Walking In The Light

Intro:

Aren’t these intro vides great?

This week we are going to start a mini-series on the book of first John.

I’m calling it a mini-series only because it won’t take us a year to complete.

I’m really excited about the message that God has for us this coming year and this study is going to prepare us for ministry and for the next series to come.

The things we will talk about in this study are, as the video says, “not new information.”

“This is not new information.”

These principles are ones that we have talked about before, but just like the church that John is writing too, we all need to be reminded sometimes of who we are and what we are called to be.

I was sent a headline by a friend of mine on Friday night about a proposed split in a denomination.

The friend isn’t a believer and he is one that God has called me to invest in.

I have spent years cultivating the relationship that we have.

He didn’t say this, but because I know him, I know what he was thinking.

If the church is following Jesus, why is it necessary for it split?

This is a great question.

We see in our text today that there is a group of “deceivers” that have left the church and were trying to convince the rest of that body that what was being taught in their church was incorrect.

Just to be clear, this specific thing is happening at TGP.

This message isn’t a response to anything.

However, we are all bombarded with false ideas and teachings through the culture that we live in.

If our goal is to know Christ and to make Him known, we must know him and be transformed into His likeness.

The goal of this series is to see and experience that Jesus is the Light and Love.

As we experience that truth, we are going to be made into his likeness and will become the conduit that Jesus can use to show the world who He is.

I want to say this too as we step off into this series.

We are all in different places and have come to the church at different times during our growth.

During this study, if I seem to breeze past a topic or idea that you think needs more explanation or clarification, please let me or your life group leader know.

Don’t just assume you should know and be embarrassed to ask.

If you don’t know or can’t remember, you probably aren’t the only one.

Last week we did, what I would call a review, of the ABCs.

I covered some material that we taught during our core group training when we first planted the church.

Out of all the people that were here last week, only four of us were in that core group.

So, don’t be afraid to ask questions.

1 John 1:1–4 NLT

We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life. This one who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen him. And now we testify and proclaim to you that he is the one who is eternal life. He was with the Father, and then he was revealed to us. We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.

Yesterday I was scrolling Facebook and ran across a live video from a guy that I used to go to church with.

I haven’t cried, I mean ugly cry, in along time, but I did yesterday.

He was telling his friends that he has been diagnosed with stage four cancer and only has a few years left.

Now, this guy is not old. He’s maybe ten years older than me and has kids living at home still.

Yet here he is, staring down death, beginning a battle that, unless God intervenes, he won’t win, and he uses that opportunity to share the truth about God.

He uses that time to tell his friends and family that he is not afraid because he knows that God is going to use this and is asking them to pray for the doctors, nurses, and others that will be involved in his treatment.

What brings a person to that place?

What has happened in their life, that when they are at the end of their rope and they have the opportunity to make it all about themselves, they point to God?

This guy knows God.

He is so intimately acquainted with Jesus that he knows that his life and his death are not his own.

They belong to the father.

I was telling Bethany Friday night that in the last three weeks I have had to make several trips to Shreveport and had to pass Willis Knighton Hospital.

That is where she had the initial surgery that found cancer and other follow up procedures.

Every time I drive past it feels like a gut punch.

I’m reminded of the pain that Bethany went trough, the emotions, the uncertainty, and the fear that we both felt.

I’m not just playing the cancer card to get your attention or play with your emotions.

I’m sharing with you the truth about where my heart is.

Because of the things that my family has been through, my perspective is different today.

I realized while we were talking Friday night, that a big part of the attitude change I have had toward Christmas is because of this change in perspective.

That’s just one example, but there are many things in my life that have changed as a result of who I have discovered God to be.

Because God walked with us through that time, I know Him in a way that I didn’t know Him before.

But something else happened as well.

I have been given a better perspective on the life that I have left.

I am sharing these stories with you today because they have changed me.

They didn’t turn me in to a “yes man.”

Quite the opposite in fact.

The things I have experienced cause me to weigh every decision against the weight of knowing Jesus and making Him known.

I have walked with God, heard his voice, felt his hand, and know him.

In verse 4 John says this...

1 John 1:4 NLT

We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.

I was talking with someone this week and I was again relating my sentiment on why I have felt frustration.

It has absolutely nothing to do with personal or church growth.

I get frustrated when I see people struggling with life and the answers are right in front of them.

They have heard the truth.

They have seen God working in the lives of others.

Yet, they try to fix things themselves and then are even more broken when it doesn’t work.

Just to be clear, I ask God daily, that He would give me the words that He wants to say to you all.

But just so you know, I am emotionally invested in those words.

I’m invested because you are my people.

When you suffer, I suffer.

When you laugh, I laugh.

When you enjoy success, I enjoy it with you.

When you experience failure, I’m there too.

God wants our joy to be complete and the only way that happens is if we know Him.

We will not have complete joy until we know him, nor can we share that joy until we know Him.

I have shared these stories today as a way of showing you what this looks like.

Share your God experiences with the people in your life.

John is writing to his friend that is part of a church that is experiencing troubles.

He wants to encourage them that they are correct in their belief in Jesus.

Those that were causing trouble were trying to convince them that Jesus was not the Messiah.

John confronts that head-on by sharing his experiences.

1 John 1:1–4 NLT

We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life. This one who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen him. And now we testify and proclaim to you that he is the one who is eternal life. He was with the Father, and then he was revealed to us. We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.

John is starting off this letter by sharing with them that Jesus is the Christ and John knows it because he has experienced it for himself.

Look at the language that He uses.

we have heard.

we have seen with our eyes.

we have looked upon - he is stating that he is an eyewitness as it happened.

we have touched with our hands.

John isn’t teaching something that he has heard from someone else.

He is teaching based on his personal experiences with Jesus.

He, therefore, has authority that these naysayers could not have.

Put yourself in the story for a moment.

Imagine you are there when these men are trying to convince the church that Jesus wasn’t the messiah and John sends this letter that completely contradicts them.

John’s argument isn’t based on theory or interpretation.

It is based on facts and personal experiences.

This wasn’t based on man made theology.

John is clear from the outset of his reason for writing.

He is writing so that they may know and be part of the fellowship.

Having personal experiences with God is such a simple concept, but we forget so easily.

We get caught up in life and somehow forget that the point of all this isn’t to just transfer knowledge from one person to another, but to actually know, to be in a relationship with God.

I remember a time in my life when I was on staff as a youth pastor at a church.

I was preparing for a lesson on a Wednesday night.

I remember reading through a passage and thinking, why would anyone want to live this way.

How in the world can I convince these teenagers that they need to die to themselves and live for others.

How do I sell this to them?

In that moment I realized that the bible had become something I worked out of and not something that I loved.

I was trying to teach beyond my experience.

I didn’t want to die to myself in the way the passage was calling me to and because of that I knew I couldn’t convince anyone else either.

I was in a really dry spell in my relationship with God and had been doing pretty good job of faking it, but I couldn’t anymore.

The truth of the scripture had not changed at all, but I couldn’t, with a clean conscious, tell someone else that living that way was better.

Do any of you remember or experience the anxiety that came from “witnessing”? aka handing out flyers in the mall?

Any of you have to do that as a kid?

It scared me to death and was incredibly embarrassing.

You know why?

I wasn’t so in love with God that I wanted to tell people about it.

I was doing it because someone told me I had too.

When we try to operate beyond our experiences, people know.

It was a wake up call.

God was revealing to me, the truth about myself.

I was just working a job, not pursuing Him.

What we are then sharing is not the truth of God revealed to us by God, but rather it is someone else’s interpretation of who God is.

I had gotten so caught up in life and trying to please those around me that I had let the most important part of my life slip away.

I know my specific example probably may not be your experience, but I bet you have something similar that has happened in your life.

That other person’s experience may be accurate, but it isn’t yours.

Has there been a time in your life when you were experiencing a time of spiritual drought?

John is writing them to say, “I know Jesus is the Messiah. I know because I was there when he healed people. I was there when died. I was there when he reappeared after his Resurrection.”

He isn’t replicating someone else’s story.

He is sharing his story.

So what do we do with that?

So John sends this message to the church to to show the difference between his eyewitness account and the words of men that were trying to deceive the church.

He is going to make a case against these men who are selling false ideas using their own arguments.

Some of the members have decided that what they think is

We run to God.

We repent, speak honestly with God and ask Him to change our hearts.

1 John 1:5–10 NLT

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.

Examine life through the lens of scripture.

John made his introduction and established his authority over those that were speaking against Christ.

In this section we see John using three statements.

We can see too, that he is directly addressing the “deceivers”.

“If we say we have fellowship with Him”

“If we say have no sin”

“If we say we have not sinned”

John is directly addressing the “deceivers”.

In order to legitimize their claims, those that were trying to deceive the church have tried to compare themselves against the biblical standard of righteousness.

They are saying that what they are teaching is from God and therefore they have not sinned.

Isn’t this a classic tactic of the enemy.

He disguises his works to make it look like God in order to lead people astray.

He cast doubts in our minds to make us question what God has said.

This is literally the oldest trick in the book.

We see this happen in churches all the time.

People, well meaning or not, use God’s word to try and make things happen the way they want.

The context clues that are given in the book help us see that this is the same thing that is going on.

Jesus is getting in their way and so they try to convince everyone else that He wasn’t the Messiah so that they can continue to live they way they want.

However, the leaders of the church were no dummies.

They picked up on it and reached out to John for advice on how to handle it.

I think it is no accident that John responds to these deceivers in the same way that Jesus responds to Satan when he was being tempted in the desert.

John’s response to these statements is to contrast them with what God says is true.

He examines their words and motives through the lens of what He experienced with Jesus and finds that it they aren’t true.

The deceivers are saying they have fellowship with God, but John argues that this can’t be true.

They cannot be in fellowship with Him and be living in spiritual darkness at the same time.

God is light - this would

He is pointing to their lives and showing that they are not living in the light but in darkness.

John explains that if they were living in the light, there would be fellowship, not quarreling between them.

He makes the case that Jesus is the Light and the words of the deceivers are darkness and they cannot occupy the same space.

You are going to have experiences like this in your life, but rest assured that it will be okay.

Light always drives away darkness and darkness is powerless to do anything about it.

They are claiming they do not sin.

If this isn't a red flag, I don’t know what is.

Scripture is very clear to say that we all sin.

John reminds them of this but also reminds them that there is forgiveness for all who confess.

Finally, they claim that in this specific incident they are not sinning.

After stacking up all the evidence, John concludes that they are in fact sinning by leaving the church and trying to tear it down with false teaching.

John is helping the church to see the differences between what these deceivers are saying and what he has seen for himself to be true.

What we need to see in this passage is that God is light and we are called to live in that light.

As a result of living in His light, there will be no darkness in us at all either.

It is the light that draws people in and if we are living in the light, we will be a part of that process.

We cannot separate the two things.

If we are not living in the light, we may try to bring others to Jesus, but we will be just like the deceivers.

We are bringing them to our own idea of who Jesus is, not Jesus himself.

Matthew 7:21–23 NLT

“Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter. On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’

matt 7:

Just doing things in Jesus name isn’t enough.

We also need to be aware that while we are in the light, there may be some in our lives that are going to try to draw us out of it.

If there is anyone in our lives that are trying to convince us of something that does not stand up to the test of the scriptures, we need to be quick to realize it.

Over this next year we are going to be digging into scripture and allowing God to change our perspective on what it means to be a follower.

We want God to change our perspective on what is important in our lives.

As we are going through that process, we are going to have people that try to convince us that the way we are choosing to live ins’t what’s best for us.

Look at what John says in chapter two.

1 John 2:

1 John 2:1–6 NLT

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.

Live in the Light by obeying His commandments.

We are all going to mess up.

When we do, we must run to the father and He will be faithful to forgive us.

I have said many times recently that how we respond to God shows the world who God is.

The same is true about how we respond to the sin in our lives.

If we run to the father He will forgive us.

The people that are close to us are going to know about what is going on with us and they are going to be encouraged by it.

The question of “Am I living in the light?”, it an easy one to answer.

Are you obeying the things that God has commanded?

We cannot go and cannot do the things that God is calling us to do if we don’t move beyond this point.

We cannot be the church that God wants us to be if we are just here to play the church game.

If we are here just to go through the motions, we are not living in the light.

I want to end here today. We may come back to this point next week, but I wanted to stop here for two reasons.

This is a challenging place to end today.

I wanted to stop here for two reasons.

One - I want you to see that it isn’t just me that is saying these things. vs 5-6

I want you to have time to really be able to contemplate what this means for you.

Take the time this week to spend time with God regarding this last passage.

Have hard conversations and ask hard questions.

Two - I want the life groups to talk about these passages this week, but specifically about this last section.

If you are having difficulty obeying something that God is telling you to do, bring that to the group.

Take time to talk about, look at it through the lens of God’s word, and pray for one another.

Encourage one another and walk together into the hard places.

Scripture is clear that if we are God’s people, we will not be like the world and that is going to cause some uncomfortable moments.

That doesn’t change the fact that God has set his people apart from the world and calls us to live differently.

Sometimes we need to gather together, embrace the awkwardness for a moment, and encourage one another.

The joy that John is talking about is the joy that is found in Jesus as we walk with Him and with other believers.

This is the joy that I want you all to experience.

I don’t want you to miss this life.

I am so excited about what our future holds.

I am so excited about what our future holds.

I’m excited because I love to see the church being the church.

I love seeing lives changed because someone was taken care of in a way they didn’t expect.

I love seeing broken hearts mended.

I love seeing families being made whole.

I love growing with my people.

I am excited t