About 40 years had passed since Rome and Britain had been at war, at a cost of 250,000 people…a huge number when you consider the population was much smaller then than now.
Finally, that war was coming to something of an end but other wars were ongoing all across the empire.
Recently a Volcano had erupted killing 16,000 people in a single city, buried in ash and fire, also a huge number when you consider the relative size of the population.
An epidemic broke out in the capital…soon a pandemic would sweep across the world.
The emperor was reestablishing worship of his family and persecution against the church was amping up…then he was assassinated, it was a time of ongoing political turmoil.
There were scandals in some of the churches and fights among some key church leaders.
During this time frame John wrote his first letter.
What is happening in our world as we read from his letter this morning?
The middle east is threatening to explode.
The Russian/Ukraine war is soon to pass two years in duration…no end in sight.
Azerbaijan and Armenia are largely off the radar but that could erupt into a major regional conflict.
The US house has its own war.
The culture wars continue to grow…however you choose to define them…but they like war.
Then you have…all the thousands of local problems, and the host of personal problems that we each deal with…just like John and his readers dealt with.
So, what are we to do in here?
Are we burying our heads in the sand by not talking about these many important issues in the world?
What about John, was he oblivious to all that was happening in his world when he wrote this letter…why didn’t he talk about it?
What if 1 John was about then current news?
Would we be reading it this morning? No.
And if we focus on current news in here…how will it shape us for time and eternity?
Do we really need yet another person (me) waxing eloquent on contemporary, soon to be, old news.
I am aware of what is happening…I read…I read news and the Bible and other books, mostly books, that are not knee-jerk reactions to current events.
I admit…I don’t care for social media, or letters to the editors…I prefer to hear from people with certain expertise and with longer perspectives.
There is a place in the church, of course to talk of these things…I have many conversations about them.
But I am convinced by settled conviction that what we need in gathered worship is the longest perspective of all…God’s.
He has merciful given it to us in his word
As we are shaped by his word we are equipped to go out and shape our world…this has always been God’s strategy to change the world, his strategy hasn’t changed.
Now, there is historical narrative in the Bible, like in the book of Exodus, Acts…but this is not newspaper or blog narrative…it is narrative narrowly focused on the acts of God in history building towards the coming of Christ and return of Christ.
We must be aware of what is happening around us…but we must not allow current events to be the main shaping force in our lives.
And we also must not move through life only doing introspection…we need to pay attention to our hearts…but only so we can align them with the truth.
We must see what is happening around us, and in us, through the lens of the gospel…not any other lens.
If we see through a gospel lens…both the macro events in the world, and micro events in our own lives…then we are equipped to be found faithful in all it.
And that, must be our primary aim.
Percival Lowell, was a 19th century American astronomer whose name is on an observatory in Arizona.
He made several significant observations of the planets. His biggest contribution being the hunt for Planet X beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Although his search was unsuccessful, Pluto was eventually discovered near the place Lowell had predicted the missing planet would be.
Mars fascinated Lowell the most. He was convinced that there are intelligent beings on Mars, for he could see through the telescope a maze of canal like structures on the surface of the planet.
He theorized that an advanced civilization indigenous to Mars built the canals to bring water from the polar ice caps in some last-ditch attempt to survive on a dying planet…that’s a big leap, Lowell.
Lowell also saw a spoke like structure on Venus…was there life there as well?
Other scientists were skeptical…but curious…what was he seeing and why didn’t others see it as well?
A century later a couple of amateur astronomers proposed a theory: Lowell was gazing into his own eye.
Because of the way Lowell would set up his telescope he was effectively turning it into a giant ophthalmoscope (op thall mo scope), an instrument used by eye doctors to see into the eye.
What Lowell saw as spokes on other planets were actually shadows of the blood vessels and other structures in his own retina.
So instead of mapping the surface of planets, Lowell had been mapping the structures in his own eye.
This phenomenon is a well-known annoyance among astronomers observing planets at very high magnification.
He was looking into the cosmos and he was seeing his own eye.
John is looking through the lens of the gospel and seeing God in history…past, present, future.
He will in this passage, challenge us to look forward to the return of Christ, backwards to Christ’s first coming…then to look at our own lives through this perspective.
November 5,12,19, I’m teaching our River Christian Training class on worldviews.
The term, worldview, was coined in the not so distance past, maybe by James Sire, author of “The Universe Next Door”…now it is used by virtually everyone in describing how people see the world.
I hear or read it almost every week in some news commentary.
But a worldview is best described not as how we see the world, but what we see the world through.
It is the lens through which we look at the world, understand it, and live in it.
Everyone has a worldview, but not everyone is aware of it…or of how it impacts them.
Certainly not everyone’s is coherent or true.
John’s letter, like all of Scripture is giving us the lens through which can see the world as it is.
Non-Christian worldviews skew perspective…like Lowell seeing his own eye.
Scripture is a corrective lens; it fixes our myopia and allows us to see what is actually there.
John is specifically concerned with Christian confidence, certainty.
As people look around and are confused by heresy, and personal tragedy, and current events and trends.
He wants his dear friends to have certainty in the gospel…to have confidence.
To that end he gives three tests…to help us with our confidence.
- Theological: Do we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, God incarnate? If not, then you are not a Christian. If so, then make sure you maintain that focus, with its implications, in order to maintain your confidence.
- Moral: Sin is incompatible with walking in the light. We ought to be growing in Christlikeness over time. If we continue in sin, we are not Christians. We can sin and we will, but we must not surrender to it…Christ has come to give us freedom from it.
- Social: Since God is love, to say you love God but to not love others is to be deceived.
-You can’t love the unseen God, if you don’t love the people, you see right around you.
So, these three things: Faith, holiness, and love are the true signs of the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s life.
He introduced these tests, these three lenses in his letter…then he took a couple of laps around other important issues…now he is back for round two of the three tests.
- Moral: 2:28-3:10
- Love 3:11-18
- Truth/Doctrine 4:1-6
Our confidence, our certainty grows when we train for righteousness, when we are faithful in seeking to love one another and when we fix our minds on the truth of who Jesus is.
Today we look at his elaboration of the moral test.
The proof of being a Christian is not just orthodox belief, but orthodox behavior:
-ortho (straight)
-doxa (praise)
Orthodoxy, truth about who God is leads to worship…leads to orthopraxy…life lived in line with that truth.
Someday, John writes, we will see Christ face to face, and we will be fully transformed in his image…we will be holy.
For now…the more clearly we see him, the more we become like him morally.
28 So now, little children, remain in him so that when he appears we may have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his coming. 29 If you know that he is righteous, you know this as well: Everyone who does what is right has been born of him.
Righteousness is the evidence of new birth, it not the cause of it.
Our confidence is tied to this righteousness.
Our lives are to bear our family resemblance…as we live as his kids, we grow in joy and confidence in him.
Sin undermines our confidence.
3 See what great love the Father has given us that we should be called God’s children—and we are!
“How great” is actually a word in the Greek that means “of what country?” (potapen)
Imagine being at a seaport in the first century and people were coming from all over the Mediterranean…Asia Minor, Italy, North Africa…you ask passersby…”what country are you from?”
John is asking here…”Where does this kind love come from? it is not from around here!”
See what great love the father has given us…How can it be that we should be called God’s children!
David put it like this.
Ps 8 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?
God is able to be called, Abba, Daddy…he has given that to us…but he remains God.
We cannot forget that or we will start seeing our own eye when we look around at the world…we will “emsmall” God down to our size, like Lowell making a planet the size of his own eye.
When I contemplate the cosmos, that before time and space, God was.
I cannot bring myself to demand that God answer to me on anything.
I don’t expect to understand him at any level on my own…had he not told me, I could know him.
Had he not made me, I would not exist.
Did he not hold me in existence, I would cease to exist.
He does not answer to me, I answer to him…he owes me no explanation, no apology…I am his possession and he can rightly do with me what he wants.
He and we, exist for his own glory…if we cannot “see” this we will not “see” anything else clearly.
“Terry, you say that flippantly…I wonder if you would say that if this happened or that…?”
Yeah, I wonder too…I don’t know how I will respond in the future. I hope well and in faith.
But I am not remotely flippant about this…and I have believed this in the middle of some difficult times…so no, I’m not flippant…but I do believe.
I think about the transcendence of God over all things…then I go to God with David’s question “Who am I you are mindful of me?”
The biggest question for me…is not…why isn’t God more involved, it is why is he involved at all?
The greatness of the God who made the cosmos is one thing…he is transcendent.
The greatness of a cosmos making God who calls me his child…is another thing.
“Of what country is this love, it is not from around here.”
Try to get next to some celebrity, some world leader…you won’t get close…they live behind gates and guards and wealth and walls.
But these human celebrities…all of them…are made of dust and they will return to dust…they are nothing.
The cosmos making God has called us his children…not in the general sense of being humans and but in the specific sense of being born again through the gospel.
He is abba, daddy, and we are his children by new birth.
The reason the world does not know us is that it didn’t know him.
John says this directly in his Gospel…Jesus made the world and then he came to his own creation, the people he had made, but they didn’t recognize him.
The fact that we have been born again is not going to be readily obvious to people around is…just as people saw Jesus and didn’t see who he was…they will see us and not see who we are.
When those who do not know Christ look at the world, they look at it through their worldview lens…the same is true for when they look at his born-again children.
We are to see through the Gospel as we look at the world around and live our lives in it.
The gospel is that time telescope that looks back and looks forward and then allows us to see how to live our lives now.
We are not like the world without Christ…they look through the lens of their own eyes and see themselves.
God is often created in their image.
We look through the lens of the gospel and we see God’s purpose in the world…we look back at the first coming of Christ…with its moral implications and we look forward to his return with its moral implications.
It is tragic when we turn the first coming of the Messiah into mere cultural sentimentality.
I love most everything about cultural Christmas…I get excited when I see Christmas stuff in Home Depot in August…I love White Christmas, the movie, the song, and the rare actual white Christmas in Wichita.
I am sad that for many, all the trappings, submerge the most important event in human history…the first coming of Christ.
Sad because his coming brought us life…transformation.
It is equally tragic when Christians turn his immanent return into weird speculation.
Speculation that always goes up when world events heat up.
Ironically, Jesus said in Matt 24 when you hear of wars and rumors of wars the end is not yet.
Paul wrote in 1 Thess 5 that the end will come when people are saying “Peace and prosperity.”
We should never speculate on the end but if we did…it would make more sense to do so when the market is up and wars are down.
The point, biblically, of looking back at the Lord’s first advent and forward to his second is to impact how we live our lives now between those events.
2 Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is.
We are God’s children, whether the world sees it or not.
But what we will be, remains to be seen…the exact nature of our future existence is a mystery…it does no good to speculate beyond what has been revealed…and that is not a lot.
My suspicion is that we wouldn’t understand what we were looking at if God were to reveal it more fully…our future glory, is likely beyond our current ability to comprehend.
Charlie Plumb, grew up in small town KS in the 40’s and early 50’s.
I’ve become acquainted with him the past 6 months and have enjoyed hearing some of his story.
He became a Navy fighter pilot and was shot down in Vietnam.
He is in his eighties now, still travels the world speaking of his experiences and when asked, “Did you have great dreams of being a pilot, traveling the world?”
He responded, “I saw plans flying over but didn’t think I would fly one, I wasn’t equipped to have those dreams from my experience.”
How does a boy in 1948 KS, dream of what he cannot conceive?
His dreams grew with his experiences.
That is us…we have been given as much information about our future as we are equipped to handle…more will follow when we have been given better equipment.
Here is what we do know: When he appears, we will be like him, because we will see him as he is.
We are already being remade in his image; we are not yet fully restored to that image…we will be then.
We will be with Christ and like Christ…the rest of what that will look like, we leave with God.
Again, the reason for the revelation we have been given is transformational not speculative.
We have been given enough insight in order to train to become like Christ now…enough to give us a sure hope.
3 And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.
This hope is: he will appear, we will see him, we will be like him.
This is not an uncertain hope, like mere human hopes…I hope I marry, I hope I have children, I hope this is not cancer, I hope the war doesn’t expand.
This is not like that of hope…this is hope as a sure thing…hope as confidence.
This confidence is to lead to changed character.
So first we look through the gospel lens to the future return of Christ and what that will mean for us then…that view is to shape us now, in the present.
We look through it as we see the world around us and it shapes our:
- Ethics: we do the right thing when it costs us, we do the right thing when no one is looking.
- Morality: we seek to be pure, because purity is what Christ is and purity is freedom.
- Values: we align our values when him, what he says is most valuable…actually is.
-Self-seeking, pride…the stuff John addressed in 2:15-17 is stupid stuff, the dust of death.
Sin is not just the acts of rebellious commission (active hatred, lust, pride) and of acts of omission (active failure to love, failure to serve)…
But it is also the subtle sin that puts ourselves at the center of things, that make life about us.
This is where we all struggle alike…this is the core of all sin: “Me…not God” becomes the center…we look around and see our own eye.
CS Lewis wrote the problem of Pain in 1940…He had lost his mom as a child and a dark shadow permanently fell over his family.
He had personally suffered in the trenches of World War I.
Now as he wrote this book his homeland, England, was being bombed from the air as World War II had descended with its darkness.
I’ve read the book many times and find it very helpful…it is largely cognitive, ideas about suffering…how God could be good and powerful and yet suffering could exist.
But recently I re-read his book (A grief observed) that gives his personal view on suffering…it is a view from inside his heart after his wife, Joy, died of cancer…it is a very different kind of book.
The title is not “Grief Observed” but “A” Grief observed…it is very, very specific.
One of the things that comes out in the book is how often he, Lewis…not God, not others, not even Joy his wife…becomes the center of things.
So, as we talk of sin…be careful that you neither rank yourself using common categories of sins…I am better because, I am worse because.
Or to look at unbelievers and say, “But they are so nice, how can they be far from God!”
God alone sees the heart, and scripture says…in Jer. 17:19, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, who can understand it?”
All humans, are prone to look at the cosmos, and their own lives…and to see their own eye.
This is the center of sin, making ourselves the center of all things…rather than crowning and keeping Christ the center.
So, we focus our view on Christ’s return to compel us to be more like him now…this is our destiny, so John writes…let’s get on with that destiny now.
This the end of human history…Christ is in charge of it, he will being it to his own conclusion.
Why waste our efforts, joys, and sorrows on anything else…become more like him Christian now…it is your destiny.
Next, he adjusts his telescope from looking at the implications of our future hope to looking back at the implications for our lives in Christ’s first appearing.
What are the implications?
They are the same…Christ has come, Christ will return…let those realities shape your life…let them propel you towards holiness.
He will repeat his argument twice in these verses: the redundancy is for emphasis.
First the problem: sin
Then the solution: Christ came to defeat Satan and sin.
4 Everyone who commits sin practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness.
The word sin “hamartia” is a word that means to miss the mark.
But that is a background definition of the word, but not all that the word means.
John refines the definition…Sin is lawlessness…it is a defiant violation of God’s moral law.
We look around us or inside our hearts and see “relatively harmless sin”…”come on, it’s not that bad.”
John defines sin as lawlessness…defiance of God’s moral law.
You can no more break moral law than you can break the laws of nature….dive into a solid object, you will break your neck.
Dive into sin, you will break your life.
That is the problem…sin is lawlessness…now the solution.
5 You know that he was revealed so that he might take away sins, and there is no sin in him. 6 Everyone who remains in him does not sin;, everyone who sins has not seen him or known him. 7 Little children, let no one deceive you. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. 8 The one who commits sin is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose: to destroy the devil’s works. 9 Everyone who has been born of God does not sin, because his seed remains in him; he is not able to sin, because he has been born of God. 10 This is how God’s children and the devil’s children become obvious. Whoever does not do what is right is not of God, especially the one who does not love his brother or sister.
What we have here is a duplication of a line of reasoning:
The set up: V. 4 & 8: Everyone who sins, the one who commits sin
The terrible fact of sin: V. 4 & 8: The nature of sin is lawlessness, the origin of sin is the devil
The purpose of Christ’s appearing: V. 5 & 8: He appeared to take away our sins, he appeared to destroy the devil’s work.
The conclusion: V. 6 & 9: So, no one who lives in him will keep on sinning, no one born of God will continue to sin.
To continue to sin as a follower of Christ is at odds with the purpose of his coming…it is to fail to live in line with our birthright.
What I want to do now is to look at some key points of application…this is appropriate because John’s purpose is to be changed by the gospel…not merely to collect information about it.
- The first step toward holiness is to recognize the “sinfulness of sin.”
-It’s essence as lawlessness…it is not harmless…none of it is.
-It’s diabolical origin…you play with sin, you are messing around with the ultimate terrorist, Satan…he wants to steal, kill, destroy.
- the second step is to see it’s absolute incapability with Christ.
-I want to be more like him…then you must be less like that…because Christ is without sin.
The more we “see” this the more we will see sin as it is and the more, we will be determined to be rid of it.
- We must hold all John has said in its proper balance.
Earlier he wrote that we all sin and we have a path to forgiveness.
Here he writes that those born of God will not sin.
-He is not here contradicting himself
We all sin and we must be continually cleansed, but the one who is born again will not willingly, continue in sin.
They will mess up, fess up, and move on.
John says everyone sins, and then he writes…but sin is incompatible with the Christian life.
We don’t continue in sin.
This is not confusing…it’s reasonable.
No good parent tells their child…”I know you are not perfect, and I love you…so do whatever you want and we will hope the best.”
And no good parents tells their child…”There you go again; you missed perfection again…I’m done with you and you are dead to me.”
The good parent does exactly what God does…and as John writes, “I am writing so you will not sin, but if you do you have an advocate.”
“If confess our sins he faithful to forgive our sin debt and cleanse our sin stain.”
No…go, be my child…obey and thrive.
The new birth exerts a strong internal pressure toward holiness…we are drawn to become more like Jesus.
If you are born again…I know you understand this.
The desire to become more holy…the remorse the Spirit brings at our sin.
John has written so we would have certainty. “I have written so you will know you have eternal life.”
He has given us three tests to increase our clarity…because clarity impacts certainty.
-Clarity about who Christ is…he is the incarnate God, died, rose, and will return.
-Clarity about what sin is…is it lawlessness, it is Satanic in nature
-Clairity about how we are to live our lives…love others
Increased clarity on these things empowers increased certainty about them.
Perhaps you are struggling with doubt because you are struggling in rather than against sin.
Sin undermines confidence in Christ…turn to him for forgiveness, power over sin…and increased confidence.
Let’s pray:
Father, please helps us let the truth of Christ’s coming and his return…compel us to live our destiny now.
Your destiny is to see Christ and to become like him…empower us to get on with that now…and not be sidetracked by lesser things.
God help us to look at the world around us and to look inside at our own hearts and not see our own eyes…but to see you at work.
For your glory, for the good of others, and for our own joy.