Well, good morning. It's good
to see some of you here. It's good to see all of you here.
But it is still some of you, you see. It's good. The Lord is faithful and true.
And his purposes are not going to fail, beloved. They're not
going to fail. And in that, and in that alone,
we can rest. You can always rest. And when
we look at the world and we look at our lives, we think, oh, Lord,
is this really what you have and plan and store? This is really
what you want to happen? And the answer is yes. Yes. It is what God has established
for us. Sometimes we even think that,
well, we've made some bad choices, so God's punishing us. No, God
doesn't punish his children. He disciplines us, which teaches
us to trust in him. What is the greatest outcome
of true spiritual discipline? Do you know what it is? Prayer. That's not the ultimate end,
but it's to the glory, to the praise of His glorious grace.
We thank Him and we praise Him, but one of the greatest disciplines
that comes out of the discipline, the loving discipline of our
Father, is prayer. We learn to pray Better. We learn to pray more effectively.
We learn to pray because we depend more upon God than we do ourselves. And we stop trying to pretend
like we're asking God to develop us into the hero of the story. And we know that God is the savior
in the story. God is the father. We're not.
God is the spirit. We're not. God is the son. We are not. And so we're here
in 1 John again, and I would say we probably have a couple
of more weeks in this letter than we're going to spend a month
or so into 2 John, or year, I don't know. And then a little bit of
time into 3 John, and then we're going to deal with some doctrinal
things. And then we're going to move into the letters of Timothy
and Titus, letters to Timothy and Titus. But here in 1 John
chapter 5, we hear these words. Let's start reading again in
verse 13. I write these things to you, the believers, the believing
ones, those who are the believers in the name of the Son of God,
that you may know that you have eternal life. And this is the
confidence that we, the believers, have toward Him, that if we ask
anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that
He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the request
that we have asked of Him. If anyone sees his brother committing
a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will give him
life to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There
is a sin that leads to death, and I do not say that one should
pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that
does not lead to death. We know that everyone who has
been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born
of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.
We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the
power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God
has come, and He 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 the Christ. He is the true God and He is
the eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves
from idols. Alright, so I'm going to start
at the end and I'm going to back up. And of course we're going to talk
about idols in the weeks to come. But I'm going to start at the
end and I'm going to back up and I'm going to move back into this discussion that
we've had over the last six to eight weeks about this text over
and over again. We've read it. We've looked at
it. There's a lot here. Keep yourself from idols. Keep
yourself from idols. What is an idol except that which
is not the truth? An idol is something that we
decide, that we choose to have affection for. An idol is something
that we choose to have hope in. An idol is something that we
create of our own doing. An idol is something that we're
shown by other people. An idol can be a relationship,
an idol can be a circumstance, an idol can be security, an idol
can be anything that we hope in, love, hold affection for,
et cetera, that is not true. In other words, it does not truly
give us the hope that we put in it. For example, There are
people who, and I'm not going to try to indict anyone, but
just thinking of examples, in this sense, in a spiritual way,
there are people who have little tiny angels that they have bought
at Hallmark, and they pin them to their rearview mirrors, and
they pin them to their bathroom vanities, and they pin them to
their lapels. And they're so giddy and excited,
like, listen, my little guardian angel. I almost said gardener
angel. Yes, my little gardener angel. My little guardian angel.
This little angel, I've seen, I've ridden with people before,
and they touch that angel and go, keep it safe, ding. And I
know they're not worshiping these little pens, okay, they came
from Hallmark. But there is a sense. that, oh
no, this little angel's looking out for me. And maybe it's representative
of the truth that God says he does send his angels concerning
our safety and our well-being. We don't know how. There's not
a big theological exposition on angelology, the study of angels,
the study of heavenly beings, but this is an idol. I know I'm
good. I got my angel. Everything's
good. You see where the focus is? The focus is not on the Lord.
The focus is not on the truth, who is the truth. The focus is
on that which is not the truth. The same thing is true with some
people with their Bibles. Some people say, well, I've got my
Bible. I'm safe. I'm not kidding. I mean, you
think I'm like, what? I'm not kidding. I'm safe. I have my
Bible. God's not going to wreck my car
with his Bible in it. I mean, It's just not, that's
silly, that's superstition. That's really what idolatry is,
it's superstition in a lot of ways, in a spiritual sense. And
then there are some who worship certain things. There are some
that will actually, I have to be careful because I don't want
to bring indictment against anyone, but I want you to understand
just how close we are to the cuff of idolatry. There are people
who believe that their dead loved ones are listening and watching. and that they themselves have
become angels watching out for them. If I woke up tomorrow and
I saw a dead relative flying over my bed, it's getting shot. You know, I don't want that. I don't want to put my focus
on the ones who have gone to be with the Lord or the ones
who are awaiting justice. I'm going to put my focus on
the one who is the justice giver, who is the mercy bringer. who
is a propitiatory substitution for me. And see, so it's so easy. Now that's a broad sense. And
then there is the general sense in which, you know, people just
worship idols. People worship statues. People worship false
gods. People worship all sorts of world
religions and Eastern mysticism. People worship ideas and spirits
and energy and all things, and they worship them through their
interaction. It's not that everybody who worships
something bows down to it or feeds it. but we do bow down
to it and feed it. When we submit to something in
our hearts because of its so-called power, we are bowing down to
it. When we feed it, we also feed
it when we give it time, when we give it affection. So in that
sense, idols can become extremely, I mean, you think about it. There
are a lot of things that could become idols. A lot of things
that are idols in our lives. I would say that if we took out
notecards, we pass out notecards to everybody and all of you at
home, you took out notecards and said, okay, write down the
things that you love the most. We'd all say the word of God
and the Lord and the church and then we would really run out
of ink writing everything else down. And I would say that we
have been taught well enough to say the spiritual truths of
that we love the Lord and his word and his people. But if we
really got down to it in our priorities, we would show that
we loved the things that are fourth and on in the list above
the first three that I mentioned. So they in themselves would become
the idols of our hearts. And when we get rid of this idol,
then that's okay, we got 25 more ready to go. We can love our
cars, we can love our health, we can love our wealth, we can
love our mind, we can love all sorts of things, we can love
each other to the point that we become idolatrous, But that's
not the point of Paul. That's not the point of John's
writing here. Keep yourself from idols. Remember
he who is true. You see that? Look at verse 20
and 21. And we know that the Son of God
has come. And we know that the Son of God
has given us understanding. And we know that we have this
understanding from the One who has come, who is the Son of God,
so that we may know Him who is true, because we are in Him who
is true, and this person is the Son, Jesus, who is the Christ,
who is, He is the true God, and He is the eternal life, little
children, Don't worship anything else. Little children, don't
put your hope in anything else. Little children, if you think
what's going on in Congress is going to help you in an eternal
way, you got another thing coming. Don't put our hope in the works
of men. Don't put our hope in the knowledge
that even comes out of our own minds. We are to rest in the
fullness of that which has been revealed to us by the Holy Spirit
of God through His Word, who is Jesus Christ, who is the Son
of God, and so on and so forth. So today and next Sunday, we're
going to expand on this person who is Jesus. And we're going
to show and be reminded, this is not new, this is just a reminder
as he closes this letter, he wants to really just take everything
that he's taught and he wants to press it into the hearts and
the minds of these people that by the Spirit of God, they would
walk away just like, there is no other God but Christ. Because remember, they're being
inundated by people who are revising the very nature of Jesus Christ.
They're revising what it means to be the Christ. They're revising
what it means for Jesus to have come in the flesh. They're revising
what it means for the work of God the Father to send the Son
distinct from Himself into the world. They're changing the doctrine
by wiggling the words and dealing with the philosophies of their
mind over the clear, direct, simple, and elementary kindergarten,
first, second, third grade teaching of the Bible in itself. We think too hard and we create
idols. And when we find somebody that
sounds smarter than us, we idolize them. And the fallacies that run amok
in the body of Christ even presently are innumerable. When the simplicity
is, is that saving faith, and you know how I feel about that
term in and of itself. Saving faith knows the one who
has saved. And saving faith rests in that
knowledge. Did you hear that? So God saves his people through
Christ. Period, it's done. The proclamation
of the Christ from prophecy to fulfillment and then now looking
back and waiting for the day of glory, tells of the story
of two kingdoms. And it tells of the story of
two kingdoms to the point that that's all the Bible's about.
It's a story start to finish, that's it, with some letters
attached that relate to the story. And what has happened in our
culture is that everybody has piecemealed the stories to the
point that we've got people trying to be David, people trying to
be Samuel, people trying to be Solomon, people trying to be
Paul, people trying to be Timothy, people trying to be Jesus. And
we wanna apply the narratives of scripture and the poetry of
scripture and the wisdom of literature of the scripture to our lives
in such a way that we implement idols without even knowing it. Where there is application to
the body of Christ, the apostles have clearly taught it simply.
So when we impose any application whatsoever from any other person
in the Bible to any other believer who is in Christ, we lie like
the devil. And we are twisted in our spirit
in these things. And then we create an entire
religion, an entire subsect of Protestantism, an entire cult
based on our philosophical application of these things, these nuances. Nope, this is my condition. Nope, this is my Jesus. Nope,
this is what my gospel is. I have a hard time saying that
sometimes to people. As Paul would say, my gospel. Is it Paul's gospel? You better
believe it. Is it your gospel? You better believe it. It's your
gospel too. It is the good news of your salvation
in Christ Jesus alone. Let me show you just how subtly
the error has infiltrated the truth. In our day, even amongst
believers who believe in the doctrines of grace, and I'll
let that term hang out there in outer space, There are some of us who still
fight this pressure culturally to try to convince someone to
choose to believe in something. What's gonna do what it gave
you? I don't know, put it in your taco and eat it. You have to do nothing with what
is given to you according to the proclamation of the gospel.
There's nothing that you have to do. But see, we're at that
precipice. Oh, you gotta exercise something. Well, get off the couch and get
on the treadmill then and quit trying to work your faith into
eternity. If you think you can work yourself
into believing, you're condemned already. Cuz you're not believing
in the only son whom God has sent. That's not my words, those
are Jesus' words, talking to the greatest theological mind
that has ever walked on two feet. according to the prophecies of
Christ. His name was Nicodemus. If there was one man who ever
had the grasp of the gospel in the Old Testament, it was Nicodemus.
And he understood, he said, we know that you have come from
God. We know that you are, let me
just paraphrase, Messiah. And Jesus says to him, you can't
see me. You can't enter into me. You
have all the knowledge of me you want. You can know every
detail of every theological thing that I've ever done and everything
that's ever been prophesied. You can know it in nine languages,
backwards and frontwards, and say it in your sleep. You can
teach it perfectly, but if you're not born of God, you will die
in your sins. You must be born again. What
did that do to Nicodemus? It went, what does that mean? Go back into my mother's womb
and come out again? And I'm gonna tell you what,
that's crude. I hate teaching that text, because
I always, I was taught properly. There are certain things that
you speak of and talk about, and you don't talk like that
in public. You don't talk about going back into your mother's
womb. That's crude. And I believe it
was crude in Nicodemus' day. I believe that that's the only
thing he knew to say. Are you kidding me? The only idea that
I have in my mind is that I need to go back into my mother and
be reborn again out of my mother. And Jesus says, I'll tell you
the truth, unless you're born of the Spirit, you will not enter
into the kingdom of heaven. So what could Nicodemus do? What
could Nicodemus do? He went all through the pages
of his learning. He went all through the idols
of his life. He went through everything. He's
like, I'm going through Moses. I don't see what he's talking
about. I'm going through Abraham. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And the
catalog of all of his understanding found itself wanting. There was
nothing there. Nothing. Not one thing in all
of the entire Old Testament that gave him sense of what Jesus
was saying because the only thing that would give him sense was
when the Spirit of God went. And he saw it. That's it. That's it. The wind. blows where it wishes. Jesus
says God the Spirit will blow into his people as he wishes
and until he blows you will not understand a thing I'm saying.
You are thinking so temporally. You are thinking so cognitively.
You are thinking. Stop thinking and see! See. And there's nothing that can
be done except when the Son of Man commands the unbeliever to
see and then that man sees. That's what John's writing about.
You see why I love John? And he starts this letter out,
that which was from the beginning which we have heard. See, John
heard the voice of God when he heard the human voice of Christ. John looked upon God Almighty
when he watched Him die on the cross. John. has touched with his hands
concerning the word of life. Beloved, there's a reason why
the scripture continually reiterates and recapitulates the mindset
of having the faith of a child. And a child will believe anything,
won't they? And they get to that age where
you actually have to trick them and give them a little bit more
evidence. And then you know that their childhood is coming to
an end. No child will believe anything.
I mean, I used to prove this. I can have my hands empty and
just cup them. Guess what's in my hand? And
they'll start guessing. Okay, nothing in my hands. Now
what's in my hand? And they'll start guessing. And
I said, no, you're wrong. Let me see. And they'll try to
pry your hands open to let them see. That's the faith of a child. The God is in the heavens and
he does as he chooses. And he sent his son to become
a human being and he came to the earth. And he obeyed his
father in everything and he gave his life as a ransom for his
people who God has known before the world began. It's why God
created the world, little child, so that he would see the praise
of his glorious grace in his elect. And then God the Son gave
his life. and he died, and he saved his
people from their sins, and he rose from the dead, and he came
back to life, and he preached salvation to the ends of the
earth, and he, by the spirit of God, we see that Jesus substituted
for us, and so on and so forth, and children are like, yes, that's
exactly right. And there was a scientist named
Bruce Banner. You get it? Oh really, does he
live close by? And he got some gamma rays and
he turns into this big green monster named the Hulk and he
can bust down walls and jump over outer space. Wow, I bet
he's seen God. I mean, you know, this is how
children, they believe it all. They don't question it. And not just to say we're supposed
to believe everything, but that's the kinship of a childlike faith
is that we see and we know. And this is the work of God the
Spirit. We know. What are some things that we
know? We know Him who was from the beginning, before all things. That's what that means, by the
way. When the beginning was, He was before. That's what that
means. We know the eternal life. We know His righteousness. We know the light of God. We
know the love of God. We know He is love and He is
light. We know. And there are those
who say they know, but they don't know. They argue the person of
Christ. They argue the work of Christ.
They argue the conditions of faith. They argue all these things
they don't know. They say they know, but they
don't know because they aren't resting in the sufficiency of
the Lord. You see? How do you know that you know?
It's because you know Him who is true. And beloved, I believe
in our day, and I'll talk about these over the next few weeks
as we close out this letter. I don't believe, I know that
we live in a day and age where so many people who profess to
be in Jesus, the Christ, do not know Him. And I'm not going to broad stroke
groups, because if I did, I'd have to broad stroke us in it. There are people among our ministry,
among our fellowship, that may not know Christ truly. They may know of Him. They may
have everything. And see, the very nature of our
flesh goes, well, what if it's me? Am I the elect? And well-meaning
people have tried to establish a criterion in order to prove
that you are elect. You know, the only way that you
know that you're elect is that you believe by faith, with childlike
faith, because God has granted you faith to believe in the proclamation
of the finished work of Jesus Christ, who is the Holy Anointed
One of God in the flesh. That's it. And you rest. And
the Word says rest, and the world says fight. And the Word says
rest, and the flesh says strive. And the word says rest, and we
just continue to get up in our minds, and I'm resting, but it's
a war, and the war is fought in the simple resting, which
is faith. Faith believes that which God
has said concerning His Son. And not just says, oh yeah, those
principle things are true. This is my salvation. Christ
is my life. See, we sing the songs of grace,
don't we? We sing the songs of grace, but sometimes we don't
settle in the power of it. And it's okay. The proclamation of the gospel
to the elect at the hearing of spiritual, with spiritual ears,
that person will know. And then that person will grow.
That person will grow into the understanding of the knowledge
of these things, not from the systems of history, not from
the theologians of history, but from the pages of the word of
God given to them. I have to confess something to
you. I used to a long time, for a
long time, indicate spirituality, and I'll say that very loosely,
by one's own desire to be in the Bible. That's not always
the case. Definitely people who are passionate
about the scripture and who are born of God, this is a healthy
place. This is healthy spirituality.
But there are a lot of people who are excited about the Bible
who are spiritually dead. I've been to seminary a bunch.
Many of them taught me certain topics. We know. We know. We know all sin is wrongdoing.
I mean, look at this text here. What do we know? We know all
sin is wrongdoing. There's a sin that leads to death and John
has not given us what that is. He doesn't give us any inclination.
If we go to the other parts of the Bible and try to figure out
what that is and any specific sin, then we're going to fail
contextual understanding. In the context of this, we must
hold to the fact that there are people who would claim to be
our brothers and sisters in Christ who would not be subject to the
biblical teaching of who Christ is and what he accomplished for
whom. And they would fight against that and they would try to create
a way in which their idol that they call Jesus, that they call
the Christ, is the same as the true Christ of Scripture. And in doing so, and in that
little dichotomy, in that little pushback, we find that there's
one specific thing that's always true about those who are in the
error. They hate the brothers and the sisters. And so John is saying, listen,
these people who don't believe the gospel, quit trying to pray
for them to have love for one another, because they're not
going to do it. They're not going to stay. They're not going to be intimate.
They're not going to weep. They're going to be aggravated and irritated. They're going to cause problems.
They're going to be divisive. And it's not about the fact that
the truth isn't divisive. It's the fact that the way people
act is what divides. The truth divides enough in here,
Hebrews 4.12. It divides our hearts. It divides our minds.
If we're not on the same page, what happens? Those who are in
the flesh will rise up and show it. But we don't get any instruction
in that. Don't worry about that. Quit
praying over all that stuff. Let's worry about the body of
Christ. Let's pray for those brothers
and sisters that we see falling into sin. Let's pray for these
brothers and sisters that we see who are living, who are heading
down a path of destruction because they are not yielding to and
listening to the instructions of the Bible for the sake of
their joy. And that's why we have all this
deep doctrine in all these letters and then the therefores. Because
the gospel is good news, and because all that we know about
the gospel is true, and because everything that we are before
Christ is declared before the foundations of the world, we
then need to relate to one another in this way by the command of
God himself. And in that, according to Paul
in Romans 12, it is our spiritual act of worship, the transformed
mind that loves. that is humble and kind and speaks
the truth and love Ephesians and so on and so forth. It's
the simplest instruction but the hardest thing to do. Why? Because one of the greatest idols
of the human heart, even the believer, is our own ego. I'll
tell you right now, pride comes before the fall. For those of
you who remember when I was renovating my house and we put the air conditioning
in and the first thing I did is hang the back door And I shut
it, and it shut so pretty. And I backed up and went, look
at that. And I fell right through the vent opening and skid my
shin that far up, took the skin off of it about a quarter inch.
And I got out, blood everywhere, hurting, going, pride truly comes
before the fall. I'm so proud of myself. And that's
a silly little example, but we know what pride is. We know when
we can't swallow. that we're wrong or that we've
treated others wrongly or that we've spoken in error. We just
can't say it. But by the love of Christ, Christ did not, though he was
equal with God, take that equality, something to come and grasp and
to make himself known as the authoritative God of all things,
but he lowered himself to become obedient as a slave unto death
on a cross, and this is the mind of Christ. Who is a greater person
than Christ? Who has greater authority than
the person of Christ? Who has greater power than the person
of Christ? Who has greater privilege than the person of Christ? Who
has the prerogative to do anything he wishes and all that he does
is righteous and just than the person of Christ? And who are
we to think that there's any room for pride in our lives?
If he laid himself down to be a sacrificial lamb, we should
also likewise do the same. Christ. I wanna deal with this
in verse 18 right here. Everyone who has been born of
God does not keep on sinning. If we go over, you know, I don't
wanna go back through it, but over there in chapter three, I think it's verse
eight, whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil. The
devil has been sinning from the beginning. We know the context of that sin
is to reject the sufficiency of Christ and his gospel. Hebrews
10, Hebrews 6, we see warning passages there amongst Paul's
writing to the Hebrew people, to the Christians of Israel. And he says, listen, if you continue
to forsake the finished work of Christ, the sacrifice of the
Lord, then there's no more sacrifice for your sin. So you can only
expect judgment. When people add to the gospel,
Paul included himself in that hyperbolically in the first chapter
of Galatians, but he meant it absolutely. It wasn't a possibility
for Paul, but he was just showing that even if he himself came
and preached an addition or a condition to the gospel that had not already
been declared to them, That person was to just be anathema. Who
does the anathematization? Who does the anathemizing? God
does. He takes the sheep and the goats and he separates them.
When did he do that? Spiritually, before the foundation
of the world. Temporally, at the day of judgment. And then
we can talk about that and what it looks like if you want to
talk about metaphysics. Doesn't matter. What does the
Bible say? Anyone who comes with another gospel, let him be accursed.
So it is a big deal to have ideas and interests and philosophies
about Jesus that don't line up with the proclamation of the
testimony of the Spirit of God, of the Father, of the Son, of
the Word, of the prophets, of the apostles, and now of the
body of Christ. Over in verse 6, He who came
by the water and the blood, Jesus Christ, not by the water only,
but by the water and the blood, and the Spirit is the one who
testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. Now we see over
here, He, Jesus Christ the Son, is God, and the one true God,
and He also is the truth, and He is the eternal life. And although we'd love to just
sit down and have a 700-800 page book on Christology, beloved,
it's not the book on Christology that's going to make you go,
wow, it's the Word of God right here. Saving faith doesn't come through
the understanding of the systems of theological things. Saving
faith comes by the Spirit of God to those whom Christ has
satisfied the wrath of God for 2,000 years ago when he said
it was finished. Faith is a result of your salvation,
not the cause of it. It is a necessary condition.
All the elect will have faith. It's like all the elect will
be alive in their flesh at one time in their life. And one day,
all the elect will be glorified. All the elect will believe. And
there are seasons in life for all of us where we did not believe,
yet we were the children of God. Because if we were not the children
of God, then we have no hope. This is the simple good news
of it all. It's not how do I become a child of God? You aren't going
to become a child of God. You are a child of God when you
hear and know that you have been a child of God forever and Christ
has paid for your sins for his children. But there are so many
things that I could do here. There's so many places I could
go, but hear this, everyone who keeps on sinning, that means
those who continue to revise and reject the finished work
of Jesus and what it did. When we try to play with our
own idols, when we want to make the gospel fit to our conditions,
when we want to make the gospel fit to our circumstance, when
we want to make the gospel fit to our culture, we are idolaters. And worse, if we are truly the
beloved, we are adulterers. Remember, two kingdoms. Two kingdoms. The kingdom of
the world, the temporal kingdom of the world over which God has
given authority to the enemy Lucifer to do what he will after
his own will, after God's own will in this world. To bring about everything that
God has decreed to take place. Greatest evils, Illnesses, all
of it. Devil had a hand in it, God caused
it all. See, just that frustrates us. You know why? Because we're ignorant
sometimes. Because we have been taught from a Sunday school teacher
about sovereignty rather than the word. We've been taught from
a book we read from some dead man rather than the spirit. should
not shake us to know that our God is sovereign
and has controlled all the outcomes of everything and has decreed
all the circumstances of anything. Because if he hasn't done that,
your salvation is weighing in the balance. He might not be
able to handle that. Two kingdoms. Who is this Jesus? Who is the one born of God? Look
at the verse 18. But he who was born of God protects him. Who? The believer. Everyone who
was born of God, the one who was born of God protects the
one who is born of God and the evil one does not touch him.
Who is that? That's Jesus Christ. That's Jesus. begotten you. The firstborn. See I have four brothers, you
know, younger than me. So I'm the firstborn. And a thousand years ago I'd
had everything and they'd had nothing. It's not the way that
works now is it? You split it all up fairly or
you give more to the favorite. But by law, the firstborn gets
it all. He is the preeminent one. He
is the one who has all authority. He is the one who speaks on behalf
of the father. And when the father is done, he picks up. The other
brothers work for the boy. They get what he gives them.
That's the point of Jesus being the preeminent, the firstborn
of all creation. He has power and authority and preeminence
over all the elect to save them through his sacrifice and to
give them life through his resurrection because of his love for them. He protects us, why? Because
he's already saved us. But salvation is done. This is
something that cannot be revised. If you do not understand the
good news of Christ in this way, I pray the Lord would give you
understanding this day. We have made it too complex.
We have too many articles, too many paragraphs, too many sections,
too many writings and books and sermon. We got too much stuff
being said about the simplicity of the gospel when it's just
this simple. Jesus Christ has secured the
salvation of his people through his death and it is finished. They have been saved. They will
never see condemnation. There is no way at all, any way
possible that anyone for whom Christ died will perish ever. It is done, beloved. And he protects us. I said last
week about how sometimes, you know, people infiltrate the church
with the idea of measuring one's own assurance and confidence
of election and one's own assurance and confidence of being justified
by their conduct or their morality. And these are nonsense. This
is nonsense. I don't care what anybody in
history has to say about any of this. They are wrong and they
speak with the lies of the enemy when they try to parse out this
expectation of confidence through someone's life. It is evil. Either salvation is a perfect
work of God through His grace or it is something that man must
accomplish by working with God and those two are so far away
from one another in the revelation of this word that that is absolutely
impossible to bring close to the table. God the Son protects us from
the accusations of the truth of the enemy who says, these
people are guilty. Look at your righteousness. They
have not made the cut. And the son says, no, I was cut
for them. I made the cut in their place.
This is me. Romans 3. The righteousness of
God is shadowed in Moses. The life and the trueness of
the righteousness of God is in Christ Jesus. And the evil one cannot touch
us. He cannot accuse us. What else do we know? Verse 19.
We know that we are from God. How do we know that? Romans 8.
We know by the Spirit of God who testifies to our spirit that
we are the children of God. Remember we talked about discipline
of the father? There's one thing that my children, no matter how
old they are, the ones who are adults and gone, and the ones
who are still at home, they will tell you, and if they don't tell
you, they're just being prideful, that I am their advocate. That's
what I do. If I don't do anything else for
my children, I am going to show them what an advocate looks like.
I'm going to stand for them, I'm going to take up for them,
I'm going to chastise them when they're wrong, but I'm still
gonna stand in their corner. They're mine. And they hate my gut sometimes
when they turn 15, 16, 17. They hate me because it gets
hard in my house. It gets hard. In their view,
we're easy. And then when they turn 20, they
go, wow, dad, you were really loving me then, you know? You
were looking out for me. You were protecting me. You've
always got my back. So even when we feel disciplined,
we feel like, I really hate this discipline. I hate the person
who's bringing it. This is not fair. This is not
right. You're killing my style. You're cramping my joy. You're
taking away things that I wish I had. Why come everybody else
can do and I can't do? Why can't everybody else can
have and I can't have? Why can't I go put my head in the furnace
somewhere to see if I can get those singe marks? I think that's
a cool style because you'll burn your face off. No, you're not
doing that. Well, who cares? It's my face. I have to pay the
medical bills. Dummy. I mean, you know. So it's my
problem. When you're paying your own bills,
you burn your own face off. You know, silly stuff like that.
But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, when they
know they have no other option, and when they know that there's
no one else there, they come to dad. And to mom, you know,
parents. I'm just talking about myself.
I don't want to make my wife look mean. But they come, they
come and say, Dad, can I? Will you? And we always do what
parents? We're there. Until we're not. Because we're not we're not God
and we're not the Lord and we're not going to be perfect and we're
going to make mistakes and we're going to die one day and we're
always not going to be there for our Children. But the Lord
is there for his Children forever and the sun keeps us and there
is nothing that can take us out of his hands. And we know that
we are from God and yet the whole world lies in the power of the
evil one. Yet there is nothing in this world that is outside
the power and the authority of Christ himself. It's all of Christ. If I were to go through all the
prophecies of Christ, it'd take us an hour or two. But there's
a lot of them. And there's a lot of people who
have done a very good job of listing these things, and depending
on the list you see, you can see hundreds and more than hundreds,
and sometimes they've categorized them into things, but I mean,
you know, I've got a list here. Let me just give you a few. First one that
comes to mind in my head always when I think about the prophecies
of Christ is Genesis 3. In Genesis chapter 3, not that
it was written first, but that it was the first one. After the fall, Jesus, walking
in the garden with Adam and Eve, comes into the garden and they
are hiding because they know they are naked. What is that
guilt? Shame. They know. They didn't have to
be told, you're naked, look at you, naked. No, they knew. Where
are your clothes? No, they knew. They knew they
were wrong, they knew they were guilty, they knew they'd sinned
against God, they knew that death was a reality for them now. And
so they tried to develop their own righteousness by covering
their shame, their guilt, their nakedness with fig leaves, but
God had a different story to tell. And the story was that
the only thing that could satisfy true justice is that righteousness
must die, innocence must die in the place of guilt. So God,
in whatever way he so chose, killed an animal and took its
skin and covered the guilt of these first people. Then he promises
them two things. He promises them the pain and
the suffering of this world, which is discipline, which is
a consequence of sin. But he promises them his people,
his elect couple, that what the serpent did in
this kingdom of the earth would be destroyed by the one that
he would send, who would crush the head of the serpent. You
see that? And that's as much of the gospel as Adam and Eve
got that moment, in that paraphrase, I believe, of Genesis, of Moses. I believe the conversation was
probably a little bit longer. I'm sure Adam's excuse and Eve's
excuse was a little bit longer. Who knows? We have the word of
God, we hold to that as sufficient. And that's all we need. So in
Genesis, we see that through the seed of the woman, Jesus
is the crusher of the head of the enemy. We see that he's the
son of God. Many times over in Psalm 2, we
see that he's prophesied to be the son of God, the one who has
been born of God. The seed of the woman, yet he
was born of God. He was the seed of Abraham, yet
he was what? Born of God. It's not Isaac. But it's Christ. The seed of David. And all throughout
the scripture, we can see in Genesis, the latter parts of,
actually chapter 48, 49, that at a certain time, God would
send him into the world, that he would be born of a virgin,
Isaiah, I'll read some Isaiah in a few minutes. He would be
born of a virgin, he would be called God with us, Emmanuel,
he would be born in Bethlehem, he would come from Egypt, and
so on and so forth. We see the adoration of the world,
we see these people who are all, who are going to be his predecessors.
We see all the promises of the prophets, God showing throughout
all the Old Testament narrative, even little things about how
he would get into Galilee and how he would enter in on a colt. Little things. No bones will
be broken. Little things. So throughout
the history of Israel, these stories by the prophets of God
were continually told about a true kingdom, about a real kingdom. about the one who would be born
of God who would come to save the true people of God from their
sins, that they would be set free from the bondage of the
law, that they would actually understand righteousness in a
way that they've never understood it because it would sit in the
lap of righteousness. This is the message we have heard
from Him, that He is light and He is love. We see prophecies in Psalm 69
about the zeal of Christ. We see prophecies in Psalm 78
about his parables. We see Isaiah speaking in Isaiah
35 about his miracles. We see the psalmist writing in
several different places about him bearing the reproach of the
wicked, being rejected by his brothers, being a stone of stumbling,
being betrayed by one of his closest friends. These are prophecies. These are things hundreds of
years before the Christ ever came. thousands of years in some instances. See little things in Psalm 22
about how they're going to cast lots for his clothes. Little
tiny things. Now here's the cool thing about
it is that the Word of God is prophesied all, even the priestly
office of Christ, everything that he would accomplish, everything
that he was, everything that he would do, and all the shadows
of the law and everything that it points to is Him and He fulfills
them all. 100% without fail, all of the
prophecies of history have been fulfilled in Christ Jesus. Concerning
Him, have been fulfilled in Him. And so when we know that the
one who is born of God protects us who have been born of God,
we know that we are from God because we know Him who is from
God. And we know that while the whole
world lies in the power of the evil one and always comes against
us, we know that the Son of God has come and given us understanding. Understanding about who He is
and what He did. So to revise who He is or to
revise what He did is a lie. And it's a false gospel. It will
not bestow salvation upon its hearers. A false gospel cannot bestow
salvation upon its hearers. God cannot allow that. God would be a liar in and of
himself. Didn't we already see if there's some things that we
say that God has said and what we say is against, what does
it say? That we have made God to be a liar. We are not going
to make God to be a liar. Whoever does not believe God
in verse 10 of chapter 5 has made him a liar. Why? Because
he has not believed the testimony. that God has born concerning
His Son and the testimony is this, that God has given us,
His people, eternal life and that life, this life is in His
Son. That whoever has the Son has
life, whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.
Do you have the Son of God as prophesied, as fulfilled, as
proclaimed, as taught in the Bible? Well, how much do I need
to know? You need to know everything God
has taught you about the Word that became flesh. That's why I'm emphatic about
believers and young believers and old believers continuing
to read, especially in our world and culture, the Gospel of John. Read the Gospel accounts. Read them as a proclamation of
the kingdom that is come, who is Jesus Christ, who came to
create a people. He created a people and to save
a people for himself. This is the finished work of
God. And Jesus, as we see in Hebrews,
is a son over the house of God, not like Moses, who was a slave.
Slave can't set you up. Slave can only set up the bed
when the master tells him to. A slave might cook the food,
but he can only cook the food the master buys and tells him
to cook. In Psalm 40, it is written, In
sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given
me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering
you have not required. A prophetic word about Jesus
Christ and his faithful service as Savior, as the one born of
God to satisfy God's wrath. In Psalm 40, continuing in verses
7 and 8, it says, Then I said, Behold, I have come in the scroll
of the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will,
O my God. Your law is written on my heart.
In Hebrews 10, 5 through 7, we hear these words. Consequently,
when Christ came to the world, he said, Sacrifices and offerings
you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me, and
burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then
I said, Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is
written to me in the scroll of the book. Now, why in the world?
Because that's what Paul in his gospel is saying of Christ in
his gospel that the psalmist said of Christ in his gospel. And Jesus Christ is the faithful
Savior. He has done the work of redemption. He has saved His people from
their sins. And beloved, anything else is an idol. Thinking that
you can choose to accept salvation is an idol. It's a false gospel.
Thinking you can do good works and just make God happy and you
can become a believer is a false gospel. Thinking you can sign
some card or come down an aisle is a false gospel. Thinking you can add to the grace
of God is a false gospel. views of the same thing, these
are separate things, these things are wrong. And we can call them
all sorts of things, you know, historically. We can call Arminianism
historically, or we can call it classically, or we can call
it theologically, or we can do whatever. But anything that conditions
salvation upon any act or will or volition of a human being,
except the Christ, is a false gospel. This is what happened
in Galatia. They heard the true gospel and
they believed it. And God, the power of God, calls
them to see. Many of them, not all of them.
We know that it's not 100% efficacy in every town. The culture has
a way of critical mass, doesn't it? Making people, all sorts
of people, want to be part of everything. I mean, I've never square danced
in my life after I turned eight, but I'll tell you this, if we
had a hoedown every Friday night, I'd probably find myself back
up here. Not that I want to, but I probably will. Well, there's
nothing to do, everybody's square dancing, let me go square dance.
And we find this stuff all over the
place, we find it in our culture. And for some strange reason,
beloved, we'd rather, in the name of false peace, we'd rather
just say, okay, you know what, it's all right, let's just let
things ride. And when somebody professes a false gospel, let's
just be quiet about it. How about we love them enough
if we have that relationship to open our mouths and say, this
is the true gospel. And if you want tips and tricks
on how I do that, my personality, your personality are completely
different, I promise you. And the way I think, you don't want to step in. You
don't want to go into this head. I promise. I've been trying to
get out of this head for 47 years, and I still can't get out of
it. But I think one of the greatest ways of expressing an understanding
or developing an understanding of what someone else is expressing
is to ask. Ask. What do you mean by that? Because
sometimes people have language that they just don't even know
how to articulate. Sometimes they're using a word that they're
actually defining correctly in their head. So ask, well, what
do you mean by that? Yeah, that's nice. Your little
child brings you a cupcake that they just made in the kitchen.
They're four years old. That's nice. What's in it, boogers?
You go, uh-uh. Now, what do you mean by boogers? Well, I rolled
it up candy and I put it in there. It looks like a booger. Okay,
I'll eat that. Did it get out of your nose? No. So sometimes
we can use terms that aren't necessarily defined congruently. So ask, what do you mean by that?
What do you mean by that? Well, where is your hope? Help
share with me. Just like the scripture says,
always be prepared to give a reason for our hope. Why don't we ask
others to give a reason for their hope? Oh, that's your hope, that's
great. Tell me what you mean by that. And see, we find ourselves doing
that apologetically with cults, known cults, a lot more tenderly
than we do with people who claim to be in the faith. We need to
be just as tender with these people. And the scripture calls
us as elders, me and the other elder brothers of this congregation,
to be patient and endure evil in that context, as long as someone
is submissive and quiet and calm and willing to learn, we need
to continually try to teach them. We don't need to just let things
ride in such a way that we don't care, because that's what it
all boils down to. But beloved, stop believing that
lie subtly in the back of your flesh that, oh, that person is
just ignorant of the gospel. You're not ignorant of the gospel
if you've been born of God. Now, you may be ignorant about
some things concerning the gospel. You may be ignorant of other
things and depths of the gospel. You may be ignorant of gospel
terms, but you're not ignorant of the fact that God, in His
sovereign prophecy, planned to send His Son, God
in the flesh, to pay for the sins of His people and only His
people, and that is how we have righteousness, and so on and
so forth, because it's the same story. The woman at Sychar, John
4, she understood some of the text that I've read here. And
you see Isaiah, what does it say in Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 53?
We know those texts. Isaiah 9, for unto us a child
is born, a son is given, right? And the government shall be upon
his shoulders, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty
God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of
his government and of the peace, there will be no end. See, this
is not about the world. This is not about the earth.
This is about a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom of glory. In Isaiah
53, we see the same type thing. He was pierced for our transgression.
So here he comes in his authority, and here, He comes in His efficacy. He will be pierced for our transgression.
He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement
that brought us peace. With His wounds we are healed. We are all like sheep who have
gone astray and have turned everyone to His own way. And the Lord
has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and
he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth like a lamb led
to the slaughter, and like a sheep that is before its shearers is
silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment
he was taken away, and as for his generation who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of living, stricken for
the transgression of my people, and they made his grave with
the wicked and a rich man in his death, although he had done
no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth, yet it was
the will of the Lord to crush him. He was put to grief. He,
the Lord, has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering
for guilt, he shall see his offspring. He shall prolong his days. The
will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish,
listen to this, beloved, Isaiah 53, 11. Out of the anguish of
his soul, he shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall
the righteous one, my servant, shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
So everybody who heard the gospel in the days of the apostles understood
this story of these kingdoms. They understood the story and
the nuances and the intricacies, not the depths, not all the theological,
you know, potholes, but they didn't have to get there in mind
through the entire world, but they understood what God was
going to do through His Son, and they understood that God
was going to save His people through the sacrifice of Jesus.
They might not have known His name, they might not have understood
the word Messiah, or whatever, but they knew it was God in the
flesh. And when that revelation continued
to be made to the apostles, we see in Matthew's gospel now the
birth of Jesus took place this way. And what do we see? We see
the historical lineage of all the prophecies and the promises
of God being exposed in the birth of Christ. Being exposed, and
get this, it wasn't like Jesus just came on the scene like,
who is this guy? No, God sent the forerunner and the spirit
of Elijah and John the Baptist so that for several years before
Christ even came on the scene, people were already thinking
about that son of Zechariah. that they hadn't seen in a long
time. And then here comes John and he's preaching the prophecies
of the Christ in a Roman-controlled Palestine, which is where Israel
is. Now, The birth of Jesus, the birth
of Jesus, the birth of Jesus. He did all these things. You
see it in Matthew, you see it in Luke and John. He even goes back before
the birth of Jesus, doesn't he? In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with
He was in the beginning with God and all things were created
through Him and everything. And then the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us. And we have seen His glory. Glory
is the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. And
from His fullness, we all receive grace upon grace. We see that
little, we see some stuff in there, don't we? In the middle
of all that, we see John the Baptist proclaiming about the
light that the darkness will not overcome. We see the fact
that Jesus, the living word that came and tabernacled with his
people, it is only by the will of God the Father that they could
see him and believe in him because he came to what? to give them
life, to birth them into a new kingdom. You can't see the kingdom
of heaven, Nicodemus, until you can see, you can't enter the
kingdom of heaven until you can see the door. I'm the door, I
am the kingdom. This is not of this world, it
is of another world, and I have come to inaugurate this and secure
its citizens. This is the work of Jesus. Jesus
came to secure the citizens of an eternal glory that he would
share with them. And He gave them a right to become
the children of God, not by the will of the mind or the flesh
or the decision of man, but by the will of God. And He did that
by becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And He did that through
only one means, and it's grace upon grace upon grace upon grace
upon grace. And if you want to remember how
we should understand that, go back to the first 16 weeks of
John. I think we were in the first
chapter a couple of months. Jesus says in John 14, 6, I am
the way, I am the truth, and I am the life, and no one comes
to the Father except through me. How must I come to the Father? You must know who Christ is.
You must know what he has done. You must know he has saved his
people from their sins. You must understand this. How
do we get understanding? And we know, verse 20 of 1 John
5, that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding. So that we may know him who is
true. so that we may know that we are
in Him who is true. Who is this? And His Son, Jesus,
who is the Christ, who is the true God, who is the eternal
life. A little tool to keep yourself
from idols. So see, I believe that that's the real context
of that statement. Since we have a great high priest
who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us
hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one in every
respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. Therefore, since we are surrounded
by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight,
lay aside the idols of false religion. Lay aside the idols
of false gospels. Lay aside the idols of cultural
spirituality and humility. No one justified
goes, I'm not like them. The justified man prays this
way, propitiate for me. Satisfy your justice for me. That's literally what the man
prayed. Have mercy on me. The word, propitiate for me. Let us run with endurance to
race that is set before us. How? Looking to Jesus. I preached
this about five, six weeks ago, maybe on Wednesday night. The
founder and the perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that
was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and
is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him
who endured from sinners such hostility against himself so
that you may not grow weary or faint hearted in your struggle
against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding
your blood. Beloved, he is the true God and
he is the eternal life and we have the fullness of joy that
comes through the knowledge of him given to us by God the spirit
through the hearing of the words of Christ. You are hearing the
words of Christ when you hear the text read. We are discussing
the words of Christ and we talk about it in this way. You must
know the one true God and the Son who he has sent. You must
know who he is and what he accomplished. Because only then can you rest
in his work. And the only way that happens
is if God the Spirit, this moment or in any moment, grants you
the faith to see and to rest in the knowledge of Christ. Let's
pray. We thank you, Father, for the
truth, for the knowledge of Christ, Lord, I thank you for your word
above all things given to us. For in the word, Lord, you have
powerfully and supernaturally taught us of yourself. And Lord,
we know that the fullness of the word is truly Jesus Christ,
who is the word become flesh. To declare your works to your
people. to establish your kingdom that is not of this world, Father. And we are so thankful for that.
There is no refurbishing that this world could see that could
ever bring it unto your liking. But you will create all things
anew. And you have promised so in Christ, and you have promised
to save your people through him. And you have done so. So Lord,
we look forward to the continued work of your word and of your
son and of your spirit as we continue to proclaim the truth
of the gospel, that you would call your people to yourself,
that they may know that they have the eternal life who is
Jesus Christ. And then we may simply understand
the simple grace that is ours in him. Strengthen us therein,
Father. In his name we pray. Amen. Thank
you, Church.