He is Victorious

Scripture: 1 John 5:1-6

1 John 5:1–6 NIV

1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. 2 This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. 3 In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, 4 for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. 5 Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. 6 This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.

5/5/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Communion

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 1: Communion

Opening Prayer:

Lord Jesus, we gather in Your name to celebrate Your victories today. Nothing can stand against You. Your faithfulness is unshakable. May you be honored by our worship today. In Your Holy Name, Amen.

He is Victorious

Celebrations

Our faith is built on celebrations. From birthdays and anniversaries to Independence Days and Thanksgiving, many of our most beloved celebrations find their roots in Jesus.

Indeed, we can go as far back as Abraham, whose whole life and purpose hinged on a child’s birthday. We can remember the Exodus as the Independence Day for the Hebrew people and the birth of a new nation. We cannot forget Noah and the Flood and the rainbow, which forever stands as a symbol of God’s faithfulness in rescuing us from the consequences of our sinful world if we will but follow Him.

The generations that left Egypt and moved into the Promised Land were called to remember those mighty acts of God in celebrations each year. Each year for Passover, they were to fix a special kind of to-go meal, one that would remind them of how quickly God moved in and moved them from their home of slavery into the wilderness, where they had to follow God in faith each day. Each year, they were to spend several days in tents, called the feast of booths, and remember the 40 years God provided for their ancestors in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. What did they do once they finally made it into the Promised Land? They started celebrating, remembering, and thanking God for all He had done for them.

Celebrations are also essential for our faith today because we still follow and serve a God we cannot readily see. As our scripture passage mentioned last week, no one has seen God, but we feel His love and follow where He leads. The evil in the world that tries to pull us away from God knows that it cannot win, so it tries to distract us from God or make us forget all that He has done.

Some people thrive off the anguish and suffering of others. They try to resurrect wars fought and won from generations past. They don’t understand that we cannot go back. We can only grow forward into greater faithfulness. They do not believe that our battle against sin and death was finished when Jesus said it was finished on the cross and in the empty tomb.

But they are wrong. In our scripture today, John explains that Jesus has overcome the world, so we can trust and obey Him no matter how the world fights against us.

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Belief in Jesus

Without Jesus, you cannot love God. Does that sound silly? If you are sitting here today, you may already believe in Jesus, but there are people out in the world who don’t believe in Him. They don’t believe He died for our sins or rose from the dead. But they think they can still lead a life that is pleasing to God. John says they are wrong.

John says that if you truly love God, you will also love Jesus. If you love the Father, you will love His Son. We can quickly dismiss that as another one of John’s references to the Greatest Commandment: to Love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But that is not what this passage says. It refers not to all God’s children (meaning those of us adopted into His family) but to one child - His only begotten Son, Jesus. In the Gospel of John 8:42...

“Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me.” (John 8:42, NIV)

If you love God the Father, you will love Jesus. If you believe in God, then you will also believe in Jesus. When He says, “In this world, we will have trouble, but we should not fear because He has overcome the world,” we can take that to the bank. We can trust it with all our weight as we learn to lean into Him.

Yes, there are plenty of mysterious things about Jesus, but there are many more things that he told His disciples outright, and they have meticulously passed them down to us. We know from John 1:29 that John the Baptist identifies Jesus as “the one who takes away the sins of the world.” We know He is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that He came to save us. Not try to save us. He did save us. He showed us the love of God, and He conquered the power of sin and death in our lives. All we must do is believe and follow Jesus out of the fire.

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Following Jesus

But sometimes we don’t want to believe. Sometimes, we grow attached to the darkness around us. We fall in love with the lies or let them chase us into a dark corner. We let our past actions in the dark determine how bright our future could be instead of trusting Jesus to lead us.

We follow Jesus by obeying His commands. In John 14:15, Jesus says it plain as day:

“If you love me, keep my commands.”

And His commands are not burdensome.

Sometimes, the lies we hear from the world make it seem that following His commands is the hardest thing to do. Last weekend, you probably saw pictures of the miniature golf course we set up at North Campus. The fourth hole was labeled as a par 4 with a steep incline up a mini-mountain to settle in a hole beneath the Ten Commandments. I can tell you, as long as you hit it up the mountain onto the short ledge the first time, it was not hard to get there. But if you missed that first hit and had to chase the ball around the bottom of the mountain, you would be there for quite a while.

Jesus helped us focus all those commandments into one command to love God and each other. Rather than showing us where to avoid hitting the ball, Jesus pointed us in the direction we needed to go. And then, He went a step further. He modeled it. He painted a target on His back and said, “Hit me.” “Aim right here.” You can’t see God, but I can see Him, so do whatever you see me doing as I do whatever I see the Father doing.

Then Jesus gave us His Holy Spirit to impart the skill and ability to love and do what is right. And something more important as well. Let’s be honest here for a moment. You don’t have to be strong enough to lift a certain amount of weight to obey God or be smart enough to pass a particular test. You don’t have to have unique talents in music, writing, cooking, sewing, or woodworking. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to follow Jesus. What you need more than anything else is the desire.

If you desire to love God and others, you will find your part of the way, and God will cover the rest—every time. It is never a question of having what it takes to obey Jesus’ commands. The question for you is, do you want to have what it takes to follow Jesus? He is giving it away to anyone who asks.

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Victory in Jesus

1 John 2:2 says that Jesus’ death on the cross was the sacrifice that brought us forgiveness of our sins. Then John 19:30, the last words of Jesus before dying on the cross were: “It is finished.” In Greek, it was not three words. It was one word that meant finished for good.

When you finish your homework for the week, you can say, “It is finished,” knowing you will have more to do next week. When you finish it at the end of the semester, you can say it is finished, knowing you will have more to do in the fall. However, there are some students out there who are graduating and will not go back to school ever again. When they say, “It is finished,” it is finished for good. That is the perfectly and forever finished that Jesus claimed about the power of sin in our lives. With His death, He destroyed it forever.

We are called to celebrate that victory not once a year but every time we gather together. You may notice we are still in Easter Season, even though it has been a month since we last celebrated Easter together. We still drape the cross with white cloth to symbolize Jesus’s resurrection power, and even when we move into a new season, we will continue to look to the cross each week, perhaps even each day, as a reminder that Jesus won.

It's not food that draws us together. It is that victory. Not our victory, but Christ’s victory that won us as His prize for heaven. The best we can do is remember to get together and tell Him thank you. The US Postal Service doesn’t send thank you cards to heaven, so we pass on our gratitude by loving someone Jesus loves near us. We share what Jesus has freely given us with others, with the intentional hope that they would come to believe and choose to follow Him freely, too.

When the world goes to war around us and challenges us to fight for our freedom, we remember that we are already free. This world can't touch our eternity. When we don’t know what tomorrow holds, we don’t have to name it and claim things that we have no guarantee about. We can remember and celebrate what we know, the things Jesus has accomplished for us already, and hold fast to our faith that He holds all of our victories in His capable hands.

Our faith is found and founded upon the fact that God not only knows all but has already done enough to prove His love and carry us onward. We have to remember those victories, believe Him, celebrate His unwavering love for us everywhere it shows up, and share that love He gives us with each other. We find our victorious strength to live for Jesus, not in what we believe we can do but in what He has already done for us.

So, as we gather together to celebrate today, remember Who it was and What He did that made it possible for us to celebrate. Let us give Him thanks and share His love with one another as we remind ourselves that we are Easter People every day and Because He is victorious, we are set free to live joyfully for Jesus.

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, nothing is as powerful as Your love for us. You have proven that by bringing that love to life in Jesus Christ and offering that life to us as a sacrifice for our sins on the cross. Your love is so powerful that the symbol of death, the cross, was forever transformed into a symbol of eternal life with You as You claimed victory over the grave forever. We know we are not enough, but You claim victory over our weaknesses and redeem our lives when You call us to follow You. Call us again today, Lord. Call us to be Your people, gathered together to celebrate Your victorious love in our lives. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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