(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.

(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.

(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.

(Jeremiah 31:31-34, Daniel 12:1-4; 1 John 2:18-27)

If you were here last week, you may remember I asked you a profoundly important question: how many Methodists does it take to change a light bulb? I hope you remember the point, that there’s a real and dangerous temptation to try to blur the line between walking in the light and walking in the darkness. It’s a temptation we see quite clearly in the American church—not just among the Methodists by any means, far from it—but it’s not new to us, it’s not new to our age; indeed, it’s as old as sin, which is why John goes after it in this letter.

He hammers at the point: you can have God or you can have the world, but you can’t have both; and whatever the world may have that you want, what God has for you is far, far better. There is far greater joy, far greater blessing, far greater good in letting the world go to follow Jesus than in pursuing the world; it will send you running the opposite direction, and in the end, you’ll find it was just a will-o’the-wisp after all. There may be a pot at the end of the rainbow, but there’s nothing in it but fool’s gold and rust.

The thing is, true as that may be, truth doesn’t govern human belief. Rather, as Francis Bacon put it, people prefer to believe what they prefer to be true. We have an amazing appetite for the comfortable lie, and no matter how many times it gives us indigestion and how badly it sickens us, we still feel the temptation; without the intervention of the Holy Spirit and the work of grace, we just keep going back to it, time after time after time, hoping that this time the results will be different.

This is why Jesus says in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” because what drives our faith, what drives our decisions, isn’t our experience, but our thirst. Bad experiences in relationships do not by themselves drive people to pursue and build healthier relationships, and good experiences of God do not sustain faith. Experiences shape our understanding, but they’re in the past, and they fade with distance; what drives us, what moves us, is what we hunger and thirst for now, in this moment. That’s why the pleasures of the world never satisfy; if they did, we could move on to something better, but instead, they leave us wanting more, building the craving, strengthening the addiction. It’s also why the Holy Spirit does not work to sate our hunger and thirst for righteousness, for love, for joy, for God, but only to deepen and strengthen them. Which sounds just like the world, but there is this difference: with the world, the hunger and thirst are an agony; with God, they are in themselves a joy.

As dissimilar as they are, though, we still tend to want to satisfy both—to try to find hope in Christ and at the same time pursue the hope that this relationship will be the one that makes me happy, or this job will be the one that turns out well and makes me feel secure. As agonizing as hungering and thirsting for the world may be, we resist giving up that hunger and thirst—we resist admitting defeat, admitting that we are in fact hungry and thirsty for something that will never nourish us. But if we’re in the church, if we name the name of Jesus, then we don’t want to give that up either; and so one of three things happens. We may acknowledge the conflict and, by the Holy Spirit, make the painful choice to let him go to work on our soul, to wean us off the world; we may instead openly choose the world over Christ; or we may try to find a way to pretend that Jesus actually approves of our hunger and thirst for the things of the world.

This, I think, is what John was dealing with. We see the word “antichrist” and we think of a powerful figure of evil at the very end of time, but that’s not what John’s on about here; rather, that figure will have many, many precursors, all in the same spirit. What is antichrist? It is one who seeks to replace the true Christ with a false Christ—and who may even, and in the end certainly will, claim to be Christ himself, while leading people away from God.

Now, let’s be very clear here, this doesn’t just mean anybody who has some of their teaching about Jesus wrong—that’s all of us; this is talking about someone who systematically denies the heart of the gospel, that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, God become human, in whom alone is salvation through his atoning death and resurrection on our behalf and for our sake. Anyone who denies any of this denies Jesus, and anyone who denies Jesus denies the Father, because it is the Father who sent his Son and bears witness to his Son, and it is the Son who testifies to the Father and reveals him to us. Anyone who denies this is a liar, and a servant of the lie; anyone who does this serves the spirit of the antichrist. It doesn’t mean they’re evil, or beyond redemption, but it does mean their teaching is a lie and must be fought.

To understand why John’s opponents were doing this, look what he says: “They went out from us, but they were not of us.” Indeed, he actually says, “They went out from us so that it would be revealed that they were not of us.” They looked like Christians, considered themselves Christians, but they never really belonged to Christ; God allowed their outward departure from the church so as to reveal the fact that they were never truly part of it to begin with. John doesn’t tell us explicitly why they weren’t, but from the context, it seems they loved the world and were unwilling to give that up.

As a consequence, their governing theological principle became the insistence that God couldn’t actually be telling them they had to give it up—everything else had to bend to fit that, even including their understanding of Jesus, who he is and what he did. Like the Pharisees (though in a very different way), they would only accept Jesus as the Messiah on their terms, provided he would be the kind of Messiah to suit their preferences; they would not accept Jesus as the Messiah he was.

Now, we don’t want to make too much of this as a conservative vs. liberal issue, because this is no less a temptation for conservatives; we tend to be guilty of this more covertly, is all. But it is a governing principle of liberal theology—it has been ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher, who essentially founded modern liberal Protestantism with his work On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers—that Jesus and his gospel can and should be trimmed to fit what the culture is already comfortable believing; when we see those who call themselves evangelical adopting this idea explicitly, as I believe we have seen and are seeing with Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and others in the emerging-church movement, this should be cause for great concern.

In that context, it’s interesting—one of the first complaints I ever heard against Bell, from another Grand Rapids-area pastor, is that he was telling his congregation that they needed him in order to understand the Scriptures. At the time, I just put it down to a little bit of ego, not really surprising in a megachurch pastor, but you know, that’s a very common approach among false teachers. You find it a lot in cult leaders, actually, as a means of keeping control of their followers. I think John was dealing with this as well on the part of those against whom he’s writing here, because he tells his hearers, “No, you don’t need anyone to teach you—you have been anointed by Jesus, you’ve been given his Holy Spirit, and you have all knowledge.” NIV follows a different reading in verse 20, but I think that’s the correct one—“you know all things”—because that’s really what his argument requires; you can see that he ends up with that point in verse 27.

This isn’t to say that good teachers aren’t valuable, nor is it a justification for spiritual pride, as we must always be humbly open to learning from each other. This is, rather, an attack on any claim of spiritual dependence, and on our tendency to vest authority in human figures rather than in God. God chooses to raise up men and women to preach and teach, and they bless us, but in the last analysis, none of us who do this are necessary, because God could perfectly well do without us if he chose. I’m grateful he doesn’t, but he could. And in that process, we aren’t the ones who really matter; God uses the work I do, the work Matt and Kathy do, the work Pam and her volunteers do, but we aren’t the ones who make anything happen; it’s the Holy Spirit working through us who teaches and strengthens and builds up the body of Christ.

The key here is that this all comes back to what I noted last week, that the only way to learn to live is by living; ultimately, the only way to know the truth is by abiding in the presence of the One who is Truth, by remaining in him and letting his truth fill us. We just need to keep coming back, again and again, to the heart of the gospel, to who Jesus is and what he has done for us—to keep coming back to that and letting that judge and correct everything we think and everything we want to do, letting ourselves be conformed to him rather than seeking to conform him to anything else. We need to keep coming back to God and opening our hearts and minds to him, through his word and through prayer, trusting that by his Holy Spirit he has given us all truth and will lead us into all truth—because he has, and he will. He desires to do that, because he wants us to know the truth, because he wants us to know him—that’s what he made us for. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—who hunger and thirst for God—why? Because they will be filled.

(Deuteronomy 30:15-20; 1 John 2:12-17)

I have a great fondness for light bulb jokes, and especially ecclesiastical light bulb jokes. How many televangelists does it take to change a light bulb? (One—but for the light to continue, send in your donation today.) How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? (None—Presbyterians don’t change light bulbs. They simply read the instruction manual and pray the bulb is one that has been predestined to be changed.) And how many United Methodists does it take to change a light bulb? (This statement was issued: “We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that a light bulb works for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your personal relationship with your light bulb (or light source, or non-dark resource), and present it next month at our annual light bulb Sunday service, in which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life, and tinted—all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.”)

That last one’s always told on the Methodists, but I don’t know that it’s really specific to them; there are a lot of folks in the Protestant mainline who really don’t want to insist that people need the light—who want to muddle the distinction between walking in the light and walking in the darkness. John, though, draws a sharp contrast: you’re either in one or the other, no middle ground. You can’t be partly following God and partly following the world; you can’t be most of the way with Jesus but keep part of yourself back to do something else. You can have Jesus, or you can have the world, you can have what you want, you can have your own way. You can’t have both.

Now, John’s laid this out pretty clearly in the first chapter and a half, which we’ve read these past two weeks, building toward the first command we see in this book: “Don’t love the world or the things of the world”; and what he’s said through verse 11 of chapter 2 is certainly enough to support it. “There’s light, there’s darkness, you have to choose, so choose God, not the world.” But interestingly, he doesn’t go right from that point in his argument to verse 15; instead, we get this strange little thing, verses 12-14, stuck in between them. This has always puzzled me, and I did a fair bit of reading on it before it started to make sense.

The key here is to remember that John addresses his readers all the way through the book as “little children,” so he’s not actually talking about three different groups. Rather, he’s addressing his readers in general, then breaking them up into two groups. He’s made it clear to them that the choice between God and the world is absolute, you can only love and serve one, and he’s going to command them to choose God; but first he takes a step back to tell them why. First off, all of you: for Jesus’ sake, your sins have been forgiven, and you know God the Father. You have been given an incredible gift—you’ve been set free from your sin, you’ve been set free from yourself, you’ve been brought into relationship with the Creator of all things; this is better than anything the world can give you and anything it can do for you.

Second, to the older people in the church, he says: “You know him who is from the beginning”—which is to say, Jesus. Why does he say this? I suspect it’s both a corrective and an affirmation. On the one hand, we learn how to live by living, and the longer we live and the more we face, the more we draw on our own experience and how we’ve dealt with things in the past to figure out how to deal with the challenges of the present. This is good, and how it must be, but it does have a downside. How many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb? (Change?) It’s the famous seven last words of the church: we’ve never done it that way before. So John reminds us all that even our oldest traditions are but temporary and fleeting; only Jesus is from the beginning.

At the same time, the less important the new and different becomes to you for its own sake, the more clearly you can see the importance of that truth, that Jesus is the one who was from the beginning, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever—and the more clearly you can see how badly we need a God who does not change with every wind of fashion, but who remains the same and remains faithful no matter how the world might shift or what it might decide to do tomorrow. That’s the perspective which it seems every generation of new leaders in the church is in danger of losing—and which too many leaders in each generation do lose. Too many never get it back.

Which is all too predictable, for a number of reasons; the old are not always humble by any means, but the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to be humbled, and to learn that you don’t really know better after all. Increasingly, I think the most important part of learning is coming to appreciate the extent of our own ignorance. But there’s another part to this, too, and that’s fear. Some people know their own fears, while others repress them in some way, and everyone’s fears are different, but they all would drive us to the same basic thing: compromise with the world. Maybe we’re afraid of failure, maybe we’re afraid of rejection or of being thought a fool, but fear pushes us to make our separate peace with the world; and so John says, “No, you don’t have to do that. You are strong, because the word of God abides in you”—Jesus Christ is in you by the power of his Spirit, his teaching is in you—“and in him, you have already overcome the evil one. You don’t know that yet, you haven’t experienced that yet, but it’s true, because he has already won the victory; just trust him.”

Don’t love the world, John says, because the world is temporary, it is passing away; the world is dying, only God and those who walk in his light will live. Don’t choose that which had a beginning over the one who was there when it began. Don’t love the world, because you don’t have to give into it—it will not always be easy, but by the power of God you have the victory over it; in him, you need have no fear. Don’t love the world, because you don’t have to settle for it: God has given you something much, much better. Far beyond its temporary and distinctly mixed pleasures, he has given you the freedom of his forgiveness, and the blessing of eternal joy and love in his presence. Love that which is most lovely, and let the rest go.