This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 26 April 2009 on 1 John 3:4-10.
I’m going to start by reading you a number of statements. After each one, I want you to put up your hand if you agree with what I say. Okay? Hands up if you agree.
1. Becoming a Christian means you don’t have any fun in life.
2. All Christians are ‘loving people’ all the time.
3. Bad things don’t happen to truly godly people.
4. Christian churches are places where you can trust everyone you meet.
5. Christians never have any struggles and always feel close to God.
Well done, folks. Each one of these statements is wrong for different reasons. Of course Christians can have fun – as Christians we are people with a deep joy inside us and it should show in how we celebrate the fact that Jesus is alive and our living King and Saviour. Christians are not always ‘loving people’ – sometimes we get it wrong and act towards others in ways we shouldn’t. There’s little much clearer in the Bible than its teaching that bad things will happen to good, godly people. Just look at Jesus. He truly was godly – in fact he was God – but they crucified him. Look also at Job, Joseph, David, Daniel, Peter, Paul – there’s hardly a believer in the Old or New Testaments about whom we don’t read undergoing periods of pain and suffering. Christian churches are not always places where you can trust everyone you meet. They should be – but I’m sorry to say they aren’t. For example, there are churches where false and damaging teaching is taught. It would be wrong to trust those teachers, even if they stand up and the front and claim they are preaching God’s word.
But it’s the last statement we’re going to concentrate on tonight. It is simply not the case that Christians do not struggle in their faith and always feel close to God. Life is a struggle for the Christian as much as for anyone else!
As I said, we’re going to concentrate on verses 4-10 of the passage tonight. Last week we say how the passage teaches that God is our Father who loves us and adopts us as his children. We also saw how we will one day ‘grow up’ to be something so amazing that John can’t really tell us what it will be because it will be so wonderful and so much more than we could ever appreciate in this life. We also saw that though the future is sparklingly bright for the Christian, the present is also good because we are God’s children, and since we are we need to live as God’s children and keep ourselves pure. We also saw that the way John envisages us doing that is not by our own efforts but by looking to Christ, by confessing our sins to him, by trusting in him and believing that ‘the blood of Jesus purifies us from every sin’ (as chapter 1, verse 7 says).
Tonight’s verses follow on from this statement that God’s children purify themselves and I think verses 4-10 tell us about three distinct – though linked – struggles that we all go through in our Christian lives. They are our struggle against sin, our struggle with the devil, and our struggle to be people of love, to do good and be righteous in how we live our lives. And as I said, these three struggles though distinct are nevertheless closely linked.
The first struggle the passage talks about is the struggle with sin.
John begins, in verse 4, almost with a definition of what sin is. ‘Everyone who sins breaks the law ... sin is lawlessness.’
Most of you will know that when I left school I studied law. One of the hardest subjects you study as part of the degree is called jurisprudence which basically means the philosophy of law – or in simple terms, what is the purpose of the law. What’s it for? As you might imagine, there are many different theories about this but almost every one agrees on one thing – the purpose of the law is to help groups of people live together in peace and harmony. The law is a series of rules designed to make life better for every one, and help people to get on with other. You might even say that the purpose of the law is to produce right conduct and where there is no right conduct to both punish the wrongdoer and give justice to those who have suffered from wrong conduct.
That might help us understand what John means here in verse 4. Sin is lawlessness. The particular Greek construction used here means the terms are interchangeable: sin is lawlessness, and lawlessness is sin. Sin is breaking the rules, flouting the law. Sin is anything that goes against the law including wrong thoughts, words and wrong behaviour. But at its heart, sin is anything that goes against right conduct designed to help people live in harmony with each other and with God.
The law John is speaking about here is not Roman law – the law of the state though – it’s God’s law he means, God’s rules of right and wrong. Not so much the particularly Jewish laws about kosher food, or Sabbath observance, but the moral principles shared by every society in the world – God’s law condemning dishonesty, pride, hypocrisy, anger, violence and so on.
And it’s in breaking this law and committing sins that is the first of the Christian struggles identified in the passage.
John isn’t mealy mouthed about it – he ‘shoots from the hip’ as the saying goes. He gives his readers it straight.
You are God’s children, he’s just told them. Jesus Christ is your big brother and as you’re all in the one family, you’ll keep yourself pure just as he is pure. That’s what John expects of Christians. We’ve to be pure. He is also very realistic and knows that we fail to do that – and we looked at that last week – the importance of coming to Christ for forgiveness and restoration to purity through his blood.
I hope you can follow John’s train of thought here in verses 5 and 6 and again in verse 9. You know, he says to the readers, you know that when Christ appeared he took away your sins. This is reminiscent of John the Baptist’s words about Jesus quoted in John’s Gospel – ‘Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ He took away your sins, and there was no sin in him, so no one who is in union with him, who lives in him, who abides in him, and has his Spirit living inside him or her, keeps on sinning. And he even goes as far as to say in verse 6 that any who does ‘keep on sinning’ has not really met Jesus or trusted in him.
These are strong words that John says. And I don’t want to minimise the forcefulness of what he says. Christians – you and I – should have nothing to do with sin. If we are in union with Christ, joined to Christ by faith, then sinning should never happen. There’s never a good excuse for sinning. It’s never ‘okay’. It’s always serious, it’s always wrong, and it always hurts our relationship with God. But at the same time there is always forgiveness, pardon and restoration available to a sinner who truly comes again in repentance and faith to Jesus for the first time or the millionth time.
However, at the same time I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression. Notice that John does not say that a true Christian never sins. John knows very well that Christians sin. As we’ve seen before, he actually says in chapter 1 of this same letter that if we say we don’t sin we make God out to be a liar and the truth is not in us! What John says – and it’s well brought out in the TNIV we’re looking at – is that real Christians don’t keep on sinning. Other translations say things like ‘No one who lives in him makes a practise of sin’. In other words, Christians don’t go on and on sinning continuously. Yes, there are sins we might struggle with for years – maybe even our whole life – that’s not what John means. He means that if a person goes on and on sinning and it doesn’t bother him or her – if you can sin and not feel guilty about it, then you might ask yourself how real your relationship with Jesus Christ really is.
The point is reiterated in verse 9. ‘Those who are born of God will not continue to sin because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.’ In other words, we are God’s children, so we will act in a different way - we will act like God is our Father and his ‘seed’ is in us. This is a metaphor which means God’s life changing, life growing power is inside us - and we know this probably refers to the Holy Spirit who lives in us. John’s point is basically that when Christians sin they are acting ‘out of character’, which is the opposite to the situation for the people of the world. They are sinners by nature; when they sin, it’s no more than them acting in character. But for Christians to sin is unnatural because they have a new nature and a new life as God’s children.
Nevertheless, although the Christian has a new nature whose inclination is not to sin, we have not totally got rid of our old selves. And so, our struggle with sin remains very real. It exists and we shouldn’t minimise it, and though it should be fought against, it shouldn’t consume our lives with guilt either. We need to cling to verses like Romans 8:1: ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus’ and remember they were written to sinners, not to perfect stained-glass saints.
Also remember that the best way of combating it is not by trying to live a stricter and stricter moral life, keeping yourself out of harms way, out of the way of temptation. That’s almost the worst thing you could do. I know – I’ve been there. When I was younger I was like a young Pharisee. I would avoid sins by avoiding certain places, by avoiding certain activities, by avoiding certain people, by cutting myself off more and more from the world around me. The trouble is that the more and more effort you put into overcoming sin through your own moral efforts, the less and less you look to Jesus and the less and less you are living under the gospel. You are actually going backwards and living under the law. The way to tackle sin is yes to break bad habits of actually committing sins (the Bible says we are to put sin to death – we are to murder sin in our lives) but alongside that we need to keep the cross of Christ and the forgiveness we find there firmly in view. Whether it’s a law of nature for all of us or not, I don’t know. But I do know that I find it much much easier to do something because I want to than if I have to. By that I mean, paradoxically, it’s actually easier not to sin once you realise you are living to please God because you want to and not because you have to.
If I can use a sporting analogy – have you noticed how well the Scottish football team or Rugby team play when there’s nothing at stake? You know how it is, they’ll get beaten by Peru and draw with Iran and then when they’re out of the World Cup, they’ll beat Brazil or Holland. It’s because the pressures off, isn’t it? There’s no weight of expectation. The team can go out and just play for fun, and guess what – suddenly they are playing like world beaters and it is fun!
That’s a bit like the struggle against sin. If we live fearing God won’t accept us because we’ve sinned again and again, if we live guilt-ridden lives that focus only inward on how bad we are, if we are always disappointed with ourselves, then we end up failing more and the pressure becomes too great. But once we know we’ve already ‘qualified for the next round’ (because unlike the Scotland team, we are ‘more than conquerors’ and our name is already on the trophy so to speak), we can play for fun and actually sin less.
So that’s the first struggle – the struggle against sin.
The second struggle is our struggle against the devil.
The Bible is very clear that the devil exists. I know that nowadays there are many people who scoff at such things. Some of them are even in the churches. But as we are Christians who take the Bible seriously, we’re faced with clear teaching in passage after passage – from Genesis to Revelation in fact – that the devil is very real. The Bible is sketchy about his origins. It seems he was one of God’s angels who rebelled against God and was thrown out of heaven. He is known as ‘the Prince of the air’ or ‘the Prince of this world’ which could mean that he was originally meant to help God rule on earth, but decided instead to take over and rule himself without reference to God. What we do know is that he is the implacable enemy of God, he is opposed to Christ and he is the enemy of Christ’s people.
This passage teaches us a couple of things about the devil. In verse 8 it says that the devil has been sinning from the beginning. He is in fact the worst sinner of all because he is the first sinner, he is totally evil and he is never going to change. He is going to be sent to hell one day forever.
The devil is not just a mere personification of evil, he is an evil being – a fallen and depraved angel – who is determined to wreck as much of God’s creation and as many lives as he can before his time runs out.
Our struggle as Christians against the devil is two-fold I think. First, it is clear that the devil will try to get us to commit sins. He will tempt us. The very first time we encounter this figure in the Old Testament is in the Garden of Eden when he appears in the guise of a snake, tempting Eve to disobey God. We also know that the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness at the beginning of his public ministry. He comes to tempt us too. In fact several times in the New Testament, he is called ‘the Tempter.’
Each one of us will be tempted in different ways, but all of us will be tempted in some way. I know that’s the case for me anyway. The devil always seems to come to me in areas where he knows he can get at me. And it will be the same for each one here. I suppose it’s in the nature of ‘temptation’ that it is only felt in areas of our life where we are actually susceptible to temptation.
The other struggle we have as Christians against the devil is in his primary role of being the Accuser. In fact that’s what the devil means. In Hebrew his title is satan, in Greek diabolos from where we get ‘devil’ and both mean ‘the accuser’. It could mean that, as one commentator puts it, he was indeed God’s appointed Accuser – the chief prosecutor in heaven – and he got so caught up in wanting to find things to report to God that he ended up encouraging heavenly beings to disobey God so he could accuse them.
Whereas the devil’s role as tempter is uppermost when he’s trying to get us to sin, his primary function as accuser comes to the fore when we have sinned. That’s when the devil comes and really goes to work on us.
You probably know how it is when you realise you have committed a sin? You get that feeling inside - the feeling of guilt. Now, let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that feeling. Guilt is supposed to be there when we do things wrong. God put it there in that part of our mind or our spirit that we call conscience. Feeling guilty when we sin is not the devil’s work. No, he moves in after that. Maybe we’ve realised we’ve sinned, we come to God and confess our sin and ask him to forgive us, or we go to the person we’ve sinned against and say sorry. Then the devil goes to work on you.
Because according to God’s Word, when we confess our sins, God forgives us. We start off again with a clean slate and are to move forward with God again. But the devil comes along and whispers in your ear: ‘You’re not really forgiven. There’s no way God is going to forgive you this time. You’d be as well giving up now. You’ve had it.’ Or he comes and says: ‘Call yourself a Christian? How could you do what you’ve done if that’s the case? You’re a sham. You’re no more a Christian than all those other hypocrites.’ Make no mistake those accusations from the devil are very real and they are very powerful. They get to us deep inside, don’t they?
The devil’s accusations can be like having a monkey on your back. They stop you in your tracks - they make you change your focus from looking outward to Christ to looking inward into yourself. They can make you feel so much false guilt that you become totally paralysed and ineffective as a Christian.
Both of these works of the devil are a real struggle for every Christian at times I think, maybe even a lot of the time!
I have to say verse 8b is one my favourite verses in the whole Bible. It’s a verse it’s worth memorising and coming back to again and again when the devil is tempting or accusing you. ‘The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.’ There’s a whole sermon in those words. All I will say tonight is that we need to remember that Christ has already destroyed the devil’s work and defeated the devil through his death on the cross.
So, when the devil comes to us as tempter, we can say to him - Christ has defeated you and so sin has no power over me. I have died with Christ through trusting in his work on the cross. As Paul wrote in Romans 6:11: ‘Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.’ If we’re dead as far as sin is concerned, we are free from sin. We don’t have to give into temptation, not through looking towards our own efforts, but in looking at the cross.
Similarly, when the devil comes as accuser, we need to remind ourselves that we are saved through Christ’s work and that work is complete. We do not need to fear. ‘It is finished, it is accomplished’ was Christ’s shout of victory on the cross. The devil can have no hold over any child of God any more. The penalty for my sins has already been paid in full by Jesus Christ; God cannot punish me for sins for which Christ has already been punished.
As an old hymn by Augustus Toplady puts it:
‘If Thou hast my discharge procured,And freely in my room enduredThe whole of wrath divine:Payment God cannot twice demand,First at my wounded Surety's hand,And then again at mine.’
As it was in the Garden of Eden, Satan can only have a hold over us if we let him, not as of right. So when we struggle with the devil’s words in our ear we need to remember that Jesus has already destroyed his works, and put the apostle James’s advice in practice: ‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.’ (James 4:7-8).
Very briefly I want to look at the third struggle Christians face - the struggle to love, to do good and be righteous.
There are a couple of verses in the passage that touch on this struggle. In verse 7, ‘Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.’ And again in verse 10, ‘Those who do not do what is right are not God’s children; nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.’
The first two struggles we’ve looked at have been against one thing and another - the struggle against sin and against the devil. The third kind of struggle is very different. It’s a positive struggle if I can put it that way: the struggle to do the right things, to love other people.
Maybe you’ve heard the scientific principle that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’? Basically it means that in the world around us, the scientific laws mean that any empty space gets filled in very quickly. A vacuum is a space where there’s no air. As soon as that space is opened, air rushes in to fill the gap. A similar principle means that if you clear a piece of ground, before long weeds will grow there. If you dig a hole in a field, it will soon fill up with mud or water. A clean shelf soon gathers dust.
The same thing is true of our lives. We cannot live empty lives. We will fill our time with something. The only question is what things will we spend our time doing. If we’re going to try to do better in our struggles against sin and against the devil, we need to spend time doing positively good things. No-action neutrality is not an option.
The positive things we are to do are good things. We are to love others and show it in our words and actions. We are to do what is right - in other words act in ways that the Bible calls righteous. We are to be kind and generous, we are to do good. In Galatians 5:22, the apostle Paul says that we are to have the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ in our lives, which are: ‘Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’ He also gives a picture of the kinds of things we are to fill our lives with in Philippians 4:8: ‘Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’
If only it was as simple as just getting on with doing that. But the fact is that we often find it a struggle to do those positive good, loving things we want to do. All the struggles we have looked at are related to each other. We find it hard to live righteous lives because we find it all too easy to sin (to live unrighteous lives). Finding it hard to do good is the flip side of struggling with sin.
That means that both struggles are intimately connected. They’re like a see-saw that goes up and down. When doing good increases, sin decreases; when sin increases, doing good decreases. It also means that one of the important ways to combat sin is to do good.
Fortunately, Christianity isn’t about following a set of rigid rules that constitute ‘doing good’ or that equal ‘love’. So I can’t stand here and tell you what to do different tomorrow, or next week, or from now on. Because each one of us is different. Christianity is about relationships - with God and with other people. Christianity is about great principles that stand immoveable. But how you put the principles into practice can be done in hundreds of different ways.
The thing to grasp, the thing to actually act on is to consciously try to love more and do good more often. If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit living inside you. He will tell you what putting it into practice means for you. Listen to that still small voice that is prompting you to speak to that person you ignore every day on the way to work, or send a cheque to that charity, or write that letter, or visit that friend you haven’t seen in ages, or pray more, or whatever it is.
The main thing is to live as righteous children of God. Not in a legalistic way because we are not under law but under grace. Not for fear of hell, because there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Not even just because it’s the right thing to do, though God delights in our obedience. But if we centre our lives on love - love for God and love for our brothers and sisters and our neighbours, then may, just maybe, we will live as God’s children should and show the devil and the world who our Father really is and live lives that are offerings of thanks to him for all he’s done for us.
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Sunday, 26 April 2009
Children of God
This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 19 April 2009 on 1 John 3:1-3.
I wonder: if you were asked to sum up your relationship as a Christian to God, what would you say? And if you were asked to sum up the Church’s relationship with God, what would you say? Well of course the Bible speaks of these relationships in a number of ways. An individual might say he or she is a believer, a follower of Christ, maybe even a servant of God. The church might be described as a group of sinners saved by grace, the congregation of believers with a living faith, God’s covenant people, or maybe as Christ’s body. And of course none of these descriptions is wrong – in fact all of them are biblical and all of them are complementary. But there’s another way of describing both the individual and Christians as a group that includes all these things and conveys, I think, so much more about the personal, loving, sharing, relationship and commitment that each of us as individuals and together as a church has with God. And that’s the way that the apostle John describes in this passage: we are each children of God and together we are the family of God.
Think about an earthly King. It’s one thing to say you are a subject of the King, or to say you are the King’s servant, or to say you are a loyal follower of the King, or even to say that you are the King’s friend; but it’s quite another thing to say that you are the King’s son or daughter. That’s the difference. And I think that if we look at our relationship with God the Father, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our relationships with other Christians and with the world, everything somehow changes when viewed through this lens of sonship, daughtership and Christian brother and sisterhood. I hope that as we look at this together we will find our faith, hope and love deepened and strengthened.
If we look at the passage we read in 1 John 3, and in particular the first paragraph from verse 1 to verse 3, I think there are three main points for us to focus on as God’s children:
· The Father loves his children
· God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father
· During their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins.
So, the first thing for us to grasp from this passage is one of those truths in the Bible that grabs to me deep in my heart every time I hear it: God is my Father and he absolutely loves and adores me as his son. God loves each and every Christian, including you, more deeply and more powerfully than any human father could ever love his son or daughter. Isn’t that an astonishing thing when you think about it? The almighty God who created the universe, who governs all things by his providence and rules over all things in his sovereign power as King of Kings and Lords of Lords, the One who sits in all majesty and glory in the throne room of heaven, and is worshipped night and day by squadrons of angels and archangels – this God is my Father! This God is my Daddy (‘Abba’ as the original Greek has it). He’s not some remote spiritual being with no real knowledge of me, no real interest in what’s happening in my life. He’s not an absent father. The Child Support Agency doesn’t have to go after him. No, this God – the God of the Bible – is my Daddy who stays with me, who loves me, cares for me, is concerned about me, provides for me and protects me. All these things are implied whenever we call God ‘Father’.
There are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel is described as being like a Father to his people.
As far back as Deuteronomy 1:31 we read of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt described like this: ‘The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son.’
In Psalm 103, it says: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.’
In Isaiah 63, the prophet says to God: ‘You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.’
However, although the Old Testament people of God might have regarded God as their Father, they would not have dared address God as ‘Father.’ Jesus changed that forever. It will Jesus who taught that not just that God is like a father to his people, but that God is their Father, and it’s okay to speak to God like a child speaks to his father. That’s one of many truths Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we say every week: ‘Our Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 6:9).
So, God is our Father, and as our Father God loves us with all his heart. That’s what the first verse in our passage says. God doesn’t love us a bit – God’s love is ‘lavished’ on us. He loves us so much that he makes us his children. ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
That is absolutely one of the most astonishing and profound teachings in the entire Bible. In fact it may be the most amazing thing of all.
We know that God’s amazing love for us is one of the big themes of the Bible – especially in the writings of the apostle John. In perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible, John points out that God loves us so much that not only does he make us his children, but that he gave his own child to die for us:
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)
The apostle Paul said the same thing in his own way:
‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8)
Later on in this Letter, John writes:
‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:9-10)
I know that for me, when I think about God as my Father, about Christ as my Father’s Son and my brother, and about the Holy Spirit as my family counsellor and guide who brought about my adoption as a child of God (as Romans 8:15 teaches), it completely changes how I feel about God, it has really deepened my relationship with God this past week or two, especially over Easter. Once you see God as Father and Christ as your brother, it’s hard to not feel different. For me it changes my attitude and my heart in worship, in reading the Bible, in prayer, in sharing fellowship with others, in obeying God’s commandments, in serving other people, in being the man I want to be.
It helps us see that our relationship with God is for every day living, every second of our life, every situation we go through, good and bad. Most of us here have families – brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. How natural do we find it to spend time with them, to share our lives with them, to tell them our worries and laugh with them in our joys. Isn’t that how our relationship with God should be too?
The next time you are feeling a bit down, a bit low, or the next time you are feeling disheartened because you’ve been laughed at or scoffed at for being a Christian, remember this verse: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
The passage teaches, like so much of the New Testament teaches us, that opposition is what we should expect as Christians. As verse 1 goes on to say: ‘The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’
But I think that John is also encouraging us here to ‘keep your chins up’ in the face of opposition. You are a prince or princess of the Most High God. You are a child of the royal family of King David. You are destined to rule with King Jesus forever. Once you see yourself in that light, don’t you feel a bit better about yourself and about the challenges life throws at us?
The prophet Zechariah wrote: ‘The LORD…will save his people…as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.’
All God’s sons and daughters are like jewels in the royal crown. Grasp that and hold on to that, and never forget it.
The second thing for us to take from this passage is that God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father God.
John writes in verse two: ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’
The contrast that John makes here is not between bad and good (things are bad now but will be good later) but between good and better. We already are children of God, and the future we will ‘grow up’ if you like to fully become like our Father God.
Unfortunately, isn’t the Christian life often caricatured by those who don’t know Jesus in a different way? People distort the Christian gospel and say that what Christianity teaches is that we are supposed to be content with a second-rate life now in exchange for a first rate second life after we die. This was one of the objections that Karl Marx had to Christianity – that it told the poor to be happy being miserable in this life.
I don’t know often I’ve heard people say things like – the trouble with asking me to be a Christian is that I’m you then expect me to have a miserable life of not sinning and enjoying myself now, in exchange for happiness in another life I don’t even know for sure exists. The kind of spiritual equivalent of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?
Well the apostle John has an answer to that. He says the truth is that things are great now but will still be better in the next life! We are children now he says, but ‘what we will be has not been made known.’ We do know some of ‘what we will be’ in the life we shall have after death. We know that we shall go to heaven, we shall see God and Christ face-to-face, we shall conform to the image of Christ, we shall become without sin, we shall know things we do not know here, and one day we shall receive new resurrection bodies and go on to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth. But what John is saying is that God has not told us the full extent of the joy and bliss that awaits us as God’s children. He really means ‘the full extent of what it means to be a child of God in eternity has not been revealed to us yet.’
We do know when this will happen though – it will be when Christ appears – for the second coming of Christ will usher in the end of this world, the last judgment and beginning of those new heavens and earth that John later wrote about in the Book of Revelation.
That’s what’s ahead of us in the future. For now, John points out that God’s children will resemble their Father.
There’s an old saying – ‘like father, like son’. Sometimes people will say of a child that he’s ‘cut from the same cloth’ as a parent, meaning not just that he or she looks like their parent, but resembles them in their attitudes, behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and so on.
I think John is saying here that God’s children should resemble their heavenly Father when he says ‘We shall be like him’. It doesn’t really matter whether that ‘him’ refers to the Father or Christ the Son, for to have seen one is to have seen the other, and they are One anyway. Either way, we should be ‘cut from the same cloth’ so that people can see in our attitudes, our words, our actions that we look like in practice what we actually are in principle – God’s beloved children.
This is exactly the same as what Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-48 Jesus says to us:
‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
My goodness, don’t these words challenge us? I know that they force me to look at myself. What a standard to set! ‘Be perfect.’
That is the long-term goal for all of us as Christians, to become in nature, what we are in status already. To grow into the kind of people who live as God’s children should. Why are we to do this? To make ourselves into God’s children and earn God’s blessings? No! John teaches we already are God’s children and therefore should live that way.
The way we become God’s children is not by something we do, not by doing good works, but by faith in Jesus Christ and trusting in his work – his perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his victorious resurrection from the dead.
As John taught in his Gospel:
‘Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.’ (John 1:12-13)
A lot of this is future of course. John is clear that we won’t realise our ambitions to truly perfect lives as children of God until we get to heaven. It will only be once Christ returns that this will happen.
Even so, the third point that John makes is that during their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins for us. In other words, the process of God’s adopted children growing and developing into the people God wants them to be begins in the here and now.
Verse three says as much: ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
We’re going to be looking at verses 4-10 next week and they teach us a lot more about the Christian’s battles against sin and the devil but here in verse 3 John makes it very clear that although becoming a child of God is entirely of grace and entirely of faith – it is not a matter of human effort or good works – nevertheless being a child of God does affect how we live our lives. The Bible knows nothing of a Christianity that so emphasises grace so as to excuse sinful, wrong behaviour.
As Paul answered an imaginary questioner who thought that the gospel of salvation by grace was a licence to commit sins in Romans 6:1-2:
‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’
John’s message is exactly the same as Paul’s. ‘All who have this hope in him [i.e. in Christ] purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
In other words, all who consider themselves children of God, and look forward to eternal life as princes and princesses of their Father God, seek holiness in this life, because their Father is holy.
The Old Testament gave the same command to the people of God time and time again. Nine times in the Book of Leviticus alone the commandment occurs:
‘Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2)
The principle in the New Testament is the same as in the Old – if you are my people, my children, God says, you’ll be like me. You’ll copy me, follow me. You’ll live my way.
It’s interesting that what John writes in verse 3 is not a command, it’s a description. He doesn’t say: ‘All who have this hope should purify themselves’. He merely points out that anyone who is a Christian does purify themselves.
You see what we mustn’t do is think that we need the gospel of Christ dying for us to take away our sins to get into God’s Kingdom or God’s family, and then think that once we’re in we have to stay in through doing enough good. In theological terms, I thought we entered the Kingdom by grace but stayed in by law, by doing good.
That is a mistake I made in my Christian life for years and it stopped me from growing as a Christian for years. Instead of feeling loved and enjoying the freedom I have in Christ, I would feel I’d never done enough good, had sinned too much, and I was burdened with a sense of guilt for what I’d done and what I hadn’t managed to do nearly all the time. It reduced my Christian walk to a hard drudgery, a world away from the ‘easy burden and light yoke’ that Christ promises his followers.
I used to think that becoming a Christian was by faith, but remaining a Christian was by works. This is just not the case. I remember my thinking being completely turned around when I read an article by an American evangelist and Bible teacher, Jerry Bridges. Bridges pointed out a simple truth that I hadn’t really grasped before – that the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ is a message for Christians as well as for non-Christians. It’s the key to living as a Christian, not just the key to becoming a Christian.
You see, we as Christians need the message of the cross and the empty tomb preached to ourselves every day to stop ourselves turning into either guilt-ridden legalists or sin-stained libertines. Trusting in Christ and his work on the cross is not just something people need to believe to become Christians; it’s what we need to believe every day in order to live as Christians. It’s the way in which we ‘purify ourselves’ in the way John describes.
John has already said as much in this very letter. That’s why it’s really useful if sometimes we read large chunks of the Bible or even a whole letter at a sitting. It helps us get things in context.
On their own, John’s words about people ‘purifying themselves’ might suggest they are to do it on their own effort, without reference to Jesus. But that would be entirely wrong. Back in the first chapter of this letter, John has already explained what he means by a Christian purifying themselves. I’m going to read 1 John 1:7-10 because they are very important to us understanding this verse about us purifying ourselves just as God is pure. Listen carefully to what John says:
‘If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.’
So, yes we are to purify ourselves. But how do we do it? According to John it is by looking to Jesus. We do it by trusting in his work on the cross, by relying on his blood, which purifies us from all sin. We do it by being brutally honest with God and admitting to him that we are far from perfect, by acknowledging that his word is right to assess what we’ve said and done as sinful. We do it by confessing our sins to God and trusting that God’s word is true and so he will be faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us.
John is clear that Christians are to seek to live good lives, to try to do good works, and to make an effort at refraining from sinning. It is the heart that the Father looks into. It is the seeking that matters to God, not the succeeding. Or to use a sporting cliché, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part. Truly seeking to do good, to follow Christ and to not commit sins matters more to God than whether we actually succeed or fail. We are his children; he knows what we’re like. He remembers we are only like little toddlers here on earth staggering around, not too good on our feet and likely to fall over more often than we stand up.
John characterises how we should live as ‘walking in the light’ but he is also totally realistic. John – like the apostles Paul and James, and Jesus himself – knew we would not reach perfection in this life, and it is not God’s will for us to live lives crushed by guilt. Friends if you leave here with one thing tonight, make it this: God does not want you to spend your life feeling guilty because you fail. Because you will fail, over and over again, and God wants his children to be filled with love and joy and peace, not guilt. Instead, when we sin, we need to remember that we are not saved by our works but by Christ – that there is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus as Romans 8:1 says, and second, we need to come to God, confessing to him what we’ve done and asking to be forgiven. And there’s no limit on how often we can do that. God’s love and God’s grace are boundless. If we commit a sin a hundred thousand times and come back to God to ask for forgiveness and are truly sorry, he will forgive us.
After all, as God is our Father, so Jesus Christ is our brother. Once Peter asked him: ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus, our brother answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’
And when you remember that the number seven signifies perfection and completeness in the Bible, then it is obvious that Jesus is not saying up to precisely 490 times, but rather, an infinite number of times. Just as he commands this of us, so he offers us unlimited forgiveness.
It is through availing ourselves of that forgiveness on offer because of Christ’s cross and resurrection that John understands and pictures Christians purifying themselves.
Next week we’ll look more at the battle the Christian faces with sin. Tonight may we all rest and find comfort in the facts that God loves us as his children, that great though that is, the future will be even better, and until then as God’s children we will purify ourselves, not by our own efforts, but by looking to Jesus, his cross, his blood and his victorious resurrection life.
As the writer to Hebrews put it, echoing the words of John here in this passage:
‘We … see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.’ (Hebrews 2:9-11).
I wonder: if you were asked to sum up your relationship as a Christian to God, what would you say? And if you were asked to sum up the Church’s relationship with God, what would you say? Well of course the Bible speaks of these relationships in a number of ways. An individual might say he or she is a believer, a follower of Christ, maybe even a servant of God. The church might be described as a group of sinners saved by grace, the congregation of believers with a living faith, God’s covenant people, or maybe as Christ’s body. And of course none of these descriptions is wrong – in fact all of them are biblical and all of them are complementary. But there’s another way of describing both the individual and Christians as a group that includes all these things and conveys, I think, so much more about the personal, loving, sharing, relationship and commitment that each of us as individuals and together as a church has with God. And that’s the way that the apostle John describes in this passage: we are each children of God and together we are the family of God.
Think about an earthly King. It’s one thing to say you are a subject of the King, or to say you are the King’s servant, or to say you are a loyal follower of the King, or even to say that you are the King’s friend; but it’s quite another thing to say that you are the King’s son or daughter. That’s the difference. And I think that if we look at our relationship with God the Father, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our relationships with other Christians and with the world, everything somehow changes when viewed through this lens of sonship, daughtership and Christian brother and sisterhood. I hope that as we look at this together we will find our faith, hope and love deepened and strengthened.
If we look at the passage we read in 1 John 3, and in particular the first paragraph from verse 1 to verse 3, I think there are three main points for us to focus on as God’s children:
· The Father loves his children
· God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father
· During their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins.
So, the first thing for us to grasp from this passage is one of those truths in the Bible that grabs to me deep in my heart every time I hear it: God is my Father and he absolutely loves and adores me as his son. God loves each and every Christian, including you, more deeply and more powerfully than any human father could ever love his son or daughter. Isn’t that an astonishing thing when you think about it? The almighty God who created the universe, who governs all things by his providence and rules over all things in his sovereign power as King of Kings and Lords of Lords, the One who sits in all majesty and glory in the throne room of heaven, and is worshipped night and day by squadrons of angels and archangels – this God is my Father! This God is my Daddy (‘Abba’ as the original Greek has it). He’s not some remote spiritual being with no real knowledge of me, no real interest in what’s happening in my life. He’s not an absent father. The Child Support Agency doesn’t have to go after him. No, this God – the God of the Bible – is my Daddy who stays with me, who loves me, cares for me, is concerned about me, provides for me and protects me. All these things are implied whenever we call God ‘Father’.
There are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel is described as being like a Father to his people.
As far back as Deuteronomy 1:31 we read of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt described like this: ‘The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son.’
In Psalm 103, it says: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.’
In Isaiah 63, the prophet says to God: ‘You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.’
However, although the Old Testament people of God might have regarded God as their Father, they would not have dared address God as ‘Father.’ Jesus changed that forever. It will Jesus who taught that not just that God is like a father to his people, but that God is their Father, and it’s okay to speak to God like a child speaks to his father. That’s one of many truths Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we say every week: ‘Our Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 6:9).
So, God is our Father, and as our Father God loves us with all his heart. That’s what the first verse in our passage says. God doesn’t love us a bit – God’s love is ‘lavished’ on us. He loves us so much that he makes us his children. ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
That is absolutely one of the most astonishing and profound teachings in the entire Bible. In fact it may be the most amazing thing of all.
We know that God’s amazing love for us is one of the big themes of the Bible – especially in the writings of the apostle John. In perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible, John points out that God loves us so much that not only does he make us his children, but that he gave his own child to die for us:
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)
The apostle Paul said the same thing in his own way:
‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8)
Later on in this Letter, John writes:
‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:9-10)
I know that for me, when I think about God as my Father, about Christ as my Father’s Son and my brother, and about the Holy Spirit as my family counsellor and guide who brought about my adoption as a child of God (as Romans 8:15 teaches), it completely changes how I feel about God, it has really deepened my relationship with God this past week or two, especially over Easter. Once you see God as Father and Christ as your brother, it’s hard to not feel different. For me it changes my attitude and my heart in worship, in reading the Bible, in prayer, in sharing fellowship with others, in obeying God’s commandments, in serving other people, in being the man I want to be.
It helps us see that our relationship with God is for every day living, every second of our life, every situation we go through, good and bad. Most of us here have families – brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. How natural do we find it to spend time with them, to share our lives with them, to tell them our worries and laugh with them in our joys. Isn’t that how our relationship with God should be too?
The next time you are feeling a bit down, a bit low, or the next time you are feeling disheartened because you’ve been laughed at or scoffed at for being a Christian, remember this verse: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
The passage teaches, like so much of the New Testament teaches us, that opposition is what we should expect as Christians. As verse 1 goes on to say: ‘The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’
But I think that John is also encouraging us here to ‘keep your chins up’ in the face of opposition. You are a prince or princess of the Most High God. You are a child of the royal family of King David. You are destined to rule with King Jesus forever. Once you see yourself in that light, don’t you feel a bit better about yourself and about the challenges life throws at us?
The prophet Zechariah wrote: ‘The LORD…will save his people…as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.’
All God’s sons and daughters are like jewels in the royal crown. Grasp that and hold on to that, and never forget it.
The second thing for us to take from this passage is that God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father God.
John writes in verse two: ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’
The contrast that John makes here is not between bad and good (things are bad now but will be good later) but between good and better. We already are children of God, and the future we will ‘grow up’ if you like to fully become like our Father God.
Unfortunately, isn’t the Christian life often caricatured by those who don’t know Jesus in a different way? People distort the Christian gospel and say that what Christianity teaches is that we are supposed to be content with a second-rate life now in exchange for a first rate second life after we die. This was one of the objections that Karl Marx had to Christianity – that it told the poor to be happy being miserable in this life.
I don’t know often I’ve heard people say things like – the trouble with asking me to be a Christian is that I’m you then expect me to have a miserable life of not sinning and enjoying myself now, in exchange for happiness in another life I don’t even know for sure exists. The kind of spiritual equivalent of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?
Well the apostle John has an answer to that. He says the truth is that things are great now but will still be better in the next life! We are children now he says, but ‘what we will be has not been made known.’ We do know some of ‘what we will be’ in the life we shall have after death. We know that we shall go to heaven, we shall see God and Christ face-to-face, we shall conform to the image of Christ, we shall become without sin, we shall know things we do not know here, and one day we shall receive new resurrection bodies and go on to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth. But what John is saying is that God has not told us the full extent of the joy and bliss that awaits us as God’s children. He really means ‘the full extent of what it means to be a child of God in eternity has not been revealed to us yet.’
We do know when this will happen though – it will be when Christ appears – for the second coming of Christ will usher in the end of this world, the last judgment and beginning of those new heavens and earth that John later wrote about in the Book of Revelation.
That’s what’s ahead of us in the future. For now, John points out that God’s children will resemble their Father.
There’s an old saying – ‘like father, like son’. Sometimes people will say of a child that he’s ‘cut from the same cloth’ as a parent, meaning not just that he or she looks like their parent, but resembles them in their attitudes, behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and so on.
I think John is saying here that God’s children should resemble their heavenly Father when he says ‘We shall be like him’. It doesn’t really matter whether that ‘him’ refers to the Father or Christ the Son, for to have seen one is to have seen the other, and they are One anyway. Either way, we should be ‘cut from the same cloth’ so that people can see in our attitudes, our words, our actions that we look like in practice what we actually are in principle – God’s beloved children.
This is exactly the same as what Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-48 Jesus says to us:
‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
My goodness, don’t these words challenge us? I know that they force me to look at myself. What a standard to set! ‘Be perfect.’
That is the long-term goal for all of us as Christians, to become in nature, what we are in status already. To grow into the kind of people who live as God’s children should. Why are we to do this? To make ourselves into God’s children and earn God’s blessings? No! John teaches we already are God’s children and therefore should live that way.
The way we become God’s children is not by something we do, not by doing good works, but by faith in Jesus Christ and trusting in his work – his perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his victorious resurrection from the dead.
As John taught in his Gospel:
‘Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.’ (John 1:12-13)
A lot of this is future of course. John is clear that we won’t realise our ambitions to truly perfect lives as children of God until we get to heaven. It will only be once Christ returns that this will happen.
Even so, the third point that John makes is that during their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins for us. In other words, the process of God’s adopted children growing and developing into the people God wants them to be begins in the here and now.
Verse three says as much: ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
We’re going to be looking at verses 4-10 next week and they teach us a lot more about the Christian’s battles against sin and the devil but here in verse 3 John makes it very clear that although becoming a child of God is entirely of grace and entirely of faith – it is not a matter of human effort or good works – nevertheless being a child of God does affect how we live our lives. The Bible knows nothing of a Christianity that so emphasises grace so as to excuse sinful, wrong behaviour.
As Paul answered an imaginary questioner who thought that the gospel of salvation by grace was a licence to commit sins in Romans 6:1-2:
‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’
John’s message is exactly the same as Paul’s. ‘All who have this hope in him [i.e. in Christ] purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
In other words, all who consider themselves children of God, and look forward to eternal life as princes and princesses of their Father God, seek holiness in this life, because their Father is holy.
The Old Testament gave the same command to the people of God time and time again. Nine times in the Book of Leviticus alone the commandment occurs:
‘Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2)
The principle in the New Testament is the same as in the Old – if you are my people, my children, God says, you’ll be like me. You’ll copy me, follow me. You’ll live my way.
It’s interesting that what John writes in verse 3 is not a command, it’s a description. He doesn’t say: ‘All who have this hope should purify themselves’. He merely points out that anyone who is a Christian does purify themselves.
You see what we mustn’t do is think that we need the gospel of Christ dying for us to take away our sins to get into God’s Kingdom or God’s family, and then think that once we’re in we have to stay in through doing enough good. In theological terms, I thought we entered the Kingdom by grace but stayed in by law, by doing good.
That is a mistake I made in my Christian life for years and it stopped me from growing as a Christian for years. Instead of feeling loved and enjoying the freedom I have in Christ, I would feel I’d never done enough good, had sinned too much, and I was burdened with a sense of guilt for what I’d done and what I hadn’t managed to do nearly all the time. It reduced my Christian walk to a hard drudgery, a world away from the ‘easy burden and light yoke’ that Christ promises his followers.
I used to think that becoming a Christian was by faith, but remaining a Christian was by works. This is just not the case. I remember my thinking being completely turned around when I read an article by an American evangelist and Bible teacher, Jerry Bridges. Bridges pointed out a simple truth that I hadn’t really grasped before – that the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ is a message for Christians as well as for non-Christians. It’s the key to living as a Christian, not just the key to becoming a Christian.
You see, we as Christians need the message of the cross and the empty tomb preached to ourselves every day to stop ourselves turning into either guilt-ridden legalists or sin-stained libertines. Trusting in Christ and his work on the cross is not just something people need to believe to become Christians; it’s what we need to believe every day in order to live as Christians. It’s the way in which we ‘purify ourselves’ in the way John describes.
John has already said as much in this very letter. That’s why it’s really useful if sometimes we read large chunks of the Bible or even a whole letter at a sitting. It helps us get things in context.
On their own, John’s words about people ‘purifying themselves’ might suggest they are to do it on their own effort, without reference to Jesus. But that would be entirely wrong. Back in the first chapter of this letter, John has already explained what he means by a Christian purifying themselves. I’m going to read 1 John 1:7-10 because they are very important to us understanding this verse about us purifying ourselves just as God is pure. Listen carefully to what John says:
‘If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.’
So, yes we are to purify ourselves. But how do we do it? According to John it is by looking to Jesus. We do it by trusting in his work on the cross, by relying on his blood, which purifies us from all sin. We do it by being brutally honest with God and admitting to him that we are far from perfect, by acknowledging that his word is right to assess what we’ve said and done as sinful. We do it by confessing our sins to God and trusting that God’s word is true and so he will be faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us.
John is clear that Christians are to seek to live good lives, to try to do good works, and to make an effort at refraining from sinning. It is the heart that the Father looks into. It is the seeking that matters to God, not the succeeding. Or to use a sporting cliché, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part. Truly seeking to do good, to follow Christ and to not commit sins matters more to God than whether we actually succeed or fail. We are his children; he knows what we’re like. He remembers we are only like little toddlers here on earth staggering around, not too good on our feet and likely to fall over more often than we stand up.
John characterises how we should live as ‘walking in the light’ but he is also totally realistic. John – like the apostles Paul and James, and Jesus himself – knew we would not reach perfection in this life, and it is not God’s will for us to live lives crushed by guilt. Friends if you leave here with one thing tonight, make it this: God does not want you to spend your life feeling guilty because you fail. Because you will fail, over and over again, and God wants his children to be filled with love and joy and peace, not guilt. Instead, when we sin, we need to remember that we are not saved by our works but by Christ – that there is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus as Romans 8:1 says, and second, we need to come to God, confessing to him what we’ve done and asking to be forgiven. And there’s no limit on how often we can do that. God’s love and God’s grace are boundless. If we commit a sin a hundred thousand times and come back to God to ask for forgiveness and are truly sorry, he will forgive us.
After all, as God is our Father, so Jesus Christ is our brother. Once Peter asked him: ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus, our brother answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’
And when you remember that the number seven signifies perfection and completeness in the Bible, then it is obvious that Jesus is not saying up to precisely 490 times, but rather, an infinite number of times. Just as he commands this of us, so he offers us unlimited forgiveness.
It is through availing ourselves of that forgiveness on offer because of Christ’s cross and resurrection that John understands and pictures Christians purifying themselves.
Next week we’ll look more at the battle the Christian faces with sin. Tonight may we all rest and find comfort in the facts that God loves us as his children, that great though that is, the future will be even better, and until then as God’s children we will purify ourselves, not by our own efforts, but by looking to Jesus, his cross, his blood and his victorious resurrection life.
As the writer to Hebrews put it, echoing the words of John here in this passage:
‘We … see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.’ (Hebrews 2:9-11).
Monday, 20 April 2009
What St Paul Really Said
What St Paul Really Said
by Tom Wright
Lion Publishing
When I began reading What St Paul Really Said I was determined not to like it. In fact I was resolute that I was going to hate it, find it heretical, say so in a scathing review and then chuck it in the nearest bin.
The truth was a bit different. Not quite a Damascus road experience, but I finished the book convinced that far from being the heretic that some have caricatured the author as, Tom Wright has more in common with the spirit of the Reformers than some of his opponents, even if he fails to always come to the right conclusions. His sole concern, it seems to me, is to find out what the Scriptures say, over against any traditions, even those of evangelicalism. However, that does not settle the question of whether he does, in fact, succeed in finding out what the Scriptures say and in showing that his view is the correct one and the more traditional interpretations of say Romans and Galatians are in error.
"What St Paul Really Said" is his popular-level treatment of Paul's place in Christian theology. It is an engaging read, extremely well-written and easy to read. In fact, it is a fine example of how interesting prose by theologians should and could be.
I am not convinced by everything he says. In fact, I strongly disagree with some of his conclusions - he does not always give enough credit to 'old perspective' Reformed theology, its emphases, and the arguments of its greatest theologians. Justification is certainly not just about ecclesiology it is also about soteriology and I think Wright vastly overplays his hand in that regard. It is about salvation, about how I as a sinner can stand before a holy God, not just about me as a Gentile being allowed to eat with Jews as a member of the covenant people.
On the other hand, I think Wright is on to something when he emphasises those aspects of justication that Reformed and Lutheran theology has traditionally downplayed. To put it another way, I think the Old Perspective is fundamentally right on the substantial points regarding justification, but the New Perspective has valuable insights to offer regarding the implications of the doctrine of justification for the Church's and the individual Christian's life. Our fellowship with other Christians, our being the church, our being the covenant people of God is, after all, on the basis of this justification we have received through faith.
I got the impression Wright has an at times unhealthy fascination with the 'newness' of his project and this may be one of his weaknesses.
Even so, this work really demands to be read by any evangelicals serious about New Testament theology, particularly the New Perspective on Paul, because I believe there are insights here that are valuable and can be taken on board by evangelicals without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Thoroughly recommended reading for the thinking, if discerning, Christian.
by Tom Wright
Lion Publishing
When I began reading What St Paul Really Said I was determined not to like it. In fact I was resolute that I was going to hate it, find it heretical, say so in a scathing review and then chuck it in the nearest bin.
The truth was a bit different. Not quite a Damascus road experience, but I finished the book convinced that far from being the heretic that some have caricatured the author as, Tom Wright has more in common with the spirit of the Reformers than some of his opponents, even if he fails to always come to the right conclusions. His sole concern, it seems to me, is to find out what the Scriptures say, over against any traditions, even those of evangelicalism. However, that does not settle the question of whether he does, in fact, succeed in finding out what the Scriptures say and in showing that his view is the correct one and the more traditional interpretations of say Romans and Galatians are in error.
"What St Paul Really Said" is his popular-level treatment of Paul's place in Christian theology. It is an engaging read, extremely well-written and easy to read. In fact, it is a fine example of how interesting prose by theologians should and could be.
I am not convinced by everything he says. In fact, I strongly disagree with some of his conclusions - he does not always give enough credit to 'old perspective' Reformed theology, its emphases, and the arguments of its greatest theologians. Justification is certainly not just about ecclesiology it is also about soteriology and I think Wright vastly overplays his hand in that regard. It is about salvation, about how I as a sinner can stand before a holy God, not just about me as a Gentile being allowed to eat with Jews as a member of the covenant people.
On the other hand, I think Wright is on to something when he emphasises those aspects of justication that Reformed and Lutheran theology has traditionally downplayed. To put it another way, I think the Old Perspective is fundamentally right on the substantial points regarding justification, but the New Perspective has valuable insights to offer regarding the implications of the doctrine of justification for the Church's and the individual Christian's life. Our fellowship with other Christians, our being the church, our being the covenant people of God is, after all, on the basis of this justification we have received through faith.
I got the impression Wright has an at times unhealthy fascination with the 'newness' of his project and this may be one of his weaknesses.
Even so, this work really demands to be read by any evangelicals serious about New Testament theology, particularly the New Perspective on Paul, because I believe there are insights here that are valuable and can be taken on board by evangelicals without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Thoroughly recommended reading for the thinking, if discerning, Christian.
Monday, 13 April 2009
Television and Me
This article originally appeared as the editorial in the parish magazine for Spring 2009. Subsequent to publication, readers may be relieved to note that we now have purchased a television and a TV Licence.
Have you ever tried living without a television? It's interesting that since I got married in January, Laura and I have been living without a television in our flat. Before that, at home, we have televisions in the kitchen, the living room and I had one in my bedroom as well. I have to admit I haven't gone completely "cold turkey" as we do watch some TV using the BBC's iPlayer on the internet (and by the way, no you don't need a TV licence to watch programmes using iPlayer - we checked!).
We are planning to get a television (and licence!) in a few weeks, but this time without a TV helped me realise how much more time there is for other things when the "goggle box" isn't there, dominating our time. There's time for talking to each other, listening to music, reading books, playing games, writing, cooking, doing things around the house that need done, chatting to friends, and of course praying and reading the Bible.
I'm not against the television. I think it is a wonderful invention that we take for granted. There are so many different sights and experiences most of us simply would not have in life if it weren't for TV. A lot of what I've learned in terms of general knowledge and things has come to me through watching TV. It is a great educational and entertainment tool when used well. But we need to make sure the TV is only that - a tool - a servant and not our master.
When things on the TV come before more important things - like friends and family, our spiritual and physical health and wellbeing, not to mention God and our life as Christians, then we need to rethink our priorities, don't we?
Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:15-16: "Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil."
We are to life careful lives - by which Paul doesn't mean cautious lives, but lives that aren't careless. We are to live deliberately, making the most of every opportunity. It means we should think about what we are doing, about how we are living and about what we spend our time doing. We have to use our time wisely, because Christ is Lord of all our lives and that includes how we spend or waste our time.
Again, Paul encourages us, this time in Philippians 4:8 – “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
I’ve always thought it a good idea to watch the programmes you want and then turn the TV off rather than “channel hopping” as it’s called – which basically means switching from one channel to another until you find one that has something on it you are prepared to watch. I wonder, if you didn’t know something was on and you come across it by accident, how much do you really want to watch it?
Everyone will have their own views on this subject of course and there are no right and wrong answers. I just wonder if it might do some good if we watched the telly a little bit less and did something else – almost anything else! – a little bit more?
Have you ever tried living without a television? It's interesting that since I got married in January, Laura and I have been living without a television in our flat. Before that, at home, we have televisions in the kitchen, the living room and I had one in my bedroom as well. I have to admit I haven't gone completely "cold turkey" as we do watch some TV using the BBC's iPlayer on the internet (and by the way, no you don't need a TV licence to watch programmes using iPlayer - we checked!).
We are planning to get a television (and licence!) in a few weeks, but this time without a TV helped me realise how much more time there is for other things when the "goggle box" isn't there, dominating our time. There's time for talking to each other, listening to music, reading books, playing games, writing, cooking, doing things around the house that need done, chatting to friends, and of course praying and reading the Bible.
I'm not against the television. I think it is a wonderful invention that we take for granted. There are so many different sights and experiences most of us simply would not have in life if it weren't for TV. A lot of what I've learned in terms of general knowledge and things has come to me through watching TV. It is a great educational and entertainment tool when used well. But we need to make sure the TV is only that - a tool - a servant and not our master.
When things on the TV come before more important things - like friends and family, our spiritual and physical health and wellbeing, not to mention God and our life as Christians, then we need to rethink our priorities, don't we?
Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:15-16: "Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil."
We are to life careful lives - by which Paul doesn't mean cautious lives, but lives that aren't careless. We are to live deliberately, making the most of every opportunity. It means we should think about what we are doing, about how we are living and about what we spend our time doing. We have to use our time wisely, because Christ is Lord of all our lives and that includes how we spend or waste our time.
Again, Paul encourages us, this time in Philippians 4:8 – “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
I’ve always thought it a good idea to watch the programmes you want and then turn the TV off rather than “channel hopping” as it’s called – which basically means switching from one channel to another until you find one that has something on it you are prepared to watch. I wonder, if you didn’t know something was on and you come across it by accident, how much do you really want to watch it?
Everyone will have their own views on this subject of course and there are no right and wrong answers. I just wonder if it might do some good if we watched the telly a little bit less and did something else – almost anything else! – a little bit more?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)