The Herald of the Sunrise

Posted on 18 December 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(2 Samuel 22:1-4, Micah 7:8-20; Luke 1:57-80)

I have to admit, this passage from Luke gave me fits. There’s a lot of interesting things to say about it, but I don’t just want to stand up here and tell you interesting stuff; and I had trouble finding the sermon in it. To be sure, it’s a great story. Elizabeth gives birth, and her family and the whole community rejoice. They wait to name the baby until he’s circumcised, and everyone around assumes he’s going to be named Zechariah after his father—until Elizabeth interrupts, “No, he’s going to be called John.”

Well, now that wasn’t how things were done, because sons were supposed to be named after fathers or grandfathers, and John wasn’t a family name. The neighbors seem to have figured Elizabeth was cutting her husband out of the decision—they clearly thought he was deaf as well as mute—so they asked him directly; to their surprise he wrote, quite emphatically, “His name is John.” Note that—not will be, but is. God named that baby before he was even conceived, and he’s been called John since before he even existed. With that, Zechariah’s speech is restored, and he begins praising God—and the community falls back in fear, recognizing that God is at work, wondering who on Earth this child is going to be. It’s a great scene, and it would be easy to talk about Zechariah putting his faith in God and receiving his reward; but is that really the point?

Then you have this great song of praise, commonly called the Benedictus; interestingly, he’s praising God for giving him a son, but that’s really not the focus of his song. It’s been said that every man wants his son to be a star, but we don’t see that in Zechariah’s words; instead, he essentially says, never mind the star, the sun is rising—and my son, you get to go ahead of him to let everyone know he’s coming. It’s a wonderful declaration, drawing once again on Malachi, which we read a couple weeks ago. It would be easy to turn it into a nice little moral lesson about how we should value people for how they point us to Christ, not for how impressive they are in themselves; which is true enough, but that isn’t the gospel heartbeat in this passage.

More interesting is verse 72, which our English translations blunt a little bit. Zechariah declares that God has raised up a horn of salvation for his people—the image is of the horn of an ox, with which it strikes and drives back its enemies—and then he says, “to do mercy to our ancestors.” Again, the idea here is the Old Testament word hesed; our concept of mercy tends to be pretty passive and pallid, just a matter of letting the guilty off the hook, but here we see the biblical concept of the faithful, covenant-making love and mercy of God as an active force, God taking decisive and powerful action to deliver his people. And even more interesting, Zechariah says that in bringing his people salvation from their enemies, God is doing mercy to their ancestors—he is fulfilling the covenant promises he made to them.

If you really stop and consider what Zechariah is saying, you have to be struck by the grand sweep of his vision; and here, I think, we strike something that is the gospel word for us this morning. We have the real tendency to collapse our view of God’s salvation to just one thing. Classically, for evangelicals, it’s personal individual spiritual salvation from sin, which can lead into a sort of “me ’n’ Jesus” isolationism. Equally classically, for liberals, it’s social justice—political liberation from oppressive societal structures. With the American evangelical move into political engagement that began a few decades ago, salvation began to be somewhat identified with moral transformation of the culture. You wind up with dueling theologies as political campaigns.

None of these visions of salvation is big enough; none matches the vision God gave Zechariah. There is definitely a political element to the deliverance he foresees, as the enemies of the people of God will no longer be able to oppress them—they will be removed as enemies, either by their destruction or by being brought to repentance. That cannot be removed from the picture, because the deliverance God promises is not merely internal and subjective. At the same time—and this is where so many in Israel missed the boat—his deliverance is not merely political, either; the language of verses 77-79 goes far beyond that. The Lord will deliver his people, not merely from political bondage to Rome, but from spiritual bondage to sin; he will free them, and guide them by his light, so that they will at last walk in the way of his peace.

Now, here again we have a word that cannot be captured by its English translation, though shalom is rather better known. This doesn’t just mean “peace” as in “peace and quiet” or “not fighting.” Rather, the idea in this word is of being in complete harmony, first of all with God and his will, and thus, second, within yourself—resulting in a calm, unshakeable sense that all is well, and freedom from anxiety; this in turn creates harmony with others, to the extent that they are willing to be at peace with you. A life of shalom is a life lived in tune with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will. This is the life to which Jesus will call those who believe in him, and which he will make possible for those who believe in him.

Along with this, there’s also the aspect of his salvation we see in verses 74-75: God is fulfilling his promise to Abraham “to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” This is what we might call the social aspect—the bridge between our individual deliverance from sin and the political deliverance of the people of God from those who do evil: God saves us in order that we may serve him with our whole lives, and in fact that opportunity to serve is part of the blessing he gives us. That service is not merely activity on God’s behalf, but is a way of life submitted in humble obedience to him—conformed to his holiness and righteousness, accepting his definition of what is good and right rather than insisting on our own ideas and preferences.

The salvation of God in Jesus Christ unites all these elements, because God is on about redeeming a people for his name; he saves us as individuals, but not just as individuals, and he isn’t saving us only from our individual sin, but from all the sin of all of us together. That’s why Paul in 2 Corinthians describes the work Jesus has entrusted to us as “the ministry of reconciliation,” because in delivering us from our sin and giving us peace with him, part of his purpose is to give peace between us—to cleanse the sin not only from our own hearts, but from our relationships. As he gives us the humility to bow before him and accept his good instead of our own, so too he gives us the humility to bow before each other and accept each other’s good instead of our own.

God is on about redeeming our hearts, our relationships, our families, our churches, our culture, our society, our nation, our world—in fact, all of creation. His deliverance comes at every level; his salvation operates in every area, in every aspect. He will not stop until the knowledge of him fills the earth as the waters fill the sea, and all people bow the knee to him as the only Lord and God, the only authority, the only one to be obeyed, the only one deserving of worship.

In the Middle of the Ordinary

Posted on 11 December 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(1 Samuel 2:1-11; Luke 1:39-56)

God didn’t come when he was expected. He didn’t come during the crisis of conquest, or the heady days of the Maccabean revolt, or the hopeful (if brief) period of independence; in any of those times, the opportunity for a national deliverer to arise and restore Israel to its glories under David and Solomon was apparent, but God didn’t come then. He didn’t come where he was expected either—he didn’t show up in a palace, or among the priests, or with the rich and powerful; indeed, he didn’t even come to the capital city of Jerusalem, the city of God. His coming was not in an extraordinary time, or an extraordinary place, or to anyone whom the world would have considered special or important in any way.

Instead, God came where the world wasn’t looking, when its head was turned. He came at a time that was like most times—neither one of great prosperity and success, nor one of crisis and great need. He came to a place that was like most places, not a center of culture nor a community of power and wealth, but just an ordinary small town where nothing much ever happened once, let alone twice. And he came to an ordinary family, no one to whom society would have given a second glance, people who were completely anonymous in the broader scheme of things. The most extraordinary event in human history—the birth of God as a human being—began in the most ordinary context you could possibly imagine.

And in this we see the gospel. We see God working salvation completely by his own initiative and power and grace, completely apart from any human effort or plan or expectation. Mary does nothing to earn this or make this happen; neither did Elizabeth or Zechariah. Yes, Zechariah and Elizabeth were faithful and godly people, and Mary seems to have been a young woman of deep and serious faith and character as well, and that’s clearly part of why God chose them; but the choice was all God’s, none of their doing—for them, there was only to receive his blessing with gratitude and faith.

We also see here that God does not judge people the same way we do; as he told Samuel, where we look at the external stuff, he looks at the heart. The world would never have chosen Elizabeth or Mary for anything important, but God did—because he knew better. He doesn’t honor our hierarchies, our evaluations, our priorities; he inverts and upends them. He doesn’t follow our agendas, he does what he will and calls us to follow him—and he does so in a way that drives home the fact that we neither know nor control as much as we think we do.

Now, there are those who use Mary’s song in political ways, as justification for their political agendas, but to do that is to miss the point and drastically shrink its vision. Human revolutions may bring down the proud, but they only replace them with other proud people; in most cases, they end up being hijacked by those who are hungry for power and greedy for wealth, and you wind up with folks in power who are no better than the ones they overthrew. Human schemes to humble the rich and raise up the poor don’t really change the system, they just shift the balance of winners and losers. That’s all they can do, because they’re all about our goals, our agendas, our efforts, and our desires—they’re about us, and focused on us. What God is doing is very different.

The great theme of Mary’s great song of praise—underscored by God’s choice of her and Elizabeth—isn’t rich vs. poor, but the humble vs. the proud. God has brought down those who are proud “in their inmost thoughts”—those whose pride is deep in their bones, who think they have no need of God. They are oppressors, perhaps of whole nations, perhaps of their wives and children, because they don’t respect others—and they don’t respect others because they don’t respect God. They feel free to use and take advantage of other people if they can because they’re strong enough to do so and they bow to no law but their own; but God has brought them down.

Now, to be sure, we can’t hide from the fact that if we look around, we can see a lot of the proud doing just fine, to all appearances; God keeps bringing them down, and more keep rising up. As we’ve said before, we live between the times—the kingdom of God broke into the world with the coming of Jesus, and is already here in us his people, but it has not yet been fully realized; in the vivid image of Swiss NT scholar Oscar Cullman, we live between D-Day and V-E Day, when the outcome of the war has been decided, but the enemy has not yet given up fighting. The proud may not know they’ve been brought down, but Mary is right: their final defeat has already been accomplished.

If we lose sight of that, it’s probably because we’re looking for hope in all the wrong places. We keep looking to the proud, to the powerful and influential, for deliverance. We look to politicians to fix our country’s problems, to government or big corporations to solve our economic issues, to people we see on TV to reverse our moral decline—and we forget that God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. To be clear, I’m not saying that everyone who’s famous is proud in their inmost thoughts—though being famous tends to breed that pride—nor am I saying that God doesn’t or can’t use powerful people. Obviously he can and he does. But we need to remember that “God helps those that help themselves” is Ben Franklin*, not Scripture, and Scripture doesn’t tell us that God gives grace to the mighty. God gives grace to the humble.

This is the key, and it’s the crux of Mary’s song: God is holy, and his hesed is for those who show him reverence. If you haven’t been here when I’ve talked about hesed, stick around and you’ll hear about it—this is one of my favorite Old Testament words, in part because it’s so rich there’s no good way to translate it. Our English versions render it a lot of ways—mercy, lovingkindness, covenant love, covenant faithfulness, faithful love; but really, it needs a sentence at least. Hesed means love in action, steadfast love that always keeps its promises, unswerving loyalty and faithfulness, complete commitment and unfailing reliability; it’s the way God treats those with whom he has made covenant. It’s what the Jesus Storybook Bible calls his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

This is the love of God, the mercy of God, the faithfulness of God, for his people whom he has chosen—not because we were impressive, wise or wealthy or powerful; indeed, as 1 Corinthians tells us, God quite deliberately chooses the unimpressive in order to make it clear that the wisdom and the power and the riches are all his. He chooses us in our weakness and foolishness, and he gives us his Holy Spirit; and by his Spirit he gives us Jesus, whom he has made our wisdom, righteousness and holiness and redemption. He fills us with his love, and he teaches us to worship him, and him alone. What matters is not that we are good enough, talented enough, important enough—none of us is; what matters is that he has chosen us, and he is more than able.

* Note: though not original to Franklin, the phrase is best known in the US through its inclusion in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Eternity Contracted to a Span

Posted on 4 December 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | 2 Comments

(Isaiah 7:10-14; Luke 1:26-38)

What we see here is God announcing his plan to do the impossible. In the first place, it’s physically impossible—Mary’s a virgin. She’s betrothed to Joseph—and just so we’re clear on this, betrothal is what they had back then in place of engagement, but it was much stronger; it entailed all the commitments of marriage with none of the benefits, and it lasted a whole year. So, she’s legally bound to Joseph, but they’re still living apart, probably with family making sure they don’t sneak off and do anything inappropriate. There’s absolutely no way she can be pregnant. But she’s going to be.

The physical impossibility, though, is secondary; it’s only to underscore the spiritual impossibility: this baby born to a virgin girl would be God. The angel doesn’t really push Mary to understand this fully, and she probably didn’t until much later; it was far too great an impossibility for anyone to comprehend at that point, and Mary was overwhelmed enough as it was. It’s all there, though.

In particular, note verse 35: the child will be called holy and the Son of God—why? Because he will be conceived, not by normal human action, but by a direct miraculous work of the Spirit of God. He will be fully human, but he will be more than merely human, right from the absolute beginning. He will be God become one fragile human being; the creator of the universe, the Word by whom the world was made, will take up nine months’ residence in a woman’s womb.

It’s a wonder, this; it’s a wonder we keep collapsing into sentiment and trite moral lessons because even now, even as many millions of times as the story has been told, it’s still too big for us to really grasp. The maker of all that is, the one who holds our incomprehensibly vast universe in the palm of his hand, as an unborn baby doing backflips and kicking his mother in the bladder; Almighty God with messy diapers and a rash. As the British poet John Betjeman asked in wonder,

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

Yes, it is true, incomprehensibly, gloriously true: the infinite, all-powerful, all-glorious Son of God, the source of all life through whom all things were made, reduced himself to a zygote in the womb of a humble girl in a backwater village on the edge of civilization, to be born among the animals and laid in a feed trough by parents who were soon to be fugitives, to live as a homeless wanderer, to be falsely convicted and wrongly executed, to rise again from the dead—and he did it all for you, that you might know him, and know he loves you.

Bearing Witness

Posted on 27 November 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Malachi 2:17-3:4, 4:5-6; Luke 1:1-25)

There aren’t all that many hymns for Advent. We have a lot of hymns for Christmas, of course, and a lot for Easter, and there are quite a number that work well for Lent, focusing on the sacrifice of Christ; but for Advent, not so many, and very few at all that are widely sung. Really, the only ones you can count on finding in the hymnal are “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” Which, for a season of the church year that lasts four Sundays, is just a little bit short.

I was lamenting this the other week as I was starting to plan the service for this Sunday and next, and I got this comment from my wife: “Our culture is actually anti-waiting, anti- letting things take time and not be instantly resolved . . . I think it might be the same reason that the church is so bad at grieving.” The point about grieving was one that hadn’t occurred to me, but she’s right about our culture. We live in a society that wants to get it decided, get it done, and move on. We have our instant oatmeal, microwave popcorn, and fast food; we have drive-through pharmacies so we don’t have to wait ten minutes while our prescriptions are filled—we can drive off and come back later. Our communications are supposed to be instantaneous—many people derisively refer to physical letters as “snail mail,” because having to wait a day or two is such a burden.

Of course, our ability to do things quickly has its advantages; but to the extent that we’ve taught ourselves to expect quick, easy answers to our needs and our problems, we’ve done ourselves a disservice. Some things just take time; some plants bear fruit slowly, or not at all. Our wounds often take longer to heal than we wish, or realize, and trying to rush the healing process only does more hurt. And all of us, in various ways, at various times, will find ourselves hung betwixt and between—unable to stay where we are, but with no apparent way forward. Even the most fortunate among us have nights of anguish, not knowing, hoping against hope that the worst hasn’t really happened; even the most blessed have times of longing for good news that does not come.

And the fact is, it’s into just such cruxes in our lives that the gospel speaks; they are entry points for the Holy Spirit in our hearts because they are points at which our sense of self-sufficiency breaks down, and we are driven beyond our wants and desires to the true deep need of our souls. Waiting, even when it’s painful, is not an interruption of God’s plan, or something we have to explain away; it’s part of his plan, part of the way he works in us to accomplish his purposes.

In light of that, it’s interesting that we see this theme working at a couple different levels in our passage from Luke this morning. At the big-picture level, of course, Israel had been waiting long for God’s promised Messiah. If you were here this spring, you remember Malachi’s ringing words, proclaiming the coming Day of the Lord . . . but those words had fallen into silence. Where God had so often spoken to his people through his prophets, after Malachi there were no more. “Behold,” God declared, “I am sending my messenger, who will prepare the way before me” . . . and then nothing, for over four centuries. After the Persians came the Greeks, then a brief period of independence, then the Romans, and through it all no sign of God’s messenger.

That’s the big story here, but it’s not the only story Luke is concerned about; indeed, it’s not the story with which he begins. Instead, he begins at the human level. Zechariah was a priest, married to a woman who was a descendant of Aaron, the first of all the priests; they were a devout couple who faithfully obeyed God and sought to please him. No doubt Zechariah prayed for and earnestly desired the coming of the Messiah—but there was something else that weighed more heavily on his heart, for he and Elizabeth had no children. They had prayed and prayed for a child, but it seemed God had ignored their prayers; they had waited so long for a baby, they’d given up, for they were now both too old for such things.

And then came the high point of Zechariah’s priestly career: he was chosen by lot to go into the Holy Place in the heart of the temple during the sacrifice—apparently during the evening sacrifice, because there was a large crowd gathered to pray; since there were some 18,000 priests, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And as he stands there, burning incense before the altar of God, carrying the prayers of the people to heaven with the smoke, an angel appears to him and says, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah. God did hear your prayers for a child; Elizabeth will have a son, and you will call him John. He will be the messenger God promised, the one who will go forth in the spirit and power of Elijah to prepare the way for the Lord.”

God could have chosen any couple he liked to bring John the Baptizer into the world; but as he brought his people’s long wait for their Redeemer to an end, he chose to bring this couple’s long wait to an end as well. To a Jew in those days, being childless was one of the bitterest of sorrows, and usually taken as a sign of God’s judgment. Zechariah and Elizabeth had served God faithfully all their lives, and so her inability to conceive must have been agonizing and perplexing. Had they somehow displeased God? Had God failed them? From everything they understood about God, it didn’t make sense; and yet they remained steadfast in their faith, serving him devotedly even when he had withheld from them the one gift they most desired.

You have to feel for Zechariah here. He’d probably given up any hope of a child long since, and now an angel appears to him and announces that God is going to give him and his wife a son, and it’s all just far too much to process. It’s hard to blame him for asking, “How can I be sure you’re telling me the truth?” The poor man was simply overwhelmed. And yet even so, the angel gives him a sign, but the sign is a punishment for his unbelief—his ability to speak is taken away until the child is born.

It’s hard to blame him, because Zechariah knows that what is happening to him is impossible—and worse, it’s implausible. It’s the stuff delusions are made of. He has a firm grip on how the world works, just as most of us do, and this simply doesn’t fit. He’s a man of faith, but within the bounds of the rational and the limits of what is reasonably possible; he knows the stories of what God has done in the past, but they’re stories, not a part of his present. As such, he can’t quite believe that God could actually do such a thing now; his faith struggles to outgrow the box of his assumptions. And so Gabriel rebukes him, for part of God’s purpose is to teach him, and others, that God is not limited by what we think he can do, or will do.

In conceiving and ultimately giving birth to John, Elizabeth isn’t just giving birth to the one who will bear witness to the Son of God; she is herself bearing witness to the truth that God is capable of doing far more than what we think is possible, and of blessing us far beyond what we can dare to hope. She is bearing witness to the truth that God can turn our mourning into dancing and our sorrow into joy—that he can take our defeats and our losses and use them to bless us in ways we never could have dreamed. She is bearing witness to the truth that just because God makes us wait doesn’t mean he isn’t coming, and just because he doesn’t act on our schedule doesn’t mean he’s too late. He is faithful, ever faithful, and he never fails to act in his good time.

That We May Know

Posted on 20 November 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Numbers 15:27-31; 1 John 5:13-21)

John is a big one for knowledge. “I write these things to you who believe in the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life,” he says. This is closely akin to his purpose statement near the end of his gospel, in John 20:31: “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” That we may know who Jesus is, that we may act on that knowledge by putting our trust in him, that we may know that in him we have eternal life—that’s what John is driving at here; and in this conclusion of his letter, he backs that up with statement after statement about what we as Christians know about who God is and who we are in him. Not merely what we think, not just what we want to believe, but what we know—what is bedrock, what is absolutely certain; what we can stake our lives on.

And as part of that, he calls us to stake our lives on what we know. These days, we tend to think of knowledge the way we do in school, as a collection of facts that we have to be able to remember to answer the questions correctly and pass the test. You tell me stuff, I tell it back to you to prove that I was listening and remember what you said. It’s rather like mama bird feeding little baby birds—eat worm, regurgitate worm, repeat.

That’s not the biblical definition of knowledge, and it’s not what John is on about. Biblically, true knowledge, knowledge of the truth, produces true action; it shapes and forms the way we live. Thus John says here, “I write these things to you so that you may know that you have eternal life,” but back in 2:1, he wrote, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” To us, these sound like different things, but to John, they aren’t. Knowing we have eternal life in Christ—and Christ alone—affects how we live; it draws us away from sin and toward God. We don’t learn not to sin by force of will or fear of punishment or some form of manipulation, we learn not to sin by coming to know God and his blessings, and so to love him, and value them, more than the pleasures and promised rewards of sin.

That truth underlies the points John is making in this final section of his letter. “This is the confidence we have in God’s presence,” he tells us, “that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” “Hearing” in this context doesn’t just mean that God knows we said something, but that he responds positively to our request, and thus that we can know that we will receive what we ask. If we ask according to his will. In which case, isn’t our prayer redundant?

No, it isn’t. You see, God can bless us whether we ask him to or not; but he can’t bless us as an answer to our prayers unless we pray. And more than that, God doesn’t do things capriciously or without reason; why should we assume that his will doesn’t take our prayers into account? Our prayers don’t force God to do anything, but does that mean he doesn’t will to do things in part because we ask him to? I think one reason we have trouble thinking about prayer is that we implicitly have a transactional model of prayer, as if we were asking the bank for a loan, or the library for a book. We say prayer is about our relationship with God, but we don’t really think through what that means. Prayer is how God involves us in what he’s doing; we give him what’s on our mind and heart, and he takes that into his counsel, and he helps us to understand his will and what he intends to do. We learn to see our lives in that light, and to want what he wills.

This begins, though, with knowing—not just in our heads, but in our hearts and in our bones—that in Jesus, we have a different kind of life from the world at large, something more than the world has to offer. Prayer according to God’s will begins with the trust that God’s will really is better—and better for us specifically—than our own ideas and plans. Sin, by contrast, is the practical expression of the belief that we cannot trust God. They’re polar opposites of each other.

That may be why John commands us in verse 16, if we see a fellow believer sin, to pray for them: the first response we should have to the public sin of another is not condemnation, or lecturing, which are applications of our own power to punish, but prayer, which is an appeal to the power of God to heal and restore. Yes, public discipline is sometimes necessary as well, but that isn’t where we should start—and even discipline must be combined with prayer, because nothing we can do can bring people to repentance; only God can do that. Only he can give life.

Now, John distinguishes between “the sin that does not lead to death” and “the sin that leads to death”; people have come up with various random suggestions for what “the sin that leads to death” might be, but I don’t think John’s making a random reference here. Remember the context; remember the false teachers against whom he’s writing, who have deliberately turned away from Christ, choosing darkness over light. That deliberate rejection of our only hope of salvation is the sin that leads to death, because it is the sin of choosing death over life; we call it apostasy, and John says, “I don’t command you to pray for such people.” You can, but he isn’t going to force the issue, because that will break your heart. It’s not a bad thing, that what breaks the heart of God should break our hearts as well; but it isn’t easy to bear.

The danger in talking about this is that in bringing eternal punishment into the conversation, it can inspire fear; I remember a couple conversations in high school with classmates who were afraid they had committed the unforgivable sin. Thus John follows up with strong words of reassurance, reminding us what we know, why we need not fear or lose heart. None of this is new, he’s said it all over the course of the letter, but he wants to make sure it sticks. “We know that anyone born of God does not keep on sinning”—yes, we do sin, but we repent, we ask forgiveness, and we give it to Jesus, who took it all on the cross. Jesus protects us, and he keeps the evil one from leading us into the sin that leads to death. The system of this world is under the control of the evil one, but we know we’re free of that, because we are of God—we belong to him alone.

“And we know 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, in his Son Jesus Christ, who is the true God and eternal life. Therefore, little children, keep yourselves from idols.” “Therefore” isn’t in the text, but I think it’s implied. John’s closing thought is at once a profound statement of praise and a call to action—a call to live lives in accordance with that praise.

We’re tempted to go after idols—to put our trust and our faith and our love in people or things ahead of God; but how foolish is that, really? In God, we have nothing to fear, and there is nothing better we could desire—the Son of God has come, and through him we are able to know the one who is true, the God of all creation, the source of all light and goodness and grace. More, we are in God, we live in him and he lives in us, because we are in Jesus Christ, who is God, who is eternal life. We have been united with Christ by his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, who lives in us by the will of God the Father; he is the source of truth and grace and love, hope and joy and peace and all good things.

Don’t settle for idols; accept no substitutes. Jesus came that we may know God—not just know about him, or worship him, or know his commandments, but know him, as we know our closest friends and family. He came to be the way for us to God, and there is no better way. Indeed, there is no other way, never has been and never will be; and John writes so that we may know this beyond all doubt, and be moved to praise, and to trust—and to follow.

A Different Kind of Life

Posted on 13 November 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Deuteronomy 30:11-14; 1 John 5:1-12)

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves everyone who has been born of God.” With that line, John begins his final turn, into the conclusion of his letter. The people of God are those who believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God born as an ordinary human baby to live and die and rise from the dead on our behalf, so that we might be ransomed from death and given new life, and that true life is found in Jesus Christ alone and no other. Those who believe in him do not merely have someone else to follow or someone else to worship, we have been reborn, spiritually, by the will of God the Father and the power of his Holy Spirit; he is alive in us, his Spirit fills us, and we have been given his love. By his love, we love each other—everyone else who believes in Jesus is family, and we love them even when we don’t like them very much.

And then John throws us a bit of a curve. He’s been saying that the sign that we love God is that we love our brothers and sisters, which we see in verse 1 as well, but now he flips that; in fact, he closes the circle by saying, “This is how we know that we love God’s children, when we love God and obey his commandments, because obeying God’s commandments is how we live out his love.” We know we love God because we love each other, we know we love each other because we love God—if one is there, the other is, they can’t exist without each other, because love for God necessarily produces love for his people. And the sign of that, the practical heart of that, is obedience to God.

Which is interesting, because we aren’t accustomed to thinking of love in that way. We tend to define it subjectively, in terms of whether the other person feels loved. Understandable, certainly, and if nobody feels we love them, that should probably tip us off that something’s wrong; but those perceptions are not always accurate. People aren’t always going to receive loving statements and actions as loving, because as we’ve said, loving each other well has to involve challenging each other at times and calling one another to repentance. The final measure of whether we’re loving God and each other is whether we’re doing what he told us to do.

Now, against that, we have a lot of voices in the church insisting that following the commands of Scripture is burdensome, and that whatever commands they consider burdensome must not really be God’s commands anymore, because his commands aren’t supposed to be burdensome. If the Bible tells me I can’t have sex with that person I want to have sex with, or that I’m supposed to give generously to the church and to the poor and vulnerable, or that I have to love and serve that person over there who hurt me deeply, well, that’s burdensome, and so God can’t really mean that. Which makes a lot of sense, from a human perspective, and so a lot of people happily buy in to that approach, and happily follow teachers who present this as God’s word. John wants to change our perspective on what “burdensome” is, by changing our idea of what life is.

To give you an idea, one of the joys of being a Seattle Seahawks fan back in the days when there were any was the play of our great left tackle, Walter Jones. Normally, watching a left tackle isn’t what you’d call “fun,” but Big Walt was an exception. He’d drive defensive linemen back ten yards before they knew what had happened; on pass plays he’d stretch out one arm, grab a pass rusher, and put him flat on his back. He was as big and strong as a truck—and he got that way by pushing them around. Literally. Part of his workout every offseason was pushing a three-ton Escalade around a big parking lot near his house. You’d see pictures, and from his face the man was in pain. That hurt to do. But was it burdensome? No, it wasn’t. He did it gladly, even joyfully.

Why? Because that’s part of what it took for him to be what he wanted to be—a dominant, Hall-of-Fame force at one of the game’s key positions. That struggle wasn’t a burden, it was a blessing, because through it, he grew, he got better, and the physical gifts God gave him were realized in his performance on the football field. Walter Jones could easily have avoided all that pain and turned aside from all that struggle; but his life would not have been better for it, as he would have been far less than he had the ability to be.

We tend to go to God and say, “I want the world.” Maybe not all of it, but at least this part of it. When we don’t get the world, we complain and say bad things about God. When the Bible tells us we can’t have that particular part of the world we want, we try to explain it away or get rid of it; when other people call us on it, we say they’re unloving. But the fact is, God doesn’t promise us the world; in fact, he doesn’t even offer us the world. God offers us something completely different in Jesus Christ: a whole new kind of life, and a victory that overcomes the world.

I was thinking about this the last few days, not in quite these terms but in terms of our freedom in Christ; John doesn’t use that language here, that’s Paul in Galatians, but it connects. You know, the freedom I want in Christ—the freedom I believe we’re promised—is freedom from myself. Hear me carefully on this, I don’t mean freedom to be somebody different, I’m not talking about different talents or abandoning my commitments or anything like that; I mean at a deeper level.

I want freedom from the fears that cripple and paralyze me—I know God’s love has not been perfected in me yet, because there’s a lot there still to drive out. I want freedom from the desires that drive me—and I don’t just mean the sinful ones; I don’t want to be controlled any longer even by those that are perfectly appropriate. I want to be free from my bad habits, and more, I want to be free from my idols. I want to be able to stop putting myself first in my life, and thus to be free to love. I want to be unchained from my ego, and my need to make everything happen by my own power, so that the power of God may flow freely in me and through me. I want to stop flapping my puny little wings and just soar on the winds of God’s joy and grace and love. I’m not there yet, but before God, that’s the freedom I want. That’s the life I want.

And my hope—even as it’s also my frustration at how often I submarine myself—my hope is that that’s the life I’ve been given. It’s the life we’ve all been given, by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Our faith is the victory that has overcome the world—including the influence of the world in our hearts—not because there’s anything special about our faith, but because it is through our faith that we confess Jesus as the Christ and have been born again, from above, of God. It is by faith that we have turned from the world to the life of God in Christ, whose life has overcome the world, and is overcoming it, and will overcome it.

God Is Love

Posted on 6 November 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Leviticus 19:17-18, Deuteronomy 6:4-5; 1 John 4:7-21)

God has a strange sense of humor. Mind you, I can’t complain, because I have a strange sense of humor, too, but sometimes God’s is differently strange. This week was a good example of that, to find myself preparing this passage as we had two meetings with the Presbytery of Wabash Valley regarding our departure from the PC(USA); they didn’t use 1 John, but they did try to argue that it was a betrayal of Christian love for us to end our affiliation with them, and especially to do so in the way we did. It was another reminder of how easily the language of love can be used for the reality of manipulation.

That’s what happens if we define love in human terms; not only is that even true for Christians, I’d argue it’s especially true for Christians. If we affirm that God is love but don’t allow that truth to challenge and change our understanding of what love is, we end up by defining God in human terms—which is to say, we end up worshiping a god made in our own image; we end up worshiping an idol. We end up twisting Jesus, by one means or another, until we have a pretty picture of a Jesus who would never lead us anywhere we don’t want to go, or push us in any way we don’t want to be pushed. I don’t know if that’s what happened to the people against whom John is writing, I don’t know if that’s why they left the church—though I wonder; but I think it’s exactly what led astray the false teachers who are currently running the mainline Presbyterian church, and what has seduced them away from the true gospel to a lie.

This is why John has taken great pains to say two things. One, we know what love is by the example of Jesus, and especially his death on the cross for us; we learn what love is and what it looks like by looking to Jesus. This is essential, but it isn’t sufficient for identifying false teaching, because we can be deceived; thus John also says, two, that anyone who speaks by the Spirit of God is oriented completely toward Jesus Christ, and is primarily concerned that people put him first in their lives, love him above all others, and seek to please him in everything they do. The love of God never aims us at pleasing ourselves or fulfilling our own agenda, though that may happen along the way, nor at satisfying the desires and agendas of others, though that too may happen; rather, the love of God in us makes us concerned first and foremost with loving and serving him and doing what he wants us to do, whether it’s what anyone else wants us to do or not.

The place where we’re so prone to go wrong, the mistake that so often wrong-foots us, is our assumption that the love of God, because it is unequivocally for us, is therefore about us. Nothing could be further from the truth. The love of God is above all else about God. We talked about this last year when we talked about the Trinity and what it means to say that God is love—not that he is loving, but that he is love. The key to understanding this is the truth that God is three in one—a reality which we see at work in verses 13-16, as the Father sends the Son, who pointed us to the Father, and he sends the Spirit by whom we are able to acknowledge the Son, and by whom God lives in us.

When we begin honestly to understand God in that way—which is beyond us to grasp fully, but when we begin to think that way—we can start to understand what John is saying here. We can say that God is love because in his very nature, they exist in love between himselves. The love of God is the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for each other. We were created that we might be drawn into that circle to share it, but the circle doesn’t break because we enter it. Love is still fundamentally something which comes only from God and which is directed ultimately toward God; we share in his love, we are included, it has become for us as well, but it isn’t for us first. Which means that we don’t get to define it, or control it, or try to dictate terms to God, because his love doesn’t depend on us; if we reject him and reject his love, it grieves him, but it does not diminish him or his love in any way, only us.

Now, does this mean that God doesn’t love me best? Yeah, it does. Is that reason to feel bad? No, it isn’t. The love of God is infinite, and his love for each of us is infinite, and how much headway are we going to make comparing infinities anyway? If Jesus already loves us more than we will ever be able to comprehend, what does it matter to us that he loves the Father and the Spirit even more? Where exactly do we lose in that? What matters is that he created us to love us, he redeemed us because he loves us, and he is leading us home to live in his kingdom for eternity because he loves us—and that by his love, he is teaching us to love him and to love each other as he loves us.

This creates a cycle here, one which is implicit in this passage though John doesn’t spell it out. Why do we love? Because God first loved us. How do we know? Because he sent Jesus his Son to offer himself as a sacrifice on our behalf, that our sin might be taken away and replaced with his righteousness. How do we know this, and how do we know what his love looks like? Because he has given us his Holy Spirit, who shows us Jesus.

And how does the Holy Spirit show us Jesus? In his word, the Bible—and in his body, the church. In the only body Jesus currently has in the world—us—his people, filled by his Spirit with his love that we might be like him. We learn to know his love, and we learn to love, in part because the Spirit of God loves us through the people of God; by so doing, he makes us part of his people and fills us with his love so that we might love others and they might learn his love through us.

This is what God is doing with us, and what he is doing in us, and through us; more than that—God is love—this is who he is, this is his nature, and this is what it means that he lives in us. This is what it looks like for Jesus to be the Savior of the world, because this is what his salvation means. It isn’t merely that we have sinned, that we are incapable in ourselves of getting free of our sin or making it all right, and that we need Jesus to cleanse us and set us free from our sin; that’s all true and absolutely essential, but it doesn’t stop there. He sets us free from our sin into his love—and in so doing, he radically transforms us, from the root up.

We can see this in John’s statement that perfect love drives out fear. From the context, part of the point is that the love of God removes our fear of being sent to Hell when we die; but God’s salvation is much bigger than just that assurance, because it isn’t merely a transaction, it’s not just about giving us a “Get out of Hell free” card, it’s a transformation. Our confidence, our assurance of salvation, is rooted in the fact that the love of God is at work in us, changing us from the inside out, to such a point that John could say with a straight face that we are in the world now in the same way as Jesus was then. His Spirit is in us, his love is in us, he is at work in us, and while a lot of other things are also in us and get in the way, they are dying; they are passing away as we become by the power of the Holy Spirit the people we already are in Christ.

Thus we can see that God’s perfect love drives out any reason for us to be afraid of God, because God no longer stands in relation to us as the one who will punish us; which, by the way, shows the essential falsity of those who would seek to scare people into Heaven by terrifying them with Hell. God isn’t in this to punish us because he has given us his love, and his love is purifying us and setting us free from all that. We love him because he loves us, and instead of being judged and punished, we are renewed and remade as the people of his love.

And in so doing, God’s perfect love doesn’t only remove our fear of him, it removes our fear of the world, because the world no longer has the ability to punish us. We fear rejection—that people will punish us for not being who they want us to be. We fear failure—that society will punish us for not being good enough. We fear loss—that the world will punish us for caring, for hoping, for dreaming. We fear many things, because we look to the world to meet our needs and give our lives meaning and significance. The less we look to the world and the more we look to God, the more we depend on him to provide all our needs and the more we trust him to do so, the less we need the world and the less power it has to hurt us; and so our fear of the world leaves our hearts, driven out by the perfect love of God, which is ours in the power of the Holy Spirit, through the grace of Jesus Christ the Son of God, by the will of God the Father, who is now and forever to be praised.

Our Spiritual Compass

Posted on 30 October 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Deuteronomy 13:1-5; 1 John 3:23-4:6)

Unlike certain earlier parts of this letter, John’s argument here is very simple, and very clear. It’s also critically important. As we’ve seen, the purpose of his letter is to keep his audience from being led astray by false teachers who have left the church to preach a false version of Christianity; he has drawn a sharp line between those who walk in the light of God and those who don’t, and made it clear that those who walk in the light are those who are filled with the love of God, and those who don’t, aren’t. In our passage last week—of which we’ve included the last couple verses again this morning, as John once again links his argument very closely—he gave us the standard for what the love of God looks like: Jesus Christ, and most particularly his death on the cross for us. Love is not just anything that calls itself love, it’s something that looks like Jesus.

And here, he gathers that point up, binds it together with his earlier observation that the false teachers are false because their teaching denies Christ, sharpens it all into a spike, and drives it home. You want to know who to follow and who not to follow? One simple rule: anyone who is all about Jesus Christ, first, last, and always, is from God. Anyone who isn’t, even if they use the name of Jesus Christ, is not from God. Period.

It doesn’t matter if you were born in the church and your name was on the membership rolls three weeks before you drew breath; it doesn’t matter if you have a perfect-attendance badge in Sunday school going all the way back to your days in the nursery. It doesn’t matter if you’re an elder, a deacon, a pastor, a professor; it doesn’t matter if you work in a building that calls itself a church and holds services every Sunday morning. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of a denomination that’s been calling itself a church for 500 years, or 2000 years. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written books for Christian publishers, articles for Christian magazines, songs for Christian record companies, or greeting cards for Christian bookstores, or showed up on Christian TV programs to talk about any or all of them. If your primary purpose isn’t to point people to Jesus Christ, to encourage them to put their faith in Jesus alone to follow Christ alone, then you do not acknowledge him, you’re only trying to make use of him for your own purposes; and if that’s the case, then you are not from God, and you are not speaking by the Spirit of God.

Now, again, John isn’t expecting perfection here, and none of us do this perfectly; we all have ulterior motives that creep in at various places. We need to keep after them, cutting them back and digging them up, but they do not disqualify us. The key is, what are we trying to do first and foremost—what is our goal? What are we really on about, and what is essential about what we do and why?

You know, I certainly hope that y’all will invite people to come, and they’ll keep coming and invite others, and that some who are outside the church will come, and hear the gospel, and bow before Jesus as Savior and Lord, and in their turn invite others, and so on and so forth; I certainly hope that this church will grow, and it would be nice if it grew enough that the giving was high enough to support all the ministries we do, so that we didn’t have to keep selling off assets to pay the bills. That would be nice, and there’s nothing wrong in hoping for it. But if I start to make that the purpose of my preaching, if I start to make that the focus of the ministry God has given me here, then I would be out of step with the Holy Spirit, and I would become a false teacher. I want the church to grow—but if God should call me to preach a sermon that would somehow drive half the church away, my responsibility to him would be to stand up and faithfully preach that sermon, whatever the consequences. I don’t see that happening, of course—it’s a pretty extreme thought experiment—but that’s where my calling would be.

Similarly, when teachers come along insisting that we need to change our understanding of God or of the Scriptures, and their arguments are all about what people in our culture believe or want or think they know, when they contend that we must fit the biblical definition of the love of God to what the majority in our society wants to believe is loving, we need to stand against that. The fact that the world listens to them, and does so with approval, is not evidence they’re right, it’s a sign that they are from the world, not from God. If the world seeks to marginalize and silence us, it’s not a sign that we’re wrong, out of date, or regressive; rather, it’s evidence that we are standing in the way of Jesus, who spoke the truth of God so clearly to the world that they butchered him for it.

Now, we need to be clear about something here: “the world” doesn’t just mean “not the church,” and it doesn’t just mean “liberal.” There’s plenty of the world in the church, too, unfortunately, and plenty of people who are conservative because the part of the world they want to please happens to be made up of conservative churchgoers. It’s all too easy, as Jesus notes in Matthew 7, to see the speck in our brother’s eye, and not notice the log in our own; the teachings of Christ, properly understood, will convict us and make us uncomfortable just as much as they will encourage and support us, and just as much as they will convict and disrupt “those” people “out there” who we know are wrong about this, that and the other thing. Indeed, if we are truly conscious of our own sinfulness and need for grace, we should expect the Spirit of Christ to convict us even more than others, for we should be able to say with Paul, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

That said, though we must be humble before all people, even the false teachers and false prophets of our age, our humility is because we are sinful and imperfect, and our understanding of God’s truth is thus incomplete and flawed. God is perfect, and his truth and love are utterly without flaw, and so we must hold fast to him and his truth with no hesitation, no apology, and no compromise. We don’t understand everything yet, and so we continually need correction and refocusing as we abide in Christ and grow in him; but by his Spirit we have all truth, and we can trust him to help us understand it more and more as we need to, in his own good time. We always need to recognize and admit our limits, but we never need to back down, no matter what anyone might say or do.

And you know, as we hold fast to Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we should do so joyfully, even when doing so brings us trials and tribulations. James doesn’t say, “Complain, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that society should appreciate you properly and do what you want”; no, he says, “Rejoice when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” When the high priest had the apostles flogged, they didn’t grumble that this was supposed to be a godly nation—they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to share in the sufferings of Christ. And John doesn’t say, “Little children, expect the world to like you and approve of you for being like Jesus”; rather, he says, “The world just didn’t get Jesus, and it’s not going to get you either if you look like Jesus, so don’t be surprised when the world hates you.”

If we are truly agents of the gospel of Jesus Christ working to carry out the ministry of Jesus Christ in the face of the hatred of the Father of Lies, then the more effectively we point people to Jesus, the more the Enemy is going to attack us, using every weapon he can conjure up—and he is the Father of Lies, so that gives him plenty of opportunity for conjuring—and the more unexpected, undeserved, and painful the attack, the better. When we respond with complaint, with bitterness, with anger and resentment, when we fight back, we play right into the Enemy’s hands and give him what he wants. It’s far better for us to respond to those attacks by looking to Jesus.

Just as an example, when Dr. Kavanaugh’s ministry comes under attack in one way or another, if you hear him talk about it at all, you’ll always hear him say, “Well, praise God.” There are times I think he’s maybe a little ironic about that, but I have the sense—and correct me if I’m wrong, Doc—I have the sense that he’s trained himself to that discipline to keep pointing himself back to the truth that such things really are reasons to praise God.

When you are attacked for preaching the gospel instead of telling people what they want to hear, for pointing them to Jesus Christ instead of what they want to see, don’t complain, but rejoice that you are sharing in the sufferings of his ministry, and that his Spirit is using those sufferings for your growth; and don’t fight back, don’t let yourself be drawn away from the truth, but go on preaching the gospel. Go on pointing people to Jesus Christ. Go on trusting him to be faithful and true even when that’s hard to see, and in your own trust, show others how to do the same. And those who don’t listen, leave them to God—they’re not your worry, they’re his. You, look to Jesus, follow those who help you see him, and show him to others in your turn. That is enough.

Live Love

Posted on 23 October 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Genesis 4:1-8; 1 John 3:11-24)

John concludes the previous section of this letter in verse 10 by saying, “This is how we know who are the children of God, and who are the children of the Devil: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God”—which restates what he’s already said in verses 7-8; but then he adds to it: “nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. For,” he continues, launching into this next part of his argument, “this is just what you’ve heard all the way along: we should love one another.” This is the standard by which our relationships with other people should be measured, this is what our lives should look like, this is the sign that the love of God is in us: do we live out his love to the people around us?

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t like math—you can’t measure it or plot it on a graph to prove that you love someone (or don’t, as the case may be). As we’ve talked about, we can’t just take people’s statements about love at face value—not even our own—because human beings use the word “love” in some pretty slippery ways. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do,” and the world “love” is all too easy to use for that purpose. We recognize that it has power, and so there’s a great temptation to seize that power to use against others for our own purposes, to get what we want. Biblically, though, that’s the exact opposite of love, which is not about getting, but giving; the demands of love are directed not at each other, but at ourselves.

Thus John gives us first the negative example of Cain—an extreme example, as one who literally physically murdered his brother, but one who in that very extremity offers a powerful illustration of the problem. Why did Cain kill his brother? We saw this last year when we worked through Genesis—Cain was all about Cain. He didn’t give God the best of his crops, just what he felt like giving; and when God favored his younger brother because Abel did give God his best, Cain grew angry and bitter. Instead of accepting God’s rebuke and admitting his sin, he blamed it all on his brother. He put himself ahead of his brother, which led him to see Abel as a rival and a threat; as a result, he came to hate him, and ultimately to kill him.

By contrast to Cain, we also have the positive example of Jesus—also an extreme example, as of course he was God and therefore perfect, which makes him the perfect illustration of love. How do we know what love is? Jesus died on the cross for us. What does it mean for us to love others? Go and do likewise.

Now, as John goes on to say, this doesn’t mean that we all need to lay down our lives for others in the exact same way as Jesus did; for one thing, we can’t because we’re not him, and for another, that’s not what people need from us. As James Denney put it in his book The Death of Christ, “If I were sitting on the end of the pier on a summer day enjoying the sunshine and the air, and some one came along and jumped into the water and got drowned ‘to prove his love for me,’ I should find it quite unintelligible.” I might need love, but such an act would do nothing for me. But, he continues, “if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning,” and someone jumped in and saved my life at the cost of their own—“then I should say, ‘Greater love hath no man than this,’” because then I would understand the sacrifice that was made for me. I. Howard Marshall sums it up this way: “Love means saying ‘No’ to one’s own life so that somebody else may live.”

Note this: what we see most clearly in Jesus’ way of dying is also his way of living, and the way in which he calls us to live. Living out his love means, day by day, saying “No” to ourselves and our desires so that we can say “Yes” to meeting the needs of others. If we see others in need and harden our hearts against them, lest pity move us to sacrifice some of our comfort to help them meet their needs, then the love of God is not in us. I don’t agree with the Occupy Wall Street movement as a matter of economic policy, but I do believe there’s a moral intuition here which we must take seriously: I think most people in this country perceive that the very rich don’t care tuppence about them, and I think for the most part, they’re pretty much right. As it happens, experience has taught me that the exact same thing is probably true of most of them, and if they were suddenly hugely rich they’d be no better, so I don’t think their high horse has any legs to stand on; but that doesn’t make their insight false, just truer than most of us would like to admit.

Does this mean that we must give to anyone who asks, or that we must give them whatever they want? No; again, we aren’t Jesus, we aren’t God, so we don’t have the ability to give so much to so many. It is not given to us to meet every need we see; we are far more limited than that, and we must begin by taking care of those closest to us before we seek to provide for people outside that circle. Then too, not everyone who claims to be in need is trustworthy, and I don’t see anything in the gospel that necessarily makes a virtue of being cheated. There are prudential decisions here, of whom we can truly help, and how, and how much. But it is to say this: love changes our priorities. Love isn’t about getting what we want, it’s about giving others what they need. Love seeks first to bless others, not to bless ourselves.

And you know, maybe we can’t apply that with mathematical precision, but this is a standard we can use to evaluate ourselves. When we look at how we spend our time and what we do with our money, what do we see? Do we only give when it doesn’t cost us anything, when we really don’t have to give anything up? If I go home, and I’m tired, and Sara’s tired, and the kids are squirrely, and I go off in a corner and do whatever I feel like while she’s trying to make dinner and manage four kids and keep herself together emotionally, do I love my wife? Not at that moment, I don’t. If I decide that I don’t want to give my tithe to the church this month, that I’m going to keep that money and buy a flatscreen TV, do I love the church? Not with my actions. If I see a friend in need—it doesn’t have to be financial; it could just as well be emotional or spiritual—if I see a friend in need and choose to look the other way because I want to keep my time, my energy, my money, for myself, do I really love them? Not in any way that matters.

And if I do these things, if I choose to spend my money, my time, and my energy on my own pleasure and my own satisfaction, can I say that the love of God is in me? No, I can’t. But if I live my life as an ongoing offering to God—recognizing that he has given me all the time I have, all the energy I have, all the money and possessions I have, and that he gave them to me so that I might use them to love and bless the people he has given to me, and those he sends across my path—if I desire to please him and to bless him by blessing other people, to respond to his love and live in his love by loving others and giving them what best I can, then I can say, yes, this is the love of God in me; this is what it looks like. I’m not all the way there yet, but by God’s grace, by his love, by the power of his Holy Spirit within me, I trust he’ll get me there. May it be so for all of us.

Children of God

Posted on 16 October 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 17:6-15; 1 John 2:28-3:10)

I hate to rag on the NIV too much, since a couple of my favorite profs were on the translation committee, but here in 1 John, the NIV puts us on the wrong track right from the start of this section. It’s not a huge misdirection, but it’s a real one, caused by the fact that the NIV likes to use different English words to vary the translation. Thus all over chapter 2, John uses the Greek word meno, which means “to abide” or “to remain,” and throughout the passage we looked at last week, the NIV translates it “remain”—you see it in verse 19, and a couple times each in 24 and 27. And then here in verse 28, all of a sudden, the NIV takes that same word and translates it “continue,” as if John has just moved on to something new—as if it’s just a transition, nothing more.

Which is too bad, because there is in fact a very close connection here—so close that scholars don’t actually agree whether verse 28 marks the beginning of a new section at all; some see 28 and 29 as part of the previous section, with the next part of the book beginning with 3:1. Truth is, I think, those two verses really belong to both sections; there really isn’t a break here at all, because John’s argument in our passage this morning is deeply rooted in what he’s just been saying in the passage we read last week. He’s been talking about abiding in Christ, and abiding in the Father, and abiding in the Holy Spirit—he doesn’t say it that way, but that’s what he means, as the Holy Spirit is the anointing we have received from Jesus—but it’s not just about abiding in God so that we know true things and aren’t deceived. This is much deeper, and so he drives deeper.

What he’s on about here is a very deep truth, and a very difficult doctrine—difficult because it’s something of a mystical reality, not something which we can easily rationally define: our union with Christ. Christ himself talks about this in John 15, where he says that he is the vine and we are the branches, and so we must abide in him and he in us if we are to bear fruit. Paul goes after it from a number of angles—he describes the church as the body of Christ, united in him who is our head; he also talks quite a bit about our having been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, crucified with him and raised to new life with him. Following Jesus, being a part of the church, isn’t just about doing certain things or not doing other things; it’s not just about working together, and it’s not even just about being in relationship with God and with each other as we usually understand that. It’s about being one with Christ in a very deep way that we can’t really fully explain, we just have to live into and experience.

That’s what John’s talking about, and it’s important we understand that, because if we don’t, we’re going to misunderstand everything else he’s saying. If you were here when we started this series, remember what John says in chapter 1: righteousness is a result of walking in the light—you walk the right way when you have the light to see where you’re going. Remember what Jesus said: the branches bear fruit because they are a part of the vine, and that’s just what healthy branches on a healthy vine do. Remember that he told his disciples, “You will know them by their fruit”—a tree doesn’t grow up, decide it wants to be an apple tree, and then start working as hard as it can to squeeze apples out of its limbs; if it’s an apple tree, apples are simply a natural part of its life, assuming it’s healthy, has enough water, and so on.

This is how it is with righteousness—it isn’t something we have to strain to make happen, it’s evidence of what has already happened and is happening. We have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, we have been crucified with him—our old life is dead, and we now live by his life in us—and as such we have become God’s children; all his love is ours, lavished on us, poured out with utter abandon and complete disregard for dignity. This is now the fundamental reality of our life; we just need to stop striving to live something else instead. It’s not even about trying to live this way, trying to abide in Christ—it’s about not trying not to. My kids don’t have to try to be my kids; they just are, they’re stuck with it. It’s not always the best bargain in the world by any means, but no matter what may happen, thus it will always be; and it’s how it’s supposed to be, which means that even though my kids no doubt wish sometimes that I did things differently—and sometimes no doubt are completely right—and even though I’m not the best father in the world, them being with me is what is best for them.

And so it is with us and God, except that he is the best Father in the world; all the more, then, is it for our best to abide in him as his children, to live in his love and humbly bow before his authority. Again, this means living differently from the rest of the world—because we are in the light instead of the darkness; because we are loved and we respond to his love. It means giving up our own plan and direction for our lives and accepting being remade like Christ—which, in truth, is being remade as ourselves, the falsehood stripped away, leaving us as we truly are, as God made us to be. This also means being purified, because drawing near to God has that effect; nothing impure can survive in his presence—including, ultimately, our impure desires. The closer we come to him, the more we want to please him, and the less we want anything that doesn’t.

This will set us against the world around us—not that we’ll always feel that strongly; sometimes it won’t be obvious at all. But that reality will always be there, and we should always expect it to be there. The world hated Jesus, after all, and the more we’re like him, the more it’s going to have a problem with us. And remember, it wasn’t the bad people in the world that hated him most, on the whole: it was the religious part of the world, the people who were good and godly and upstanding and righteous. Why? Because they were the folks who were most impressed with themselves, and so they were the ones least willing to hear the message that they were sinners, alienated from God and in desperate need of his grace. That’s the start, that’s where abiding in Christ begins: right there, in giving up the false hope that we can somehow be good enough to make it all right ourselves, in accepting his grace. Being really good at being really good doesn’t make you a Christian, it makes you a Pharisee.

Now, it might seem strange that I would say that when verses 4-10 are full of strong language against sin; but remember, in chapter 1 John has already said that no one can claim not to be a sinner, and anyone who does is a liar. Remember that he said that as he was talking about the importance of walking in the light—we walk in the light, we have fellowship with God, and yet we know that we do stumble and we do sin; the key is that when this happens, we are in Christ, who allowed himself to be crucified for us as the sacrifice to pay the price for our sin and purify us from our unrighteousness. He became sin for us so that he might be our righteousness—so that we might have his righteousness instead of our own, because our own wasn’t good enough.

And remember the context of this passage, why John is writing this letter: because there were those in the church who had left to follow their own preferred version of Jesus. This is the sin of rebellion—or lawlessness, as the NIV renders it in verse 4—of choosing to reject the will of God because his will isn’t what we want it to be. It’s the sin of choosing the darkness over the light. Do we sin? Yes, and then we repent, we ask forgiveness, we seek to make it right—and above all, we trust in Jesus and give thanks for his grace. We sin, but we don’t go on sinning; we give our sin to Jesus, who took it all on the cross, and we are cleansed. As Luther said, we are at one and the same time sinners and saints: we sin, but Jesus takes away our sin; there is darkness yet in us, but the light of Christ is in us, driving away the darkness. We sin in various ways, but by the power of Christ in us, by the work of his Spirit, we continue to choose him over sin But those who are committed to sin—those who, when it comes down to brass tacks, choose their sin over Christ—don’t abide in him, they abide in sin, and so their sin remains.

The bottom line is that this is about living as God’s beloved children. Be loved; live in his love; let him teach us what that means, rather than insisting on defining it for ourselves; trust him to know and do what’s best for us, obey his commandments, and follow where he leads; and when we don’t, repent of our disobedience and ask him to forgive us. He loves us; he has redeemed us; he will never let go of us. All we need is to abide in him, and all will be well.