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Testament reading this evening
comes from the book of 1st John, chapter 5, beginning at the first
verse. You can find that in your pew
Bibles on page 1023, 1st John 5, starting at the first verse.
Let's give our attention to the reading of God's word. Everyone who believes that Jesus
is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the
Father, loves whoever, has been born of Him. By this we know
that we love the children of God when we love God and obey
His commandments. For this is the love of God,
that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not
burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes
the world. And this is the victory that
has overcome the world, our faith. Who is it that overcomes the
world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? Here ends the reading of God's
word. Please pray with me. Father, We thank you for your
word. Write it on our hearts. Lord,
I am a poor and sinful man, and I pray that you would correct
my words, that I would only speak your words after you. Holy Spirit,
I pray that you would cause us to grow closer to you and to
understand your love and experience your love more fully as the result
of this sermon. All this we ask in Jesus' name,
amen. So, we all reach that stage of
life where we realize that things are changing. And I think I've
been grappling with that for the last couple of months. So I used to work for a ministry
called Harvest USA, which actually was started in part by 10th Presbyterian
Church about 30 some odd years ago. And a coworker from Harvest
USA came to visit me here at the church back in May. And we sat in my office and she
asked if she could pray for me and she started out, Lord, as
Tim and I enter this season as senior saints, this final season
of our ministry on earth. And I said, whoa. Not quite ready for that. And
then last night, my wife Susan and I were having a time of fellowship
with our neighbors. And we have two neighbors, well,
we have many neighbors. We have a family across the street
that have five kids, and four of their five kids were there
last night, and their 16-year-old son was talking about some work
that he was doing at a retirement home, and he talked about old
people. And he qualified old people by
saying, you know, around 60. And I had to correct him and
say, Josiah, 60 isn't old. But all of that to say, I've
begun to become a little more aware of my age and the pitfalls
of growing older. One of the things that I think
I realized too is that the way in which I grew up and the things
that I learned have changed a lot during my lifetime. So for example,
when I went to school, 45 or so years ago, 50 years ago, back
with the Brontosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus rexi, we learned
how to write letters. And we didn't write letters on
a computer. We didn't type out letters on an iPhone. We wrote
letters on lined paper, this lined paper that had chunks of
wood in it so big that you got splinters as your hand went across
the page. And the goal was for you to learn how to write a personal
letter to someone else. Because there was a time in human
history when personal letters were the primary way that people
communicated with one another other than face-to-face communication. So if you're a certain age, you
might remember what the elements of a personal letter are. There's the date. There's the
recipient's name and address at the top. In which corner? the right corner. I'm sorry,
now I forget because it's been so long. There's a salutation,
there's the body of the letter, there's the closing, and there's
your signature. And in the days before low-cost
instant telecommunication via cell phones and video calls and
email and social media and texting, writing these long-form letters
was an art form. It was a way that people could
wax eloquent. It was a way that people could
really share what was on their hearts. Well, most of us don't
do that anymore. A CBS News survey of a couple
of years ago revealed that 52% of American adults said that
they had not sent or received a personal letter in the last
five years. 17% of them had never sent or received a personal letter.
Be that as it may, the text we examine this evening in 1 John
is a letter. And it is a letter that did not arrive in the recipient's
hands in the form that we see it in our English Bibles today.
When John wrote this first of his letters, he wrote it long
form. He wrote it in something called
Scripta Continua, or Lectio Continua rather, which is just a series
of continuous characters. There were no word breaks. There
were paragraph breaks, but no word breaks. And there were no
chapter and verse designations. It just started with what we
see as chapter one, verse one, it went all the way through the
end of chapter five. And it was meant to be read and
listened to in one foul swoop. The way that we digest our letters
today, this letter, I should say today, is somewhat different.
As you know, we've been working through 1 John since spring. And I think we have two more
sermons left after tonight. But as we break it up into these
little chunks, we lose some of that fluidity. We lose some of
the thrust and the meaning and the form of what John intended
his original hearers to experience as they listened to this letter
read beginning to end. An American New Testament theologian
from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, someone older
than me, Ernest DeWitt Burton, suggested that John's thought
in the letter kind of moves in circles, kind of like a coil-shaped
spring. where John repeats certain ideas
gradually and uses that repetition to advance his narrative, to
advance his thought. Essentially, John says the same
thing in slightly different ways in order to emphasize his core
point. And then he connects that point
to another point, all working toward his denouement, his finale,
at which point the relationships among all these concepts are
revealed. And that's where we find ourselves
tonight as we begin chapter five. Chapter five is the beginning
of John's denouement, where he weaves together the main points
of his letter so far, and his hearers hear the rich relationships
among the various topics that he's revealed. John's final act
of this letter, the thought he wants everyone to leave with
its application, is something that I hope we're going to begin
to uncover this evening. And we've seen certain things
that John has wanted us to see and apply so far. You might recall
them from previous sermons. Love God and love your believing
brothers and sisters. Confess your sin and trust in
the atoning work of Christ. Be alert for false teachers who
distort the gospel and try to lead you astray. Rest in God's
love through Jesus Christ. But the ultimate message in 1
John is this. Through the person and work of
Jesus Christ, we who trust in him have overcome the world. We've overcome the world. And
that grace to overcome the world is rooted in love. Another one
of John's major themes in this letter. God's love for us through
Jesus Christ and our love for one another in the church. And
so we'll look at tonight's passage using two points, the burden
of love and the victory of love. First, the burden of love. I
mentioned a few minutes ago that 1 John is a long form letter,
was designed to be read aloud to its audience from salutation
to conclusion. And because we only look at brief
parts of the passage each week, it's easy to miss the fact that
John is building to a climax as he crafts the letter with
his hearers in mind. In chapter five, verse one, for
example, when John's original audiences heard that everyone
who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,
and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of
Him, They would be sensitive to the repetitious nature of
these ideas. Those core concepts have been
repeated throughout the letter so far. And others have been
as well. Jesus is the Christ, the one
who promised to save and deliver his people. Those who believe
that Jesus is the Christ have themselves been adopted into
the family of God as sons and daughters. And it's a natural
outcome of being loved by God to in turn love all the rest
of our brothers and sisters in Christ by reflecting that same
selfless love into their lives. So in hearing these three core
concepts drawn together, John's hearers would have been prompted
to anticipate the climax of his letter. In verse two, John reiterates
the connection between loving God and keeping God's commands
and loving one another. John tells us, are you certain
you love one another? Here's the proof. You actively
love God and obey his commands. And in verse three, John reminds
us that the clear evidence of loving God is that we keep his
commands. But then he goes on to say in
the second half of verse three, and his commands are not burdensome. His commands are not burdensome. Now, why would John go ahead
and say that God's commandments are not burdensome? Well, the
only logical reason is that he would need to convince his audience
contrary to what they assume about those commands in the first
place. They must have assumed that God's commands were burdensome,
that God's commands to love God and keep all of his commands
and to love one another would be too much for them to handle. Verse one marks the 10th and
final time in this letter that those mutually inclusive
commands are mentioned. Love God, love one another. It probably would have taken
the reader 25 or so minutes to read 1 John aloud from start
to finish. And hearing the commands to love
God and to love one another 10 times in that tight timeframe
might have seemed repetitive. and hearing me talk about them
now may seem repetitive to you this evening. Why? Because perhaps you and I realize
how short we fall in faithfully carrying out these commands ourselves.
And maybe it irks us to be reminded so frequently that this is what
the Lord requires of us. But repetition in the oral tradition,
such as in the oral dissemination of John's letter 15 centuries
before it was readily available, in print rather, to Christians
in their own languages, repetition in the oral tradition is meant
to emphasize the main idea, to draw it out, to give it prominence
among all the other ideas surrounding it. We do it today. Why do we
sing hymns with choruses and refrains? Because we want to
hear the same central idea in our ears over and over and over
again. Why do we read parts of the service
aloud as a congregation every week? Elements like the Apostles'
Creed or singing the Gloria Patri or reciting together the Lord's
Prayer. Because we want the core of that gospel or doctrinal truth
over and over and over again in our ears. Why do we memorize
scripture? so we can repeat it to ourselves
over and over again. Repetition is one of the ways
the Lord created our minds and our hearts to be shaped and formed
by truth. But our hearts and minds are
formed by whatever they're exposed to, whether truth or a lie. And so we come to the burdensome
part of keeping God's good commands to love him and to love one another.
These commands seem burdensome to us because we've been conditioned
by lies, by sin, to want the opposite of these commandments. Instead of loving God, we want
autonomy from Him. We see him as a threat to our
independence. We see him as the sociopathic
King George character in the Broadway musical Hamilton, singing
a love song to the rebellious colonists, promising to kill
them if necessary with his love. We see God as an existential
threat to our authority and to our self-priority. I will ascend
to the throne of my own life, we say. The Apostle Paul tells us that
this is our most fundamental symptom of sin that controls
us apart from Christ. It is the epitaph on the tombstone
of our spiritual deadness apart from the resurrection power of
Christ Jesus. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5
verses 14 and 15, For the love of Christ controls
us, because we have concluded this, that one has died for all,
meaning Christ, therefore all have died. And he died for all
that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but
for him who for their sake died and was raised. In other words, Paul says that
our core sin is an all-consuming love of self. You and I want
things our way, and when we can't have it that way, we sin to try
to get it anyway. Paul says we're all narcissists,
and that's why God's commands seem burdensome to us, because
the burden of being invited to love God and to love one another
is a direct assault on our pathological self-importance. The reformer John Calvin wrote
this in his Institutes. He said, the godly heart feels
in itself a division because it's partly imbued with sweetness
from its recognition of the divine goodness, partly grieves in bitterness
from the awareness of its calamity, meaning God's judgment. It partly
rests upon the promises of the gospel, but it partly trembles
at the evidence of the soul's iniquity. It partly rejoices
in the expectation of life, but it partly shudders at the thought
of death. 140 years later, the Puritan
pastor John Owen, in a sermon, exhorted his hearers to be willing
to die daily. How, he asks rhetorically, By
exercising faith constantly in the sovereign grace, the good
pleasure, the power and faithfulness of God, the soul is now taking
its leave of all that it knows by its senses, all its relationships,
everything with which it has been acquainted up until now.
From now on, it will be absolutely, eternally unconcerned with them.
It's entering into an invisible world of which it knows nothing.
except what it has by faith. Both Calvin and Owen write about
a deep division in the heart of the one who believes in Christ.
Calvin talks about this great dichotomy of desire, on the one
hand, to embrace relationship with the Lord, and on the other,
to run and hide out of fear of God's judgment, shuddering, as
he says, at the thought of death. Owen speaks of the only way forward
for the Christian being to embrace the reality of death to sinful
desire daily and to cling to faith in God's love through the
work of Jesus. The prospect of death is not
a happy one. And yet if we shudder in fear
and never choose in faith to put to death the sin that still
resides in us daily, we'll never experience the joy of new life.
And that's the burden of love, the burden of God's love anyway.
The only way to truly experience it is to embrace what we all
instinctively resist in our flesh, the death of our dream of autonomy. Without death, there's no life. That takes us on to the second
point, the victory of love. The Greek word hati translated
for at the beginning of verse four is an important word. It's
important because it establishes a causal connection between John's
statement in verse three that God's commands are not burdensome
and the reason why they aren't burdensome. And so John says
that everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. This is great news. John has
already established the fact earlier on in the letter that
Christians are born of God. He says in chapter three, verse
one, see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that
we should be called children of God, and so we are. And if
you have made a profession of faith in Christ Jesus, if you
know that he is the very son of God, if you know that he came
to die a vicarious death for you because you are a sinner
and have no hope of having any kind of positive relationship
with God, then you are a child of God. As John says here in
verse four, you are born of God. If that's true for you, praise
God, that's great news. But where's the freedom in the
gospel reality for you? Where's the victory? Let me ask
you, do you feel loved by God? Do you feel victorious in your
new life? Do you have an intimate spiritual relationship with your
Father? Do you experience joy? I don't ask those questions accusingly.
I ask them because it's the typical experience of the typical Christian
that no, they don't experience love or victory or intimacy or
joy with God on a consistent basis. They don't experience
it. We don't experience it. I don't
experience it. If you're a typical Christian,
the seeming lack of a payoff probably seems discouraging.
It might even seem disheartening. Maybe you're tempted to think
you're not really a Christian in the first place or that God isn't
real or that there's no way that God could love someone like you. I struggle with all those questions
and those thoughts sometimes myself. So why does John tell us in verse
four that This is the victory that has overcome the world,
our faith. My faith is lacking. I doubt God's love. I often feel
far away from Him. I continue to struggle with temptation
and with sin and with unbelief. I am one of the least joyful
people I know. and I do not love my brothers
and sisters in Christ consistently or well. So where is the victory? In 25 or so years of Christian
counseling and pastoral ministry, one of the things I've discovered
about myself is that the core sin of loving myself more than
God and more than my neighbors is still deeply rooted in my
heart. It's fighting, it's struggling
to survive, it's gasping for breath. Although the work of
Jesus on the cross has severed its aorta and it is gradually
losing strength, it is losing it in a painfully slow fashion. It's with me morning, noon, and
night. It tries to exert its influence over me by desperately
promising me things that it knows that I want. Jesus tells me to
put it to death. Take up your cross and follow
me, he says. But to be honest, part of me
doesn't want to kill it. I don't want to experience the
pain of the cross, the pain of death to which Jesus invites
me daily. And I'd be willing to wager pretty
much anything that you are pretty much like me. You're divided. You want to please the Lord,
but you also want to love yourself. You want to love your brothers
and sisters well, but you want to make sure you're taken care
of first. So where is our hope? Where is
our victory? The writer of Hebrews tells us
in Hebrews 2 verses 14 and 15 that Jesus, through his death,
destroyed the one who has power over death, that is, the devil,
and has delivered all who, through fear of death, were subject to
lifelong slavery. Let me read that again. Jesus
through his death has destroyed the one who has power over death,
that is the devil, and has delivered all who through fear of death
were subject to lifelong slavery. And that's our victory, that
Jesus broke the power of death over us. You and I are afraid of what
putting sin to death in our lives will cost us. You and I are afraid
of being gravely disappointed by God. You and I are afraid
that loving others will be unrewarding and will keep us from getting
what we want out of life. And the faith of which John speaks
as being our victory is a faith in what is to come because we
choose to rest in what the Lord has done for us. And it's not
a passive faith. It's very much active and it's
growing. One of the privileges we have in loving one another
in the body of Christ is building up each other's faith. Paul says
in Ephesians 4.16 that we are meant to build one another up
in faith, in hope, and in love. John ends this evening's passage
by asking the question, who is it that overcomes the world except
the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? That's a rhetorical question.
The answer has to be no one. Only as we look at Jesus, the
one who submitted to the will of the Father, the one who took
on flesh and weakness and became one of us, the one who lived
a life of perfect obedience to the law, the one who suffered
and died in order to put death to death, the one who rose again
on the third day in order to give us new life, the one who
is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters and to share his
inheritance with us all? The one who gave us his spirit
to transform us and sanctify us in order to fit us to him
forever. The one who laughs with us, cries
with us, grieves with us, laments with us, hopes with us, and encourages
us in order to grow our faith. The one who will one day return
to gather us to himself and take away the tears from every eye. Only as we look to Jesus do we
experience the victory that John talks about and rest in it. Only
as we look to Jesus do we find the help and the faith that we
need to keep God's commandments and to live joyfully as God's
children. And my friends, I would be remiss
if I didn't say again that when any scripture writer talks about
what it means to grow in sanctification, what it means to grow in repentance,
what it means to grow in Christlikeness, and as John talks about here,
what it means to avail yourself of this victory, you and I can't do it on our
own. If you try to do it on your own, you will fail. And if you're a human being,
you have tried it on your own and you have failed and you probably
feel like a failure as a Christian because that's been your experience.
My friends, the Lord has saved us into his body that we would
build one another up. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was
a Lutheran pastor and who wrote extensively about discipleship
and about what it meant to grapple with having real relationship
with God, describes it this way. He says, the Lord has given us
his word. He's put it into the hands and
the mouths of men. but he's given it to us in order
that we would share it with one another, that we would speak
it into one another's lives, that the Spirit would use us
as his messengers to proclaim the life-giving power of the
gospel to one another. The New Testament writers talk
over and over and over again about the need for us to build
one another up in faith, to exhort one another to the truth daily.
to remind one another who we are, to hold up scripture as
a mirror to one another so that we would be able to see ourselves
in the midst of it and see not only where we fall short, but
where the Lord calls us higher and gives us grace to remain
in his love. We need to build one another
up. If we don't do that, we are utterly
failing as a church. We can send 100,000 missionaries
into the world. We can care for hundreds of people
dealing with homelessness on a weekly basis. But if we are
not building one another up, if we are not making kingdom
disciples, if we are not taking the steps and taking the risks
necessary in order to be transparent with one another and to share
our struggles and our fears and our experience of a lack of victory
with one another, then we're never going to experience that
victory in the first place because we're never going to receive
the support and encouragement that the Lord intends for us
to receive in order for it to become tangible. And so brothers and sisters,
let's pray that the Lord would make us that kind of church.
Let's pray that he would make us those kinds of people who
would not only believe the gospel ourselves, but would be willing
to speak it and live it out in one another's lives. Let's pray. Our Lord and heavenly Father, We thank you for your word, and
we confess that it is sometimes a hard word, because it sounds
as though you're offering us something that it is impossible
for us to receive. Lord, I pray, not only for my
brothers and sisters, I pray for myself, that we would all
experience the victory the strengthening of our faith in Jesus Christ,
the strengthening of our desire and resolve to love you and to
keep your commands and to love one another. Lord, show us how
to spur one another on at 10th. Show us how to build one another
up in faith in order that that victory would become not only
more tangible, but more powerful, and that we would, in fact, overcome
the world in Christ. All this we ask in His name,
amen.
Victory
Series The Epistles of John
| Sermon ID | 71524041535936 |
| Duration | 33:10 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | 1 John 5:1-5 |
| Language | English |
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