What Does Life in Christ Look Like?

Introduction

Personal Testimony

I was born and raised in Burbank, CA, where I lived with my family for about 12 years. My parents led worship at a Presbyterian church we attended for several years, but church never felt like home to me—rather, home felt like church. My family hosted weekly Bible studies at our house for years, often more than one at a time, and that was where I truly experienced Christian community for myself. I was taught to pray and study Scripture on a daily basis, and I had a number of spiritual encounters that shaped my individual faith significantly.

When I was about 12 years old, the Lord called my family to Jackson, Mississippi, so that my dad could attend seminary. It was a huge culture shift for all of us, but the Lord used it to challenge and encourage my family in big and small ways. Personally, I experienced a lot of the Lord’s work through the faith of my parents, because while my siblings and I were always along for the ride, the spiritual side of things looked different for each of us. I’ve known the Lord as long as I can remember, but I believe the moment it became real for me was when I made the conscious commitment to follow Him wholeheartedly at the age of 15. After that point, I began to see the Holy Spirit working in me, encouraging and challenging me toward change and growth in faith and maturity.

When I was 16, I went on a summer-long mission trip to teach English and preach the gospel in Poland with Teen Missions International. It turned out to be one of the most difficult challenges I have ever faced—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Still, the Lord continued to push me to go deeper with Him, embrace change, and be bold for the gospel. I vowed I would never go back, but that very next summer, I took a friend with me to teach English and preach the gospel in rural Honduras. My expectation was that living and working in Honduras was going to be much more difficult than Poland in every respect, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. While Honduras proved to be significantly more demanding in a lot of ways, it was so much more rewarding, and it certainly helped to have gone through it once already.

Immediately after that trip, I set off to Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, CO, where I hoped to become a journalist...or a film director...or something, I wasn’t quite sure, but I knew that was where I needed to be. I made some great friends, learned a lot about myself and the world ahead of me, and met my wife-to-be, Chelsea. I found a real sense of community in a number of churches during college, one of them being where I finally got baptized as a public demonstration of my commitment to Christ. In my Junior year, I changed my major to Biblical Studies with Languages and stuck with it to the end, a degree that deepened my faith and increased my understanding of Scripture and its application. I got married the day after my graduation ceremony, which made for a very hectic but exciting weekend, and Chelsea and I started out on a new adventure together.

We eventually found a little apartment in Lakewood and I got a job teaching ancient and classical history at a classical academy in Littleton for a year. Teaching was never my answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and history was always my least favorite subject, but by God’s grace, it turned out to be an incredible experience. By the end of the school year, the school was having issues and ended up firing over half their teachers K-12, and I ended up being one of them. At the same time, the cost of rent kept rising in the area where we lived, and we didn’t really have any viable options for staying. We prayed for months, and one night, out of the silence, I heard a faint but clear whisper of the word, “preach.” I asked Chelsea about it later, but she hadn’t heard anything, and there was no noise inside or outside our apartment that would have accounted for it. In time, I asked a handful of trusted people for advice, and they told me if I was going in the direction of preaching or teaching, seminary would probably be the best step to take.

We then moved out to Wray, where I got a substitute job at the school to try and save a little as we sought the Lord’s direction. The next spring, I started looking at different seminaries and came across Carolina College of Biblical Studies in Lafayette, NC. It was immediately the perfect fit; everything checked out, and I registered for a degree in Bible Translation. Over the course of my time at CCBS, I learned so much about the Lord, the Church, and that translation specifically might not be where He was calling me in the first place. The more I learned, the more I studied, the more opportunities I was blessed with to speak and teach, the more I realized He had called me to literally preach, the old-fashioned way. We met the people of this church a couple of months ago when we came with Jade one night, and about a week later, Larry (seemingly out of the blue) asked me to come and speak, so I am very blessed to be here tonight to show you what the Lord has been teaching me about obedience and the pursuit of holiness.

“What does life in Christ look like?”

The gift of salvation is not fire insurance, or a get-out-of-hell-free card; it's a lifelong commitment to serve Christ holistically as our Lord and Savior, but it’s all too easy to treat our faith like a supplement to the life we have already chosen for ourselves. Life in Christ is more than that. But what does that look like? How do I know I know Christ in the first place? How can I be sure of my salvation, beyond remembering when I prayed the prayer asking Jesus to come into my heart? How can I live out my faith practically? Today we’re going to be spending the majority of our time in 1 John 1:5-2:6, where the apostle breaks down and lays out our responsibility after entering into relationship with Jesus.

1 Jn 1:5-2:6

“This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth. But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.

If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness. If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts.

My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous. He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world.

And we can be sure that we know him if we obey his commandments. If someone claims, “I know God,” but doesn’t obey God’s commandments, that person is a liar and is not living in the truth. But those who obey God’s word truly show how completely they love him. That is how we know we are living in him. Those who say they live in God should live their lives as Jesus did.”

Opening Prayer

Message

Passage Context

John the Disciple

John the Author

In 1 John 1, the beloved disciple starts his letter by establishing his own credibility; he writes, “and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us— what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete” (1 John 1:2-4). He saw Jesus, he knew Jesus, so he is qualified to convey His words, as he does in the very next verse: “This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:5-7). This is the foundation for today’s passage, where John breaks down what living in the Light really looks like.

1 John was written to a church in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, by the apostle John several decades after the ascension of Christ. This John, also the author of the Gospel of John and potentially Revelation, was very close to Jesus throughout His ministry. Many times throughout his Gospel, John refers to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” placing himself front and center at many well-known stories about Christ: he’s the one who leans across the table at the Last Supper to ask Jesus who will betray Him; along with Peter, he’s the one Mary Magdalene hurries to tell about the empty tomb; and he makes it very clear that he’s the one who beats Peter in a race to the tomb that same day. It’s evident in all of John’s writings that he was very close to Jesus and understood the importance of that relationship for all believers, and in 1 John 2:1-6, he explains the crux of this relationship with Christ: obedience.

John the Witness

Evidence Seen

God Is Light

Christ Is Righteous

1 John 2:1-6 comes directly after one of the apostle John’s most insightful challenges: walk in the Light, as God is in the Light. The crux of his first epistle is this idea that God is light, God is love, and anyone who does not love, anyone who does not pursue the light, is not in God either. To live in the light is to live as Jesus did, as today’s passage will tell us, because He Himself is the light, He Himself is the truth, He Himself is the only true Life, and He is the only way to the Father. Fellowship with God is what we were made for, which you cannot gain by any means of yourself, but only by believing in His Son. Paul says in Romans 10 that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. Once you are alive in Christ, He covers your sorry state with His blood of the new covenant, justifying you in the eyes of God and beginning the process of sanctification, in which you are made like Christ through spiritual disciplines in the Holy Spirit. Between the advent of your spiritual life and the end of your physical life, you are not yet made perfect, and Christ serves as your defense attorney before God the Father. 1 John 2:2 says “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father.” And why is He able to do this for us, beyond having satisfied God’s wrath on the cross? Well, it’s closely related, because the only way He could have been a successful propitiation for sin was by being sinless during His earthly life. The very next verse in this passage identifies the Advocate as “Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous,” which specifies the credibility Christ has in that role.

Christ Is Our Savior

Verse 2 says, “He Himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins, but the sins of all the world.” In the Old Testament, God’s Law demanded animal sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, in various ways and at various times. Some sacrifices were done on behalf of an individual’s error, others for the entire community in a grand ceremony. The problem is, while this system provided forgiveness of sins for those who participated, it could not remove the stain of sin from any one person. The Law never “saved” anyone, it essentially held back the wrath of God from pouring out onto the community. Paul says that the primary purpose of the Law was to highlight sin, not solve the problem of human depravity, and the longer the Israelites lived in Canaan, the further they got from being faithful to God through following His Laws. Eventually, they were exiled to Assyria and Babylon for their spiritual adultery, and when they returned 70 years later, they vowed never again to violate God’s Law in such a fashion. Over time, those who were most righteously dedicated to this vow became the Pharisees, a Jewish sect that created minor laws around the big Laws to make perfectly sure that they would never violate God’s Law again. This is why, when Jesus encountered the rich young ruler, the young man could confidently say that he had never broken God’s Law, because of all these sub-rules that kept people like him in check. Despite this, what matters more to God is the human heart, and the hearts of these Pharisees were black—hardened from years of piety and arrogance, which is why they would not be forgiven for blaspheming the Holy Spirit: it isn’t that Christ is harsh and unforgiving, it’s the reality that they were so far gone, they would never actually repent in the first place. But the most ridiculous thing about all of this is that Christ died for the Pharisees, for the unbelieving Israelites of old, for the Gentile sinners who had no knowledge of the One True God. He died as a substitute for sin, so that all—and I mean ALL—would have the opportunity to be saved from their sinful condition and enter life in Christ forever. He truly is our Savior, and even more so, He is our Lord.

Slavery isn’t something we like to talk about much these days, especially in America. When it comes up in Scripture, we often like to ignore it or explain it away somehow, but the truth is, it was a whole different deal in those days.

Three Ways to Pursue Life in Christ

1. Confess Our Sins

"...but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin."

2. Obey God’s Word

"By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments."

We prove our love for Him by obeying His commandments. We cannot live our lives according to our idea of what's good and right for ourselves, or else we're no different from the world. In John 14, Jesus says "If you love me, obey my commandments," and in Matthew 6:33, He says "seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." If Christ is our first and only priority when we get up in the morning, as we go about our day, and as we go to sleep, our lives should reflect His more closely all the time. Sanctification begins in the heart and spreads out into our thoughts, words, and actions, eventually effecting those around us in powerful ways. Our identity is not (should not be) in our last name, birthplace, gender, hobbies, or who we voted for. Once you commit your life to Christ, the biblical language is that you are no longer slaves to sin, but slaves to God. The terminology of slavery is a bit unsavory in modern America, but the concept holds true: if Christ is truly our Lord and Master, we must do nothing but obey His commandments. He is our Savior, our Friend, our Comforter, but most of all, Jesus is King, and who are we to disobey direct orders from the king? Furthermore, how are we supposed to hear these orders if we aren't posturing ourselves to listen in the first place? If all our attention is in the things of this world, the meaningless trite that distracts us from the One True Mission found in Matthew 28, to go out into all the world and make disciples, then we are not walking in the Light as He is in the Light. If our decisions, big or small, are based on the frivolous ways and beliefs of this world, we are useless. We are called to be transparent vessels of the Holy Spirit, ready and willing to be used in any and all ways; after the Last Supper, Jesus told His disciples that He was going away, but that He would send a Helper (paraclete), the Holy Spirit, who would lead us into all truth and enable us to do even greater things than Christ did during His earthly ministry. How can this be? Christ Himself was 100% God, 100% man, serving as the only example we have of a perfect human life, fully submitted to the will of the Father. Jesus' miracles were not done out of some divine power unique to Himself, it was the Holy Spirit working through Him according to the will of the Father. He was the first human being to demonstrate what it truly means to live in relationship with the trinitarian God, which is why our lives MUST model after His. We cannot succumb to the idea that "Jesus was Jesus, we have no chance of ever really being like Him because He was God." Of course He was, but that completely misses the point, as pointed out in Philippians 2, which says "He made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death--even death on a cross!" Christ himself said "take up your cross and follow me," and he didn't mean pray before meals and wear cross necklaces. He meant for us to model our lives after His in every way, even to the point of death, for the sake of the gospel. Martyrs are like seeds, and their deaths have given way to incredible harvests of spiritual fruit; if they accomplished that much by means of sacrificing their lives, imagine what you could do by applying your life to the gospel mission, actively, on a daily basis, seeking His will and obeying His commandments, for the health of the Body of Christ and the encouragement of the saints. Love is obedience, and obedience is of Christ, and Christ is all and in all. If you claim to be a Christian, you must live your lives as Jesus did, there is no other way to true life.

3. Live Like Jesus

"By this we know that we are in Him: the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked."

Conclusion

Summary/Final Statement

Closing Prayer