A.In 1
John 3:19-24, and the paragraph immediately preceding, this
is judicial setting.
1.
Possibly a preview of what we
are in for.
2.
Look at the language:
a.
“condemn,”
b.
“accuse”
c.
“keep,” “obey” the commandments
3.
It is “our hearts” which
are on trial here!
a.
I love the image that
Augustine gives us from the 2
nd century,
which he borrows from Job 31:6,
b.
that our heart has been weighed
in the balance and found wanting.
(1)
Figuratively, a heart should not
weigh more than a tiny feather on a scale. It will be
overweight if it has gathered even a speck of dirt from sin.
(2)
A human heart tips the scale at
8-10 ounces for a grown woman, 2 ounces more for a male.
c.It is
your heart that accuses you,
condemns you before God.
4.
The first half of this paragraph
mentions “our hearts” three times, and the second half of
the paragraph talks about obeying “the commandments.”
5.
If you go back to the Fourth
Gospel chapters 14-17, you will notice a similar pairing of
a believer’s heart or love and the keeping of God’s
commandments:
a.For example,
John 15:10, “If
you keep my commandments, you will abide, you will
persevere in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s
commandments and persevere in his love.”
6.
I have discovered that the word
“commandment” appears side by side with the word “love”
28 times in that farewell speech of Jesus.
th Gospel, between 13:31, through chapter
17:26, a form of the word “love” appears 29 times!
8.
Our commentator Dr. Peter Rhea Jones, the Southern Baptist
from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, quotes BF Westcott
“who saw this text as the most remarkable passage in
which John portrayed the office of the heart (and)
recognized that the heart included the conscience, indeed
the whole moral conscious nature of man.”
a.
This is the very heart of our
church, our collective congregation!
b.
And John the writer, the church
leader and Elder is struggling heart and soul through this
trial as one with his church members.
II.
There is an almost unnoticed
shift in this paragraph: John speaks of keeping the
commandments in the plural, but in one verse, the 23rd, he
mentions the one commandment!
A.For me this
is one of the most powerful statements in all the pages of
the Bible. It rivals John 3:16 in its impact!
1.
“And this is his commandment,
that we should believe in the name of his son Jesus Christ
and love one another...”
2.
In one short sentence John lets
you know everything you must do to have eternal life.
3.
So concisely stated, in 21
words, the whole of the Christian faith is summed up!
4.
Along comes the church, and we
add to it all of our doctrines and rules.
a.
Our church has an 85-page policy
manual with job descriptions, bylaws, sexual misconduct
policy, church bus use rules.
5.
We compound the faith, we twist
it and restate it and psychologically analyze it, put
asterisks on it, and question whether it is a politically
correct statement.
a.
Does it use inclusive language?
b.
Is it culturally conditioned?
c.
Is it truly Reformed and follow
our Book of Order?
d.
Do we ever ask, “is it loving?”
B.You may
recall one of my sermons last year in which I told you
about Raymond A Moody, a physician and a psychologist who
followed up on the pioneering work of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler
Ross, interviewed 150 patients who died, had an out-of-body
experience, then were resuscitated.
1.
Dr. Moody in his book from 1975,
“Life After Life,” learned there were some common
threads in those out of body experiences. Each interviewee
said they experienced some kind of holy or spiritual
presence in a wonderful light, as if God gave each a final
review of their life. God asked each one:
a.
What have you learned in your
life and how did you use it?
b.
Second, how have you learned to love?
[PAUSE]
2.
I think of my father on this
Father’s Day and how I learned to be a Christian by watching
him as a missionary doctor in Tabriz, Iran, by learning to
love others as he loved my mother and each one of us, as he
loved his poor, illiterate Muslim patients. I am thankful
he has embodied the love of a Heavenly Father for me. Now he
lies in a nursing home bed 24/7 in Portland, Oregon, ravaged
by dementia waiting to be called home.
C.There is a
fascinating discussion about the evolution or REDUCTION of
the laws of Moses–the commandments–into only one law.
1.
The recent Scottish theologian
Dr. William Barclay in his Commentary observes: The
Jewish authorities in the 1st century A.D. taught that Moses
had been given the 613 basic laws on Mt. Sinai, 365
according to the days of the year–and 248 corresponding to
the known generations of humanity.
a. The 365 laws
prescribed what you could NOT do (the "don'ts);
c. David is said to
have cut the 613 laws down to 11 in Psalm 15.
d. Isaiah, prior to the
Exile, further reduced the 11 down to 6 ( 33:15).
e. Then Micah
(6:8) came along and whittled the 6 to 3 "in the
profoundly simple
statement" (Barclay)
(page 2)
(i) "What
does the Lord require of you--only this: to do justice, to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
f.
Deutero-Isaiah, the prophet of the Exile reduced them to 2
in the 6
th century--keep justice and do
righteousness.
g. finally Habakkuk
believed he had contracted every law into one,
"The
righteous shall live by faith"
(2:4)
(i) Paul in
Romans takes up a discussion of this one law.
2.
For John and 1 John that one law is the law of mutual
love, love of God, love of neighbor.
a. This singular commandment in I John 3:23 is a
logical outgrowth of John 3:16; it is a restatement of the
Great Commandment. On this one passage all the rest of
John’s Epistle hinges.
3.
John in this letter and in the Gospel says: God's only
rule of faith is the law of love. Yet it remains the
one rule of faith we find impossible to keep.
4.
John, the pastor and elder, says that standing before God’s
trial court, our hearts accuse us and might even condemn us.
a. However something else happens in the same breath.
b. You and I are won over by what Peter Jones calls “a
psychological turn,” a persuasion to believe.
c. This confidence is a gift. “To believe” in the
Greek also means “to pacify... set at ease or rest,” to be
completely reassured.
5.
And there are a few bonuses!
a. In this confidence, our belief in his Son Jesus and
our love of each other, “we
receive from him whatever we ask,”
(i) John 14:13, “‘I
will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may
be glorified in the Son’”
(New International Version).
(ii) This
incredible promise appears in all 4 Gospels.
III.
What
you have here is a two-sided ethical imperative in
which BELIEF and LOVE are in essence one, grounded in the
person of Jesus Christ! can we say it inversely? God’s love
for us is so perfect that he also believes in you and me as
Christ’s own church.
A.
John incorporates the combination of 2 laws
previously separate and unequal: love of God and love of
neighbor.
1.
Our author restates this one commandment in different forms
in each of
the 5 chapters of his first
letter, and he ties everything he says about
Christian life and faith to
that one edict.
2.
The one thing the rich young ruler lacked, who had kept
perfectly all the law, was the one thing Jesus wanted to
give him: he lacked love.
B.
John stands in a long line of
Biblical writers who appreciate the richness of the Jewish
heritage of “God’s law.”
th psalm, “the great Psalm
of the Law,” as Mitchell Dahood calls it in The “Anchor
Bible.”
2.
Psalm 119 is not only the longest chapter in the Bible,
a. but an acrostic poem,
in which each group of 8 verses begins with a succeeding
letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
3.
Just feel the richness, the dynamic nature he attributes to
God’s Law:
a. “the
gate of the LORD by which the righteous shall enter”
b.
“a lamp unto my feet”
c.
“your righteous testimonies for ever”
d.
“the unfolding of your words”
e.
“your promise for your servant.”
4.
Literally, he loves God’s law as he loves God with his whole
being.
IV.
Well
then, if I want to keep God’s one commandment to have
eternal life, what is the nature of my obedient life? Or to
put it another way, how do I move from believing to doing?
A.
First of all, says John, I BELIEVE
in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, my personal Lord and
Savior, whom I confess willingly and openly.
rd verse is the first time he uses the
word “believe,” (Greek, pisteo)
2.
This word “believe” appears subsequently 6 times in his
letter.
3.
John Henry Jowett, a renowned British pulpiteer who lived 70
years ago refashioned a statement by Hankey in this manner:
“The true Christian religion is betting one’s life
that Jesus is the son of God and the Savior of the world and
hazarding everything for the honor of his friendship.”
a. That makes more sense
than that obnoxious bumper sticker, “Honk if you love
Jesus.”
4. “‘Andyou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and
with all your strength: this is the first
commandment.’” and all other commandments issue from
this one.
B.
Second, as we said last Sunday,
your life is a life which is lived in LOVE with every one of
your neighbors–especially the “have not’s.”
1.
These two are inseparable, each a distortion without
the other.
a. This is the essence of
to “abide,” to persevere and persist in Christ.
b. My obedience is a
matter of the whole self brought into discipline,
(i) brought into
a humble servant-like nature,
(ii) surrendered,
sacrificed
c. John 15:7, “‘If
you REMAIN in me, and my words REMAIN in you, ask whatever
you will, and it shall be done for you.’”
2.
Isn’t it interesting that John talked about love of neighbor
first, and after that belief in Jesus?!
3.
My love starts with my church circle and moves
outward–everyone!
C.
Finally, that love and obedience is
lived in CONFIDENCE before God that God loves me and
you unconditionally, that we please him in our
daily lives, and in the ASSURANCE that you and I
have life eternal even today.
1.
This whole spectrum of feelings is summed up in our
Christian joy.
2. C.S. Lewis helped us see that
hope as well as joy is the expression of a
believer’s confidence and
self-assurance.
a. In hope you and I overcome the world.
b. So what we all want is
to end up with the certainty that we have God’s
own love which some day will be perfected, completed,
finalized in us.
c. I think that happens
only before his judgment seat, our final trial.
3.
“In
this love is perfected with us,”
we read in I John 4:17,
“we may have
confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so are
we in this world.
There is
no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear. We love
because he first
loved us.”
May each of God’s beloved little
children now say, “Amen!”