. Thank You for sharing Your Spirit to give us a new life and the choice to lead a life free from sin and death. We pour ourselves out to You today, Lord, with all our mess and misery, and invite You to pour Your pure and Holy Spirit into us and claim us as Your own. Take us, Heavenly Father. Let Your will be done in our lives today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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