Sin and Obedience

Sin and Obedience

Intro: Sabbatical reflection

Good morning, again! For those of you who started attending Stonebrook since May, you might not recognize me, as I’ve been away on Sabbatical for the Summer. My name is Matt, and I am still one of the pastors here. It is good to be back. I was only mildly worried over the summer when I learned that almost as soon as I went on Sabbatical, the deacons had the church re-keyed. Fortunately though, I was allowed to have a new key this past week, so apparently they were trying to help me have a good sabbatical, and there wasn’t really a question about my return.

I am very grateful to you all for the sabbatical. It was a good Summer for me. A much needed time of gearing down and focus, rest and learning. I am refreshed and ready for the Fall. I have some things that I’ve realized and am looking froward to putting into practice. I’ll have some more detail on that at the all-members meeting, and a quick write-up that I’ll be putting somewhere on the Web.

One of the things that I did during the Summer was quite a lot of personal reflection as I read through the scriptures. One of the traps that a pastor falls into is that all of our reading and study becomes about what we might share with the congregation and with individuals we are working with, and we begin to forget that we need just as much, if not more, ministry from God’s Word as everyone else, for our own souls.

During this extended time of “letting the Bible read me” and not really worrying so much about what I was going to tell other people, one of the scriptures that really hit home was 1 John. I’ve been dwelling on it for a few months now.

When it came time to get back in the game, and begin preaching again. I found that we’re in the middle of a series on “Building convictions”.  Brad had compiled a list of possible topics, but I was pretty keen on preaching 1 John. So I found a topic that fit relatively well and I’m going to pretend that that’s the topic so that it fits the series, but really I’d just like to teach you 1 John. Actually, overlaying the topics on the scripture is going to yield an interesting result.

So, theoretically, the topic is a combination of Sin’s destructiveness and how to flee it, and how to walk in obedience to God’s word.

Let’s turn in our Bibles to 1 John. Pray with me as we do.

1 John – The letter from the beloved apostle

John wrote this letter to the church for 3 reasons

  1. To ground our hope for salvation in Jesus’s sacrifice for our sin, and not in our own efforts (1 John 2:1-2)
  2. To warn us about false teachers (antichrists) (1 John 2:26)
  3. To help those who believe in Jesus test whether, and be assured that, they have eternal life (1 John 5:13)

I want to focus in on the first reason this morning, and touch a bit on the third. And for our purposes lets just say that the second is about anyone who teaches something other than one and three.

Let’s start off in chapter one verse 5.

Walking in Light, Walking in Darkness

1 John 1:5-10

5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7 But 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 cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

What does John mean when he says that “God is light”, and what does he mean by “walking in darkness?”  It seems obvious that he’s using imagery in his wording, he doesn’t mean that God is literally composed of photons. So what is the image? What comes to your mind when you hear “God is light and in him is no darkness at all?” What is the light, and what is darkness?

I think I always used to read this image of light and darkness as something like purity and sin. So another way this could read is “God is pure, and in Him is no sin at all.” Does that make sense? Is that kind of how you’ve thought about it? So when it speaks of us walking in light or in darkness, it would mean something like “walking in purity” or “walking in sin.”

But while dwelling on this passage over the last few months, I realized something: it can’t mean that. Otherwise verse 7 would say “If we walk without sin, as God is without sin… then the blood of Jesus will cleanse us from all sin.”  And, well, if that were true, we’d all be doomed.

Instead, I noticed a parallel between verse 7 and verse 9.

“If we walk in the light… …the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.”  and

“If we confess our sin… he is faithful and just to forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

And so it hit me (and probably some of you were already way ahead of me on this one), that if you look at everything else he’s saying in these verses here, there is a lot of parallel between light and dark, and truth and lie.

Walking in the light = telling the truth

Walking in the light is not about being pure. Walking in the light is about telling the truth.

And so we see that John’s actual point in chapter 1, is something like “God is truth, and in him is no deception at all.” God sees everything accurately. God tells everything accurately.

And the thing that John camps on for us in terms of telling the truth: confession of our sinfulness. God is fully aware of the fact that we are sinners. And we know this too, unless we have ourselves deceived into believing that we are not. And John exhorts us to be honest about this fact.

In verse seven John says that our being honest with ourselves and others about our sinfulness and our need for and desire for grace will result in two things: 1) Fellowship with one another and 2) forgiveness and cleansing from sin.

Fellowship fueled by confession

Isn’t that interesting? John is saying here that our pretending like everything is okay, our pretending that we’re not as bad as we are, our pretending that we’ve got it all together keeps us apart.

I’ve wondered about that for us as a community, maybe especially in some of our life groups. In our culture, we spend so much time trying to make everything appear like we’ve got it all together. That we’re generally happy, well adjusted, moral, ethical, prosperous, full of faith and really “nailing it” in our walk with the Lord.

When the reality is that for many of us, we’re struggling with sadness, doubt, depression, stress. We’re struggling in our faith and not doing so hot in our devotional life. We carefully guard and hide secret sins, resentment, grudges, anger, selfishness, pride, lust.

The reality for most of us is probably somewhere in between those two extremes. But I wonder what would happen to the depth of connection and relationship and friendship we’d have with one another if we stopped trying to keep up appearances and acknowledge our weakness and need of grace.

Sin and Obedience, Walking like Jesus walked.

1 John 2:1-2

1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 2 He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

The line of tension John draws, and his emphasis.

Having just decisively declared that every single human walking the planet has sin, wrestles with sin, John draws an interesting line of tension.  He says that believers in Christ should not sin, fighting any teaching out there that says “live how you want to live, it doesn’t matter, grace is free to all!” – John calls this false teaching.

But he also fully recognizes the reality that everyone does sin.

So the question is: what do we do with that? The answer: look to Jesus’s sacrifice as the propitiation for our sin, not to your own avoidance of sin, your own performance.

Propitiation

This word propitiation is a big word. It needs to be defined because it is used in many important places in the Bible. The word means “something done to make someone or something propitious.” Helpful? 🙂  “Propitious” means favorable.

In this context it means that Jesus’s sacrifice changed God’s attitude toward us as a sinner from being angry at us because of our sin, to being favorable toward us! God is rightly full of wrath toward sin. Jesus’s sacrifice took away that wrath.

So JESUS’s work, not ours, is what makes God favorable to us. Johns big point here is that when we sin, what is it that we need to look at, turn to, and trust in to take away God’s wrath? Jesus. We need to remember that Jesus’s work took away God’s wrath once and for all.

This is probably the most central concept in all of Christianity. Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, not our deeds, is the thing that wins God’s favor for us.

1 John 2:3-6

3 And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. 4 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.

What is the commandment?

It is important to pause for a bit on this idea of “keeping his commandments”. I wonder how many of us have given much thought to what, specifically, John is encouraging us to. Which commandments? The 10 commandments? The 613 commandments of the Mosaic law?

If John said nothing more about this, and left us to infer from the rest of scripture which commandments he’s talking about, I think there would be a fairly wide variety of possible understanding here. And in fact, I think most of us, myself included, when we read this verse today, we usually do so in the context of a quick morning devotion, where we see this exhortation in isolation. Or perhaps we have memorized this particular verse in a song, and the line runs through our head, in isolation. Leading us to a variety of understandings, and in fact confusion, about what John means here.

However, if we read this passage as the author (John) intended for us to, we find that fairly quickly (just a few paragraphs later) he defines the commandment for us!

1 John 3:23

And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.

The commandment hearkens back to John’s Gospel account, in what we’ve marked out as chapter 13-17, the “upper room discourse”, Jesus discussion with his disciples at the last supper. The command has two parts

The Command part 1: We are to believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ

“In the name of” means that we are to believe in everything about Jesus. That He is who He said He is, that He did what He claimed to do, and that His way of living is the right way of living!

And this is where verse 6 comes in, whoever believes that Jesus is who He says He is: the son of God, and believes that His teaching about how we should live our lives, ought to walk that way. Your walk should match your talk, shouldn’t it! But let me ask you: how’s that going for you? Living like Jesus lived?

In the past I’ve heard sermons on this concept, and it would go something like this. “The Bible says we ought to walk as Jesus walked. So let’s apply this. Here are three steps to walk like Jesus walked.” And then there would be three prescriptions, usually that started with the same letter, or had the same ending, or rhymed or spelled something clever like “W.A.L.K.” A memorable set of marching orders that we could try and live out.

And some of us would do pretty well with doing the prescriptions and would feel pretty good about ourselves. At least for awhile. And some of us would do pretty poorly at keeping the prescriptions, and we’d feel pretty poorly about ourselves. Maybe even doubting our salvation. Or doubting the reality of Christianity. In fact, I have several friends and family members who have “tapped out” of the church because their inability to keep the prescriptions of a preacher caused them to believe they were either damned, or that somehow this whole thing was a scam.

Here’s the thing though. I think that approach to this passage is missing the point, nearly entirely.

John is not issuing a command to walk as Jesus walked. That is something we are supposed to do, but that’s not what John is after here.  John is instead asking us to test ourselves and our claim to be walking in the light. Does that make sense? He’s saying: “Hey if you say you believe this, you ought to be walking the walk… how’s that going for you?”

So how’s that going for you, your success at walking like Jesus walked? Be honest with yourself. (You’re not fooling anyone, you know…)

What is John up to?

John is intentionally writing to us to make us despair of our own efforts. If we are honest with ourselves, which is what walking in the light is actually about, we would fully admit our failure to walk as Jesus walked.

And if you are out there right now thinking “Matt has got this wrong. I actually am doing a fairly decent job of walking like Jesus.” Let me refer you to chapter 1 verse 8. You are lying to yourself.

Why is John doing this? Several reasons: 

  • He is humbling those of us who, from time to time, do a better job than others at keeping some of the commands. He’s reminding us that this isn’t always the case for us, and that there is remaining, indwelling sin to be dealt with. We are not as great as we think we are.
  • He is encouraging those of us who struggle more, or are more prone to doubt and despair, that it is not our performance at all that is what makes God pleased with us.
  • And maybe most importantly: he’s giving us the fuel we need to actually obey God’s command to love our brother.

The Command part 2: We are to love one another AS WE HAVE BEEN LOVED.

“…and love one another, just as he commanded.” 1 John 3:23b

John 13:34 (ESV)

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”

How has Jesus loved us? What is John saying about this?

John is pointing out the tension between what we ought to be doing, (walking as Jesus walked, in sinless perfection, since we purport to believe that this is the right way to live), and how we actually live, faltering obedience, doubt, sin, occasional rebellion. He does go on to say that a true believer is one who is repentant, who strives to do better, who acknowledges their sin, but he never lets up the exhortation that Jesus gave that we must “be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect.”

Believers are humbled by this, and acknowledge their failure.

John is pointing out that we have failed to live up to God’s commands over, and over, and over. That we have sinned against him over, and over, and over, and that He has forgiven us, cancelled the debt we owe him, and loves us and embraces us as children.

And he then says, love your brother this way. Forgive their sin, just as I have forgiven yours. Love them when they don’t deserve it, just as I loved you when you didn’t deserve it.

I heard an anecdote this summer about a pastor counseling one of his congregants. This person was struggling to forgive someone who had wronged them. They couldn’t bring their heart around to want to forgive them. They knew Christ’s command to forgive, the person who wronged this congregant was genuinely repentant and seeking forgiveness but he simply couldn’t seem to bring himself to forgive.

The pastor eventually said “I don’t know what else to tell you. Maybe try this: why don’t you go out and sin against God to the same degree that person sinned against you. Experience God’s forgiveness and see if you can bring yourself to pass that along.

Realization of and honest acknowledgement of our sinful condition, and the realization that God offers us grace in the midst of our condition, is the fuel that will enable us to love as Christ has loved, and forgive as Christ has forgiven.

Maybe some of us here this morning could use a dose of that too.

Conclusion

Chapter 2 continues with the exhortation to love your brother and to hate the things of the world. Notably “the pride of lifestyle”. There is another sermon coming on this topic. I think this is an exhortation most all of us need. There is a struggle to keep up with a lifestyle that we feel our culture expects of us. It’s fed to us by friends and family, coworkers and neighbors, TV shows, movies, commercials and the news, a pressure of expectation about what kind of car I should drive, house I should live in, clothes I should wear, phone I should carry, sports I should watch, events I should attend, salary I should make.

All of these need to be held in check by our allegiance to Christ, our love for our brothers and sisters in Christ, helping those who are in need, and fellowship and service in the community of the church.

I’d like to close with a remarkable few verses that John writes. John’s teaching in this letter is hard. In fact if we take it seriously, it is shattering. So all throughout he weaves the Gospel of Grace.

1 John 2:12-14

I am writing to you, little children,
because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake.
I am writing to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I am writing to you, young men,
because you have overcome the evil one.
I write to you, children,
because you know the Father.
I write to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young men,
because you are strong,
and the word of God abides in you,
and you have overcome the evil one.

Our hearts, convicted by the teaching that friendship with the world is enmity with God, that we do not love God if we do not share with the brother or sister in need, cry out that our sins are not forgiven, that perhaps we don’t know God, that we haven’t in fact overcome the world!

John’s reply to this: do you believe that Jesus is the Christ? The son of the living God?  The one who died for your sins? Then yes you are forgiven, even when you don’t feel like it. Yes you do know God, even in your doubt, yes you have overcome the evil, even though now you are failing. Because Christ is all these things for you. Your forgiveness, your conqueror, and the one through whom we know God.