Transcript

I want you to go to 1 John 3 with me this evening. I’ll have to ask your forgiveness for postponing the sessions on the antichrist and the antichrist spirit. I was negligent to look at the calendar for June and we have an abbreviated service on the ninth, actually next Sunday night when we close out our vacation Bible school and then we miss Father’s Day night. There’s no time to get that done before July so I’m going to pick that back up in August, Lord willing, and spend probably four sessions on it at that time.

But we come to 1 John again to a section of Scripture that has, I think, a very simple outline to it but though it may be simple, there are very substantial truths therein. As the Apostle John is writing and he has a great burden on his heart to refute the worldly errors that are coming into the church and that’s something we certainly know a lot of today. And, you know, I like to study the Puritan authors and some of them wrote 300 to 400 years ago but the richness of their exposition is unparalleled in today’s scholarship and it’s amazing how they will often write of compromise and worldliness and gimmicks and things that are trying to come into the church and I thought we just dealt with that but it happens in every era, particularly there were gnostic heresies. There were many others but probably the most prominent was the gnostic heretics who believed in this permeation of the spirit in the lives of a few select people and the spirit would come and give key insights to just a few people and so people all would be dependent upon these few anointed spiritual leaders. And one of the things they would teach is that all matter is so thoroughly and inherently evil that you can’t reform it or do anything with it, and that when we get to heaven or to a glorified state one day, there will no longer be anything physical. It would all be spiritual and all be of a spiritual nature, and they would even argue that Jesus looked like he was a physical man but he wasn’t physical. He just gave the appearance of a physical body because if he had anything physical or material about him, it had to be corrupt and evil. Now, what would happen, the dominoes would fall in their presumed deductive reasoning and they would say, therefore since there’s nothing good, there’s only evil, you can just let your bodies do anything it wants and that’s okay because the body is evil anyway, you can’t fix it. But, of course, that’s a heresy. That’s a lie. That is not true. God made Adam and Eve pure. He gave Jesus a literal physical body. He has promised to give us literal physical bodies when we’re glorified in heaven, and we are to begin the sanctification process in these literal physical bodies while we have this pilgrimage on the earth to live pleasing to the Lord and holy unto the Lord.

So it might be hard for you to think that that was in the church. I mean, in the first century church, prominent teaching was going on that taught you can know Christ but live just sinfully and wickedly as your fleshly lust desired. You know, the Scripture says that in the last days men will be lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God and I think that’s what we see so prominently in our culture where every lust that can possibly arise in a fallen man’s heart, we’re supposed to bless it, condone it, celebrate it, and by no means ever discourage it or or judge anybody for having these kind of lusts in their lives. Why is that? Because men are lovers of pleasure and any pleasure their old fallen, vile, base nature might come up with you’re supposed to just let it go. Explore it and enjoy it. And that’s not too unlike the gnostic heresies that were going on in John’s day.

Let’s look at it together, 1 John 3, beginning in verse 1, going to verse 8. What a statement here.

1 See how great a love [or what type, what manner of love] the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. 2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. 3 And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure. 4 Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. 5 You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. 6 No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. 7 Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; 8 the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.

I think all of this section hinges on or builds upon the foundation of the amazing love of God and that’s what I’ve entitled this exposition, “The Amazing Love of God.” This first area I’m going to draw from verses 1 and 3 I call his crowning love. His crowning love, the pinnacle of his love, the climactic expression of his love, and that’s summed up in John 15:13 when the Lord said, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” God loves in a lot of ways but the crowning love of God is his laying down his life for his friends, or you might even say for his children.

I found this many years ago, it was after one of the Amtrak trains derailed in the swamps of Louisiana and literally the cars had gone over on their sides and they were being sucked down under the swamp. Now, we had the usual things in the press that you always have, a lot of blame shifting and finger-pointing and statements of lawsuits, but lost in all of that was an amazing story of a man, Geary, and his wife Mary Jane Chancey, they both perished in the crash but for 11 years before they perished in the swamp there in Louisiana, they had devoted their energies and their lives to their wheelchair-bound daughter who had cerebral palsy. And the story is that as the waters were seeping in and filling up in the train car, it was a long ways to the window because the train car was sideways, they took the last energy and effort they had and lifted that little paralyzed girl up through the windows where rescuers could take her but they lost their lives. What a powerful picture of love and that gives me something of a thought of the love of Christ as he gave the last measure of all that he had to lift us up out of the muck and the mire of wickedness and depravity that we might go free and he perished in the effort to save us. That’s his crowning love.

Now, there is another way this is so powerfully portrayed here as the great love that it is, it’s as if and I am here and I wish I was a wordsmith, I wish I was greatly gifted in the English language so I could use all the elaborate skill of the English language to try to describe the great glories and the love of God but I’m not. I’m not a Charles Haddon Spurgeon. That’s why I’d love for you to read Spurgeon. It’s one of the greatest crimes in the history of the world that English classes don’t require the reading of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. There is no one that used the English language like Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Nobody had a grasp like he did.

So John here seems to be grappling and so he just says, “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us.” Again, it’s a phrase of what kind of love this is and John says, “This ought to shake you a little bit and shake you with a joy and an enthusiasm and a marvel,” and hopefully sometimes and as I meditated on that, that’s what I found. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to think even. I wanted to just dwell on this one thing and see how great a love that God has for us that, here it is, “that we should be called children of God.” John says, “Does that do anything for you? Does it not shake your core a little bit that you are designated by God as a child of God?” That’s a simple thing but it is astounding when you think on it.

You know, once you birth a child, it doesn’t go back. Have you noticed that? It’s yours. It bears your name. It’s there and God has put his full devotion, as I’ve said to you before, the infinite power of the Godhead is totally dedicated to you being preserved as God’s child for all eternity. “What matter of love, what kind of love is that,” John says. “Where have you seen that in the realms of humanity? In all the pagan philosophies and stories of antiquity about gods and goddesses and worship and philosophy, where can you find that kind of love? That wretches like us, defiled, aggressive traitors and opponents of a holy God, ones that were plunged into hopeless muck and mire of wretchedness and ungodliness and that he would designate us children of God?” But what kind of love has he given us? The expression here “what kind of love” or “how great the love” in the New American Standard, has the idea that God didn’t just give you a gift, he devoted his very love toward you and in devoting his love toward you, it encompasses all the character and the gifts of God. Yes, salvation is a gift but it’s bigger than that. He gave us salvation because his love was toward us. I hope there’s a part of you that thinks on this in the night watches. I hope there’s a part of you that says, “Oh dear God, I can’t speak of such a thing. I cannot comprehend. I am the child of God.”

He saved us. He plucked us out of the kingdom of darkness and placed us into the kingdom of light. He took us out of the dominion of Satan and placed us into the kingdom of God. Now, God has great love that showers down on all men. Now, this whole world has one grand continuing process of totally negating and denying God even exists but yet his love is everywhere. Men breathe air every day, the love of God. The sun shines, the love of God. The stars are beautiful in the heavens in the evenings, the love of God. Men have food to eat and water and beverages to drink, the love of God. The crops are growing. I noticed the wheat around here. The men didn’t used to plant wheat and now they seem to plant wheat all around us now and it’s about to be harvested. There is food to be taken, the crops grown, the love of God.

But that’s not what John is talking about here. That might be called God’s general love like often what we call common grace, but it cannot be compared to God’s saving love. Completely ruined wretches, totally undeserving of any consideration by God. Don’t you ever let come into your mind these godless, man-centered preachers who want to tell you that there is some inherent goodness in you that caused God to want to devote his love toward you. That is a wicked lie. All you were as Paul said in Romans 5, was the ungodly. You were in Romans 5, without hope. You were according to Romans 5, the enemy, the active enemy of God. And in all of that Romans 5:8 says but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet, while we were yet those kind of people, Christ died for us. You see, there is a giant chasm that separates the general love of God that is cast over all men and the redeeming love of God that he shows to his elect children. How great is his redeeming love? No words can describe it. John just says, “What kind of love is this? What is this that we are children of God?”

His incomparable love bridged the gap between God and man to make us the child of God. It bridged the gap between God and man and that’s why he became man to bridge that gap. It bridged the gap between sin and holiness. That’s why he became sin to bridge that gap. It bridges the gap between death and life, that’s why he died in my place. So I’ve been transferred now out of the kingdom of darkness into that kingdom of his beloved Son.

Now, this is a family secret. Notice what John says here in the last part of verse 1, “For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.” So don’t try to find the world rejoicing with you. Don’t try to find the world agreeing with you or joying in any way with what you find joy in. They don’t get us. They do not understand our priorities. They do not understand our joys. They do not understand our convictions. They do not understand our values because they don’t know him. In John 15, Jesus said, “The world hated Me, and it will hate you also because you are the object of the sovereign love of God and he has made you a child of God.” His crowning love. The epic, the climax of the great love of God is making us children of God.

Let’s go a little bit further, looking at verse 2, notice his completing love. His completing love. “Beloved, now we are children of God.” Now, we have that standing now and that cannot be altered, but he continues and says, “and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.” Now, we were saved to become like Jesus and he says we don’t know yet what we’re going to be and I don’t think John is saying we have no idea. Now, once you’re saved and the Spirit of God lives in you and you have the illumination of the Spirit and the word of God, you begin to get small insights into something of what the glory is going to be but they are very small. The Scripture says we see through a glass dimly, then we will see face to face. Dimly. We see a little bit but I think the contrast here is that the world knows nothing of what we’re talking about. The world knows nothing of what it is to be a child of God and to be in the process and heading toward the culmination of being like Christ one day. But Christ is in this completing work and one day when we see him we will be like him. Now we are the children of God but we don’t look like it like we ought to look like it; we don’t appear as we’re going to ultimately appear when the glorification finally ultimately comes.

Look at a couple of verses. Philippians 3:21, first of all. Philippians chapter 3, verse 21. Let me just go to verse 20 to get the flow of the context, “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.” It’s another way of just explaining and elaborating on this transformation, this completing work that the Lord is going to do one day. Now, is it hard for you or do you find it a little bit foreign to you to walk in a totally antichrist, a totally godless, now when I say godless I don’t mean everybody in the world is just as wicked as they could be, I just mean there’s no God centeredness, there’s no God orientation, there’s no glory of God focus in this whole world system. Most of you go to work every day and you’re in a godless system. There is no desire or no preestablished premise in your work environment that God is to be glorified, God is to be honored, his word is to be obeyed. Now, you might work in an environment where you have a Christian boss and thank the Lord if you do and you have something of an influence, but generally speaking we are in a godless world, an ungodly world, working with the children of the devil, but we are on a total antithesis track from that. We are the children of God and it’s hard sometimes to get that in your mindset, “I’m a child of God and he’s going to complete what he started in me. He has promised to complete it.”

A few cross-references here, John 14:3, “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself that where I am, there you may be also.” What a promise. John 6:39, “All that the Father gives Me,” Jesus says, “I lose nothing but raise it up on the last day.” His completing love. “I’m not going to lose any that the Father has given Me,” he says. Romans 8:29, “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed,” here it is, “to the image of His Son that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.” So he has promised, “I’m going to complete what I started in you. You are now,” John said, “you are now the children of God but it’s not yet appeared.” We have some insights but to the world it hasn’t appeared yet. They don’t have any idea of what’s going to happen to us. They don’t have any conception of who we are and the great glory that’s ahead for us. They don’t get our values. They don’t get our perspectives. They don’t get our viewpoint. They just don’t get it and they’re not supposed to. God hasn’t illumined their understanding.

He promised that he’s going to complete this thing, also he prayed to the end that this would be completed. John 17:24 in Jesus’ high priestly prayer before his crucifixion, he prays about his followers and he says, “Father, I desire that they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am.” I often use this verse at funerals because every time a child of God passes, the Father answered the Son’s prayer. He said, “I want them with me where I am.” Then he says, “in order that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me for thou didst love me before the foundation of the world.”

So here he says in verse 2, “Beloved, now,” right now, “we are the children of God,” but we’re still in the process, “it has not yet appeared as yet what we will be,” at least from the world’s perspective. They have no concept. “We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.” We have his promise and we have his prayer. When we see him, that speaks of the resurrection, and you might view the resurrection as a birthing from the earth’s womb. We have had our earthly pilgrimage as already the children of God, but this is an earth that is cursed. This is an earth that is fallen. Satan is the god of this world and there is coming a day when, if you will, we’re in a sense in the embryonic stages of development as the children of God and on the resurrection day we’re birthed forth from the womb of this earth to be transported to the glorious nursery, if you will, of God, and the new abode that we will have there. His completing love.

Now, thirdly, his consecrating love. His consecrating love and this is where he begins to attack rather vigorously the false concepts that you can be a child of God and promote and practice wickedness. No child of God is capable of in their heart of hearts desiring to promote and walk in sinful wickedness. Now, we may sin, but he uses the phrase here “practicing sin.” Now look, if you will, there at verse 4, he says, “Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness.” So he’s saying as the child of God, you ought to be discerning and know that these guys who come into the church and begin to promote these ideas that just go ahead and live in sin, turning, if you will, the grace of God into lasciviousness, saying that since it’s all of grace we can just give into our lusts and our indulgences and just enjoy the fallen desires of the flesh nature, he said that’s a practicing of sin and you know no one who practices sin is one who is truly a child of God.

There is a love that has come into us from God, a love that is in us, a love that is cast toward us that changes us and it separates us from a life of, and this is a phrase that I have used for years, I still think it’s a biblically sound expression and I still use it today, it separates us from a life of a purpose and a pattern of sin. It’s a new desire in us to kill sin and to destroy sin because we are very aware that if we walk in sin it kills and destroys us. Now, false teachers, again, would come into the church and they would mock and laugh and scoff at this idea. I really though certainly modern evangelicals have allowed lots of worldliness and lots of pollutants and lots of vile things to occur on the church rolls today and I do understand that, but I can’t conceive of what John was facing where significant groups of professing believers were beginning to come over to a gnostic heresy of promoting wickedness as a part of the Christian lifestyle. I guess in a sense at least in some seed type form, we do see that, but I don’t think not as what the Apostle John was looking at.

He promised that he would consecrate us. He promised that we would be children of God who would begin to desire to not walk in sin and live in sin and certainly not have a purpose and pattern of sin in our lives. In John 16:13 he says, “But when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth where He will not speak on His own initiative but whatever He hears, He will speak and He will disclose to you what is to come.” So the Spirit is going to come, Jesus says and he lives in the hearts of believers and he convicts us of sin and then he imparts to us the right path to be on. Aren’t you thankful for the convicting power of the Holy Spirit of God? Aren’t you thankful that the Spirit of God makes you weary of your wandering? The Spirit of God convicts you of waywardness, wrong attitudes, self-centered dispositions, Christ dishonoring viewpoints, and then begins to show you and impart the way. He promised he would help consecrate us.

He also prayed for us in this way. Again, in the high priestly prayer in John 17:15, he says, “I do not ask thee to take them out of the world,” and that’s interesting, isn’t it? I’ve had people say before, “Why does God leave us here?” Well, he wants to leave us here as a witness to complete his work of building his church for one thing. Jesus said to the Father, “I do not ask thee to take them out of the world but to keep them from the evil one.” That is to keep them out of the stronghold controlling power of the evil one. The evil one may have some victories but he doesn’t keep you in a stronghold. That’s consecration when you’re set apart from those type things.

Now, again, I think pointing out the error of the gnostic heretics infiltrating the church, we have verses 5 through 8. Let’s just kind of comment on those briefly. He says, “You know that He,” Jesus, “appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin.” So his point being: how can these guys promote sinfulness as acceptable in God’s church and in a Christian’s lifestyle when our Savior himself came to take away sin? Verse 6, “No one who abides in Him sins.” Did you know that? There is never a time when you are walking in the Spirit that you sin. Never. Now, don’t you wish we would walk perfectly in the Spirit? There is never a time when you’re abiding in the Spirit that you sin. “No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him.” The person who from the core of their heart says, “I want to walk in sin and I want to joy in sin,” does not know God and, again, these were people who were proclaiming they were Christian pastors who were teaching these kinds of things. That’s why he says, verse 7, “Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who,” here it is, “practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous,” and verse 8, “the one who practices sin,” that means it’s the centerpiece of his heart, it’s the purpose and intent of his life to promote, to purpose and to live in sin, he is what? “He is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.”

I think that’s why you have the passage in Corinthians about no fornicators or adulterers will enter the kingdom of heaven. They list other things also and some might say, “You mean if a man fell into that sin one time in his life he can’t be a Christian?” I’m not saying that at all because that doesn’t mean he’s a fornicator, it means he committed the sin of fornication. This talks about the practice, the man who purposes to walk in that kind of lifestyle cannot know God and John says, “You know these guys are false teachers.” Now, it’s another shaking thing, I think, to the soul to have that expression, what is it in verse 8, “the one who practices sin is of the devil.” Wow. John is basically saying, “You have men who profess to be Christian called pastors coming into your churches who are actually the children of Satan.” Amazing. Powerful thing.

But his point is we’re not like that. We’re of our Father who is God who lives in heaven. We do not live in purposeful patterns of habitual sin, glorying in our sin. If we sin, we are broken about it. If we sin we are shamed by it. If we sin, we want to repent of it and work our way out of it. You know, it’s much like a son or a daughter who loves and respects their parents. They may have a point or two where they are not honorable but they repent of that. They don’t want to live dishonorably to their parents. Romans 8:15 says, “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry, Abba, Father.” There is something in the child of God that he can only go so far in sin before he becomes absolutely miserable. Absolutely miserable that he has dishonored his heavenly Father.

I heard of a teenage girl who got in a car of other teenage girls and they were supposed to be riding around, maybe going down to the fast food place, maybe go bowling, some things like that, hadn’t really decided what they were going to do. But a couple of the girls in the car were real rebels and one of those rebellious girl said, “We ought to go over to So-and-so’s house. They’re having a wild party over there. Man, let’s go over there and have us a big time.” One of the girls in the car said, “Well, if you’re going to go to that party and do those things, you need to take me home first.” And one Christian girl in the group said, one of the rebel girls said to that Christian girl who said take me home first, “Oh, are you afraid of what your father will do to you? Are you afraid he might hurt you?” She said, “No, I’m afraid I might hurt him.” That’s the Christian’s heart. “I don’t want to hurt my heavenly Father. I am the child of God.”

What manner of love has been cast toward us that we should be called the children of God? Why don’t we ask God to give us a new resolute spirit to hate sin, to be miserable about sin that we find in our lives and have that part of us that says, “My greatest fear is not that sin will hurt me.” By the way, sin will hurt you. Sin will hurt you bad, “but that our sin hurts our Father,” because we are now, right now, not going to be one day, we are right now the children of God. God’s amazing love.

Let’s stand in prayer, alright?