Righteous
Notes
Transcript
Big Idea: God is growing us through knowledge, forgiveness, and victory of evil in our lives.
Complication: The apostacy of antichrists is not necessary, if we truly let the Holy Spirit lead us in our study of Scripture.
Mission/Vision Slideshow
Mission/Vision Slideshow
We exist as a community because we are Jesus followers, and more importantly because we are Jesus’ children. We gather together to worship and adore Him.
As Christ-followers we are all in a growing-up experience. We starts as what Paul calls “newborn babes” and grow and mature all throughout our experience with Christ. As we mature, Christ invites us to be spiritual big-brothers and big-sisters and even parents to other Christians. We exist to disciple and lead each other closer to Jesus.
Jesus told people that besides loving God, loving our neighbors is the 2nd greatest commandment. As a Christian community, we exist to be good neighbors in our community.
Just before he ascended into heaven and left the Holy Spirit behind to empower the church, Jesus told the disciples to Go and make disciples and baptize. This is Jesus’ command for us too. We exist to share the story of Jesus’ death, resurrection and soon return with our community.
Introduction — Stages of Life
Introduction — Stages of Life
Do you remember when you were in diapers? Most of us have long-forgotten those days when someone laid us down on a changing table and cleaned us up as they sang sweet songs to us. Or maybe your were the wiggly kind that only heard, “lie still, now!” as someone held you down with one hand and wiped with the other.
Do you remember the long days of childhood when your imagination told a million stories that you tried to live out in real life? Dolls and houses and mud-cake baking kitchens. Or maybe it was pinecone grenades and wooden sword battles. The opposite gender was gross and had cuties. When you were told to sit still it seemed like every minute took an hour, but when bedtime was nearing it seemed like the day was just too short.
Do you remember adolescence? When your body seemed to be doing battle with you. Strange things were happening all over. Your voice grew deeper. You added new paraphernalia to your dressing routine. There was suddenly a shy interest in hanging around with the opposite gender.
Do you remember your teen years? The new strength. The frustration of being not-quite-yet-an-adult-but-oh-so-close. The infuriating eruptions all over your skin, that seemed to show up right when you were going to be doing something in public. Moving into high-school. Getting a license. Choosing a career.
Do you remember that feeling of your first job? So proud of yourself for landing the job. Nervous because you had no idea what to expect. Wanting to please everyone, but also kind of wishing you had the carefree life of a child again?
Do you remember falling in love? Marriage? Your first little baby?
Do you remember when your kids were in diapers, running around with stick swords, standing in walmart looking at trainer bras, and calling girls from school? Do you remember sending them off to their first job, and then watching them pack the last of their things into their car as they drove off to their own home?
Do you remember the emptiness of your home without kids? The exploration of new purpose and meaning beyond parenting? The changes in your body as age started to wear things out?
Do you remember training younger workers in your job? Knowing that they would be the ones who would soon replace you? Do you remember making plans to retire?
Do you remember when your husband or wife breathed their last breath? When the doctor told you that you really shouldn’t be driving anymore? When your kids had that conversation with you about maybe moving in with them so they could care for you better?
Life is full of change and transition from one season to another. Each season has its joys and its trials.
We’re near the beginning of a study in 1 John that I’m calling Little Children. Today we’re studying the 2nd chapter where John invites us to consider the growing, changing life of a Christian.
Overview
Overview
1 John 2 is a mixed bag of ideas:
John’s just wrapping up the idea in chapter 1 that a) to have fellowship with God you need to walk in the light and have no sin, but that we have all sinned, and b) that the only way to walk in the light is to let Jesus be your advocate as you confess your sin.
He says,
1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 2 He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
I love that word, propitiation. It’s one of those words that makes your stop and pull out a dictionary. The Greek word that is translated propitiation could also be translated as atonement or gift to appease. John is saying that Jesus is the way that we can be at-one with God. He’s the gift of God that draws us to Him, and frees us from the sin that prevents our fellowship with God.
John goes on to talk about how important it is to know God.
He reminds us of the not-so-new command to love each other.
He contrasts that love for each other with love for the selfish, self-seeking, self-idolizing, self-pleasing world and says that if anyone loves the world the love of the Father is not in them.
Then John warns about false teachers and false prophets who deny Christs’s humanity or his divinity.
And finally he says this:
28 And now, dear children, remain in fellowship with Christ so that when he returns, you will be full of courage and not shrink back from him in shame. 29 Since we know that Christ is righteous, we also know that all who do what is right are God’s children.
But there seems to be a thread that ties all these seemingly disparate topics together, and it comes from this phrase, little children.
Read verses 12-14 with me.
12 I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. 13 I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the Father. 14 I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.
This little bit of 1 John is unique in that its written as poetry. John repeats himself, with small changes, a very common Hebrew and Greek poetic tool. The structure of these lines is completely different than the structure of the rest of the book.
Some scholars think that John was writing all these things about walking in the light and knowing God and loving your brother and he got a little worried that people might think he was bashing on the church. So, he stopped and reassured them.
“Don’t worry, I’m talking straight with you because of the false teachers. I know you’re forgiven and you know the Father and the Son, and I know you’re strong and you’ve overcome.”
To them, this poem is a brief reprieve before John takes the next swing.
But I don’t see it like that at all. Why would John change tactics? Why would he he pat you on the back with a sweet poem and then beat you over the head with perfectionism? I don’t think that’s what John is doing.
No, this unique passage in his letter is intended to be the lens through which we read the rest of his letter.
Notice how he starts with the little children.
Children
These are the new-born christians—those who have recently accepted Christ, and joined the church. They are the initiates, the ready to be or just newly baptized. What does John say to them? —— your sins are forgiven for His name’s sake, and you know the Father.
Why else would someone come to God if they didn’t know of his forgiving grace? These newborn Christians are distinguished, not by their maturity, but by their position with Jesus—forgiven.
Parents
And then there are the parents. John calls them fathers, but he’s talking to all the parents of other Christians. He identifies these by their knowledge of God. They know the one who was from the beginning. And as a result of knowing God they are the ones primarily responsible for passing on this knowledge to others. As a result, they become the spiritual parents of new Christians. They are the primary disciple makers of the church.
Youth
Even though youth comes after childhood, John addresses the youth last. These are known by their strength and vigor, and their victory of evil.
It’s no surprise that these youth are distinguished by abiding in Christ. How else can someone overcome the evil one unless they are abiding in Christ? How else can you get spiritual strength unless you are abiding in Christ.
John isn’t talking about how many years you’ve been a Christian, he’s talking about your maturity. Where do you fit in this spectrum?
Are you a newborn that is just figuring out the basics of your faith? Every new discovery in the Bible is a light-bulb moment where you see a more beautiful picture of God. Is your Christian experience characterized by confession and repentance and humility as you face the sinfulness of your life? Do you have a spiritual parent who is helping you learn to walk the Christian path?
Or, maybe you’re in the prime of your Christian experience. Many of the struggles of your spiritual childhood are distant memories. You’ve overcome addictions and temptations, mastered Bible study, and found your place in service. And yet, you recognize that there is a lot more for you to learn. You look around you and see others who are more diplomatic, more seasoned, not as rough around the edges as you, and you long for a deeper walk with Jesus.
Some of you may humbly recognize that God has given you a place of spiritual responsibility. You are a leader in the church. Your years of experience with Jesus have given you a significant knowledge of God and the Bible. Others look up to you for spiritual insight and wisdom. You may preach or lead small groups or you may lead by example and not position. When others look at you they see someone who they want to become. They recognize that you’ve been walking with Jesus long enough that there is a quite, calm, confidence to your faith. You are the mothers and fathers of the church—the elder statesmen, the wise counselors, the kind mentors.
This seasons of life, or maturing process is the lens that John wants us to look through as we read his letter. With this in mind, let’s go back to the beginning of chapter 2.
John starts this section with the reminder that Jesus is our advocate, our atonement, our gift from God to bring us into fellowship with Him. And keep in mind that we are all children, no matter how mature a Christian we are. We all must confess our sins, and surrender ourselves to Jesus. And then John says,
3 And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. 4 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
Knowing God and obedience are two sides of the same coin. The more we know God, the more we confess and repent and turn to God, the more closely our lives align to the life Christ.
And this is where the maturing part comes in. We don’t begin our Christian walk with perfect knowledge or obedience. These are things that develop as we spend time with Jesus. John even reminds us in 1 John 1:10 that “if we say we have not sinned, God’s word is not in us.” While our goal is emulate Jesus, who John says is the model of righteousness, that can only happen when our focus is looking to Jesus. God wants us to walk with Him, he wants us to obey. That’s the direction we’re headed in. Along the way we will stumble because of ignorance or addiction or habit or bad influences. Stumbling is a normal part of growing up and learning to walk. The key is that a christian will keep returning to Jesus our advocate. The more times we’ve gone through that process of repentance, the more like Jesus we will become.
In 2 Corinthians 3:18, Paul says it this way.
18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
By beholding — spending time with Jesus — we become transformed so that our lives begin to look like Him.
Back in 1 John 2:6 there’s a key word — abide.
6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
This phrase isn’t an original idea for John—He heard it from Jesus.
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.
What is the fruit of abiding in Christ?
According to 1 John, that fruit includes obedience to the law. Time with Jesus. Beholding Jesus. Consuming the words of Jesus. Thinking about Jesus. Praying to and listening to the voice of Jesus. Always coming back to Jesus when you’ve strayed into sin. — Abiding in Jesus transforms us bit by bit. We get to know Him more. We understand him more. We love him more. And pretty soon, like Moses shining with God’s glory as he came down from the mountain, we begin to act and talk more and more like Jesus.
Jesus once said that the two great laws of God are to love the Lord Your God with all your heart, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
John knew that and so he naturally transitioned from “whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way as him” in verse 6, to “whoever loves his brother, abides in the light,” in verse 10. Obeying God and loving our brother are inseparable ideas in John’s mind because the law that we are to obey is based on the greater law of love.
It’s worth noticing the warning in verse 11
11 But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
Three times John points out that a lack of love is same as being lost in the darkness without God. You cannot be a child of God and hate your brother.
And yet, this too is part of the growing, maturing process.
As a new Christian you might harbor some grudges, or have strong negative feelings towards those who have hurt you. But as you get to know Jesus, you start to realize that He didn’t hold grudges. He said that we should bless those who curse us, and forgive people who use and abuse us. When He was on the cross Jesus said, “Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.”
As you mature in your walk with Christ, God will take you through a process of examining your disappointments, pains, and hurts and invite you to forgive the people who have harmed you.
If you don’t know what forgiveness looks like, take a long look at the cross.
If you’re still holding onto a grudge or have hatred in your heart for someone, then your maturing process will slow down until you allow Him to turn that hatred into forgiveness.
Jump ahead to 1 John 2:15 where John applies this maturing lens to pleasure. He says,
15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. 17 And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
These three things—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes and the pride of life—are the source of all kinds of trouble. But they aren’t hard to distinguish in the light of the knowledge and love of God. When we abide with Jesus, the love for worldly pleasure is so contrasted with the nature and beauty of Jesus that we loose our taste for it.
Several years ago I was in a small group with a young man. He wore clothes that leaned toward the gothic culture. He had long, disheveled hair. He played the original dungeon and dragons board game with a group of friends and had expensive character pieces and upgraded spell cards. He listened to dark music. But he kept coming to our Bible study. Over time, he let go of the girlfriend who just didn’t want to go deeper in her faith. He stopped listening to the dark music and replaced it with Christ-focused music. He dropped out of his D&D group and got rid of his paraphernalia. One day he showed up to our Bible study with a neat haircut and well fitting jeans and t-shirt. It was like he was a new person. The love of the pleasures of this world had diminished and fallen away as the love of Christ grew in his heart.
This young man had LOVED Dungeons and Dragons. He LOVED his music. He LOVED his girlfriend. But he found that he couldn’t love those things and love Jesus too. And so, as his love for Jesus grew, those other things dropped out of his life and were replaced with new passions and desires that ennobled him and others.
The Wheel
The Wheel
There are three aspects of the Christian experience that John keeps coming back to throughout his letter:
Knowledge. When we know God we’ll be transformed to be more and more like Him.
Obedience. As we abide in Christ, we will walk in the same way he walked. Our lives will begin to look more and more like His life.
Love. As we hang out with Jesus, we’ll love Him more, and we’ll love our brother and sister humans more too.
These three spokes of the Christian life are John’s way of balancing out the Christian experience.
If you’re all about knowledge, you might end up being a great theologian who “knows” about doctrine, but doesn’t love or obey God.
If you’re all about obedience, you might be able to check all the boxes — paid tithe, observed the Sabbath, told the unvarnished truth, no idols, sexually pure, etc — and yet not know Jesus and not speak and act with love towards other people.
If you’re all about love, you might focus on equality and affirmation and living well with others at the expense of truth and righteousness. Your so-called love might enable the very beliefs and behaviors that lead people away from Jesus.
Knowledge, Obedience and Love will be all growing in sync in the Christian life. As we get to know Jesus, we fall in love with Him. As we get to know Jesus, we let the sins in our lives fall away and we obey His Word. As we get to know Jesus, we start loving people more and more like He did.
You might think of the Christian life like a wheel rolling down the road, picking up speed as it goes. Early on, we might not know much or obey a lot or even love much, but we know enough that we need to come to Jesus. As we get to know him more we develop more speed as we obey more fully and love more deeply. Until one day we’re just humming along down Jesus’ path, following Him with all our hearts. It becomes who we are.
John happens to be the author of the book of Revelation and in Revelation chapter 14 John describes a group of people who have the Gather’s name—His character—imprinted in their minds. These people follow the lamb wherever He goes. John says that they are blameless. That’s the mature Christian experience. Not because they are without sin, but because they have come to a mature place of abiding in Jesus.
Antichrist
Antichrist
There’s one last section in chapter 2. It’s a warning section, pointing out false teachers, false prophets and what John calls antichrists.
John says,
18 Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.
The last hour of earth’s history is that time between Jesus’ first and second coming. And, as John pointed out, there are many antichrists. These are people who were once part of the church body, but left because they had some special truth. They try to entrap and lead other christians into their heresy. In John’s day that heresy was Gnosticism. This was a false christian movement that claimed that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross. It claimed that He was only in the form of a man but that he was really only divine. John made this clear in 1 John 4:2
2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,
There was another branch of this heresy that taught that Jesus was only human, though a special, super human—a version of us that had achieved perfection. It was by His purely human perfection that He was able to stand in our place. John shot down this theory saying,
22 Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. 23 No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.
Heresy is something that most Christians will have to evaluate at some point in their lives, so John gives some advice to us, and some encouragement:
26 I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. 27 But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him.
If you’re abiding in Christ, you don’t need this so-called special teaching from Christians that supposedly know things that other, mature, believers are ignorant about. These false teachers’ theology is warped by ignorance, and pride. They have abandoned the knowledge of the Gospel for a false version of God. In one way or another they reject Jesus, the very means of their salvation.
These teachers deny the truth of God’s word, and John makes it clear that if you follow these beliefs in denying Christ or the Spirit, then you are also denying the Father and you will walk in darkness.
Unfortunately, there are many people in the Christian church today teaching false versions of the gospels. Some accept Jesus, but deny the power of the gospel in their lives. Others take their eyes off Christ and focus all their attention on a unique prophetic interpretation or on a particular standard of behavior. John’s advice is to go back to the Bible and rely on the Holy Spirit, who was promised at our baptism, to lead us into all truth.
Conclusion
Conclusion
1 John 2 does a fair bit of wandering around, so let’s wrap up with a summary of what we’ve learned.
The Christian life is a life of growth and transformation that happens when we are abiding with Jesus.
We also learned several indicators that help us identify the condition of our experience with Jesus — our obedience to Jesus’ Word, our love for our fellow mankind, and the transformation of our pleasure from selfish, worldly desire to a love of godliness.
We learned to rely the Holy Spirit and a careful study of God’s word rather than the fanciful teachings of so-called Christians who deny the power of God in Jesus Christ.
All of these these points have one thing in common—abiding in Christ.
We can’t grow unless we abide.
When we abide we grow in knowledge, in obedience and in love.
When we abide we are anointed with the Holy Spirit who will lead us into truth and away from error.
Where are you in your Christian experience? Are you a little child, or a young person or a mature parent figure? More importantly, are you abiding in Jesus, day by day?
Let’s stand and sing our closing hymn, # 483, I need thee every hour.