1 John 5 - Part 7

Good morning. You may notice that there are some study notes today. So for those of you who like to fill in the blanks, there they are. If you don't like filling in the blank, you do not have to. This is a free society here. But if it helps you, I'd like to like to try that today.

First John chapter five is where we are and we are closing in on the end. We have about five or six verses remaining. So we'll finish the verses next week. And then the last week of the month, we're going to do a review. and so we will be trying to get to chapter 5 verse 20 today. Let me read from 16 to 20. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he should ask God who will give life to those who commit this kind of sin.

There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should ask regarding that sin. all unrighteousness is sin yet there is sin that does not lead to death we know that anyone born of God does not keep on sinning the one who was born of God protects him and the evil one cannot touch him we know that we are of God and that the whole world is under the power of the evil one and we know that the son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true, in his son, Jesus Christ.

He is the true God and eternal life. That's the word of God. So last week we talked about the sin that leads to death in verse 16. And what we discussed was that there are, according to John here, two types of sins that people will commit that he was talking about at least the one type is the full apostasy where we don't have any hope that praying that god would grant life to that person would be answered and then there's really every other kind of sin or as jesus said every sin and blasphemy committed by men will be forgiven them and so there's other kinds of sins that we can pray for our erring brother, our sinning brother, and we can trust that he or she will be forgiven and actually granted life and forgiveness.

So under point number one, lest we are led to believe that there are acceptable sins, John reminds us in verse 17 that all wrongdoing is sin. Sin is lawlessness. So if we look at 17, John says all unrighteousness is sin, yet there is sin that does not lead to death. John wants us to be reminded that just because there is this worse sin that won't get forgiven, this sin that is a final sin in a sense, that doesn't mean that the other sins that we still can pray for people are somehow to be taken lightheartedly.

The hope is that God can help people with them. It's not because they're little or they're not important. So verse 16 provides motivation and compulsion to pray because there's hope for the sinning brother or sister to be delivered. So if you need me to repeat the words, if you're filling them in, I can do that. But verse 16 is a motivation to pray far more than it is any kind of admonition to avoid prayer in that one situation.

Sanctification, point three. Sanctification is as guaranteed as glorification. So that's something we need to remember as Christians. Sometimes we live defeated lives that betray that we don't really think this is the case. if you've been justified you're going to be glorified one day and we all hope in that we all understand that that as we cling to christ that one day we're going to be delivered from this body of death we're all going to be able to experience the freedom from this world that charlie's dad's experiencing right now the freedom from the bondage to sin but while we're still in this life, sometimes we act like sanctification is just something we're not sure is really going to happen.

We don't really hope in it sometimes, I think, in the same way. We don't really trust that we can be delivered and victorious in this life as I think God promises. So keeping in mind that anyone who says they're without sin makes God a liar and he himself is deceived, we don't hope for perfect sanctification in this life, but we do hope for a trajectory of continued growth and, I think, victory over sins that at one time in your life beset you.

Verse 18. This is like the most exciting section of 1 John, this whole section. I wouldn't have said so six months ago, and now I think it's amazing. So verse 18. somebody want to read that for us we'll get a different rendering of it Camden you want to read we know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on saying that he who has been born of God has been and the evil one does not excellent so in 1st John 5 18 it says if you been born of God you do not keep on sinning And it says, the one who is born of God protects him, or he who is born of God protects him.

And there's a different variation in how that can and should be translated. And that is that he who was born of God protects himself, is what it says. It doesn't say he that is born of God protects him, which then makes it read like like Jesus, who is the son of God, would protect you. It's that you protect yourself. And we're going to look at that now.

In First John three, eight, we know that a habitual practice of sin distinguishes you from being a child of God. If you turn back to 1 John 3, John says, The one who practices sin is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the very start. This is why the Son of God was revealed, to destroy the works of the devil. Verse 9, Anyone born of God refuses to practice sin, because God's seed abides in him.

He cannot go on sinning because he has been born of God. By this, the children of God are distinguished from the children of the devil. There's a little bit more there. The idea here is that as a Christian, we've just established that you won't have perfect righteousness in this life. You won't have perfect sinlessness. But it's the habitual practice of sin that we are going to be shedding away from.

We are going to be putting that off. And we will do that at least in part by protecting ourselves. So what are we going to protect ourselves from? Under point one, if you're doing the fill in the blank, we're going to protect ourselves from the evil one. So turn to Ephesians 6, and then you can see if you can guess what point two is in the fill in the blank.

You'll have to tell me what you think of it. I'm not a huge fan of the fill in the blank thing, but I'm trying different things to see. Maybe there's somebody that says, wow, that's a way better way to learn. Oh, good. Good company then. Paul who though?

Paul Tripp? Look, you know, protect yourself from the evil one with one way, the full armor of God. Look at Ephesians 6. verse 11 put on the full armor of god so that you can make your stand against the devil's schemes for our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers against the authorities against the powers of this world's darkness and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places you might have a different translation but it's saying the same thing we are to take up the full armor of God.

Verse 13, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground and having done everything to stand. And then he says, stand firm. And he explains what you're supposed to do. You're taking up a belt of truth, a breastplate of righteousness, feet fitted with the readiness of the gospel of peace, a shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.

And so the idea here is that, number three, the devil's flaming darts will be extinguished before they can assault you with a fatal blow. That's what 1 John 5.18 is reminding us of. And I'll just reread that. It says, and the evil one cannot touch him or the evil one cannot harm him. So as you're protecting yourself, the devil is then unable to harm you.

And so it's easy to be a really good Calvinist and just always say, well, we need God to protect us and we need God to do all these things for us. And that's absolutely true. But the way that that everything works out is that God commands you to put on the armor of God. He commands you to make your stand. He commands you to take up the full armor of God and to extinguish the flaming darts of the evil one by exercising faith.

And so just like, just like, I thought it was here. Maybe I put it in your notes. LBCF 16.3 says we're responsible to stir up the grace of God in us. So 0.5 on your sheet under verse 18. It's not a passive move. We're called to put on the armor.

So basically, there's no excuse for you to sit around and wait for God to make you do the right thing. So if you think about Ephesians 6, Ephesians 6 is basically telling you how to execute Ephesians 4, 1 through 6, 10. So if you're having trouble loving your wife, you don't sit around and wait for God to make you love your wife. Your job is to put on the full armor of God so that you might become that kind of person. and you're having trouble submitting to your husband, bringing up your kids in the diligence and instruction of the Lord.

You're having trouble at work being a good bondservant to your master, or maybe you're a manager of people and you're not treating people well. Any number of things that we're supposed to be doing that Paul has explained in Ephesians 4 through 6, it's your responsibility then to put on the armor of God so that you won't be so moved by the wiles of the devil. and as we pray for one another, verse 16, who we find having trouble. Maybe you see somebody sinning.

Maybe you have a Christian friend that just confesses to you and says, hey, I'm really having trouble with something. As we pray for people, we have the hope that they can be delivered in this life. if you want to review Psalm 17 I just love how this comes out show the wonders of your loving devotion in verse 7 You who save by your right hand you save those who seek refuge from their foes And David says, keep me as the apple of your eye, hide me in the shadow of your wings, from the wicked who assail me, from my mortal enemies who surround me. Part of Ephesians 6, after the full armor of God has been described, is just praying in the Holy Spirit. praying by the power of the Spirit for God to help you so that you can be delivered from your enemies.

And specifically, you have, what are the three enemies that all Christians deal with, right? How do we categorize our difficulties? Yeah, the world, the flesh, and the devil. And so in particular, John even points out the devil here. But John's letter talks about the world a ton, which will move us into verse 19. and then our own flesh is always at battle with us while we're on this side.

So in verse 19, after we see, we know that anyone born of God does not keep on sinning. In verse 18, the one who was born of God protects himself. The evil one cannot touch him. We cannot be finally dealt a fatal blow by Satan. John writes, we know. And I think John, I don't know John's personality, But I like to think he might have been being a little cheeky here.

Since the whole point of the letter, at least one of the points, is to point out that there's people that think they know stuff, and everybody else doesn't know what they know. That's the secret knowledge. That's the Gnosticism that's been talked about. When John continuously says, we know, we know, I think John's trying to really make a statement. It's not just a couple of words that he's using.

He's making a statement. We know something. He says, we know that we are of God and that the whole world is under the power of the evil one. I think it's huge that we know stuff. So don't let the modern Gnostics deceive you. 1 John 2, 20 and 27 reminded, You, in 20, however, have an anointing from the Holy One. and all of you know the truth.

He's reminding them they have an anointing. In 27, as for you, the anointing you receive from him remains in you and you do not need anyone to teach you. And Levi explained what that means several weeks ago. But he says, but just as this true and genuine anointing teaches you about all things, so remain in him as you've been taught. We have been given this knowledge and the knowledge is that we are from God.

And the whole world's under the power of the evil one. So if you turn to Colossians one and if in the back of your mind you think about. Tim's explanation that he's given on Romans six. John's trying to paint a picture that he's already painted repeatedly in the letter, and it's the distinction between the world and the kingdom of God. It's something that Paul emphasizes.

And the way the Bible writers in the New Testament describe things is like the way we sometimes look at a gemstone or or a picture. or I remember Andrew using the analogy of a tapestry. You look at something from a lot of different angles sometimes, but you're looking at the same thing. So they're describing this distinction that we feel, that we experience between living in the world, yet being a member of the kingdom of God.

And they're seeing it from different angles. And if you're a sports fan, if you just think about whenever you've watched a replay on a football game, and they'll show it from like six different angles. It's almost like you're looking at a different, it looks like a different place sometimes because you see things you can't see. And so this is one more angle.

Colossians 1, 13 and 14. Can somebody read that real loud? Women can too. I always hear men, but I just want to be clear. He has delivered us from the dominion of the domain and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son. In whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins. we've been delivered from the domain or the dominion of darkness.

What's that? That's the world, right? And he's brought us into the kingdom of his beloved son. And yet you're still, we're still in the world, right? I mean, literally, I mean, we all have to drive through the snow to get here, right? We're dealing with the world.

And so something's true about the fact that you've been delivered from the world And yet at the same time, there's something about that that isn't fully realized. And we call that the already and the not yet. When we talk about how we do theology in the New Testament, that we are already delivered from the kingdom of Satan. And you've been delivered into the kingdom of his son, Jesus Christ.

And so John wants you to recognize that you're new. You've been made new. and here we'll read the we'll read the third point here we are not of this world this is an indicative so you've been declared new you've been declared righteous you've been made a son of god so listen this is an indicative you can overcome the power of sin because you are adopted and loved and secure. And you have an advocate and a high priest who really did offer himself as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and reconcile you to God So you can overcome the power of sin and your brother and sister that you praying for Remember, the context is you're praying for the sinner that you see.

You're praying for the saint that you see sinning. You're praying for your brother or sister in church who's who's either struggling against something and they're talking to you about it, confessing it. They want help or maybe maybe they're not struggling against it. Maybe you see an erring brother or sister that isn't at a point of repentance for sin.

You have hope that you can pray for them because you or your brother or sister are adopted. You've been adopted into the family of God. You can't. I guess legally you can unadopt someone, but you can't be unadopted from God's family. So you've been made new. You're a son or a daughter.

You're loved. God's love for you will never change. You're secure. We have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ, the righteous, who's the propitiation for our sins and also the sins of everybody in the world that it's going to come to him. You have a high priest. And so this is my hat tip for Andrew's sermon.

You have a high priest who really did offer himself as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and reconcile you to God. So when you're a Christian. And you are struggling against the forces of evil, the temptations of this world that are drawing you to do that, which you know that you shouldn't do things you maybe even hate that you do. but you find yourself still indulging in them you have to remember you're a child of god and that's not your nature anymore so sometimes we mistakenly say things like we have this nature that is of a sin nature and we've been made new and there needs to be a way we can make sure we always phrase things we're not like we once were you don't have to sin anymore i think it's from tim's Romans 6 teaching, you're not a citizen of that other kingdom anymore.

You don't have to obey that kingdom's king, right? Satan is the one over the domain of darkness. He isn't your master. God is your master. And that's supposed to be freeing. It's freeing for you to know, I don't have to do the things that I once did.

Or in your Christian life, if you start finding yourself interested in new sin that you never actually indulged in before, you don't have to live that way. And neither does your brother or sister. Any comments or thoughts on that? Any experience or testimony you want to share? I should have had a plant. That's what the CIO at work does.

He always has a plant. So when he asked a question, he says, anybody have any questions? There's always one. You're like, oh, okay. And then everybody else thinks, well, I'll ask one too. So I should have done that.

Levi, you got a testimony? Levi's a good one. Testimony of what? I don't know. How being a child of God changes your perspective on dealing with your sin or maybe helping others. Well, it definitely gives a broader, I'm thinking specifically about the answers.

It makes things bigger or less superficialized. You know, wrestling is winter crossings. We have a lot of guys this year who are just struggling. So it gives broader meaning and scope to what it is we do. Nothing is just, it's not just practice, it's not just going to school, I'm just doing it for the church. I'm not doing it outside of that.

Those are just kind of shadows and symptoms or something else. That's fantastic. So to sort of rephrase it then, so you're in the world. You're not of the world. So you're in the world. So you're coaching wrestling.

You're doing this physical, we'll say worldly, physical thing, not worldly in the negative sense. but you're having an eternal perspective that says I'm doing this as a child of God and there's more important things happening even in the relationships than just if they become good wrestlers or not. Excellent. It also gives the problem to a higher role as well.

It gives the problem to all these kids that there's so much more physical time in their day. Yeah, there's so much more than that. excellent it makes me think of when tim describes counseling non-believers and how they come in wanting help with a worldly problem they're having our marriage is struggling i can't quit drinking whatever it happens to be that they would come to him for and and that tim says it's always an opportunity to point them to what god commands and then to point them to their insufficiency to do it so I can point them to Christ. Did I summarize that well?

Okay. So because we're new, we don't have to basically follow the course of this world and do things the way the world would dictate. We don't have to counsel the way the world would counsel. You're a failure as a counselor if somebody wants help drinking and they don't stop drinking. But if you're a biblical counselor, you point them to Christ and then what they do between them and Christ is going to be something that you're not responsible for.

So you're a success. If Levi teaches kids that they need to see Christ as their only hope, while also teaching them, you know, fireman's carries and everything else. Then even if they lose at wrestling, even if they don't end up being a great wrestler, if one of those kids especially comes to know Christ, even better, right? I think about Q and all the success Q had and how if I had his success at his age, I mean, I'd have skipped church to work out on Sundays, you know, but Q's prioritizing the Lord.

So that's wonderful, the impact that we can have. So verse 20, let's move on. Thank you, Levi. I knew you'd participate well. Verse 20, John adds, and we know. John just wants to emphasize we know.

I think John wants to make sure that his readers, who he calls with the term of endearment, little children repeatedly. And he means it just as a loving address most of the time. He says, we know he wants them to know stuff and he wants them to know they already know it. He says, and we know that the Son of God, and that's a key word from earlier in the chapter, this idea that Jesus is the Son of God, he's the Christ, that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true, and we are in him who is true, in his Son, Jesus Christ, he is the true God in eternal life. so if we go back to first john two a couple more verses john is doing the thing where he just kind of keeps repeating the same things over and over but he keeps repeating them with different emphasis or a different angle it's it's really a non-stop reminder of some of the same things but the way god teaches us is by giving us a lot of different ways to learn it sometimes it's just to make a fuller understanding.

Sometimes it's because one person understands things one way and another person understands things a different way. So I think God's gracious to to do that in the scripture. But in 1 John 2.22, John says, who is the liar if it is not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, whoever denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the son does not have the father, but whoever confesses the son has the father as well.

Go ahead and turn to Colossians 1. The idea here is, is that if you know Jesus, you know the father. And Jesus said that to his disciples. And this is part of the issue with having a religion that is not of this world, is that our religion has something that is impossible philosophically, which is God becoming a man. And so all of the religions of the world if you do philosophy well you will get to the point where it actually impossible It impossible for a person to be raised from the dead too There a lot of impossibilities that Christianity goes ahead and says well we going to do it anyway because God is the God of the possible or the God of the impossible, as Enola talked about last week at the Night of Carols.

But God is able to do what he wants to do and he could do it the way he wants. And the way that God has revealed himself to us is through his son, Jesus. So the disciples, remember, they're like, show us the Father. Jesus is like, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. We always want something other than the way God demonstrates it to us. And instead, God demonstrates it exactly the right way.

So in Colossians 1.19, just a few verses. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him. Colossians 2.9 right after 2.8 see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception that's what the world and the devil does which are based on human tradition and the spiritual forces of the world rather than on Christ Paul reminds us for in Christ all the fullness of the deity dwells in bodily form It's it's the way that we know God is through Christ.

And if you're thinking first John style, if Christ is a hologram, if Christ is not physically actually somebody who has come as first John 520 says that we know the son of God has come. If he hasn't come, then you don't know God. and so all the philosophers of this world that have their treatises on what God is and what he must be they all fall short of having even a scratch of a knowledge of God if they don't know Christ Christ is how we see God in 2 Corinthians 4.6 you have this wonderful somewhat hard to understand verse 2 Corinthians 4.6 For God who said, let light shine out of darkness. So the whole point here is that God can do anything.

Let light shine out of darkness. This is about God's creative power and recreative power, if necessary, to do whatever according to His holy will. For God who said, let light shine out of darkness, made His light shine in our hearts. So he could take your darkened heart, your heart that was darkened in its understanding, your heart that was part of the domain of Satan that was following the prince of the power of the air, the course of this world.

He can make his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. So in Jesus, we see the exact imprint of God's nature. We see God perfectly in Jesus. Here's the thing. You're not missing something about God. Because you know Jesus That how you know God And I think that there people who are trying to deceive us That what John says People who want us to be thinking that Jesus isn't quite enough.

A man, a man who died, he bled. the scripture says he wasn't attractive in any kind of way that we would have been attracted to him as a king. And the world will repeatedly want you to know that that God cannot be a God that actually makes a difference and can save you. And you need to by faith trust that that is actually the only God that can save you and that everything that you need is found in him.

When we just read that God made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, it made me want to go back to Psalm 17, which I put in your notes for you. When David says at the end of this psalm about fighting enemies, as for me, I will behold your face in righteousness. he says when I awake I will be satisfied in your presence I think about about Andrew Fry he went to sleep used a biblical metaphor for death and he awoke in the presence of God seeing his face and we right now get to see the face of God when we look at Christ when we think of Christ. So the incarnation, it's neat that it's Christmas time right now, the incarnation provides validity for our physical bodies.

That's in Colossians 1.22 if you look at it later. Paul talks about Christ's physical body. We know that Jesus came to earth. We know he's God and we can have the abundant life now. Eternal life is a present reality. We always think of it as, oh, eternal life. so when I die I'll get to last eternally with God.

You have it now. He's promised us eternal life, and eternal life is the quality of life whereby you know God through Jesus Christ. And so I think one of the things that happens in false religion is this bad theology of suffering. So the theology is this. If you're suffering, God or the gods are mad at you, So therefore, you have to do something to atone for yourself, and then maybe the gods will be happy.

So that's why people everywhere are constantly sacrificing to their gods. It's to get something from their god or from gods that they have. So what rain dances for the real pagan ones and then we have our more sophisticated forms of atonement that we do in the Western world where we sacrifice to things that we don call God like money and sex and things like that We make sacrifices but we don call it a spiritual sacrifice We give it another name.

But for the Christian, our suffering, and here's your fill in the blank, our suffering is no indication of God's failure. if it was then Jesus just his whole thing is just a big failure okay you get that our suffering is no indication of God's failure or his lack of love for us instead it demonstrates his love toward us so when we suffer Christ suffers his physical body may have left the earth. His physical body is no longer here during any kind of earthly suffering. He's no longer experiencing the consequences of sin and the curse, but his body remains.

Jesus's body is still on earth, and that's what we are. And because the devil in the world hates Jesus, it will persecute his body and afflict it as much as it possibly can. So the hope that John has is that the most uneducated Christian who knows that Jesus came to die and rise for him or her has more understanding than the most educated seminarian or theologian or philosopher who has not actually fled to Christ for refuge. you don't need all the fancy knowledge you need knowledge of Jesus Christ and you will experience what I highlighted in the middle of the page that we are not of this world you can overcome the power of sin which includes just the power of doubt and depression and insecurity you can overcome that because you're adopted you're loved you're secure you have an advocate and a high priest who really did offer himself bodily as a sacrifice and satisfied divine justice and reconciled you to God that is now one of my favorite passages of 1 John let me pray Father in heaven we pray that you would help these truths that John wants us to know to become realities in our hearts that we might think right and by thinking right we'll be able to do right.

So we pray that you would give us this secure hope in Christ that we would not fear the doubts that are tossed at us by the world and the devil and even our own flesh, but that we would cling to the truth that we've been taught by Scripture. In Christ's name I pray. Amen. Thank you.