1 John 5 - Part 8

Well, good morning. We're on week 8 of 1 John 5. We have averaged about 2 1⁄2 to 2 3⁄4 verses per week. And we only have one verse this week that we're going to try to get through. And then next week, I'm going to do a whole 1 John review. So that's going to be very compacted highlights from the last about 22 weeks now that we've gone through 1 John.

And so in 1 John 21, John writes, little children, or another way you could describe it as dear children, keep yourselves from idols. And this is the seventh time that John addresses his readers as little children. He also calls them children in other spots. and I had a few reasons that I put why what we can learn from what John thinks of people and God thinks of people primarily that he loves us and so I don't want to go over the top portion I just left that for you to understand and but for next week I asked you to think about what other truths can you derive from John addressing the believers or by extension us as little children and so that's something I want you to go ahead and think about for the week so when we come back next week and we review first John maybe you'll have have something that you can add to that as well any of the men who who taught so we have Curtis here and Jason and then Mike and Levi if you can remember or anything that stood out to you, maybe something you didn't get to speak about as much as you would have wanted, and I can kind of toss it in the notes for next week and when we discuss the whole book of 1 John.

So I would recommend you read it this week at least once. It's actually something you could do every day. It's not that long of a book. But I think it's been a wonderful study. So in the second part of 1 John 5.21, we have an imperative, an imperative, of course, being a command. So something that God is commanding.

And what John says to the people that he's addressing is keep yourselves from idols. And I have to admit, and I don't think I'm alone in this. I find it to be one of the strangest ways to just end your letter. So if you read Paul's letters, almost all of them, I'd have to reread them all right now to be sure, but almost all of them have a nice greeting at the beginning.

He addresses the people he's speaking to. And then some of them have entire chapters that are the closing greetings and say hello to these people and things like that. And so this seems like an odd way to just end a letter. And so I don't find any significance in that there's no final greetings or anything. But I do think that John is trying to impress upon us and his readers that this is important.

And we've talked about the fact that John has been leading up to assurance of salvation in First John 513. He was leading up to that. The whole letter leads us to that. But then as well, I think that the whole letter leads up to this idea of keep yourselves from idols. And so instead of this sentence being something that is just randomly smeared in there at the end, like, oh, yeah, I forgot to tell them keep from idols, so I'll just jot it down before I send it off.

It flows from the rest of the letter is what I'm going to tell you. And I didn't always think that. It just seemed choppy to me the first few times I'd ever studied this book. But so what does it mean to keep yourselves from idols? First, let's look at what it cannot mean. It can't mean idols are OK.

Don't worry about them at all. All right. So there's just there's just no way that John could write this sentence. Keep yourselves from idols and that we can have the understanding that that God is the author of Scripture. Ultimately, we can't look at this sentence and think, well, God doesn't care about idols. It's the New Testament.

It's no big deal. We can't think that. It also can't mean stay away from physical idols, but allow them in your heart. So this this isn't a command to just make sure that you don't do things physically, that you don't bow down and worship an idol, but you can still have idols in your heart. It can't possibly mean that either. And it can't mean to just ensure that your physical proximity to idols is some safe distance.

All right. So you can't just say that this means, well, it's OK to have idols. Just keep yourself away from them. Well, maybe it just means six foot social distancing or something like that. You can't you can't think that about this. And we'll talk about that in in the following sections.

So now what I do believe John is saying is several things. If you turn to 1 Thessalonians 1.9, we won't belabor this point, but I have included a lot of the Scripture references that I think are helpful. And so we won't turn to all of them, which is why you have the notes, so that you can go and review them yourself if you like later. 1 Thessalonians 1 I do think that one of the things John is saying and always by extension God is saying these things to us that you are to turn away from your former idols So we all once walked in the futility of our mind as the Gentiles do.

We all once lived as if there was no God, or at least as if we didn't really believe God was who he really is. And we lived the way that we wanted to live according to the prince of the power of the air, Satan himself. And in 1 Thessalonians 9, Paul's commending the Thessalonians, and he says, for they themselves, speaking of the Macedonians, he says, they report what kind of welcome you gave us, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.

And so one of the significant things about idols is that we all have idols when we don't know God. And when we turn to Christ for salvation, you are turning away from your idols. You can't keep them both together. There's one or the other. And when you think about the sin of idolatry, one thing I want you to remember is that God gave us understanding of the sin of adultery so that we would understand something that is actually a lesser sin than the sin of idolatry.

So if you think about how horrific adultery is and how painful it is to the people affected by it, to entire communities that would be affected. I mean, if there was adultery in this church, it would affect everyone and it would be devastating. It would be horrific. And God sees adultery as a lesser sin than idolatry. And he describes them both the same, though.

He describes it as prostituting yourself and straying away from that which you should have proper affection for. So we have to take it seriously. So turn to Revelation 14, 7. so secondly not only are we to turn away from former idols but we should turn away from any new ones john tells the believers let no one deceive you i am writing these things so that you may not be deceived or so that about those who are trying to deceive you the world is filled with idols that are not spelled that way.

I think Andrew has often used the example about how sin will always present itself as something good. And so the world is always presenting idols to us, and it's presenting things to us in such a way that it's deceptive. And so as Christians, we must turn away from all idolatry. 14.7, Revelation. Somebody want to read that one? It's a nice verse.

He said with a loud voice, Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. And worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water. Perfect. So part of turning away from all idolatry is just worshiping the true God. So if you're not worshiping the true God, there's no vacuum. What I mean by that is You can't.

There's nobody in the world who's just neutral and is not following idols, but is also not following God. You're either worshiping God or you're you're worshiping idols, following idols. And so part of how you avoid idolatry is just simply focusing your worship on the right thing. do not worship other gods turn to first corinthians 10 of course if anybody has a comment as we're going through this go ahead and pop in although it looks like there's a lot of notes we're already almost halfway through so we've got time to to go through some of these in more detail don't worship other gods 1 Corinthians 10 14 and 21 Eric Pettit you want to read those therefore I will but leave my belt 21 you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons add 22 do 22 then Shall we provoke the Lord with jealousy?

Are we stronger than you? Yeah. So once again, you can't worship idols and God at the same time. And people who would even attempt to are making a grave error. Did you see the notes? You got notes, right?

Levi? Yeah. And so that chapter is a really great chapter to help us understand God's disposition towards idolatry and really how we ought to act. And one of the things that happens in that chapter, in fact, skip to point D here, 1 Corinthians 10, 30 to 31. Somebody wants to read that. One of the points I think that is in this chapter is simply being in proximity to idols or potentially outwardly doing some of the same things idolaters do is not what John has in view.

And I'll explain that. But let's read the verses real quick. 30 and 31. Somebody with a loud voice. If I partake with thankfulness, why am I not because of that in which I give thanks? So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all the glory to God.

So part of the thing that was going on here in Corinth is that there was meat that was sacrificed to idols that was being sold. And there were people who would buy the meat. And there were people who thought that they could just eat the meat and it didn really matter that it had been sacrificed to idols And what they didn understand is they were harming the conscience of people who couldn't help but participate in the idolatry while they were eating the meat.

But one of the points I think Paul's making here is that you can eat meat that somebody else decided to sacrifice to an idol, and it can't hurt you. Because the idol isn't a real thing in the sense that it's not a real God. It doesn't have any real power. But at the same time, there's warnings in here about being careful about that so that you're not participating in a table of idols and so that you're not harming others.

But the reason I brought it up here was just the point that I don't think when John says, keep yourselves from idols, he's saying, you know, If you're walking by a building and there's an idol outside, you've got to switch sides of the road. I don't think this is about physical proximity necessarily. I think you should try to avoid some of those kinds of things to some extent, but it's more than just outwardly, physically trying to not be near something.

I think it's about your heart. Deuteronomy 12. And that's a really interesting chapter about idolatry, 1 Corinthians 8-10. It's pretty neat. Deuteronomy 12. The last point about turning away from all idolatry I have is that part of idolatry is worshipping God in the wrong way.

And this one's a little more difficult to see maybe. We all can understand that bowing down to a false god, would be idolatry and we wouldn't want to do that i don't know if you saw there were no study notes tyler or you get them and if you worship the right god you think you're doing the right thing and god actually has a principle in scripture that is called the regulative principle of worship that i i believe in it's the london baptist confession of faith would teach it in chapters 22 paragraphs 1 and 2 of chapter 22. And so somebody with a nice loud voice, let's look at Deuteronomy 12, 29 to 32.

It doesn't have to be super loud. I just want everybody to be able to hear you. When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell on their land, take care that you be not considered to follow them after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods?

Then I also made you the same. You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every unbiblical thing that the Lord hates they have done to their god, for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take away from it. So in the context, God's talking to the Israelites about the people whose land they're going to dispossess.

And he's telling them, don't inquire how they worship their gods, because that's abominable. They fall into all sorts of traps in their worship of their gods, because only the one true God, only worshiping him is going to ever lead to righteousness for you. But he adds that last sentence that I believe becomes a principle that applies far more broadly than just when he's speaking to the Israelites dispossessing the land.

He says, see that you do everything I command you. Do not add to it or subtract from it. So there is a sense and there's disagreements within Christianity about what proper worship is of our God. but most of what you'd call are reformed people. And what I would teach is that God has told us how to worship him. He is the one who gets to decide what proper worship looks like.

And he did not leave it up to our imaginations. He didn't leave it up to the thoughts that Satan and the powers of demonic could put into our minds. He didn't leave it up to how we feel. God who gets to define worship told us exactly how it ought to be done. And within what is proper worship, we have some freedom where elders of local churches have to decide certain details.

But the way that we worship God is defined by God and God alone. And anything that we bring to him that is different from what he's told us is either adding to it or subtracting from it. And so no matter how good you might feel in your heart, sometimes when you think you're going to worship God or an idea you have, or more so in the local church, I'd say when people in local churches think, well, let's try this thing. doing it the way God has commanded is what he told us to do.

And any other idea is a form of idolatry. So that's a deeper issue, but it is in view here. So why did John say that we should keep ourselves from idols? Idols being worshipping any other god, avoiding the worship of the one true God. He turned Exodus 20 while we're thinking about that. Worshiping God in any way not prescribed by God to worship Him.

Why did John say this? The answer is there. It's not super tricky. Amen. yeah God is jealous he has a zeal for his own glory Exodus 20 God says You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heavens above on the earth below or the waters beneath You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God.

And that's oftentimes a very difficult to fathom concept because human jealousy is usually rooted in sin. There's a lot of times that we've been jealous as as men and women or even little children. And our jealousy is easily seen as just really some some version of envy. And so when we say God is jealous, that is a little countercultural. It's counterintuitive to people.

And so that's worth thinking through. But the idea being this, that God cares about what is right and what is right is God is owed our affection and our love. And if we devote our affection and our love to any other that is owed to God, he is rightfully jealous of that. Not because he's insecure, but because he wants what's best for everyone involved.

No different from a good human jealousy. For example, if a spouse found that their spouse was interested in a different person, they would be rightfully jealous because the affection to that spouse is owed to them. And so it's possible to be sinfully jealous for us. It's not possible for God, of course, to be sinfully jealous. And so we have trouble sometimes understanding these communicable attributes of God where we are to imitate him.

And then we have devolved these things so much in our sinfulness that we think, well, this feeling, this emotion, this thing that I sometimes do is just so evil. There's no way that God's like this. And the fact of the matter is, is God's a jealous God because he has a zeal for his own glory. He is right. So worship, love, adoration and devotion and sacrifice are all due to God.

And to the extent that any of these are appropriate towards another creature, it must pale in comparison. So we owe God love, but we're also still to love one another. You're supposed to love your spouse, your kids. Kids should love their parents. So not everything that we owe to God is only owed to God. But worship is only owed to God.

But there's many things that we do for God, sacrifice our time and our money, that we also might do for somebody else. And so God has a zeal for his own glory. He also cares about us. He commands idolatry for our good. Turn to Psalm 115. I don't suppose there's anybody in this room that was thinking when we started, well, maybe idolatry is good.

But I'm trying to give you some bullet points to just remind you of why it's so bad and why God hates it. And it's not just a capricious thing. God wants what's best for us. So who wants to read Psalm 115, verse 4 through 8? Their idols are sober and bold, the work of human hands. They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see, and have ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell they have hands but do not feel feet but do not walk and they do not make a sound but a groan those who make them become like them so they walk dressed in their own because God loves men humankind is what I meant by that because God loves us he tells us not to be idolaters to keep away from idols because it's bad for us.

It's one thing to say, well, we should worship God and God only because he's worthy and he has a zeal for his own glory, and that's sufficient reason. But it also follows that when we don't worship God only, when we don't worship him rightly, it's bad for us. And he tells us here, we make these idols out of the things that are most valuable for us. Remember, what does God make streets out of? in heaven.

We think gold's so great. He's like, I'll just pave the road with it. You can walk on it, right? It's worthless to him. We make stuff that we think is so valuable, and we make the fanciest idols. And of course, in the West, we don't have statues anymore.

All of our idols are invisible in the West. I mean, like in the United States. Everything we worship is invisible. And so we look at the pagans that bow down to temples and totem poles and all these different things, and we laugh at them while we go and we just do invisible demon worship. But God knows that we become like what we worship. And so if you worship Christ, you're going to be conformed to his image.

You're going to become like him. And when we follow idols, even unknowingly, we become like idols. And idols are deaf, blind, mute, and lame, and we will become like them. I like that point of it's what's good for us, right? It's glorifying God and good for us. It reminds me of Psalm 81, when God says, "'Hear, O my people, while I admonish you, O Israel, "'if you but just listen to me, "'there shall be no strange God among you. "'You shall not bow down before God, "'I will listen to God, who brought you out of the land "'of Egypt, open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.'" So it's like God's just saying, if you just listen to me, This is where you're good.

I want to do what you're good, and open your mouth wide. It's not a matter of God doesn't have that much blessing, it's our mouth, our heart, open wide enough to receive it. That song is very interesting. If you just listen to me, please just listen to me, it's like a blessing. It reminds me of your Thanksgiving message at the school. Oh, yeah.

Remember how all the blessing God has. Christmas? No, the Thanksgiving message you gave at the Harvest Feast. Yes, to keep in mind, the non-Christian basically looks at God, the Ten Commandments, the rules in the Bible, as these are all the rules God gave to keep me from having fun. That's how non-believers view the rules that God gives us. Whereas the believer, our disposition is supposed to be, oh, this is God telling me how to have the maximum amount of joy in life.

All these rules that feel restrictive because our flesh is crying out that we want to do the thing that gives us the immediate satisfaction. All those rules that that we think are hindering us from from happiness. They're actually designed to help us to be driven toward the greatest possible joy we could have, which is found in loving righteousness in Jesus Christ.

And we have to constantly see that we have to fight our flesh against those things. So the last point in this section, what John is saying and why did he say it, is that God knows our frame. He knows how weak we are and how easily we could be persuaded away from the purity of that which is invisible for that which has form. So turn to Deuteronomy 4. And we're going to look at verses 11, about 11 to 19.

One of the things that God understands about us is our weakness. Not because He Himself is weak, but He knows everything. and God is aware that for us to apprehend the unfathomable, so that is for us to worship him in truth and in purity, we have to worship him as the invisible God that he is. And we can't see him and he knows our frame. He knows that we're the kinds of people who we're going to be more attracted to something we can put our hands on, something we can see, something we can taste, touch, smell.

Basically, we want to sense things. That's our pull. You ever talk to a new believer, and they say, I'm not sure I'm saved, right? I think Kerry brought this up on Wednesday a few weeks ago. I'm not really sure I'm saved. How do I know I'm saved?

And you know what you often find? They're looking for some concrete event that they can sense, that they can feel, that they know to help them. Because the idea of just having their faith in what's unseen is still foreign as a new believer. It's hard for us. And God knows our frame. And so he gives us commands about being away from idols so that we would not form images either on the earth or even in our own minds.

So in Deuteronomy 4.11, I'm in Deuteronomy 12. That is not going to help. In Deuteronomy 4.11, God says, You came near and stood at the base of the mountain, a mountain blazing with fire to the heavens with black clouds and deep darkness. So he's referring to the time when he gave the Ten Commandments to the Israelites. And Moses went on the mountain and all the Israelites were around the mountain.

And they weren't even to touch the mountain. And Yahweh spoke to you out of the fire. He says, you heard the sound of the words, but saw no form. There was only a voice. And then skipping down to 15. He says day Yahweh spoke to you out of the fire at Horeb be careful that you do not act corruptly and make an idol for yourselves of any form or shape whether in the likeness of a male or female of any beast that is on the earth or bird that flies in the air or any creature that crawls on the ground or fish that is in the waters below he says when you look to the heavens and see the sun and moon and stars, all the hosts of heaven, do not be enticed to bow down and worship what Yahweh, your God, has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.

God recognizes that we will be attracted or enticed in this way. It's our natural frame. It just makes sense. You look at something as big and beautiful as the sun, or maybe easier to look at would be the stars at night. Some of you don't understand what it's like to go from the city where we had 12 stars and then to move to LaRue and all of a sudden you're like, whoa, right?

This is beautiful. I missed out for a long, long time on these things. But we can so easily start to want to worship those things rather than the one who created them. And there's something about that which we can taste, touch, feel, smell, hear, that it attracts us. And so why did John say this? Because it's good for us and because God is rightfully zealous for his own glory in an even more correct way than a husband desires his wife's affection to be only on him.

Or even more perfectly than a wife would want her husband to only have eyes for her. These are things that are so normal sounding. to us, that one man, one woman. And we need to recognize that that's just a small picture of what God expects. So how do we live this out? A few practical ways on the second page. And you can take this home and look it over and see if you have questions or disagreements.

But idolatry can be committed many ways. And so to some sense, every time we commit a sin, you're committing idolatry because you're denying something about God. And so if everything's idolatry, then it's almost irrelevant. So we're going to focus on idolatry as a focus here. But there's some definite forms of idolatry that we can watch. So positively, commit to the sufficiency of God in Christ for your salvation. just quick note if you go if you look up the westminster larger catechism okay so that would be uh the you can look it up online it's like the presbyterians they call it the larger catechism because it's longer i think it's question 109 what what do we have to do for the second commandment you'll get a lot of these ideas from there as well with all the scriptural proofs but some commit to the sufficiency of god in christ for your salvation and for your entire life and this will lead to trusting the sufficiency of scripture so practically speaking if you if you would trust the sufficiency of scripture for your whole christian life you're you're going to end up avoiding a lot of idols without even and maybe realizing it.

And so this is one of the reasons why Tim is so excited about the biblical counseling movement, and especially where it's come over all these decades that he's been a part of it, is because the biblical counseling movement that is growing, hopefully, in the church right now is an idea that God's word is sufficient for your needs. You don't need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. You don't need to get a Zodiac or an Enneagram test or Myers-Briggs or, you know, you never have to know what the five love languages are to learn how to love your spouse.

You don't you don't need that. So there's a lot of things out there that we avoid when we focus on saying, well, if God's word is so full of wisdom that it has all the all the wisdom I would possibly need for life and godliness. That's what it says in Second Timothy 317. And if all the riches of wisdom are found in Christ. right Colossians 2 3 and if I would just study God's word which is inexhaustible for me already and I already don really understand it if I studied that my whole life I do better than if I studied any of these other counter disciplines to what the Bible teaches We can avoid psychological things and we can avoid a lot of idols, sometimes even accidentally.

So an idol is what we worship instead of God through Christ. That's an easy one. If you see me bowing down to a totem pole, you can say, hey, Michael, that's idolatry. That's easy. But an idol is also that which we seek comfort from when that comfort ought to be derived from God. And that's, you know, we'll get personal here.

Like, has anybody ever just eaten too much ice cream? And you realize after, well, I just did that because I felt sad about something. All right. Just me. All right. So anyway, we can seek all kinds of comfort in all sorts of things that God has given us good gifts many times.

Right. We can seek comfort in those things rather than use them to enjoy God. So we're going to we're going to have a party tonight and we're going to have food and cookies again. Right. There's all that stuff tonight, too. Right.

And people are going to feast and they're going to eat a couple more cookies than they would on a normal basis. And that's totally different to feast and actually celebrate God in this case and to celebrate with your brothers. That's different from and I had a bad day, so I'm going to stuff my face. Right. So it's just one example of an idol. People turn to drinking.

They turn to. Has anyone here ever just scrolled one of those apps on your phone? And then all of a sudden, 45 minutes goes by. I'm the only person that's ever done these things. That's insane. We can turn to all sorts of things, some of which aren't even bad things in and of themselves or in the right quantity.

We could turn to things and find that we're actually seeking some kind of comfort from that. We're seeking pleasure. We're seeking something to a degree that we should be seeking that from God. You could have little children be scared and they would come to their parents for comfort. And I think that's appropriate. You could be hurting in the church and a church member would come in and give you a hug and help you with something and bring you comfort.

And so this becomes a more difficult thing to discern because not every time we seek comfort. Are we, for example, seeking it away from God? Right. Right. So just because you seek comfort from something doesn't mean you're committing idolatry. It could be a godly way.

God uses me. All right. And so we have to be able to be discerning about our own life and honest about it. And I would say sharing with others is helpful. That which we put faith in that isn't from God, that's that's an idol. there's other types of things that that'll come alongside biblical wisdom and try to tell you well here's a good idea and sometimes sometimes it won't contradict the bible but it's still kind of another way so we have to watch out for that's very satan's deceptive he's smarter than we are he's been doing it a lot longer and he knew all our grandparents and their sense sin tendencies before we were around, right?

He knew some of that would be passed down. So there's idols everywhere. You can also have outward actions that are idolatry, even if you don't think you're being an idolater at the time. You can be outwardly not showing idolatry and have it in your heart as well. But, for example, one thing that's common in our day and age images of God or in particular a lot of people like images of Jesus.

There's these people now making these little fat Jesus dolls about this tall or kind of chubby. And they walk around, they hand them to people and they say, everyone needs little Jesus. And you know what? I would probably agree with them that they mean well. Some of these people, they really think they're evangelizing. They think they doing something that leading people to God It what they think they doing and what God is saying is that you not to make any form or image that would be made to worship and you should certainly worship something if it representing jesus but then also i just want to add you can't make a picture of the man jesus apart from his divinity since he's one person we can't depict his humanity without separating that from his divinity or you're trying to depict that which is divine.

So I don't think you should make images of Jesus. Steve, did you have a comment? I'll say a little funny story. We have those. Somebody gets those and they put them in a 15-liter desk or something. And so I'll take them and I'll hide them on another something.

For some reason, there was a stegosaurus. I don't know why it was there. Yeah, and I can appreciate that people mean well. You know, and so some of that's an educational thing. So there's other things that remind us of God. You know, a cross.

We don't have a cross, do we? You know, a cross. I don't think a cross is idolatry. you. So just because something is an image that actually makes you think about God doesn't make it idolatry either. We live in a physical world. The bread and the wine.

When you have communion, you're supposed to, you're actually touching, tasting, smelling, and seeing something, and you're hearing the word preached at the time. It's all five of your senses are engaged while you're taking communion. And this is not a bad thing. God prescribed it. And so we need to be mature so you can look up deuteronomy 13 6 later that's the one that basically says if uh if your wife or your brother or your mother tries to tempt you to worship idols you got to basically tell on them and be the first to stone them and i don't think that's what we need to do from the penology standpoint stoning but i do think we need to be careful we don't tolerate idolatry and others, particularly in the church.

I think we'd want to try to be helping people lead them out of it. So to draw near idols is kind of like a man spending time with a stranger, a forbidden woman. So idols and forbidden women, forbidden men in that sense too, they allure us by feeding our pride, promising some satisfaction that's immediate usually that's not promised by the one to whom we're betrothed so that's what sin sin always promises something that comes immediately a pleasure that you'll get right away that jesus hasn't promised you right away and he's who to whom we're betrothed and idols will drain us of everything that we're supposed to give god affection money time our life and so i say why go near him at all and I mean that from the heart perspective so we should hate the idea of dipping our toes into oceans of idolatry even more adamantly than we would want to avoid dangling our feet off a dock into a pond of sexual immorality so we should have single-minded devotion to Jesus who did everything that the Apostle John has just described for us in the last five chapters that he did for us We should be ready to take down everything propped up against the knowledge of God as we take every thought captive to obey this Christ that did all that we needed him to do for life and salvation.

So let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for the Apostle John, his love for Jesus and his hope that he had that Jesus loved him. And we pray that we would grow in our Christian life to follow the words of this wonderful man who wrote for us and who taught us about Jesus. We pray for today's worship service, that we would be excited to worship the God of Scripture and that through Christ, our sacrifices would be acceptable to you.

And it's in his name we pray. Amen. Thank you.