"Confidence in Perfect Fellowship!"
Sermon Series: Walk in Faith (part 10 of 10)
First Baptist Church - New Castle, IN
Pastor Jerry Ingalls
March 21, 2010
We are concluding our sermon series "Walk in Faith". This is our 10th teaching time on First John and throughout this series we have been learning deep theological truths of who God is as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We have been learning the Gospel Truth of why God sent His Son Jesus Christ and how we have been born again into the family of God. We have been learning the implications of our faith and how we should then live our lives as God's children. This morning we are concluding this series with John's final words to the house churches of Ephesus. These are words of assurance that summarize the letter; these are strong words with deep teaching. Please open your Bibles, pull out your sermon notes, and grab a pen.
1 John 5:13-21 (NIV)
13I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 14This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 15And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him. 16If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death.
I am not saying that he should pray about that. 17All wrongdoing is sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death. 18We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him. 19We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. 20We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true—even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. 21Dear children, keep yourselves from idols. [prayer]
In this closing section of First John, we are going to finish where we started this series; talking about Perfect Fellowship. We are going to learn that we can have confidence in the Perfect Fellowship we have with God because this relationship is one that is built upon a strong foundation. For a relationship to be a prospering and thriving relationship it must have the essential ingredient of security!
IN PERFECT FELLOWSHIP, WE HAVE...SECURITY IN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST!
In verse 13, John starts his concluding remarks with a thesis statement of why he wrote this letter of First John, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life."
This immediately reminded me of John's thesis statement for the Gospel of John.
The Gospel of John 20:31 states, "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."
We see a nuanced difference between John's earlier work (the Gospel) and this follow up letter to the house churches of Ephesus. The Gospel was written "that you may believe..." whereas the letter was written "to you who believe...so that you may know that you have eternal life." Examine the distinction and you see that this letter's intended audience were those who had received eternal life previously and now needed an assurance that they have eternal life. John is writing to the church and to the believers in the church to help them understand their faith and then how they should live out their faith!
What is this eternal life that John is giving his church the assurance of?
Eternal life is less about existing forever and more about a quality of life! If eternal life was simply about living forever, well that would be a nightmare reality for so many; rather eternal life is a statement of quality of life!
Eternal life is about living in Perfect Fellowship with God! When we receive the Gospel message and the Truth of God which was from the beginning enters our very being then we are ontologically changed; which means that we are fundamentally changed in our core being!
We pass from death (independent operators drifting along life's road groping for meaning and focus) to life (allowing the God who made us and gave us life to have rightful ownership so that He may direct our steps and give our lives focus, meaning, and purpose)!
God redeemed us so that He might come and live in us. It is God's presence in our lives that changes us! His Perfect Fellowship causes us to pass from death to life! From being lost to being found! This is eternal life! It is here and now and forever! And when you receive this new life everything changes!
John has been teaching us this throughout the letter; we hear this truth in 1 John 4:9, "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."
Eternal life is about surrendering our lives to God so that He can live through us and give us life in abundance. Jesus promises us of this reality in the Gospel of John 10:10b, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."
What does this full life look like? When we live our life in God then the attributes of God's character flow into our life. We experience the life of God!
In God there is peace; therefore, eternal life means serenity. We are liberated from the fears that burden us in this life. God's perfect love drives out fear!
In God there is power; therefore, eternal life means the defeat of frustration. We now have a life filled with power which is truly the power of the Holy Spirit living in us which means we are more than conquerors in Jesus!
In God there is holiness; therefore, eternal life means the defeat of sin. This is a life covered with the blood of Jesus Christ meaning His right standing with God is ours; His righteousness becomes our righteousness!
In God there is love; therefore, eternal life means the end of unforgiveness, bitterness, and hatred. This is a life lived in the shadow of the Cross—the greatest event in history where we all are offered reconciliation with God! Eternal life is getting right in our relationships!
In God there is life; therefore, eternal life means the defeat of death. This is a life filled with the hope that comes from the light of Jesus' empty tomb. We are born again not of perishable seed, but of imperishable so that through the Spirit of God we will never taste death.
Eternal life is in our midst today!
Brothers and sisters in Christ, in this life we will have troubles and trials, but we can be secure in this one reality that will never change--through our faith in Jesus Christ, we have eternal life in God. Let us find our source of hope, our security of personhood, and our strength to persevere in this life through our confidence in God's Perfect Fellowship!
In Hebrews 10:23, the Holy Spirit teaches us, "Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful."
This is the foundation of our new life in Christ. This foundation is how we can have confidence. For every relationship to grow it needs more than security; it needs effective communication.
IN PERFECT FELLOWSHIP, WE HAVE...EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION WITH GOD!
John continues his conclusion with teaching on prayer in verses 14-15, "This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him."
This is an incredible benefit of our confidence in having eternal life in God through Jesus Christ. He is our Paraclete—our Mediator and Advocate to God sitting at the right hand of the Father interceding for us!
When we live in God and God lives us, then we can approach Him with boldness and confidence because He has promised to listen and be present to us. Jesus promised in John 15:7, "If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you."
Again Jesus promised in the Gospel of Mark 11:24, "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."
These passages, nor our Scripture lesson, are teaching that God is a cosmic vending machine in the sky. Prayer is not a means for us to ask God to get on board with our plans or for Him to fulfill our wish lists; rather, prayer is the means that God renews our minds, transforms our hearts, and conforms our wills to His higher purposes!
We are God's beloved children being conformed into our daddy's image! It is the Holy Spirit of God living in us that continuously transforms us more and more into His likeness as we engage God in intimacy through prayer.
Prayer is a response to God's gift of eternal life living in us! Prayer is the power to hear God's Word in us and to be transformed by it in such a way that God's will is our desire so that our prayer is offered up in accordance to the will of God rather than our own desires.
Prayer is the submission of a child to his/her Father. Listen to this powerful prayer of Jesus Christ recorded in the Gospel of Mark 14:36, "'Abba, Father,' he said, 'everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.'"
Jesus Christ confidently and with boldness poured his heart and soul out to God the Father on the night he was to be betrayed, brought before the courts, and handed over to the Romans to be crucified that Good Friday 2000 years ago. With profound confidence and intimacy Jesus cried out to His Father knowing that all things are possible through God. This is why John can write with such boldness these 2 verses: God hears us and we can know that anything that we ask of God He has done.
The key is that our heart must be conformed into the heart of God just as we see Jesus doing here. We must submit our lives to God and His plan for each of us and we can only do this when we: 1) have deep abiding security in our relationship with God and 2) know Him well enough to know His heart and will for our lives.
This new life grows within us as we learn to trust God and walk with Him in the midst of our everyday situations.
The Apostle Paul teaches in Philippians 4:6, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." Eternal life is this deep abiding trust in God!
Knowing that we have an open and effective communication with the God who is Perfect Fellowship, we can now live our daily lives with the right focus.
IN PERFECT FELLOWSHIP, WE HAVE...THE RIGHT FOCUS IN THIS LIFE!
God desires for our relationship with Him to bear fruit in our relationships with our brothers, sisters, and neighbors. To be adopted into God's Perfect Fellowship as a Child of God, is to be recruited into the Mission of God--His Ministry of Reconciliation with all people!
In verse 16, John teaches us the power of prayer in our relationships, "If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should pray about that.
The main point of this passage can easily be distracted by the distinctions between "a sin that does not lead to death" versus "there is a sin that leads to death." There is a lot of scholarship written on what this distinction may or may not be.
I want to side step the pitfall of speculative teaching and get to the one thing we do know for sure: We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves and if we say we love God who we cannot see, then we better show it in our love for our brother who we can see.
And how do we love them? We reconcile them to God by praying for them! John is not saying that we cannot pray for our brother who has this sin that leads to death, but he is making a distinction to focus on what we are called to do: we are to intercede on their behalf and petition God for our brothers and sisters caught in sin!
We are to be "stretcher-bearers" and carry our brothers and sisters to the throne room of God and stand in solidarity for their healing, their deliverance, and their reconciliation! We are to bear with them in hard times!
To pray for our brother's forgiveness and his pardon from sin is an outflow of our being pardoned from sin through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross of Calvary. Forgiven people forgive! Reconciled people reconcile! What is fruit of your faith?
Let's listen to the heart of God from a very powerful series of teachings on reconciliation. From the Gospel of Matthew 18:12-14, Jesus teaches, "What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost."
God does not one of his little children to be lost; to be drawn away from the flock because of sin! This is God's heart and this we know without hesitation!
OK, I can't resist a quick excursion into speculation…what is this sin that leads to death?
My immediate answer is that it is the denial of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. This faith-based relationship is the key to all forgiveness and reconciliation. But this letter is written to those in the church who have already received the Truth of Jesus Christ. So, you have to dig deeper: it is the sin that at first may go unnoticed, or self-justified, but overtime slowly hardens our hearts towards God and then becomes an idol in our lives; we nurture it and protect it rather than humbly coming before God and confessing it. It is the sin for which we do not ask forgiveness! It is the sin we feel justified in!
How do we prevent such a sin becoming one that leads to death? In James 5:19-20, James taught, "My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins."
We need to be a reconciling community! We are to have one another's backs seeking forgiveness, reconciliation, healing, deliverance, and freedom from sin!
Imagine a faithful remnant who sought a new way in this old world where love was put before pride and restoration was placed before reputation! Imagine if we were to truly forgive one another and let go of our grudges that have become common place in our lives and families! Imagine real genuine relationships where sin is confronted and lives are saved, marriages are restored, and our children have hope and a future.
This is life or death friends! This is eternal life being lived out in a darkened world!
John makes a transition in verse 17 and heads into the triumphant reality of God's love as demonstrated on the Cross for all humanity, in verses 18-19, "All wrongdoing is sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death. We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one."
John is reminding the followers of Jesus of the implications of our victorious reality that allow us to live with focus! As followers of Jesus Christ, we must hate sin and listen to the Holy Spirit when He is convicting us of sin; then we are never beyond forgiveness. All wrongdoing is sin and sin cannot be tolerated or self-justified; nor can any of us make sin a way of life. To do so is antithetical to being in Perfect Fellowship with God; to having eternal life!
As the Children of God, born again through the Holy Spirit making His dwelling place in our hearts, we must reject the temptations of this world order in rebellion against God under the control of the evil one. We are mandated to stand firm and keep the faith which has brought us into Perfect Fellowship. The Victory of Jesus Christ is our unseen, yet true reality, and in this reality we can have focus in a world that overwhelms us with distractions! We must live by faith and not by sight!
This is the Victory of Jesus Christ. Paul summarized in Romans 6:22, "But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life."
In the Perfect Fellowship of God we are protected by all evil because we are covered in the blood of Jesus Christ who defeated the devil and through our faith gives us eternal life. We are set free from sin so that we can become the servants (slaves) of the Most High God! We receive His righteousness (right standing before God); His Holiness (purity from this world); His eternal life! And living out this eternal life is our focus!
John now comes to the second to last verse of his letter's conclusion in verse 20, "We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true—even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life."
This verse draws from the Gospel of John 17:3, "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." In this passage, John is concluding his letter with a reminder of what this eternal life is and who it comes from.
Throughout this letter John has been teaching us the focus of a child of God who has received eternal life. The four defining characteristics of a child of God are: 1) we keep the faith in God through Jesus Christ, the Son of God; 2) we are filled with the Holy Spirit allowing us to reject the evil one's schemes and deceptions in this world; 3) we renounce sin in our lives and live in divine protection covered by the blood of Jesus Christ; and 4) we intentionally live in obedience to the teachings of Jesus Christ, with emphasis on loving one another! [repeat!]
John is essentially bringing his letter to an end by pointing his listeners to the truth that all He has written us is because he is a witness to the greatest event in all of history—the living God who is Spirit, took on flesh and dwelt amongst us.
John is a firsthand witness to the historical fact that Jesus Christ manifested and demonstrated the love of God for all people to behold and then triumphantly declared the Mission of God by reconciling all of humanity to God by taking our sins upon Himself on the Cross of Calvary, effectively making fellowship with God possible for all time at one specific time in history!
Through his witness of the testimony of God to all of humanity John finishes his letter much the same way as he started it; with this good news in 1 John 1:3, "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ."
What is that good news? You are invited to have fellowship with the living body of Christ who is in fellowship with God, the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ! This invitation is extended to each person in God's house today and this confidence is yours to be had.
John then concludes with this powerful statement in verse 21, "Dear children, keep yourselves from idols."
Not one for watering down the truth, John concludes with one last exhortation: I have written to give you an assurance of the eternal life you have only in Jesus Christ so stay focused and keep your head in the game!
Like a good football coach, John is grabbing the face guard of the helmet and saying, "You must stay focused and stop being distracted with the idols (false gods, false religions, false philosophies) of your surrounding culture!"
My brothers and sisters in Christ, there is no salvation to be found in the false promises or false comforters of this world or of our culture! Nothing in this life or from this world can reconcile you to God or reconcile your family and friends to God. For that fact, there is nothing in this world that can reconcile us to one another! Our only hope for today is found in God's indescribable gift to humanity—Jesus Christ! He is our way to the Father, the Truth of the Ancient of Days, and the Eternal Life of God! No one reconciles us to the Father except the Son!
I conclude this series with the same exhortation as John, but written by Paul in Galatians 5:1, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery."
Today, God is offering you the real deal…love, joy, peace, freedom and the choice is yours. I know that you are burdened by this life and there is so much pain and disappointment, but you do not have to suffer in this life without hope. If you are tired and burdened, why not give God a chance to show you how much He loves you?
RESPONSE TIME: Pastor Ken and his team are now going to lead us in a time of response.
Let's pray together. [Pray]
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