We've been studying for the last
several weeks the concept of prayer and our text for that,
even though there are many, is given to us in 1 John 5. We're
going to look again at 1 John 5, verses 13 and following. I'm sorry, not verse 13, but
verse 14 and following, and work through our present outline,
believing in prayer. I will not go through verse 13
and 14 as we did before. We're gonna make our way through
verse 15 and 16. Hopefully we can exercise our
senses in it today. But the promise that was given
to us in 1 John 5, verse 15 is this, verse 14 rather. And this is the confidence that
we have in Him that if we ask anything according to His will,
He hears us. And if we know that He hears
us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that
we desired of Him. And what I did was take the time
to give us a number of characteristics, a number of particular attributes
consistent with the concept of God's will by which you and I
can meditate on them and think them through as the premise for
being confident that God will hear us. As you know, for many
people, the idea of the will of God is a very large concept. What is the will of God if, in
fact, the will of God becomes for us the sure basis of God
hearing us? Well, what you can be sure of
is that the will of God is everything that the scriptures say. That's
the safest place for you to start in theology. We we deal with
three categories of the will of God we deal with what is called
the Secret will of God the secret will of God. This is Deuteronomy
29 29 the secret things belong unto the Lord secret things Obviously
that what you have in your Bible is not the sum total of all God's
thoughts That would be ridiculous to conclude right because God
is infinite by nature and since he is infinite God is infinite
in his thoughts and an infinite God with infinite thoughts would
overwhelm a finite people like you and I. So God's thoughts
are, they are infinite. So when we read God's word, what
we have from God in the word is a portion of God's will, which
we call God's revealed will, revealed will. Revealed will
we have what is called the secret will of God a lot of people like
to live out of the secret Will of God and that is to say that
they don't know what God is up to But that's not true. The secret will of God is in
Deuteronomy 29 29 that's a humble principle that Moses gave the
children of Israel that God does things that are beyond our capacity
to understand or comprehend it's his choice to act in ways of
which He has chosen the prerogative of not telling us because the
relationship between us and God is very much a relationship between
a king and a servant, a father and a son. And then the king,
servant, father, son covenant relationship. The father does
not have to always tell his son what he's doing. Just like when
our children were growing up, you wouldn't, you know, when
they got to that pesty age, remember that? Where they were always
asking why, why, why, why, why? And it became almost a test of
wills. And what they were demonstrating
was a lack of trust and they were questioning the authority
of their parents. And God's that same way with
us too. When he calls us to walk with him by faith, What he's
saying to us is, do not be so foolish as to think that everything
that I want you to do requires me explaining it to you. Otherwise
it would not be faith. And that's one of the reasons
why we have the book of Job. Job is a wonderful pictorial
of what it means for a son to trust his father, even though
he went through all he went through, God told him to just trust me. And in the midst of his lows
and highs, his ebbs and flows, you remember what Job said, Even
though he slayed me, will I trust him? And God never told Job why
he went through what he went through. It wasn't necessary. All Job had to know is that God
was faithful, God was righteous, God was good, God was loving,
and that God would take care of Job. And those become the
criterion by which you and I operate with God. And so we have what
is called the secret will of God. He doesn't let us know.
And then we have the revealed will of God, the revealed will
of God. And what we call the revealed
will of God is what you have in your hand, the scriptures.
The scriptures are the will of God. Haven't we been learning
that, ladies, in biblical theology? The concept of covenant and testament
means will, doesn't it? A covenant or a testament is
a will or a treaties drawn up by the testator to let everyone
know what the testator's purpose, his design, his objectives, his
goals are. So your Bible is God's will for
us. His special revelation specifically
laid out for us. So all we have to do is go to
the Bible to know what God's revealed will is for us. There
are other categories of God's will in theology too. We have
another one called God's sovereign will. In God's sovereign will,
you and I will see God act but we won't be able to emotionally
or psychologically resolve why God did a thing.
And again, sovereignty is a characteristic or an attribute that God claims
for himself for which he can say, I will have mercy on whom
I will have mercy and I will harden whom I will harden. And
what we do with that kind of decisive proposition is simply
submit to God as being sovereign. That's a king servant position.
You guys got that? A keen servant position. So whether
you know it or not, what I am describing is this. That as we
come to know who God is, we can comply with Him more fully. See, it's really a relational
thing. To the degree that you and I come to know who God is,
we can comply with Him more fully. If we have to always know what
God is doing, we are bypassing the relationship in terms of
what we call in the rules of engagement, position number one.
And we are simply operating out of a pragmatic. Why is he doing
this? It almost implies a sort of not
having any desire to get to know the person. I just want to know
what he's up to. You guys got that? So in the
idea of the will of God, there's what we call the secret will
of God. It has to do with God doing things that are way beyond
our capacity to comprehend. The sovereign will of God has
to do with God making choices which we may not like, but we
have to trust God for it anyway. And then we have what is called
revealed, the revealed will of God, our scripture, or what we
call special revelation. These are all theological terms,
but they're important. Special revelation, because special
revelation is really the world in which God wants you and I
to live. Special revelation, meaning the Bible is sufficient
to make you wise unto salvation through a knowledge of Jesus
Christ. Isn't that what it claims? Ask 2 Timothy chapter three.
And Timothy, you have known from a child the holy scriptures,
which are able to make you wise unto salvation through a knowledge
of Jesus Christ. And the scriptures themselves
speak of the sufficiency of their capacity to not only save us,
but to give us wisdom and to give us insight into God's purpose
and God's desires. So if you and I are going to
become people who know God's will, we are going to become
people who are serious about God's word. Serious about God's
word equals serious about God's will. You guys got that? For
the word of God is the will of God. The will of God is very
clearly laid out in his word sufficient enough to lead us.
I just wanted to share that with you because people do struggle
with God's will. And there are many verses that
speak to the will of God. But in your outline under verse
14, ask according to his will is the qualifier that John gives
us in verse 13 of our text, if we ask anything according to
his will, and we have already identified several characteristics
consistent with the will of God. The first is faith. Do you guys
see that in your outline? Faith. A man or woman may not
be confident whatsoever that God will hear their prayers or
hear their requests if they do not believe that God is and is
a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. We saw in Mark chapter
11 last week where the Lord Jesus told the disciples that when
you pray, pray believing that whatever you ask the father,
he will do for you. And so when we come to God, we
must come to God believing not only that he is, but that he
is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. The other concept that
needs to be understood in the context of prayer, some of these
go without saying, but it's important. is obedience, obedience. The
obedience of faith should hallmark the life of the believer. I am
coming to God in prayer, believing that God is, and I am doing it
in the obedience of faith because God tells me to come to him in
prayer. This is almost circular reasoning.
These are not faith and obedience are not synonyms, but they are
two sides of the same coin. A man can go through external
forms of obedience and not really believe God, simply be operating
out of the perfunctory practice of, if I do this, God may do
that, and not really believe God. So one must understand that
at the base, at the foundation of your motive must be an implicit
trust, an implicit recognition that God is a faithful being,
and therefore we move out in obedience of faith to do what
God tells us to do. And we also know that faith operates
by love. I don't know if you know that.
This is Galatians chapter 5, verse 5. Faith works by love. We're talking biblical faith
now. This is biblical faith. When I talk about biblical faith,
I'm talking about a faith that has its origins in God, that's
given to you and I as a gift, and it's designed to be the basis
by which you and I interact with God on the grounds of love. A
man may be operating out of a pagan faith, a mystical faith, a what
we call a reciprocating faith, a faith based upon what is often
called the law of reciprocity. If I sow this seed, then God
will do that. But that is an inferior kind
of faith, again, that just simply falls in the category of pragmatic
things. Again, I'll use the analogy at
this point just to tug on your hearts. There are three covenants
that we are operating with in the Bible all the time. The king's
servant, the father's son, and then what? The husband, wife. The husband, wife. If the wife
always is only dealing with the husband in terms of what she
can get out of him, her love towards him is inferior. If he
is only operating in his relationship with his wife in terms of what
he can get out of her, his love for her is inferior. Am I making
some sense? If I am always expecting God
to bless me because I prayed, bless me because I read, bless
me because I did this, my love is inferior and it is not Christian
love. So it's important for you and
I to know that because we have these substitute concepts that
have entered into Christianity and has caused people to turn
God into a cosmic genie or a bellhop or an ATM machine. If I just
do this, God will do that. And that's a very dangerous place
to be because it sets aside relationship. It completely sets aside relationship.
And salvation at its foundation is a relationship So when we
talk about love, we are talking about the idea that our motive
for what we do towards God must be rooted in love. Let's see
if we can make some of this work. Go with me in your Bible, Mark
chapter 11. I want to look at verses 25 and 26. Now I can take
you to one or two verses. For those of you who have been
really grounded in biblical truth and been part of Grace Bible
Church for years, you would know that the concept of love is the
basis for all true relationship. It is the manner in which God
deals with all of his creatures with respect to obedience. The
question was raised to Jesus, what is the greatest commandment
of all? You guys remember that. And our Lord Jesus said to that
young lawyer, you know what the commandment is. You, you, you
know what it is. You are to love the Lord your
God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your
what? Neighbor as yourself. So I'm back at Mark chapter 11,
25, and this can't be, this is where we were dealing with the
concept of faith. So I want to leave that one alone. Go with
me and your Bible to Luke chapter six, Luke chapter six. But when
the young ruler asked him, what must I do to obtain eternal life?
He said, keep the commandments. And he said that he had kept
all of God's commandment all his life. And then when our Lord
says, OK, sell everything that you have, give it to the poor
and follow me and you'll have eternal life. The man went away
very sorrowful, didn't he? And that was because his relationship
with God was not based on love. It was based on merit. It was
based on reward. It was based on the fact that
God had really blessed his life. Here's a concept here in the
Gospel of Luke, chapter six, I think. Our Lord is teaching
our disciples something here about the idea of love. This is an interesting portion
of scripture. I'm trying to think now why I would have given this.
This here is what is called the Beatitudes, Luke 6, 27 through
36. Here it is, verse 27. But I say unto you, which hear,
love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them
that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
And unto him that smites thee on one cheek, offer the other,
and to him that takes away thy cloak, forbid not to take thy
coat also. And then he goes on to say this.
Now watch this, I want you to see it. Give to every man that
asketh of thee, and of him that taketh away thy goods, ask them
not again. And as you would that men should
do to you, do ye also to them likewise. And then he sums it
up this way. For if you love them which love
you, what thanks have you? For sinners love those that love
them. And if you do good to them which
do good unto you, what thank have ye? For sinners also even
the same. And if you lend to them and hope
to receive, what thank have ye? For sinners also lend to sinners
to receive as much again. But love your enemies and do
good and lend, hoping for nothing again, and your reward shall
be great. and you will be the children
of the highest for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the
evil. Be ye therefore merciful as your
father also is merciful. And I guess one of the reasons
why I pull that portion of scripture up is because when we are talking
about what the will of God is for us, the will of God is for
us to love God and to love our neighbor, which is very often
a counterintuitive set of principles. You guys got that? It's very
frequently a counterintuitive set of principles. So let me
see if I can tie this together before we go on. I would suppose
that we would all love to pray that we could get along with
everybody and love everybody and the world would be great,
right? But that's not the world we live in. And neither is it
the economy by which God has determined to save sinners. It
is generally in the context of conflict and adversity where
God's people are behaving in a manner that represents God
in spite of the situation by which men and women are drawn
to God. And thus the believer is doing
what they do toward their neighbor because they love God. Got that? So the vertical relationship
between us and God becomes the basis for which I act counterintuitively
towards those who are acting indifferent towards me. And in
that context, God promises that I will have the resources of
his blessing available to me in order that I might sustain
that witness. Because after all, this is about
God and not me. And so I am implying by this
portion of scripture that love gives. That's true, right? Now, when you think about it
on a more objective level, take yourself out right now. Don't
beat yourself up because you might be in a scenario right
now where there's somebody you're thinking about that really gets
your goat, got you upset right now. Hot! Hot! And therefore, this particular
admonition is a little tough. God knows that. He definitely
knows that. But the reason why he would tell
us to do like him is because it would cause us to think about
what he did for us when we were evil towards him. You guys got
that? So I'm segwaying back to a principle
here that I started talking about last week. A couple of weeks
ago, I'm building a thesis on this and it's called anger, anger. And I made the proposal that
at the core of our being, When we are not saved and even after
we're saved, this becomes a fundamental struggle that the human race
is angry towards God. That's a proposition that I have
now come to conclude is the basis for all the outbreak of adversity
and conflict between human beings and the hostility and rage that
we have towards God. I believe that to be true. I
believe that when we go deep down in the core of our being,
a person who has not settled the issue of his relationship
with God is basically living his or her life in a constant
complaint toward God for God being God and their circumstances
not being like they want them to be. So I'm going to say it
one more time so that can resonate with you, because you may be
thinking about anger in terms of the blowing off of the cap
of a volcano and just, you know, the kind of hostility you see
with people now taking guns and killing people every day. Those
are just symptoms of what is a core problem underneath, like
a iceberg that you only see the tip of it. Underneath is a mountain.
And I'm saying the human race as a whole in an unsafe state
has a core boiling anger, seething anger at the core of their being
because we're not right with God. And then we end up taking
it out in all of these different neurotic maladies and manifestations
that we do. We isolate ourselves. We abuse
ourselves. We abuse others. We get addicted
to this and get addicted to that. Anesthetize ourselves. We are
fighting against God. Now, when God brings you and
I out of those kinds of self-destructive molds, the solution by which
He brings you and I out of that, causing you and I to recognize
that my problem is with God, not my wife or my husband or
my children or my parents or my culture or my ethnicity or
my government. You know, we make all these arguments,
don't we? You hear from everybody. This
is my problem with them. As soon as that problem's out
of the way, there's still as cantankerous as can be. Here's how God demonstrates that
you and I really have a problem with God in the core manifestation. Our root of it is anger, is that
when God made himself accessible to us, when the secret things of the
Lord became special revelation, and the word became flesh, and
dwelt amongst us and we beheld his glory, we took him and in
anger we killed him, didn't we? So my proposition,
if it is theologically sound, is designed to drive the person
that has a problem with God to Calvary and show them that Calvary
is a revelation of my real battle against God. You guys got that? to work with that if you don't
have, because as a Christian, your solution to everybody's
problem is the cross of Christ. We should have learned this long
ago when we went through the book of Job. The answer is Calvary. Calvary reveals to us God allowing
himself to be so accessible to us that when we got a hold of
him, rather than love him for him telling us the truth, we
killed him. And we had that pattern running
all the way through the scriptures from Cain and Abel to this present
hour. Am I making some sense? So what
I'm getting at is when I say that anger is at the core of
our hostility and our disenchantment and our complaining and our murmuring
and our just being out of sorts, what I'm saying is that revelation
came to me by virtue of the cross of Jesus Christ. that Jews and
Gentiles together agreed to kill God because we didn't like his
revelation. His revelation told us that we're
sinners, that men love darkness rather than light. Is that true? And see, the Christian worldview
then is not everybody is right with God. Everybody's wrong with
God. Now, if that be true, here's
the challenge that you and I have. In a world that has been, from
the fall of Adam and Eve, wrong with God, you and I have the
overwhelming task, the supernatural task, of loving an unlovable
world. That's the world we're called
to love. That's why witnessing is so hard. Isn't that true?
It would be easy to witness if everybody loved us. But it gets
worse when we start telling them about Jesus. So it's like, man,
this is kind of tough, God, because I'm cool with these dudes as
long as I keep my mouth shut about Christ. And God is saying,
see, this is what I mean by my will be done, not thine. And
Jesus becomes what we call the quintessential revelation of
the son that obeyed his father. Isn't he? In all things, the
son obeyed the father, not my will, but thine be done. My will,
my meat is to do the will of him that sent me and to finish
his work. And at the apex of Christ's work, he cries out to
the father, father, not my will, but thine be done. I am about
to be given into the very hands of the people that I am loving,
telling them about you and they're gonna kill me. And he told us,
That's what he would be sending us into the world to experience
too. It's a pattern. Are you guys
following me? It's a pattern. Now, if people
don't out and out kill the Christian in a physical way, terminate
their life, it becomes ostracization, slander, other forms of hatred
and hostility, setting you apart, doing bad to you, the proverbial
Cinderella thing. and all Christians experience
that to one degree or another. It's in that context that you
and I are still to pray to God, thy will be done, not mine, and
thus to seek God's resources and grace so that we can live
out our life fulfilling our testimony. You guys got that? So this is
really where John is going in 1 John chapter 5. One more, going
back to James chapter 4. I'm gonna just deal with godliness
now. You know, John 14, 13 through 16 is very clear. Jesus said,
if you love me, keep my commandments. And if you keep my commandments,
I and my father will come and make our abode with you. And
I will manifest myself to you. I will give you the comforter.
He will take the things of mine and he will show them to you.
And all of the great promises that comes out of James 14, I
will probably be going there in a moment when I deal with
acknowledging his authority. But here's where we came last
week. And I just want you to see this pictorial again, of a person or a culture that fails
to recognize that the main problem is hostility towards God. And
this is this kind of dynamic that takes place. Chapter four
of James describes religious folk who don't get it, that it's
not about them. And as a consequence, the kind
of lifestyles that they live, increases the warfare and the
fighting in their souls and then among one another. And here's
how he opens up in James chapter 4. This here would describe,
ladies and gentlemen, a carnal environment, a very fleshly environment
of people who have not submitted to the Spirit of God and to the
Word of truth. They probably are not believers
which the way John begins to describe them as adulterers and
adulteresses, Friendship with the world is enmity with God.
And so he goes on to say this, from whence come wars and fightings
among you? Come they not hence even of your
lusts? See where the source of the fire
is? Lusts. You guys see that? Desire,
passion, epithumia, the temperature rising. It's lust, desires and
passion. This goes back to Genesis chapter
3, doesn't it? And subsequent to that, you lust
and you have not. You kill and you desire to have
and you cannot obtain. You fight, you war, yet you have
not because you are not asking. You ask and you receive not because
you ask amiss that you may consume it on your lust. You see what
James does? He actually describes the people
who are distracted by a life of self-centeredness that manifests
itself in a dog-eat-dog struggle, not only within themselves but
towards others, where they kill because they are desiring things.
And the word kill there, ladies and gentlemen, doesn't have to
always mean physical killing. Remember what Jesus says, if
you hate your brother in your heart, you are a what? Murderer.
So what he's actually dealing with is a core problem where
people are out of control because their life revolves around them.
And because they're disconnected from God, they have no real hope,
no real hope of resolving their problems without them, you know,
exercising the crab syndrome. As one person is trying to climb
up, grab him, knock him down, use him as a stepping stool to
get to the top. And we see this going on in business
all the time, don't we? We see it in school, we see it
everywhere. This competitive spirit that's predicated upon
individuals wanting to achieve their own goals, even if it means
destroying everybody around them. And how bad does this get? It
takes place even in our own blood families. That's how bad it gets. One of the scenarios affirming
what I'm saying is the Middle East. And the Middle East simply
is a mirror to America and Westerners. Those people are killing each
other over there, over things they don't fully understand.
but their situation is bad. There's a lot of reasons for
it. We won't go into the details of it, but if you stand back
and you are comfortably thousands of miles away, you get an opportunity
to see people who have crossed over into this blind hostility,
willing to kill each other, even to the extent of strapping bombs
to themselves and blowing themselves to smithereens to get their point
across. You guys got that? That's completely
opposite of a biblical worldview. God would never tell you to kill
someone or kill yourself in the attempt to kill someone in order
to please God. He would never tell you. In fact,
the cross work of Jesus Christ so diametrically opposes that
ideology that the two views don't even exist in the same universe.
Am I making some sense? There's no way that you can take
the God of the Bible and this mythical God that these Middle
Easterners are alleging is a true revelation of God and somehow
conflate the two. They don't exist in the same
universe. They are actually operating out of two total opposite paradigm. The one is saying, lay down your
life. You got that? The other one is saying, use
your life to kill people. And the principle is this, without
the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sins. This is
how desperate you and I are by nature. Sometimes conflicts require
the shedding of blood before we see how depraved we are and
how desperate the situation is. And I'm just using the concept
of shedding of blood in a general sense. I'm not even applying
it to Calvary. You know the old historical story of the Hatfields
and the McCoys. Do you know how those two folks
started arguing and fighting? Do anybody know? They don't know
either. So what James says is, you lust,
you have not, you kill, you desire to have, and you cannot obtain.
You fight, you war. yet you have not because you
ask not. What's interesting about James 4.2, and I've said this
before, you can mark this principle down if you want to as a rule
as we make our way through our next text. If a person is internally antagonistic
and in a mode of hostility and fighting and antipathetic and
adverse to everyone, That person is not a person of prayer. You cannot fight and pray at
the same time. You got that? Now I'm keeping
fighting in the category of prayer as a direct antithesis to each
other, because I could separate fighting and put it in a different
category and say that prayer is a form of fighting if I wanted
to and be right. Am I telling the truth? But when
we talk about fighting in the sense of pressing through issues,
struggling to get our will accomplished, you know, tearing up everything
in order for us to be noticed and people to pay attention to
us, That kind of mindset, that frame of reference of thinking
cannot correspond with prayer because prayer is a capitulation
to the sovereign will of God. It's a yielding to God. It's
an abandonment to God. It's a confession that I don't
have the answer, that I don't have the strength, that I don't
have the ability, that I need resources outside of myself in
order to accomplish the task. Got that? And very often, You
and I who understand the power of prayer, pray first because
we don't want to fight. Now let that resonate. We pray because we don't want
to fight. Got that? Because we know it's
second nature in the principle of self-preservation to fight. But very often our fighting is
a sign of unbelief where we are not trusting God. So I pray before
I get to that place of that compunction and drive to want to preserve
myself. God shield me, protect me, guard
me from me. Right? And so that's what we're talking
about here when James says you ask and you receive not because
you're asking to miss. So now the person that that's
described in James four, three. You ask, you receive not because
you ask you to miss that you may consume it upon your lust
is an individual with whom for some reason he or she fails to
realize that they are not the center of attention, the foundation
and source of the blessing. But God is and that God's will
is really to be the thing to be pursued in prayer. They've
left off with that. God, this is what I want. Now,
here's what God says in that context. You ready? That person
is not praying to me. They completely forgot who I
was. That kind of prayer does not
honor who God is by nature. It doesn't honor His dignity.
It doesn't honor His majesty. It doesn't honor His sovereignty.
It doesn't honor His goodness. It doesn't honor His wisdom.
It doesn't honor His predisposition to take care of His children.
The Lord will not withhold any good thing from them that fear
Him. Isn't that what the promise of the Word of God is? And the
Word of God has multitudes of promises that are given to the
believer. So the believer doesn't have to storm the throne of grace
and dishonor his God because he's overrunning with lust to
get his will done. That's a good picture, isn't
it? So it's very important for you and I, you and I to understand
in our outline, then I want to move on. Psalm 66, 18 is a common
Psalm. We've quoted it before. If I
regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord, what he will not hear
me, right? And what we mean by regarding
iniquity, it doesn't mean that iniquity doesn't run through
our brains. It runs through our brains all
the time. It doesn't mean that iniquity isn't residing in our
nature. It is there as part of our nature.
What we mean by regarded, it means to take the concepts or
the ideas that are based on sinful intentions, sinful motives, and
then to harbor them and to treasure them and then to protect them
as an acquaintance. Thus seek to achieve or accomplish
our goals through a simple means as if iniquity is our friend
And what God would say is if you harbor iniquity in that way
God's not gonna hear your prayers and you guys know that In fact
verse 3 of James 4 is a blessing Isn't that right? verse 3 of James 4 is a blessing
because what it tells us is God is so good that that he wouldn't
dare give me these kinds of requests when in these requests I'm going
to dishonor him. And I have often said to the
Lord, do not give me what I want. If what I want is not what you
want. Now, that's a hard prayer to ask. I'm here to tell you,
but when you get older and you realize the pain that comes from
getting what you want when it's not what God wants, it hurts
too much. The other two categories are
in verse 15 in your outline, praying in his name and believing
on the son of God. Also, therefore, what the Bible
teaches very plainly is that when we pray, we are to pray
in recognition of the authority of Jesus Christ over our life.
John chapter 14, going back there then one more time before we
move into this next interesting thought in our text, we got about
20 minutes to go. John chapter 14 listen to what
our Lord Jesus is and I want this to come home I want you
to think this one through to when you are praying now I know
that we actually use the term in Jesus name and that's all
good as long as when you use the expression in Jesus name
you are not Conceptualizing in your mind a form of incantation
by which God automatically, you know as it were let lets opens
the doors of heaven God is not, again, he's not some kind of
bellhop that if you say the magic words, God will act. That's not
the God of the Bible. What Jesus is talking about is
that the men and women that are going to have a relationship
with God by which his favors and his blessings are available
to us are men and women who have recognized that God has established
an exclusive means by which we come to him. And that is through
his son, Jesus Christ. So we read here in John chapter
14, 11 through 14. Here it is, are you there? Believe
me that I am in the Father and the Father in me. You're gonna
see how this works when we get down to John, 1 John 5, 19 and
20. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me,
or else believe me for the very work's sake. This is where Philip
had said unto the Lord, show us the Father and it would suffice
us And the Lord Jesus says, Philip, haven't I been with you so long?
And have you not seen the father? He that seeth me has seen the
father. And how say you show us the father. And so this is
where our Lord is saying in verse 10 and 11, believe is thou not
that I am in the father and the father in me, the words that
I speak unto you, I speak not of myself, but the father that
dwells in me. He does the work. Believe me
that I am in the father and the father in me. or else believe
me for the very work sake. Now, I want you to mark what
our Lord is doing. He is not confounding the distinct
person of the father with the distinct person of the son. You
guys got that? This is before I won this Pentecostal
brothers who do got a completely lopsided theology about God. Jesus and the father are not
the same. You guys got that? There is a
radical distinction between the person of the father and the
person of the son. Don't ever confound the two.
You will make Jesus a liar and you will make the father a liar
too. All right. But what he is doing is establishing
a unity of relationship that goes like this. If God is your
father, you will acknowledge me as the son Because apart from
the Son, you can't have the Father. You got that? If you recognize
God the Father, you must therefore recognize God the Son. Look at
what I'm doing. I took the two, I didn't confound
them. I placed the Son in front of
the Father to demonstrate the unity of the two and that the
Son becomes the access to the Father. There is no legitimate
access to the Father apart from the Son. This is the will of the father
that all come to the son. And this is the will of the son
that people would acknowledge the son as the authority and
means by which we get to the father. Got that? So there is
a unity that brings them so close together that one can fall prey
to calling them one. They are one in purpose. They
are not one in person. That would be a, what we would
call a philological fallacy. You can't take two persons, subject,
object, entities, and make them one person. That's a fallacy
in logic. They remain two persons. It's
only that in order for you to get to that first person, you've
got to come through the second person. And the unity of the
two is such that you cannot distinguish them in their purpose. So now
watch what our Lord says. This is how you're going to grasp
this very clearly when we get back to 1 John chapter 5. Verily
I say unto you, now watch this now. He that believeth on me,
who is the me? The son. The works that I do
shall he do also in greater works than these he will do because
I go unto who? See the distinction? He maintains
a distinction of persons, but he maintains a unity of purpose. The unity of purpose is that
God has chosen that all of the fullness of the Godhead bodily
dwell in Christ so that in order for us to get the God, we have
to come to Christ. Got it. Now, what's what he goes
on to say, and whatsoever you shall ask in my name by my authority,
according to my identity, watch this. will I do in order that
my father may be glorified, where? In the son. That's profound.
What we're talking about is a correspondence of purpose between the father
and the son in their relationship with the creature, that is you
and I, by which the son will do what we will ask because we
are asking in the son's name because the son is pleased to
glorify the father as the father is pleased to glorify the son.
Here's the beauty of the Trinitarian persons, which is where we're
forced to go as we head toward the end of 1 John 5. And we learned
this several years ago, and this is what we call the economic
revelation of the Trinity, the economy of the Trinity. The beauty
of the Trinity, when properly comprehended, is not designed
for you and I to go, ah, at the idea of a three and one and one
and three, and then use all of the failed analogies that human
life can afford us to try to explain the Trinity. When the
explanation of the Trinity causes most people to fail, the beauty
of the Trinity is in the revelation of their persons and how they
love one another and how they co-mutually work together to
accomplish their will and serve as a pattern to us as to how
we should love one another and work mutually together to accomplish
the Father's will. If you were reading your Bibles
carefully, you would be amazed at and overwhelmed by the perpetual
unity, harmony, love, oneness, cooperation, submission of all
three persons to each other in the work of redemption. And you
would see then in God why he called us to be his image bearers. that in bearing the image of
God as his sons and daughters, that we are to walk in cooperation,
that we are to walk in unity, that we are to walk in harmony,
that we are to walk in submission, mutual structural submission,
as we have the principles in scripture, because we love one
another in order for God's will to be done. So when the Bible
says God is love, what it's saying is God is love because God is
a triune person. Because love is the manifestation
of one object towards another object. You guys got that? And
so within the range, within the sphere, within what we call the
exclusivity of the Godhead, you can see love manifested between
the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. And that love is to emanate
into the life of God's people and be exhibited among us because
we are children of the living God. And thus he told us in Luke
chapter six, love your enemies because your heavenly father
loves those that are unthankful too, i.e. you. Right? And so what we would want to
do, and this is a diversion and I'm not going to divert. I only
got about 10 or 15 minutes and I want to make sure I get to
our next category of prayer. What you and I would want to
do, rather than get lost in what we would call abstract, philosophical,
technical terms around the Trinity, is to comprehend the beauty of
the revelation of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost in their
redemptive purpose towards mankind. And then ask God for grace to
emulate it. Show me how to be a submissive
Son, Father. Am I making some sense? Even
as my Lord Jesus was a submissive Son, to you. Spirit of God, equip
me like you equipped the Lord Jesus Christ to be able to love
the Father and to do whatsoever the Father told him to do. After
all, that's one of the covenant paradigms, right? Father-son
paradigm. And in the husband-wife paradigm, you and I, as the Church
of Jesus Christ, is called to be submissive to our husband.
Who is our husband? The Lord Jesus Christ. Lord,
grant me the grace to be a submissive wife to the Lord Jesus Christ
in all things that he might be honored. Since you have made
me to be his glory for the glory of the man is the woman. What
a bestowment God has placed upon us as the bride of Christ to
be the glory of Christ. But in order for us to be able
to execute that role, that calling, that blessing, we need the endowment
of the spirit of God so that we can stay in subjection to
our Lord Jesus Christ in the context of love, in order to
assist him in his job of fulfilling his father's will through us,
because he has chosen to accomplish his father's will through us.
Whether you like it or not, the objective of the father is that
he would be glorified by the son through the church. And that's
why we have that wonderful servant called the Holy Ghost here hunting
sinners down from every nation, kindred, tribe, and tongue, bringing
them to the Lord Jesus Christ as the bride of Christ. You guys
see that? What we call this in theology
is the economical manifestation of the Trinitarian persons in
their cooperation and love and service for the glory of God
in the life of mankind. It honors God for us to comprehend
the Trinity right. And this is what the language
is saying. This is why our Lord is saying to his disciples, this
language. Now listen to it now because if you read verses 9
all the way up to verse 15 where we are, the Lord Jesus Christ
has honored his father. The Lord Jesus Christ is giving
instructions to his disciples that if you honor me, I will
hear what you say and do what you say in order that my father
might be honored. Now notice what it says in verse
14 and following. If you shall ask anything in
my name, I will do it. Verse 15, here's the premise
upon which we come to God, if you what? Love me, keep my commandments. See it? Now watch this. And I
will pray the Father. Now, Jesus would be really pulling
the wool over our eyes if he were praying to himself. And he would be taking what we
call the logical semantics of language and turning them upside
down on his head. Telling us to believe that he's
speaking to an object distinct from himself when in fact he's
talking to himself I'm just trying to help you understand you cannot
you cannot fall prey to a twisted notion of the Godhead You cannot
do it You will mangle up all the Bible and you will make Christ
a liar all the way through the scriptures and you will make
God a liar all the way through the scriptures and you won't
be able to even enjoy your Bible you guys got that So now notice
what it goes on to say, I will pray the father and he shall
give you another what comforter that he may abide with you forever.
Here comes a third person. Is he real? Is he distinct from
the son? Is he distinct from the father?
Of course he is. Even the spirit of truth in the
world cannot receive because it does not see him, neither
knows him, but you will know him for he will dwell with you.
and he shall be in you. So acknowledging Christ's authority
is critical. We're gonna be taking a few weeks off. Next week, like
I had told you before, graduation is on the 13th and the 14th,
and so next Friday we'll be off. I'm thinking we're gonna come
back the subsequent Friday for our last study in John, and then
we're gonna be off for two weeks. The July 4th weekend, we're gonna
be off, okay? That'll be like the 5th. And
then we'll be off that subsequent weekend as well. That'll be like
the 12th, I think, 5 and 7, 12. And then we'll come back the
following week. So we'll have a couple of weeks
off. I'm working on some notes so that when we get into the
Book of Acts, we can run through the Book of Acts for the next
six to nine months. The Book of Acts is going to
be a very good, very important study for us to get into. So
next week off, The week after that on, and I'll reaffirm to
you that we're gonna be off two weeks after that, and then we'll
be ready to run for the summer in our Friday night Bible study.
Go with me in your Bible to the book of Acts chapter four. Acts
chapter four, I want you to see there's one more demonstration
or illustration of obedience on the part of the disciples
when Jesus told them, now, when you guys go about to do ministry,
you're gonna have to be praying to me to accomplish a lot of
things. And in order for you to get it
done, you need to be able to recognize and submit to and acknowledge
my authority. This is in Acts chapter four.
And in Acts chapter four, we read over in verse eight, this
is where there was a notable healing that
took place. And Peter is now responding to
the high priest who wants to punish them for this. And notice
what Peter says over in Acts chapter four. and we are considering
verses 8 through 10. Then Peter, filled with the Holy
Ghost, said unto them, You rulers of the people and elders of Israel,
if we this day be examined of the good deed done unto the impotent
man. That's chapter 3. Remember that?
Sitting at the gate beautiful, asking for alms, Peter said unto
him, Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have give I
unto thee. In the name of Jesus Christ, rise up and walk. And
the man rose up and walked. And here's what Peter says to
the rulers after that notable miracle was done. He says, If
we be examined this day for the good deed done unto the impotent
man, by what means he is made whole, be it known unto you all
and to all the people of Israel, now watch it, that by the name
of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucify, whom God raised
from the dead, even by him does this man stand here before you,
what? Whole. Now, we're going to be
able to enjoy these kinds of testimonies when we go through
the book of Acts. But what Peter just did was simply
say to the rulers of Israel, the reason why God made this
man whole was in order to glorify his son, Jesus Christ, whom you
crucify. Got that? Whom you crucify. So the healing of a sinner, which
is typical of our salvation, It's for God's glory and the
honor of the name of Jesus Christ. God didn't save the sinner and
heal the impotent man for himself. Do you notice there's nothing
else said in the scriptures about the impotent man? It's not about
him. It was about the name of Jesus
Christ, which would be exalted. This is the will of God. And
so Jesus's name is being exalted because the disciples are doing
exactly what they were told to do. Ask in my name and I will
do it. And our submission to his rule,
I'll leave that one alone. Go with me back to our text.
Go with me back to our text. So if you want to know how to
pray, Pray according to God's will. Pray in faith. Pray in
that evangelical obedience of depending upon the Lord Jesus
Christ. Make sure that your heart is right when it comes to prayer.
If it's wrong, tell God. Remember, the principle is confession.
I think I preached on that last Sunday when we dealt with the
tabernacle. Come to God in confession. Lord, I want to enjoy you in
prayer, but my heart's not right today. God hears that prayer better
than most prayers. You guys got that? That's honest. And it's a form of love too,
because love has the kind of boldness to come to God to tell
the truth about the condition of the heart and the motive of
the heart. That's what God wants. Because you know, what you are
telling God, he already knows. But he does want you to tell
him because remember, this is about what? Relationship. That's
right. And it's character building too.
I want to get into this last one. I want to definitely make
sure I get into this last one in our outline. The purpose of
prayer for the perseverance of the believer and the unwarranted
prayer of the apostate. I want us to touch on this tonight.
I want us to touch on this tonight because I want to be able to
spend a little time with the last part of 1 John 5. So John, after he tells us in
1 John 5, verses 14 and 15, ask, but ask according to the will
of God and be confident that he will, he gets into some very
curious language that I want us to touch on tonight. But I
do want to capture what I just said for a moment. And that is,
I think sometimes we do shortchange our walk with God. I think we
do. I think we don't value the relationship
like we ought to. And to the degree that we don't,
What we do is we ask more of religion than it can do for you. If we are defective in our intentionality
to walk with God, just a closer walk with thee. That vacuum will want to be filled
up with other affirming things. And so often we will substitute
an authentic walk with God with religious protocol, our religious
zeal, our religious activities in lieu of an actual walk with
God. And what will happen is if God
knows, and you know that really what you are doing is playing
around the hard work of position number one, talking with God,
spending time in the Word of God, taking the preaching and
teaching seriously enough for you to pray. Because see, prayer
is that raw form of faith that basically doesn't have any immediate,
what we call existential benefits. See, when you're praying, you
don't get rewards. Prayer is work, just like relationship
is work, isn't it? And so in prayer, you don't,
you know, you ain't nobody patting you on the shoulder said, girl,
that was a wonderful prayer. You and the Lord have with you
and the Lord. No, that's just you and the Lord. And after it's
done, you know, heaven, they open it up and you're not seeing
the angels clapping for you because you prayed to God for five minutes.
You didn't know. This is why praying requires
faith. And faith must work by what?
And it also must be rooted in knowledge. because the mind must
be renewed to be able to comprehend a God you can't see. And to the degree that you are
communicating with God your Father in a sincere prayer that doesn't
require all kinds of highfalutin terms and phrases and doctrinal
statements and long verbiage, I already told you about that,
get rid of it. To the degree that you are communing
with God on the basis of love and faith, with the desire for
your relationship to grow with God, to that degree, the Lord
is delighting in you doing something that he knows is unnatural for
you. That's unnatural for you to talk
to a God you can't see or hear with the physical audible ear.
Faith is operating, isn't it? Which pleases God. Got it. It pleases God for his
children to act in faith in a dimension that on a physical level is counterintuitive
to all of our senses. You know you have those days
when you get on your knees and say, man, I wonder if God is
even listening to me. And then you have those really,
really, really bad days where your mind is so jacked up, you're
going, man, is there even a God? Ooh. The religious folk in here
say, don't say that, pastor. Have you ever had those thoughts?
Yeah, what if there ain't no such thing as God? What if, what
if? Have you ever had those thoughts? You only got one or two, a couple,
two or three honest folks. Just a couple, two or three honest
folks. Man, what am I doing if ain't no God around? Right? But that thought, that thought
does not satisfy the soul at all, does it? It doesn't even
begin to satisfy the soul. That's not the blasphemy that
you and I getting ready to get into I'm gonna show you what
John says You don't have to waste your time praying for For you
to raise the question. Is there God or? Sometimes I
feel like you know, God probably doesn't exist. It's not a blasphemous
thing It's just a weakness in your faith You got that? That's all that is. And what
you and I ought to be marveling at is all the days that God has
given us grace and faith to believe that He is and is a rewarder
of them that diligently seek Him. It's amazing for me, after
37 years, I still believe God. Do you? Okay, 1 John 5, verses 16 and
17 is what we're going to deal with now. 1 John 5, verse 16.
Are you there? If any man see his brother sin a sin, which
is not unto death, he shall ask and he shall give him life for
them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death. I
do not say that he shall pray for it. You guys see that? So we wanna just talk about that
briefly. That passage is not easy. Do not even begin to think
that you can answer that in a sound bite. That is not an easy concept. It would be it would be short
sighted for us to not first consider the context and the context being
John is the personal pastor speaking to particular people in that
context at that time. What we would call the historical
interpretation. which means in the historical
context of any passage of scripture where there's a dialogue or a
conversation between two persons who are very familiar with the
context, there are things in the context of which quite possibly
you and I are not privy to. You and I must always recognize
that we are at most third party to a conversation going on in
the scriptures. Which means I don't have a right
to assume that I understand everything in that context. You guys understand what I'm
getting at? So our Lord would do things like he would talk
about Corbin, Corbin, Corbin. It is a gift. It is a gift. And
yet he would reprove the rulers for telling the young zealous
proselyte to give all that he has to the church because it's
a gift. It's a gift when he's disrespecting his mama. Well,
that's one of the passages where you're not going to find anything
in the Bible that actually affirms that concept. That's a concept
that was going on in first century Judaism of which Jesus was speaking
to them directly about. of which you and I don't deal
with. We don't deal with the concept of Corbett. You guys
understand what I'm saying? So we're a second party, a third
party on the outside listening to a conversation that there
are portions of that conversation for which we won't have any information. Here, John says, if any man see
his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask
and he shall give him life for them that sin a sin not unto
death. So obviously John is categorizing
what we would call sins that have mortal consequences and
eternal consequences from sins that can be prayed for and a
recovery take place. Sins that can be prayed for and
a recovery take place. And actually what he's talking
about is the interest of the Christian towards other Christians
on such a level that the behavior pattern of professing Christians
are important enough to us for which we, in our assessment of
their behavior, we determine that they are in danger enough
for me to pray to God for them. Did you guys get that? Let me
say it again if you didn't. The assumption in 1 John is that
the community of believers in that day didn't live like we
live pretty much in our present generation where, you know, once
we leave the building and disband, we go our own way. I don't care
what you do. You don't care what I do. When
I die, you show up at the funeral and act out and do what you do,
holler, scream and cry, moan and groan. Pastor Jesse gone. But, you know, if you saw something
going on in my life, that was incongruent with my person and
my calling as a believer, and you didn't care about it enough
to ask God to have mercy on me, then you're showing up at my
funeral as hypocrisy. Am I telling the truth? So God
is also giving us insight into the spiritual clarity that believers
have and the spiritual concern that we have towards one another,
that if we see a believer lapsing in their walk with God, demonstrating
a distance from God, showing behavior patterns that are consistent
with them not spending time with God, then we are to be praying
for them because these are troublesome manifestations that we should
all know can cause us to stumble. Right? We wouldn't want any believing
Christian to be in a state of prolonged distance from God,
walking with God, favor with God, obedience to God, because
we know that the devil is lurking to trap them and cause them to
sin and to snare them badly. of which it is possible according
to this text in James chapter 5, the effectual fervent prayers
of a righteous man avails much. Confess your faults one to another,
pray for one another that you might be healed. becomes in the
community's responsibility and privilege to make sure that we
are seeing things the way God sees them, and we are feeling
things the way God feels them, and we are caring the way God
cares, because then we are exercising our priesthood duty as a body
of believers who all have the qualification to call on God
for our brothers and sisters. Am I making some sense? But I
would also assert that if we are talking about distinguishing
between the sin that leads to death and the sin that doesn't
lead to death, now we are ready to ask, what does that mean?
Right? Because I mean, professing Christians
can do some severely sinful stuff. Can't they? It's just true. Severely
sinful stuff. Stuff that's so sinful that we
wonder sometimes, you know, are they going to recover from this?
Now, some have interpreted this to refer to physical death, where
a person may be engaging in a sin that has had them trapped and
that sin keeps them trapped and they continue practicing that
sin until they, let's say, obtain terminal cancer or some type
of mortal disease. We could talk about AIDS. We
could talk about gonorrhea. We could talk about hepatitis
through drug use. We could talk about all of the
addictive behavior patterns that we find our culture engaged in
when it operates in aberrant behaviors. And some of them are
in the church. They may or may not be believers.
That's the horrible thing about trying to, as it were, fence
this walk with God where you got one foot in the world and
one foot in Christ too. Because, see, that place keeps
you in such an ambivalent state. We don't know whether you're
saved or not. Best thing to do is pray for their salvation.
When they don't give clear evidence that they have experienced the
grace of God, come up out of the pit, and have been walking
with the Lord sometime, but may have lapsed into some behavior
that has snared them into a lifestyle that's bringing them down. And
I've said it before, and I really do believe this, If in the secret
will of God and in the sovereign will of God, not the special
revelation or what we call the preceptive will, that's another
term for it. But in the secret will of God
and the sovereign will of God, in your personal walk with God,
where you have hardened your heart to some aspect of God's
calling in your life, you just played it hard. The believer
on the outside may be praying for you, but his prayers won't
avail. So long as you are in personal rebellion against God,
God may deem to take you out because you are snuffing the
witness to which he is calling you. Am I making some sense?
You're only here to be a witness. I'll give you an example in the
Old Testament of that. This was King Asa. He was a true believer.
King Asa was a true believer. But King Asa got mad at God. Any of you guys remember King
Asa? He got mad at God. So rather than going to God for
counsel, he went to the pagan for counsel. He sought the strength
of Egypt instead of the strength of God. Now he was a born again
believer, but somewhere in his walk with God, he got angry with
God. You know what God did? Smote him in his feet with a
disease of which he died. Now we all gonna die of something.
Be careful. Once again, my Pentecostal brother
and take it way to the extreme. She got sick and died. She must
have sinned. No, we all die of some sickness. Got that? Don't
let people jack you up like that. That's religion. It's bad. You're
all gonna die of a sickness. That doesn't mean you're out
of the will of God. As you got a sickness and die,
well, you're gonna get one too. What do we just assume with you?
That you weren't right with God? Everybody ain't gonna go home,
go to sleep, smiling with their mind on Jesus and end up in glory. I'm sorry. Some of us going to
end up in the hospital and y'all gonna be praying and we'll go
through remission and we'll do fine for a while. Cause God blesses
prayer, doesn't he saints? And he'll give us extended periods
of time, but we got a number. We got an expiration date, don't
we? Okay. So here's what I want to say
that this text really is speaking to the kind of sin that leads
unto spiritual death. It does, this is what would be
a technical device that would be used to demonstrate
that a person only appeared to be a true believer, but was really
not. And this device would correspond
with what we would call in theology, apostasy. that's probably a C. Apostasy. Now what apostasy is, is when
you start off appearing to believe the truth, but ultimately fall
away or depart from it, i.e., Judas Iscariot is our model. You guys got that? Give you an
example. Now Judas was never truly saved.
But he appeared to be saved, and he was in the number, and
he had all of the external manifestations of religiosity. In fact, if all
12 apostles would have had offices in the Lord's cabinet, Judas
Iscariot would have had an office with the title Apostle Judas.
And yet, at the end, it was manifested that Judas Iscariot was whom
the scripture said he was. He was the son of perdition,
he was Child of the devil Jesus said that he was a child of the
devil John chapter 6 around verse 67 and he was a son of perdition
John chapter 17 now Judas Iscariot becomes the example for us of
which I can't treat it now because our time is up of an individual
who over time Stops believing the proposals of biblical truth
that constitute our salvation At some point in his life, he
really came to realize, I'm really not interested in eternal life.
I'm only interested in what this thing could get for me. Remember,
I was talking about that earlier, about the inferior love of some
people only relating to God by virtue of what they could get.
With Judas Iscariot, he was doing fine so long as Jesus was doing
miracles, multiplying the lows, had big followings, because like
a bunch of people, they basically are pragmatic. He saw this thing
turning into ministry. He saw himself being the Lord's,
one of the Lord's, you know, members in his cabinet. He saw
himself being able to run the finance department. He saw the
Lord Jesus Christ subduing kingdoms and him being the secretary of
state or whatever the case may be. He had these grandiose ideas
like people do until the Lord Jesus Christ began to show him
the true course that he was taking. And that was a course that was
not leading to glory first, but leading to Calvary. You guys
got that? And what Judas Iscariot struggled
with was, how can this man accomplish my will going that way? And that's
when he sold it for 30 pieces of silver. And in selling Jesus
for 30 pieces of silver, he went out and betrayed Jesus to the
rulers, which basically affected Christ's crucifixion, right?
And the scriptures had already forewarned that Judas would do
that a thousand years earlier in the Psalms. And so Judas Iscariot
would have been a model of what takes place. Now, the text that
I would go to, and I don't want to do it now, but we'll go to
it next time, is the text on what is called blasphemy of the
spirit. It's Mark 3, it's the Gospel
of Matthew, so we'll do it next time. Remember what our Lord
says, all manner of sin will be forgiven you. All manner of
sin will be forgiven you. Even blasphemy against the Father
and blasphemy of the Son, but blasphemy of the Spirit shall
not be forgiven in this life, nor in the life to come." That's
a horrible, horrible statement. Isn't that a horrible statement?
So what it actually requires is for the believer to learn
accurately what it means to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Because again,
our pagan religious folks who love to make much out of the
Holy Spirit, you know, get mad at people when we examine and
we critique what they call manifestations of the Spirit and we say it's
not the manifestation of the Spirit. Then they want to say
you're blaspheming the Spirit. That's not the case. That's not
the case. Blasphemy of the Spirit is taking
the Spirit's work and explicitly revealing the person and work
of Jesus Christ at a level of comprehension and witness that
he did in the life of Jesus among the rulers of Jesus day, where
the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians and all those
people saw Jesus do what only God could do. And over a period
of time, this didn't happen overnight. This happened over a period of
time. This is why I have in the outline, it's a process. It results
in a hardening and that hardening is irreparable. Blasphemy of
the Holy Spirit is a process. It happens over a long period
of time and that hardening is irreparable. Just to close with
you on that point, our Lord warned the rulers that they were engaging
in blaspheming the Holy Ghost. You guys remember that, right?
He warned them because they were explicitly formulating doctrine
that was attributing to Jesus Christ demonic powers to do what
he did. You guys got that? And that requires
a process. That requires a process. And
they had a motive behind it. And it was a perpetual thing
that they were doing. I want you to follow this now.
They didn't just do this one time. The common saying among
them was that Jesus was a wine-bibber, Jesus was a child of fornication,
Jesus had a devil, Jesus was a Samaritan. They were working
feverishly to discredit Jesus on every point when the Holy
Ghost, which was given to Christ without measure, was manifesting
God's glory every day, healing the sick, healing all manner
of diseases, healing everyone. Are you hearing me? And Jesus,
knowing what was happening, told them point blank, which one of
you can convince me of one sin after all of these years of me
being among you. I preached in your synagogues.
I preached in your temple. I preached in your streets. I
didn't do this thing in a corner. I didn't hide myself. I've been
among you all this time. Now you come to take me as a
thief. Are you hearing me, ladies and gentlemen? So there was a
process that was working under a powerful demonic influence
by which the whole band was led to do what they did, which is
why Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost back in chapter
five, said, you Jewish people took him and killed him. Got
it? Took him and killed him. And
what John is working through right now in 1st John chapter
5 is a theology that came up out of that antagonism. Are you
following me so far? I'm closing right here. John
is working with a group of Christians. This 1st John is about 80, 85
AD. Christ died in 8033. It's about
45, almost 50 years later. You can develop a lot of bad
doctrine in 50 years. You can have a lot of bad history.
You can have a lot of problems in 50 years. So the church, after
almost a half a century now, is dealing with the heresy coming
into the church, saying that Jesus did not come in the flesh. He didn't take on a human nature. And that Jesus was not himself
divine. They had worked that theology
fully out by the time the first century ended. This is part of
what we call historic theology. I'll talk about it when we come
back. You'll notice that the way first John five closes, little
children keep yourselves from idols. And this is where we will
explain why he would say there are some people for whom you
don't have to ever pray. Let's pray. Father, thank you
for this time. Thank you for my brothers and sisters. As we
go our way, give us traveling mercies. We thank you that this
era, this particular kind of sin is not committed so frequently
that we have to live in trepidation and in fear about it. We thank
you also that our hearts are soft enough to believe your word
and trust you in trembling, trembling, Submit to the revelation of Jesus
Christ. We don't know everything about
it Don't need to know we know that you are faithful and are
able to keep us as your word is going to demonstrate But as
we go our way give us traveling mercies. We pray in Jesus name.
Amen. God bless you guys