I want to pick up back into chapter 3 verse 24
all the way through verse 12 of chapter 4. I want us to hear
this. Whoever keeps his commandments
abides in God and God in him. And by this, we know that he
abides in us by the spirit whom he has given us. Beloved, do
not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether
they are from God. For many false prophets have
gone into the world. By this, you know the spirit
of God. That is every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ
has come into the flesh is from God. And every spirit that does
not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the
antichrist. which you heard was coming and
now is already in the world. Little children, you are from
God and you have overcome them who are from the world. For he
who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They
are from the world, therefore they speak from the world and
the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows
God listens to us. Whoever is not from God does
not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of
truth and the spirit of error. Beloved, let us love one another
for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and
knows God. Anyone who does not love does
not know God because God is love. In this the love of God was made
clearly seen among us. that God sent His only Son into
the world that we might live through Him. In this is love. Not that we have loved God, but
that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation of
our sins. Beloved, if God loved us in this
way, we ought to love one another. So no one has ever seen God.
If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected
in us. So we're going to stop there.
And you think, well haven't we gone all through this? But remember
this is one thought. This is John giving us one lesson, one
idea, one simple truth. This is not a doctrinal treatise
on God. This is not theological, theology
proper. This is just simply this. God loved us and showed us his
love in the giving of Jesus Christ to satisfy his righteousness
for us. Therefore, we ought and must
love one another. We ought to and must love one
another. Now we've already heard in the
beginning of this letter that there would be some of us who
would sit and go, well, you know what? I do love everybody like
I should. No, you don't. If you say you have no sin, you're
lying. Because the very nature of our
mind, the very aspect And I'm not talking about the new nature
and all this stuff. I'm just talking about humanity,
the very reality of who we are as human beings. We are inclined
to not love. And what we think is love, we
actually are doing selfishly. We are doing selfishly. So when
we find ourselves in the opportunity to love, And we see it being
performed in a manner that's congruent with scripture, which
is through service, through sacrifice, and so on and so forth. What
happens? We give praise to God for two
things. One, is that he's allowed us
to love like this for this little moment. And two, that he's loved
us long before we've ever loved him. And three, when we love
each other, it is then and only then that we are loving him.
Period. Our love for God is not bound
up in how much the hymns make us feel good. Our love for God
has nothing to do with the tears that choke us up in the context
of of seeing, like I read out of Psalm 118 this morning, I
will not die, I will live to declare the good deeds of the
Lord. That verse has extreme emotional connection to me. The
purpose is not necessary. But what it draws in me is not
my love for God. I don't say, you know what, I'm
tender-hearted when I hear that verse, so I must love the Lord.
No, I love the Lord when I love you. And you love the Lord when you
love one another. There is no other way. No other way whatsoever that
we can love except each other. Some people say, well, I love
the Lord and I'm answering the call to the ministry. Look at
my preaching. Look at my teaching. Look at
all my cool missions. I mean, if God were so coy and
such inclined to be like the memes of our social media, you'd
see Him going, or yawning. And certainly we don't want to
put that in our brains. But beloved, that's not going
to get His attention. What gets His attention is His will being
done. And His will is done in everything.
The counsel of His own will when He decrees all that takes place
and everything plays out for His purposes, He Himself gets
His attention. So His work in His people is
that we love one another through service, through sacrifice, at
cost. And that includes the continuation
of exhorting one another to remember the truth of the gospel. Beloved,
when we get into the book of James in a couple of months on
midweek, you're going to see James do a comparison between
a living faith and a dead faith. Nothing to do with salvation
whatsoever. It's not about who is saved and
who isn't saved. It's like you can have a marriage
that's alive or you can have a marriage that's dead but you're
still sitting in the same house like bumps on a log. You have
no romance, you have no friendship, you have no engagement. You just
tolerate each other in the space. That's a dead marriage. That's
what dead faith is like, by the way. That's what unloving believing
looks like. That's what unfruitful ministry
is. We just tolerate the presence
of these people. Have you ever felt that way? Be honest. Raise both hands. Yes, we've
all felt that way. We felt that way. And the Lord,
through his mercy, as we learn the word of God, he softens our
hearts. But when we ignore that, when
we step away, when we push ourselves and we push obstacles in between
us and other people, we are actually damaging. We are damaging the
body of Christ. So this is what John's trying
to teach us. We must love. Why is it an occasion? Because
there's a lot of unloving people in this church that John's talking
about, not this church. Oh, there are, let's be honest.
We all just raise both hands, right? But in John's writing,
his people, the people that received this, the recipients of this
letter, that's what I'm trying to get. There it is. Got it. There were some
people who were unloving, and they were staunch, and they were
harsh, and they were pressuring others to take their point of
view. Paul tells in Romans that the
people that do that kind of stuff are divisive. It has nothing
to do with doctrine. It has to do with the way they
approach the problems, the way they treat others. We are to
avoid people who have that personality. Ostracize them in such a way
that they feel the pressure of their wickedness and that if
they are truly our brothers and sisters in Christ their heart
that is filled with the Spirit of God will have an affection
for the beloved and that in that correction in that discipline
God says his grace will restore them to fellowship. So when people
aren't restored to fellowship we're to treat them lovingly
as unbelievers. We're to love. We are to love. We've seen John say that in the
fruitfulness of the Christian life, those who obey God are
walking with him. That's just what we talk about
when we hear the word abiding. It doesn't mean that God stays
with us and we keep our salvation. We're walking with him. For us
who are parents, we can talk about this very, very much with
great experience. When you're in public and your
children get missing, they just walk off a little bit. They're
around the corner, or like my son did many years ago when he
was a toddler, decided in a pet code to just walk away from me
and hop over the wall of the puppy pen and squat down so I
couldn't see him. I shut that place down like Rambo,
boy. I went to the front door. I didn't even look for him. Didn't
even call his name. I went to the front door. I said, nobody's leaving till
we find this dumb little blonde boy that's gonna die if he's
not dead already. I mean, you know, that's all
we did. Shut it down. He's over here playing with the
puppies. That's a horrifying thing. He was no longer abiding
with me. He was no longer walking with me. He was no longer there.
He was no longer my little whatever you call it. And he purposefully
tried to get away. See, it wasn't that I wasn't
paying attention. We turn the corner, he scoots in and scots
down. So I turn around literally that much, just gone. That's
how fast it took. When you're out with friends
and you, I remember some trips that I went with college friends
and high school friends and we'd go on this trip. Hey, we're gonna
go here, we're gonna see a Broadway play. Or we're gonna go here,
we're gonna go see an opera. Or we're gonna go here, we're
gonna go to Drum Corps International. We're gonna go to the National
Finals in Boston. And you got six of us together and we've
got plans and we get ready to start going and two of the knuckleheads
go, yeah, I ain't going, y'all go ahead. But you're driving. You ever hoofed it in the cold
in Boston? It's not a fun thing. It's not a fun thing at all.
And they weren't abiding with us anymore. They weren't walking
where we were going. We went together, we had a destination,
and then they separated from us. That's the language that
John's given. It's a very practical letter.
It's not very deep in its theological explanations. That's not the
point of it. It's pastoral. That John is writing practically
about the depths, theologically, of the gospel and the implications
thereof for the saints who live together. And that there are
people who trouble the saints by trying to always revise the
gospel. to try to always revise how a
person's saved or who Jesus Christ is or what's the nature of the
atonement. They're always trying to revise
it, not discuss it, not inquire. It's okay to discuss and inquire,
but change it. No intention of let me learn
from you, but the intention of let me correct all of you. Beloved,
that's not even a qualified heart of a pastor. If I can't learn
from you, you can't learn from me. Anybody who's an expert of the
Bible needs to move on down the road. We don't need them here.
We need to be taught by God and sometimes God reveals things
to us later in life and sometimes he's pretty quick. And so we
better listen to the mouth of babe sometimes when God has revealed
to them the truth and we're ignoring it. That's part of what love
does. So when we get to this part here,
we know that we are his because of the spirit within us. This
is a review but I've got to get through it because I want you
to see before we move on to the end of this letter exactly how
it fits. John is not trying to warn them
of Antichrist as much as he's trying to show them the spirit
of those who are Antichrist, what they are inside. And one
of the primary functions of how they operate in relationships
is that they have no love for anybody. Now see, we could actually say,
with John's teaching as you'll see today, we could actually
say, we can know who the Christians are by how they love one another.
And that would be a true statement. And some people go, no, no, no.
Doesn't Jesus say the same thing? They will know that you are my
disciples because of the love that you have for one another.
Isn't the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17 and the preceding
chapters, where he met with them and ate with them and talked
with them, his number one concern was what? That they loved one
another as he and the father loved one another. That in doing
so they would walk in the world on the dirt of this terra firma
as God walked with him. Loving. And that's why it's so confusing.
I can't tell you how many people I've talked to this week I just
can't keep up with it anymore. My mind just sort of flushes. I mean, Tuesday felt like it
was 36 hours long. You ever had a day like that?
And Wednesday morning I woke up thinking, was that three days? That was last night. I thought
it was three days ago. But how many times I've talked
to people throughout the week, whether it be professionally
or just casually or theologically, it all ends up theologically.
No matter how, no matter how the conversation starts or why,
it's always gospel by the end of it. And I've had several people
this week, as a matter of fact, I have four people this week,
who have told me that they don't get into church anymore and they
don't attend church anymore because of the actors that are there,
that predominantly sometimes the pastors, who are all talk
but no truth. That's what one of them said.
I'm like, well, what does that mean? Well, they just don't love anybody.
I've never had an office quarrel that ended like the church quarrels.
I've never had a boss treat me like that pastor treated me 20
years ago. I'm done with Christianity. And
my answer to that was, praise God, that's good. And they look
at me like I'm crazy. You know, just shock power. And then that's why it's so hard
for some people when they see loving and benevolent cults.
When they are unconverted, they don't know the gospel, when we
see the love that some of these people have. When we see LDS,
when we see the Russellites, when we see Rome, when we see
other places that do the work that God's Word commands all
of His people to do, to have compassion, to take care of poor
people, to take care of naked people, to take care of sick
people. to worry about our neighbor's food and don't bust a gut in
front of them while they're starving. Something wrong with that, see?
But we see the cults and the benevolent work of the world
and its organizations, and that's why when someone stands up and
says, they say, well, that was a good God-loving, God-fearing
person, and we go, do you know their gospel? It doesn't matter, does it? It doesn't matter because people
don't care about what they believed if what they do in their life
in love doesn't match. And so that's why so many of
the cults seem Christian. Because John and Jesus and Paul
and others will say this is the display of God's ontological
character. His righteousness and glory visible
to the world is his effectual love for his people through Jesus
Christ. And we know in the context of
the gospel that is a myopic work that's effectual to a very small
people. It is not a universal work, except
that all people of all nations of all tongues, there are elect
in there. So when the world hears the high
doctrine and sees lovelessness, the church is worthless. I'm
gonna say that again. When the world sees high doctrine but sees also lovelessness, the
church is worthless. You don't like that? Listen,
folks, I'm not an expert in anything, but I have read John's writing
almost every day of my life for nearly 20 years. Almost. And when you read John's Apocalypse,
That is the, that is one of the condemnations that the Lord Jesus
Christ gives to his people in Ephesus. They are not loving people. They
are high doctrine. They are, they are staunch. They
are not loving. And how does Jesus condemn them
in that? How does he indict them? He says, you have forsaken your
first love. You aren't loving me because you're not loving
each other and you're not loving your community. You're not known
as people of love. You are known as people of high
doctrine. And the truth is we got to have
both to be effective in the world. You don't have to love, you don't
have to serve, you don't have to be in ministry at all, you
don't have to care one thing about anybody to be God's sheep. But you are not sheep, plural,
you are the lamb sitting by yourself in a box in the middle of nothing
because there is no possible way for us to fulfill the gospel
in our religion. What does that mean? The practices
thereof without loving one another. And we can pray, and we can read,
and we can sing, and we can bow down in our house, and we can
weep, but that's got nothing to do with love. That's emotional
response that I could see coming up in me when I watched Fried
Green Tomatoes. You know that movie, right? Horrible
movie. Let's let you fall in love with
all these adorable characters and then kill half of them. I
mean, you know, you don't want to do that. That's the MO of
Hollywood. So we're to test the spirits. These people weren't having trouble,
but John wanted to establish in them a gospel mindset, a gospel
worldview, the mind of Christ. that includes two specific commandments. Believe in the true gospel. That's why the Antichrist revise
it. They don't confess the trueness
of Christ, according to the apostles. And if we have people in our
world today, we don't put us in the place of the apostles,
where they left us, or don't believe us. No, it's not they
don't believe James Tippens, they don't believe John. They
don't believe Paul, they don't believe Peter, they don't believe
Luke. Touche, Paul. So they listen to us. And by
the listening, by the adherence and the hearing of the Word of
God, first and foremost, not in an academic way, not in an
intellectual way, not even in a logical way, but in a supernatural
way, our minds and hearts and souls rest in the sufficiency
of the finished work of Jesus. Even long before we parse it
all out to become experts, of how it all worked and functioned. But the second part is that we
love one another. Because this is true, I implore
you, I command you to love one another. So these are the only
things we have to worry about as a church. If you go home today and you're
driving by yourself in your car, ask yourself, how is what I'm
thinking loving to my fellow brothers and sisters? How is
what I'm doing when I get home loving to my fellow brothers
and sisters? How is how I feel? And we'll find that if we evaluate
those things, we'll begin to see that the totality of our
lives, I said it, the totality of our lives, I'll never get over it, anyway,
is for the purpose of the spiritual reality of our
love for the Lord through our love for one another, and that
there is indeed a spiritual aspect to everything we do. Time management, money management,
attitude management, heart management, all of it. There's an attitude,
there's a spiritual essence to it that we, because of the gospel,
are now commanded to consider. And this is not news, this is
review. I can't go home and sin if I'm expecting to love you. If I have words with my wife,
my heart is damaged to the call of God for your sake. And the
same thing is true for you. So there is this spirit, there
is this essence, there is this mindset, there's this worldview,
there's this way in which we can see people. And we can hear
what they say, and we can know their gospel, and if it's wrong,
then we don't even worry about step two. But if it's right,
then we can include them as the siblings in the Lord, as siblings
in the Lord. Then we move to step two. We
move to the very next reality is that because now we all have
the same spirit of God, and we have the truth of God, and we
know the gospel of God, we can then love one another in a manner
congruent with this gospel. And when we do this, not only
are we serving one another with gladness, we are actually serving
the Lord Himself. Jesus indicts the church of Ephesus
in John's letter to what? That you have forsaken the love
for Him because they weren't loving one another and weren't
loving in the community. When Paul is called on the road
to Damascus and Jesus speaks to him personally and directly
and calls him, He doesn't say, why were you persecuting all
my friends and relatives and people and sheep? He says, why
are you persecuting me? So in Matthew's gospel, when
Jesus is teaching and he talks about, well, when you do this
and you did that and you did this and you did that, and the
people say, well, when do we do these things? He said, when you
did it under the least of these, my brethren, you did it under
me. And when do we have opportunity to do it? When he talks to the
Jews. to the goats When you didn't do it unto them you didn't do
it unto me so there's nowhere in the Bible that shows any aspect
of serving the Lord and Loving the Lord and having and having
joy in the Lord that doesn't always 100% of the time involve
the Lord's people all the time And that's what John's teaching.
He's saying, listen, get this together. Get this right. Your
salvation is secure because of the love of God for you through
Jesus Christ. So there's a spirit then of these
Antichrists that John's not trying to impart knowledge about. He's
using it as a comparison. He's saying that the unloving
Christian is just like the spirit of the Antichrist. Get that. John's not changing gears. He's
saying that when we aren't loving, we are literally exuding, showing,
revealing, manifesting the spirit of Antichrist. But he tells them. those antichrist
those false prophet they've gone the world remember that we know
that we are God's children because his spirit testifies to us this
is Romans 8 and by that spirit we cry out
pops dad that is the literal word in English for Abba it's
not father or oh dear father it's pop daddy There's an intimacy with the
Lord, our dad. And my children can tell me anything.
They don't believe that, but they can. They can tell me anything. They can show me anything. They
can fuss about anything as long as they're respectful. Because
when they're not respectful, I slide off the rails. And something
happens in that short, and my left eye goes up, my right eye
goes down, and I'm going, I'm either going to explode, I'm
going to kill every living thing in a 400 square mile radius.
You know, you've been there, parents. And then you sort of
massage it back out, and you go, OK, they didn't see that,
hopefully. And then you just approach it professionally. You
think, this is not my child. This is my neighbor's child.
Let me pretend. So we role play. We have that ability. We have that relationship with
our Father in Heaven who will never condemn us, who will never
be angry with us and exercise His anger toward us. And when
we think He's angry, He's really just correcting us. He's really
just disciplining us for our own joy. He's teaching us what
is good and healthy and honorable. He's teaching us what is holy
and responsible and reasonable. Living the Christian faith in
the world is a difficult thing. We add more problems to it when
we try to pile on all sorts of burdens on the body of Christ
that aren't necessary when we can't even get the primary burden
that is on us, which is to live in a manner worthy of the calling
that we've been given and the mind of Christ who gave himself
to die for people who hated him because he loved them in that
way. So beloved, love one another.
Series over. But we are not to worry about
being antichrists. That's not on the table. It's
a comparison. Beloved, do not believe every
spirit. Test it. Test what that man says
by the truth of the gospel. Test what that man's gospel is
and test his love. But more importantly, test your
love. And beloved, we're not gonna
measure up. I'm telling you right now, we're not gonna measure
up, but what causes us to drive to that center is the gospel,
as we'll see. The Antichrist is in the world
already by the sovereignty of God, 2 Thessalonians chapter
two, the sovereignty of God. God has put the spirit of Antichrist
in the people of reprobation and they are continually and
always will grow in exponential numbers with false gospels. Sadly, the false gospel bearers
of the world are more loving than most confessing gospels,
gospel Christians. You know why? Because so many
people are not taught correctly. If I taught this letter the way
it's been traditionally taught, I could open the altars. We could
slide the first five rows of chairs back and just stand all
of them in a big pile. Because that 35 or 65 feet difference
makes all the difference in the world for the Lord. You're not really spiritual unless
you just close that gap. This is the holy place, right?
There's sarcasm there. Everyone's like, uh-oh, what
are we about to do? Nothing. There's nothing uber
spiritual about any location. But it does feel good, doesn't
it? It makes us feel like, okay, in this sense, now I am penitent,
not repentant, because that's not repentance, that's penance.
I have sorrowed myself, and now I want to come and let everybody
see that I'm sorrowful. The mourner's bench, Charles
Finney, he created that. And all his Antichrist's progeny
continue to purvey it to this very day. But he says, little
children, verse 4, for you are from God and you have overcome
them. Why? Because he who is in you, notice
he gives the personal pronoun he, God the spirit, he, a person,
is in you. He is in you. And by that Spirit,
you confess Him as Savior. By that Spirit, you confess Him
as Lord. By that Spirit, in Romans 10. You know the truth. God's Spirit
has granted you faith. God's Spirit has gifted you faith.
You haven't pulled that out of your own volition, out of your
own cognition. You have been gifted this incredible
gift of faith to believe in the proclamation of the finished
work of God to redeem His people through the person of Jesus Christ
and all that He is and all that He accomplished and all those
for whom He accomplished it. That's why it's called good news.
not the good offer or the good opportunity. It is good news
and it is a finished work. The gospel is finished. And you are little children because
you are in Christ and the spirit that is in you is greater than
the one who is in the world, the spirit of the Antichrist. They, the Antichrist, are of
the world, from the world, so they speak from the world. And
the world listens to them. We, John 10, are from God. And whoever knows God listens
to us. So the apostle John here is saying we as the apostles
are from God. We have been sent by Christ Himself
and we speak and what we say is Christ speaking. So those
who have ears to hear the words of Christ are the sheep of Christ
because only the sheep can hear. Only the sheep can see. Only
the sheep will ever hear. There is no person in the world
who has lived or ever will live or who is living now if they
be a sheep of God who will die without hearing and believing
the truth of God concerning the gospel. That is what our evangelism is
about. taking the gospel, the teaching of the scripture, the
discipling of the nations, to whomever will listen, because
only those who want to listen will listen, and most of them
will fall away in self-righteousness. But the sheep of God will never
fail. Because the guarantee of their
inheritance is what? Their baptism? No. Their circumcision?
Absolutely not. The guarantee of their inheritance,
of our inheritance, is the Spirit of God. God will not destroy
himself. He is not going to destroy his
body. He finds no fault with you, beloved, because Christ
was destroyed in your place. Whoever knows God listens to
us. Whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we
know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. So now he's
giving that comparison about the Spirit. In that same way
of thinking, verse 7 of chapter 4, now he continues. Thinking
about the Spirit. The Spirit by which we test that
which we see and hear. Beloved, let us love one another,
for love is from God. So see what he just said? The
Spirit of God teaches us, and I'm teaching you, and I'm telling
you right now that if you are of God, you know God, you will
hear what I'm saying. You will know that what I'm saying
is true because it's written on the page of John. So John
is not lying concerning these things, and the Spirit of God
within you will give you confirmation of what I'm saying as truth and
then He will also empower us in a certain way. You'll see
how the Spirit empowers us. Let us love one another for love
is from God. And then it's just a simple phrase
and I've already talked about this. And whoever loves has been
born of God and knows God. So if you love, you know God,
you know the gospel, right? You know the righteousness of
God, you are learning and growing in your knowledge of God. You
are being able to discern what is good and what is not good,
what is pleasing, what is not pleasing, what is righteous,
what is not righteous. You're able to establish these things
and the foundations of these things and we're learning and
growing and we're doing so not out of fear but out of faith
because of love and next week, I'll finish up verse 12, which
is where I'll land today. The perfection of God's love
in his people. Love is from God. Whoever loves
has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love
does not know God. What's that mean? That means
if you're refusing to love and to learn to love, then you aren't
really aware of the truth of God as love. You need to be taught
that. It doesn't mean that you're dead.
It doesn't mean that you're ignorant. It surely is true of these revisionists.
Not only was their gospel wrong, but their love. They had no love
whatsoever. And I'll be honest with you.
There's an ultimate end to a false love. There's an ultimate end
to flattery. When it's amongst the people
of God who have the truth, there's going to come a time where The
love that someone may put on, they may say, well we love you,
we serve you, we love you, and they may walk with you for weeks
or years and then one day the gospel truth, the truth of who
Christ is and what he accomplished will butt heads with them and
that love will go down the toilet. You'll see that it was only superficial.
You'll see that it had no real essence. You'll see that these
people don't want to hear about your problems or your sins or
anything else. They don't want to encourage
you in the faith. They want to accuse you before God. They want to
make themselves righteous in your own eyes, in your eyes,
so that they can look good amongst the rest of the people who believe
like they believe. And the list goes on and on. We could talk
about Antichrist and the spirit of it. And beloved, if you really
want to get a good dose of it, just visit almost any church
in America. Especially those who do not practice biblical
church discipline and correction. It's tough. Such is the sovereignty of God.
He permits it. He produces it. He pronounces
it. All the other Ps that I can come
up with that don't even make sense. But ultimately there are people
who he has saved. And we will be taught. And if
we decide to stop learning, he'll take us out. He'll disperse us to the ends
of the world. John used it this way in his Apocalypse. He said,
Jesus says he will take out his lampstand. take out his lampstand. God, verse 8, anyone who does
not love does not know God, does not understand God, does not
learn God because God is love. Now this is full and I'm going
to explain it in a little more detail next week and then the
week after that a little more detail because as we get going
through I want to sprinkle some of this doctrine because I think
it's important But it's not necessarily in view here, so there's gonna
be a little topical stuff in the next few weeks that go along
with the exposition of this text. But God is love. John is saying
there that this is the nature of God, that God is. God also
does love. Tonight on Theology on Call,
I've got this question that'll relate to this. But God is something,
and then because of what God is, he does things. and that
everything that God does is always from who God is. God is not divided
in parts by his is. That's not saying if I go rob
the Tippins Bank and they come to my house and say, we got a
warrant, we got you on video. No, it wasn't me, it was my left
arm. No, it was you. Listen, the gun was in this hand,
the money was in this hand. It just dragged me along. It
was doing its own thing. God's attributes don't do their
own thing. Enough of that. God is love. And the reason John says this
is because he's trying to help us see as believers that to love
one another is actually to have the mind of God. To love one
another is to literally live as God has called us to live.
Above everything else. But it's easier for us to go
and get to the cultural things Used to be the old joke was,
you know, I don't drink or dance or cuss or date girls who do
or anything like that, you know? And okay, great, but what has
that got to do with living the Christian life? Well, I dress like a Christian,
do you? You got a $600 pair of pants on? What's the parting
shot of John's first letter? Beloved, keep yourself from idols.
That's gonna be a five-week series, probably. Just that one sentence. I mean, it is the quintessential
reality of our lives. I mean, go to our vehicles. There's
probably $1,000 of stuff that's loose in the car. Not possible. How many chargers have you bought
this year? How many cables have you bought this year? How many
phone cases have you bought? How many shoelaces have you bought
this year? How many newspapers and magazines
and little trinkets? How many times have you gone
to Cracker Barrel and said, oh, that looks cute on the dash, and it's still in
the trunk? I mean, we've got stuff in the car that would feed
most small countries, that when we clean it out in January, you've
got to start new, we're going to throw it away. I don't know
where the back is to this thing. I've been looking for that Nintendo
for a couple of years. Throw it in the trash. I mean, let's
be honest. We're filthy rich. We've got autos galore. We're
pumping them out like a, I was going to say like a turn station
at a reloading stand, but y'all wouldn't know what that means.
But we're just pumping them out, one after the other. The dishwasher,
clean, here we go. But God is love and John says
that so that he can explain this next sentence. In this, the love
of God was made manifest. That means it was revealed, shown,
and clearly stated. So there's two things in John's
letter that he talks about being manifest. One is the person of
Christ is the glory of God and all of his righteousness and
everything that he did. This was manifest, that which
was, that has been, now we proclaim to you. It was manifest to us,
now we proclaim it to you that you may have fellowship with
us in our intimacy and knowledge of God and that in that your
joy may be full. So see we're coming back full
circle to the point of the letter and if I'm not careful I'll miss
it. I won't drag it along like a little red wagon. I'll let
it sit over there and we'll forget why we're even here. And we'll
pile guilt upon our shoulders and we'll begin to think, oh
well, I need to work on love, I need to be a better lover,
I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to do the other.
And okay, we're gonna fail or we're gonna be blind to the reality
of how we're not doing as well as we ought. But what's the ultimate
purpose of God teaching us these things is that we may have the
fullness of joy in Jesus Christ. So that comes through the knowledge
of the gospel of free grace, which is sovereign. It is by mercy, it is by grace
alone that you have been saved. And the way that you know that
is through faith. God grants you the mind to see
it. That's called repentance. Your disposition has been changed
on how you look at righteousness. All of a sudden, you realize
there's nothing you can do to be righteous. There's nothing
you can do to please God. You just gotta believe in the promises
that he's already proclaimed. And believe that they are fulfilled.
Yes and amen. Saving faith. And then when we see that, we
go, wow, look at the love of God for us, 1 John 3, verse 1. See what kind of love the Father
has given to us, that we should be called the children of God,
and so we are. God is love. And so to love is
to display the knowledge of God. To love one another is to display
the knowledge of God because God is love. As God is love,
He revealed His love and clearly showed it through the giving
of His Son. God sent His only Son into the
world. This is a heavy sentence. So
that we might live through Him. There it is. Oh, God loves me. He loves you in the giving of
His Son that you may live. That you will live. So this is the love of God. 2
Philippians 2. Not 2 Philippians, but 2 Philippians
2. 2 Philippians. The mind of Christ. As Paul teaches in many different
places, we ought not to think of ourselves too highly. We ought
to listen out for the concerns and the needs and the well-beings
of others. And there's always this selfish turn. Well, who's
going to look after me? Everybody else. If I'm looking after everybody
else and everybody else is looking after me, we're in good shape.
One of the biggest problems in our contemporary culture is that
we don't share the truth of what we really need. And we think
we have to come with all these weird details of everything that
brought us to the place of where we just need a pair of socks.
Why don't you just say, I need a pair of socks, and the body
of Christ will give you a pair of socks. Because that way, you don't have
to feel guilty about the dumb things you did to get you with
no socks. And you don't have to confess all that stupid stuff
to anybody. You can just say, you know what I need? A pair
of socks. And we say, praise God, I got three pairs right
here, take two. I got one pair, you have the left and I'll have
the right. We'll hop along happily together. You see, we build too
much, we put too much on ourselves when we try to do it in the flesh. We try to work real hard to justify
how we need to ask for love. Just ask. Just be honest. Just speak the truth. And this
is love. God sent His only Son of the
world so that we might live through Him. So we ought to love one
another. In verse 10, and this is love.
So now, John is explaining in a little more detail about the
love of God. Because there's a lot of people, beloved, that
think, well, the reason that I'm going through these things
is because I'm not loving God the way I ought to be loving
God. There are some consequences to our sin, and there are some
consequences in denying the means of grace to which God has promised
the results. You cannot get to Atlanta by
driving to Miami, unless there's a plane down there that'll get
you back up here. You see, because I know my children are going,
yes you could, there could be a helicopter. In general, So we can't find
joy in doing something else except what God has prescribed. We can't
find fulfillment in doing something else except what God has prescribed.
We get temporary joy. We get temporary fulfillment.
We don't understand the joy of the Lord is our strength. Well,
if that's true, then the joy of the Lord is found in the love
of God, which is manifested for us that Christ died in our place
and is our propitiation. And because God loved us, it
has nothing to do with who we are or what we've done. It is
grace. It is unmerited. That means it's
not earned. Some of the brothers had a discussion
in here on Thursday in a Bible study, and the opposite of grace
is justice. Justice is how we work in economics. All these boss people, I can't
believe I gotta pay. Yes, you do have to pay. Justice
says I'll work 10 hours, I'm getting 10 hours worth of money.
At the end of the year, when the boss says, here's a
million dollars for nothing. I'd still say that was related
to justice. But something not earned is grace.
God's love is an act of grace toward his people. God's love
in the context here, this letter was written to believers only. Believers only. Unbelievers aren't
going to understand this. They're not going to understand
the multifaceted expression of God's love because He is love.
They're not going to understand the fact that God doesn't love
everybody equally and in the same way. They're not going to
understand that because they've been taught by culture that they
see the benevolence of God and therefore He doesn't want them
to perish. But justice requires condemnation even, listen to
this, even for God's people. Do you realize that justice,
the justice of God requires damnation of the elect? But because of God's covenant
of grace, that damnation was put on Jesus Christ in our place.
So now justice says there can be no condemnation for those
who are in Christ. Now that's a love. That is a love that we can't
fathom with our minds except to just hear the truth over and
over again repeatedly. To learn Christ every few days
and just to continue to learn the gospel and to know that,
wow, what have I done? And John answers that for us,
nothing. In this, the love of God was
made manifest among us that God sent His only Son into the world
so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that
we have loved God, but that He has loved us and
sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins, the satisfaction
of justice, the payment of wrath, the absolution of death. It is paid. It is done. That is love. and then in God's wisdom by the
same spirit that we now have he the spirit of God will reach
into the hearts and minds of those who hear the truth of God's
gospel and he will cause them to believe this amazing grace
and then they will all of a sudden in that moment be identified
as our brothers and sisters then we have to teach them more about
who God is God is light and God is love therefore we must love
one another just like we teach our children what love is you
must share you must not talk back you must be respectful you
must not make faces no don't use that finger I mean you know You've seen it. We teach our
children what love looks like and what light looks like. And
we teach each other in the body of Christ in the same way. And
that's what John is writing to us for. And we need to understand that
this love of God is eternal. The giving of the Son is an eternal
decree. It did not begin one day. God
has loved us in Christ before there was even a world. Because
God is eternal. Philosophical. That rattles around
in my head like marbles in a jar. But the point that John's trying
to make is not to have us stop on that and to go, wow, but verse
11, beloved. See, he calls us beloved again.
He calls them beloved. If God loved us in this way, said so
loved, that means in this manner. If God loved us in this way,
We ought to love one another. And now verse 12, this is going to open up another
recapitulation for next week and the week after. We ought
to love one another because of the love of God for us. You see
what the motivation is? We're not worried that if we
don't love that God's going to get us. We don't worry that if
we don't do something in the right motive that God's not going
to love us. God has loved us when we were His enemies. In a natural sense. God loved
us while we were still sinners. God put Jesus Christ on the cross
and He crushed Him and He bled Him and He died and He buried
Him. So that He could be just. and
righteous and good and loving and forgiving us. So now, John, as he did in the
prologue of his gospel, he says, no one has ever seen God. Interesting. You can't see a
spirit, right? We see this in John chapter 4
where Jesus is talking to the woman from Sychar. We see this
in John chapter 3 where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus. We see
this in the context of John 8. You have never seen God. You've
never heard his word, he says. John chapter 5. where Jesus is
talking to the Pharisees. Everybody had claimed. We see
in 2 Corinthians 3 where Paul reiterates the idea of Moses
seeing the back end of the train of God's glory and coming down
and his face was shining in such a way that the Israelites said,
please hide your face. So they had to cover his physical
face because they didn't want to look at him because he'd been
in the presence of the shadow of God's glory. In 2 Corinthians
4, Paul says, well we don't see
like that anymore, we see face to face. We see face to face. In Colossians,
Paul says that I pray I may fill up what is lacking in the suffering
of Christ for your sake, that is for the body, for the church.
And everywhere when we see the apostles write, we talk about
the love of God manifested in the lives of God's people so
that as Jesus Christ is the only one who makes the Father known.
In verse 18 of John 1, exegetes the Father. He displays Him and
explains Him. You want to know God the Father?
Then look at Jesus Christ. The word there really is exegete
in the Greek. Explains, expresses, makes known. That's what the word means. Scientific. It's just practical. No one has ever seen God, the
one and only God who sits at his side, exegetes him. Woo!
You got that? Exegetes him. Pay attention,
y'all were sleeping, now I got you woke up. Exegetes. Expresses. Displays. Teaches. No one has ever seen
God, John says. And it's everywhere. I mean,
the invisible God. No one's ever seen Him. Why would
He put that in the middle of this practical teaching about
loving because of the love of God for us? Because that's what
He's about to share with us. He's about to say that because
God loved us and because we know the love of God, we ought to
be compelled to love one another and thus reveal God's love to
one another in our love for each other. It is always beneficial to open
the Word of God and to learn the details of gospel truths. But it is equally vital and essential
and imperative of the Word of God that we also understand the
gospel power and the implications thereof. The so what's. This is true. Now what? Then
you're saved. Now what? Then you will never
be judged. Now what? You have eternal life. Now what? You need
to be with some others that are like-minded. Now what? You need
to love them. This is the commands of God. No one has ever seen God Remember
the little illustration about our kids walking and then just
sort of darting out in a convenience store or department store and
going on a trip with the friends and some of them just depart?
We're not walking together anymore. I don't know where they are.
We lost a guy one time when we were playing football somewhere
at George Southern. He just disappeared. Wasn't in his room. Couldn't
find him for two days. He ends up getting home some other meeting.
You don't know where he was. He was not abiding with us. He's not abiding. When we're
walking out of love, we're not abiding with the Lord. We're
not walking in a manner that the Lord has called us to walk
in. He hasn't left us, and we haven't left Him in the salvific
sense. His Spirit hasn't left us, but this is the language.
No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides
in us. And His love is perfected in
us. Now I'd rather you use the word
completed than perfected. Same thing over in Hebrews, completed.
He is the founder and the completer of our faith. God's love is completed
in us. It's a language that John likes
to say. And we're writing these things
so that our joy may be complete, our joy may be finished. The
love of God is finished in us. When we are loving each other,
there's nothing else to do. But keep doing it. This is the
final step. But don't we as Americans want
more? Don't we want to do more, be more, have more, know more?
We want bigger cars and bigger houses and bigger lands and Bigger
ideas, bigger drinks. When are they going to come out
with the XXXL drink? When the car manufacturers make them a
little wider with something that will hold it. That's where those
hats with the straws come in. I mean, we want more, we want
more. What else is there? All spiritual
blessings are ours in Christ. The love of God is ours in Christ.
The work of God is finished in us in Christ. So then when we
live together and love one another, then the love of God is finished.
It's perfected. We are complete. And the only
thing we have to look forward to is that true completion of
glorification. But I can't tell you the number
of young men through the years when even I was a younger man
sitting at a desk with a guy my age going, I want to be used
of God, what am I supposed to do? And I hand him a Bible and
I said, go home and read the Bible and then come back and
live it out with us. But they want to be Paul, they
want to ride on a horse on the way to Damascus and a broad lot
blind them and they have to go find some people who are running
for their lives in a Middle Eastern country and try to become something
amazing and they want to fight their way through all the Antichrists
and pull up the sword of the spirit and watch it catch fire
and get the dragon and ride on a horse and all these other type
things and make it look like something that Tolkien would
create. But the victory of the majesty
of God's power is a simple picture. God came into the earth in a
human being. A body that he created for himself
and lived in the world as a simple, ugly man. Physically, not attractive,
the Bible says. Wasn't much to look at. He wasn't
so handsome that people would take note of him. That's a paraphrase. Then he taught, he was invisible
for 30 years, then he taught for three and a half to four
years, then he died, he rose from the dead, and he secluded
himself only to a small number of people, then he ascended into
the heavens, and then the apostles began to teach the same message,
and it wasn't this wide, awesome, I mean, when all of them came
into town, it wasn't like the whole thing turned upside down.
Oh, there they are! like a parade, they snuck in,
they talked, and as things got bigger, people began to know
the truth, and things began to transform, and there was a love
for the saints that stopped the commerce of certain areas, that
stopped the behavior of certain areas, and there was a transformative
essence of the love of the saints in a community that caused a
lot of problems, mostly economically, and by the fact that it cost
a lot of people power. that they lost power that they
had over others and then they put Paul in jail and with a pen
God destroyed the foundations of the world by writing the letters
of the gospel accounts and as the church grew it suffered and
it grew and it suffered and it grew and it suffered and it grew
and it suffered and it suffered and it's still suffering today
And through all that suffering, the apostles typically toward
the end of their life are in their imprisonment. That was
the only time they had opportunity to actually write letters and
do work of the ministry. Man, I got more blog posts on
my blog than there are Bible verses. And it's worthless. I was thinking
about that the other day. how stupid we are to think that
we're doing great big things for the kingdom of God, and the
great big things have already been done. And when Jesus Christ comes back,
we see the imagery of his robe dipped in blood, and tattoos
on his thighs, and swords, and all this kind of stuff, and like,
you get him, Jesus! I think it's gonna be just like Paul says
in Thessalonians. How many times have you blinked
your eyes today? You don't know, but you have, because they're
not dried up, falling out of your eye socket. And when you blink your
eyes, you don't notice it. I'm still standing here. You
still see me? But one day it's going to be
like the twinkling of an eye. Over. We're not going to behold this
grand array of demons fighting on horseback and all this baloney.
It's going to be over. God doesn't need to show his
power in a battle. Why would he fight? That'd be
like me or you being attacked by a moth. and causing a 600 car pileup
on Interstate 95 trying to defeat it. He's sitting there on the
window, flutter, flutter, flutter, just roll it down. That's the whole of the universe
and the power of God. It's over. Simplicity of the
gospel is a weakness in the hearts of men and their self-righteousness
and power. But beloved, the love of God
is simply perfected when we live this out simply. Stay simple. Grow deep. Let your roots be
so deep that you can't move. And that's why we adhere to the
challenges of our culture. It's hard not to adopt the culture
in the name of ministry. We need time to love one another
and to serve one another. And how hard it would be to say,
I'm hungry, and you say, I'm sorry, I got choir practice. That's rough, isn't it? I'm not
saying the choirs are bad. I'd love to have one. But that's
not love. It's not love. The love of God
is perfected in us when we, by the gospel and its assurance,
by the spirit within us, are also able to love. We are manifesting
and displaying the spirit of Christ. that's in direct contrast
with the spirit of the Antichrist which is in and of the world
in all of its iterations including Christian iterations. So beloved,
rest in that. I mean, be at peace. Just take
a deep breath and just go, wow, I'm exactly where God wants me
to be. I'm doing exactly what God wants
me to do. And my love for the saints can
grow from this point forward. And God will be pleased because
he is. Why? Not because we're loving
like we ought to, that we should. He's pleased because Christ has
set our sins on himself. Let's pray. We thank you, Father,
for this glorious truth. Lord I just want to keep going
and continue to teach the rest of this father but you know we
measure out some time and we set aside these this day that
we might be together to learn and to grow but Lord would you
also help us to as we As we are taught to really begin to pray
and to look outward, to look at each other and to pray that
you would offer opportunity for us to express your spirit, the
spirit of love, the spirit of graciousness, the spirit of kindness
to one another. And Lord, we live in a very toxic
culture. The word has become synonymous
with personalities now. Circumstances revolving people
who are toxic, Lord. And it's changed the face of
psychology and counseling. But Lord, this is nothing new. Lord, help us to know that your
word teaches us, the Bible teaches us that we are to avoid people
who claim to be our brothers and sisters who refuse to lay
down their toxic aggression. And Lord, by your mercy, you
will bring them back and they will come and they will they
will be restored to us. So, Lord, help us not to labor.
Except to labor, to rest in the sufficiency of the cross. And
then to labor by faith as we live this life. For Christ is
in us. because he loved us and gave
himself for us. So we live this life in him, in Jesus name, amen.