Sermon Tone Analysis

It is truly an honor and privilege to be given this opportunity to look at the Word of God together as a church.

I want to be model honesty for the church and say that this has been a hard week.

One of our church members has gone home to be with the Lord.

It is hard for us a church, but even harder for the family.

And in the face of such difficulty we are given an opportunity.

We are given the opportunity to practice what we preach.

For the past 11 weeks or so I have been up here talking about the blessed assurance of salvation there is in Christ Jesus.

We have been looking at how we may KNOW that we have eternal life.

We have been given the doctrinal tests of being obedient, clinging to and discerning truth, and last but most definitely not least, love.

Loving God and loving His people.

Church, now is the time to show the Love of God to His people.

As the McCullough family has been dealing with this loss, there have been two silver linings that I have witnessed.

Number one, the church has been here to support them.

While there is nothing we could do to make the pain of loss go away, we have been able to show love.

May we continue to do so.

Durbin Memorial Baptist Church is a loving church, and we need to live up to that distinction now more than ever.

The other silver lining to what we have gone through this week, is that our dear brother Eddie is no longer in pain.

No more heart troubles, no more procedures to be had.

He has been made whole and is enjoying the full presence of the Lord.

While we shed tears, brother Eddie is kicked back with at least that slight grin he was known to have, experiencing the glory of heaven.

Allow me to say that this is more than a platitude.

I care too much about the integrity of the pulpit and the charge that has been given me to preach the true gospel, to offer anyone a false hope for the sake of just making them feel better.

I could not say these things about someone if I was not sincere.

Brother Eddie is at home with the Lord.

How can I be so sure?

Because Jesus said this:

Whosoever hears the words of Christ and believes that Jesus was sent by God the Father to be the perfect sacrifice and pay the debt of our sins has eternal life.

That person does not come into judgment, they will not be seen as unrighteous before a holy, righteous God, but rather they pass from death and into life!

When those who know the Lord pass from this life, they go on to experience life more abundant than we could ever even comprehend.

Those who know the Lord experience the ultimate blessing when they go on from this body to be at home with the Lord.

I am certain of this.

Eddie has gone on to be with many others we know, but even more than being reunited with other Christians in glory, he is with the Lord.

The Lord of all comfort, the Lord of all blessings, the Lord of All.

We know this because we know Brother Eddie knew and loved the Lord and that is the promise that we have been given from the Lord Himself as we read in John 5 just a moment ago.

And you might say that all of that is all well and good, but how can we know that this Jesus, the Christ as we call Him, how can we know that this Jesus can deliver on such a promise?

Today in our text from 1 John we are given an apologetic of Jesus Christ being the Son of God.

Apologetics are the reasonings to prove something.

Today in the book of 1 John we are given the proof that Jesus of Nazareth IS the Son of God.

In days passed, the existence of God would have been a given.

Today it is not so assumed by the general populace.

I don’t want to dwell too long on providing the rationale for the existence of God, but briefly, one of the simplest proof is if everything comes from something, then everything had to come from something.

That something being God.

God created all this existence that we enjoy out His great grace.

His hand is seen all throughout Scripture.

His handiwork is seen in His creation.

He has given us His word as recorded in the Scriptures.

His prophets spoke of a coming Messiah.

That Messiah, that deliverer, that great hope is none other than Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Today, as we walk through the text of 1 John 5:6-12, we will see the proof that God has given us that Jesus is the Son of God, and the great Savior of whosoever believeth in Him.

We are given a testimony from God the Father on who Jesus is and why we should believe that HE is the only Savior.

Let’s begin hearing this testimony in verse 6.

In this first verse, John is giving us the rationale for why Jesus is THE ONE.

Some translations even replace that He in the beginning with the phrase THE ONE.

So it could read, This is THE ONE who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ.

John wants to make it very clear that Jesus Christ is THE ONE.

He is the One who fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies.

He is the One Savior.

He is the One Messiah.

Everything else mentioned in this verse is given to support this idea.

I cannot overemphasize enough that Jesus Christ is THE ONE and the only one.

We will touch on this more later on, but there is no other way, no one better no one higher.

John is telling us that the blood and the water prove that He is the one, the Son of God.

But what does this mean?

How do water and blood testify that Jesus is the Son of God?

There has been a bit of theological debate on the matter.

Some suggest that the water and the blood refer to the substances we see flow from Jesus’ side after He died on the cross.

The soldiers wanted to be certain that He passed away and so they pierced His side with a spear and water and blood flowed out.

We talked about this during our Easter series for a bit, and it is a medical confirmation of His passing due to the nature of being on the cross.

But I do not believe that this is what John is referring to, primarily because of the point that he is making in the section of Scripture.

He is using this verse to confirm the deity, the God-ness of Jesus.

The water and blood that flowed from His side is a greater affirmation of the humanity of Jesus.

Others suggest that the water and the blood refer to the ordinances of the church, baptism and the Lord’s supper.

People in this camp would suggest that when we baptize and partake in the Lord’s Supper we are reaffirming what John is saying in this verse.

However, as one commenter noted, “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the church’s witness to Christ, not the Father’s.”

So instead John is using the water and the blood to point to particular moments in which God the Father has testified that Jesus is indeed His Son.

The water is referring to Jesus’ actual baptism.

The blood refers His death on the cross and particular in both of these instances we see God the Father supernaturally testifying that Jesus is the Son of God.

These two events are the bookends of Jesus’ earthly ministry and in both the Father testifies of the Son.

Before we expound on that, I want it to be known that John is intentionally and importantly repetitious when he says Jesus came by water and the blood and then he says not by the water only but the water and the blood.

I’ve mentioned throughout this series that John is committed to truth and dispelling false teachings.

One of the heresies in that time was that Jesus was a regular man who had the Spirit of God fall on Him at His baptism but that before the crucifixion that Spirit left Jesus, meaning that the lifeless body on the cross was just that of a simple man.

They denied that Jesus was really anything of note in and of Himself and was rather just a vessel for the Spirit of God as His Anointed one.

But this cannot be.

If Jesus was going to be the propitiation, the atonement, for the sins of man, it would have to be the Son of God, fully God fully man, who gave up His life on the cross.

“If He did not possess His divine nature on the cross, Jesus could not and did not conquer sin and death for believers.”

But we are told in 2 Cor 5:21

So in His life and death, Jesus was and is the Son of God.

The Father testifies to this at the baptism of Jesus.

John the Baptist was at the river Jordan preaching as the forerunner of Christ instructing people to participate in a “baptism of repentance.”

John knew that the Messiah was coming.

He was telling everyone to repent of their sins and to give a public testimony of their repentance through the waters of baptism.

In the Jewish culture such a rite was reserved for Gentiles that were joining the Jewish faith, so when these Jews responded to John’s call they were showing that they were no better than gentiles.

They, too, were in need of repentance.

But here we find a tension.

Jesus, the sinless one, had no need for repentance!

John the baptist acknowledges this:

John knew himself to be the repenting sinner.

Why would Jesus allow John the Baptist to baptize Him?

Jesus was modeling obedience.

“He publicly identified with sinners.”