I.
For the next seven weeks we are
going to be preaching out of the First Letter of John. It
is the third to last book of the New Testament, right after
the letters of Peter.
A.These
letter have a strategic placement.
a.
The letters of Peter encouraged
the faithful Christians in their terrible suffering
at the end of the first century.
b.
The first letter of John
encouraged the love of those same Christians for one
another.
c.
Because their themes are so
universal, the letters speak to you and me 2,000 years later
right where we find ourselves.
B.“We
are thrown headlong into a symphony of salvation, arranged
and conducted by God.” So writes C Clifton Black from
Perkins Methodist School of Theology in Dallas
(New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary).
1.
Black calls these first 4 verses
“The Introit for Eternal Life.”
2.
The last week of my pulpit
exchange in New Zealand, before I flew home, I took a bus
trip up to the tip of the North Island in New Zealand to
Cape Reinga, where there is a famous lighthouse.
a.
I stood high up on that
peninsula and looked many miles out to sea where I could see
the restless waters of the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman
Sea clash into each other. They each have a different
coloration and intensity.
b.Down at the
base of Cape Reinga above the shoreline (where we cannot
go), is a famous Pohutakawa Tree (that is their
native Christmas tree that turns red with amazing flowers in
December). An 800 year-old Maori legend has it that the
human spirit returns to that twisted old tree at life’s end
to begin its journey back to its spiritual homeland. [pause]
3.
The author of 1 John “sets us up
on a promontory and turns us to look backward, to scan the
expanse of the church’s proclamation ‘from the beginning.’”
4.
His language is stamped with the
great Johanine themes like a preview of what is to
come:
a.
the triumph of light over
darkness
b.
truth over deception and lies
c.
the revelation of eternal life
d.
the role of God’s commandments
in our lives
e.
and the perfection of love
C.Then we are
carried right into the present tense of the church
community’s life and its morality!
1.
As he gets into chapter 2, John,
a prisoner on the island of Patmos, ties a tight knot around
his congregation’s gripping message about Jesus Christ.
a.
how Jesus walked, and how you
and I should do the same with our brother and sister
b.
The message is specific,
personal.
2.
Everything he says about life
has a moral context.
3.
He jumps into the heart of
matters, confessing that we are liars and we need
forgiveness!
II.
For our letter writer,
forgiveness is where love starts.
A.Love is a
theme that works like Elmer’s Glue. It spills out
onto everything and holds it all together!
1.
Here is a homework assignment.
Go home and count how many times John uses the word “love’
in this letter, as a verb, a noun, an adjective.
a.
Then count how often John uses
it in Jesus’ farewell speech in his Gospel, chapters 13-17.
2.
You cannot talk about love
without dealing right up front with how pervasive sin is in
Christ’s church. He says we lie to ourselves about this.
3.
Love, forgiveness, sin: these
are inextricably tied to the other themes:
a.
knowledge
b.
truth
c.
light and darkness
d.
eternal life
e.
how you walk
f.
how you talk
B.In our
Monday evening book study, How Your Church Family Works,
author Peter Steinke in his last two chapters, says
it is our sin, our muddy communication with each other, our
focus on self, that prevents clear vision and a response for
the future.
1.
He writes, “Nowhere is the
tension more challenging than in the sphere of who we are
and what we are about as a Christian community...” than with
forgiveness.
2.
“forgiveness requires a capacity
to ‘stand back’” from yourself, to see yourself
objectively and regulated, “holy, set apart,” as Christ sees
you
3.
If we cannot do that, says
Steinke, “we fritter away our destiny.”
4.
There is a good reason 1 John is
at the end of our Bible! Revelation is the book of
our destiny, but we have no destiny without forgiveness and
love.
III.So what
is sin for John? [pause]
A.Mark
Twain tells a story about when he went to church.
He was asked afterward, “What did the preacher talk about?”
“He talked about sin.” “What did he say about it? “He said,
he’s again’ it.”
1.
John gives us a succinct and
ethical definition:
a)
anyone who does not love,
b)
anyone who says she loves God
whom she cannot see but does not love her sister whom she
sees every day
c)
anyone who does not love in word
or speech, or in everyday actions
2.
It is “a death-dealing cutting
off of relationship with God that is murderous in its
effect,” says Moody Smith, Professor of New Testament at
Duke University Divinity School (the Interpretation
commentary series).
a)
It is murderous because it cuts
off life in the church. Any individual sin spreads its
anxiety, its poison all around. There is no immunity.
B.Notice
how John gets started: with sin in the
singular.
1.But one
individual sin leads to sinning
a)
it becomes habit-forming.
2.
And sinning leads to sins
a)
the plural word, involving the
whole body of faith.
b)
Everyone feels its effect.
3.
For John, and also for Peter
Steinke in his book, sin is a relationship, a
condition, not an action nor a breaking of a commandment or
moral law.
a)How
terribly we misunderstand what the
Bible says about sin!
b) I think sin is
something I do, an evil thought. But that is only a
symptom. Sin is my attitude, my way of thinking and how I
run my life. Sin is the pair of eyeglasses I put on
and look through.
4. “To deny (the pervasiveness of) sin is to undercut
the economy of
salvation,” says Moody
Smith, “not only by lying to myself but my
making God a liar!”
b)
That’s is a harsh offensive
word, to call someone a liar!
c)
It puts an end to all
communication. Whatever you want to say, choose a softer
word. But John does not talk softly or politically- correct.
He speaks the hard naked truth.
d)R.
Buckminster Fuller, the smartest
man I ever saw, once said, “The deadliest weapon of war ever
invented is the human lie.”
4.
To deny sin in your life, in
your church’s life, is the lie that prevents a person from
receiving God’s saving work, God’s love.
a)
Talking about sin today is
paseé.
(1)
This morning on TV I saw Joel
Osteen preaching to a sell-out crowd at a football stadium.
You have to buy a ticket to hear Olsteen. but he does not
talk about sin.
(2)
The Unity Church does not
believe in sin; it believes every one has a good spirit
within them. And they are growing.
b) But the ritual
of confession is a foundational belief in Reformed
faith
C.To confess
my sin, to God and to do so openly in church, is then to
receive God’s saving work in my life and to open myself up
to love.
1.
But confession – that is so
hard!
a)
It is so personal, so humbling
2.That is why
confession is also a gift, it comes as a result of
grace.
3.
It is curious, I think, that
this first-century writer never mentions grace in this
letter; you find it only in a verse in 2 John.
a)
Yet John says everything else
that describes God’s grace when he talks about love.
4.Another thing
I want to point out about sin and forgiveness in this
letter: when we give our sin to God, God’s promise is
absolute and perfect.
a) Verse 9– “If we confess
our sins, God is faithful and just, and
will forgive our sins
and CLEANSE us from ALL unrighteousness.”
th verse– “If we walk
in the light, as God is in the light, we have fellowship
with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son CLEANSES us
from ALL sin.”
a)
#2, ALL= Our action has to be
absolute also, total and unconditional
b)When we give a sin
to God, we can never have it back; it is gone –there is no
computer undelete! That is grace.
(i)
Computers do not know grace, like those in our office!
5.
Then God says God will forget it, he
will remember it no more.
a)
That is one thing that makes God
different from me and you.
b)
You and I remember, we cannot
forget.
c)
We put it away on a shelf and save
it to use it again.fff
IV.Love,
the polar opposite of sin, starts out the same way sin
does.
A.There is an
intentional occurrence of polarities in John’s first letter:
1.
light and darkness,
a)
love and hate,
b)
eternal life and death.
2.
Each share similar qualities but in
reverse.
3.
Opposites are often so close we
cannot tell them apart, except by the fruit they produce.
a)
Like magnetic fields, they may
attract or repel each other.
b)
Did you see the “Star Wars” movies.
c)
What was the relationship between
Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader?
d)
or between Can and Abel, Jacob and
Esau, Martha and Mary?
B.Love is
singular just as my first sin is.
1.
But there is a qualitative
difference here: the singular quality of love is God’s love,
not mine; God’s gift, not mine
a)
Our singularity is sin, which we
must give to God.
2.
That singular love moves toward
loving
a)
it becomes habit-forming,
3.
to the point that it spreads through
the whole church.
a)
Just like sin, love has an immediate
effect,
4.
And love as a plural word spreads
from the church, which is Christ’s living body throughout the
whole world.
a)
Remember that bumper sticker–e
b)
“Commit spontaneous random acts
of love;’ it is very Johanine!
5.
I have identified the TWO GIVING
WORDS in the Holy Bible: forgiveness and thanksgiving!
Do you imagine that the two can be separated?
V.
Before closing, I want to add a
footnote to our series of sermons in 1 John. just as we need to
be ever so careful about our sin, so we need to be careful with
our words.
A.John’s use of
vocabulary in the Gospel and this letter is skillful, carefully
chosen and didactic or instructive.
1.
If it is true that Jesus is the
Logos, the Wisdom by which God brought everything into
being, as the Gospel says in its Prologue,
2.
if Jesus is the word of life, 1 John
1:1, what is the implication for the our language, how we train
our tongue?
a)
and not just our verbal skills, but
our body language,
b)
our facial expressions,
c)
our posture
d)
they all speak tons!
e)
and our confession of our sins is
definitely a matter of words.
B.Have you ever thought
of the Bible as a moral instruction book for how we use our
language, our human words?
1.
The first book, Genesis, in its
first 11 chapters–the prologue of human history has a story
about the origin of human languages as a result of sin–the tower
of Babel.
2.
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are
training manuals for the privileged children to discern between
wisdom and foolishness all through the use of words.
3.
Also, take a look at James 3.
a)
He says the tongue is more powerful
than the tiny rudder of a ship.
4.
1st John 1 gives us a series of “If
we say...: statements:
a. each is connected
with how we talk in our church family and how it
directly affects
our fellowship. [pause]
5.
1 John 2:5, “Whoever keeps his (God’s) word,
in that person truly love for God is perfected.”
(Repeat a second time.)
And all of let all of God’s
children say...”Amen!”