Transcript

1 John 2. Let’s go back there as we might be in 1 John for a while on Sunday night as I keep finding things I want to look at with you and we come to a section that has wonderful encouraging truths in it for the child of God. I just called this “Two Wonderful Words.” I want to preach on two wonderful words. The first word is security; the second word is sanctification. Actually, those always go together, by the way, they are inseparably linked one to another in Christian doctrine and in Christian experience.

Let’s look at how the Apostle John writes this as we look at 1 John 2. Now, once again, he’s writing against the backdrop of a lot of false teaching and one of the most prominent aspects of false teaching was the stoic or Gnostic philosophers who would basically say that the physical body is helplessly evil, it is thoroughly evil, every aspect of it is evil so you might as well just give in to all the desires and the lust of the flesh because it just doesn’t matter. The spirit man is what matters, the material man is hopelessly corrupt so they had a concept of grace that basically was literally turning the grace of God into wickedness and lasciviousness and John is combating that. You see, God gave Adam and Eve bodies before they sinned. The body isn’t inherently evil until sin came in and Jesus had a physical body and we’re going to have glorified physical bodies so it’s a false doctrine but it was prominent in the day. As you read some of these, you’ve got to realize they were people who were wantonly being the champions of a willful open lifestyle of corruption, wickedness and vile immoralities yet calling themselves devotees of Jesus Christ.

So let’s see what John says here. First of all, 1 John 2, beginning in verse 1 and we’ll go through verse 6.

“1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2 and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world. 3 By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 The one who says, ‘I have come to know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; 5 but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: 6 the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.”

First of all, our security. We see this in verses 1 and 2. First of all, let’s note under our security that Christ is our lawyer. If you’re jotting down outlines, I. Our security and subpoint a. Christ our lawyer. The word that John uses here is the word you could translate “lawyer,” it’s “advocate.” Notice what he says, “My little children, I am writing that you do not sin or you may not sin,” and that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it? If we just quit sinning? And some of you ought to quit sinning now but, unfortunately, we all keep stumbling into sin. He said, “But if anyone sins,” the last part of verse 1, “we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” He says “my little children, I’m writing to you.” That’s a tender and an affectionate phrase. John is showing that Christian compassion that a pastor should have for his flock. He calls them “my little children.” He said, “I want you to not sin.” Now, I think the point John is making is: don’t be like the Gnostics; don’t be like the Stoics who make an art-form and a willful purposeful lifestyle of flaunting and living in sin. Don’t do that. You should be fighting sin and being a repenter but when you do find sin in your life and even the godliest of people do, we have, he says, an Advocate with the Father. It is the paracletos, the Greek word translated “advocate” or it could be translated “lawyer.” Paracletos just literally means “one who comes alongside to help us.” It means “an intercessor” or “a representative.” So, John says, “As Christians, don’t sin. You certainly don’t champion the sin or make a willful banner and publication and lifestyle of sin like the Gnostics or the Stoics might do or like the liberals of our day certainly do. He said, “But when a Christian does sin, we have one who comes alongside us to help us with this just and holy heavenly Father. We have an advocate, a lawyer to go between us and God.”

Now, it’s interesting, paracletos, the word for “advocate” here, is the very same word that’s used of the Holy Spirit in John 16:7 where Jesus said, “I’m going to send another comforter,” a paracletos, “another to be with you and help you and come alongside you.” That’s an interesting truth. Hebrews 7:25 says that Jesus is “he who ever lives to make intercession for us” and that’s why you can never be lost. First of all, your justification was finished and completed when he died on the cross, it was added to your account when you believed on him in Christ and then Christ rose from the dead sealing our justification, he ascended to heaven and he has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high where he is ever faithful to intercede for us. Jesus is absolutely perfect. He is absolutely infallible. No one can topple him. No one can thwart his ministry. And as long as he is faithful, you cannot lose your salvation. What a powerful truth this is.

So, Jesus is our righteous advocate. I call him the adequate advocate. Now look, if you join the Roman church and you try to go through Mary or the saints or touch some relic, you know the Roman Catholic Church literally has medal shaped objects where they have the hearts of some of the old saints in those objects. If you go and touch that little golden encapsulated thing with literally the rotted heart of a saint in it, somehow you get powers and help from God or something. I don’t know what but it’s just silly superstitions. Look, my point is: anything you do, any hoop you jump through, any permission, any person, any statue, any ordinance other than Christ is not adequate but if we sin, we have an adequate advocate and his name is Jesus. By the way, when you’ve Jesus, why do you need all kinds of superstitions and silly forms and rituals and incantations and mantras and all this stuff that’s floating around out there, even in the church, that is of no avail whatsoever before a true and holy God?

Now, we must not get the view that God wants his pound of flesh against us when we sin, that God is sitting in heaven and when you sin, boy, he’s wanting to get at you. I mean, he is ready to rail against you. No, you’ve got to understand that God the Father wants us to stand upright before him and he provided his Son to the end that we would have a righteous standing before him. It is the Father who devised this whole plan; it is the Son in perfect love for his Father first but also for us, fulfilled and achieved the adequacy and the effectual intercession that we need to stand holy and righteous before God. “God was in Christ,” the Bible says, “reconciling the world to himself” so who is the key initiator here? God the Father. He wants us to be forgiven. He wants us to stand righteous. He wants us to be just in his sight and he gives us Christ, the adequate one, to advocate for us before himself.

Three things about righteousness that’s very important. This is not exactly in this outline but I wanted to jot this in today and that is that God being a righteous God has three types of righteousness: first of all, he has mandatory righteousness, whereby being a righteous God – let me say this about righteousness, righteousness has the idea of laying down a standard that everything else is measured by. Now, when you come up to God, you don’t say, “Now, here’s righteousness and God meets righteousness better than anyone else,” or “Here’s justice but God meets the standard of justice better than anyone else.” No, you’ve got to understand: God is righteous, he gives righteousness its definition. God is just, he gives justice its definition. He is the standard. He doesn’t come up to a standard, he is the standard and so he is a God who is righteous, therefore, he has mandatory righteousness in that he mandates all his creatures be righteous. Now, he cannot not mandate all of us to be righteous as he is righteous for that puts all of us in something of a troublesome situation because God cannot negate nor go against the truth of who he is, the righteous God, so he mandates it as mandatory righteousness.

Secondly, he has punitive righteousness. That is, his perfect righteousness demands that all unrighteousness must be punished. Punitive righteousness. Mandatory righteousness: he mandates all his creatures must be righteous. Punitive righteousness: he must punish all that is unrighteous, that does not reach up to the standard; everything that falls short. But praise his name, God also has redemptive righteousness and that is through his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, there is an adequate acceptable provision whereby all of us unrighteous ones become righteous in his sight and that’s his redemptive righteousness. Praise his name for that. So, based on the righteousness of Christ and that God accepts him, if you will, on our behalf, particularly his work on the cross of atoning for us, a vicarious atonement for us in our place, therefore, God declares us righteous.

Now, it’s an appealing picture that the Scriptures bear out here when it talks about Jesus being an advocate or our lawyer because, you see, as our lawyer before God, he knows the law better than anyone else. Do you know why? He wrote it. The word is his word.

The word came from him. He is the centerpiece of God’s truth and God’s law so he knows the law better than anybody else. Secondly, he knows the case better than anybody else. He became man, born of the virgin but became fully man and the Scripture says “he was tempted in all points like as we are tempted.” As a matter of fact, he knows more about the case than any of us know because he never succumbed to sin. You see, every one of us at some point gives in to sin so we don’t know the full weight and the full power of temptation because we’ve always given in at some point but Jesus endured all of it but never sinned. He knows our situation. He was weak like we are weak. He subjected himself to the things that we are subjected to in this life as a man. He became, the Bible says, one of us. Hebrews spells out that he can have a deep sympathy and empathy with us having lived like us and walked the earth with us and as one of us.

So he knows the law and secondly, he knows the case and I’m going to tell you what the third thing that’s really, really good is: he knows the Judge. If you get in trouble and you go before a judge, it’s real good to have a lawyer that’s very personally intimately acquainted with the judge. As a matter of fact, in one sense, Jesus is the Judge. He sits on the Judgment Seat if you come before him figuratively speaking, and when you stand before him, he says, “Who’s going to represent you?” and you say, “Well, I don’t know.” He just steps out, takes off his judge coat and comes down there beside you and puts on his advocate coat and he says, “I’ll be your lawyer.” So actually the judge becomes your lawyer. Now that’s pretty adequate as an advocate to have when we are appealing our case.

So, when Satan accuses us like the book of Job talks about how Satan came and stood before the Father and said, “You know, if you do this to Job or if you do that to Job, I’ll bet he’ll not bless you. I bet he won’t honor you anymore.” So, when Satan comes to accuse us, Jesus, our righteous advocate, intercedes for us based on his own merits on our behalf. You’ve got to stand in that security. You must stop looking at your merits. You must stop looking at your performance. You must stop looking at your propensity to fail. Jesus comes before God based on his merit but on your behalf. That’s how he goes before us and the gavel of God’s almighty authority comes down on the desk of divine jurisprudence and says, “Not guilty.” That’s our security because we have Jesus as our lawyer.

A little bit more here. I amplify this a little bit more because I believe John is doing this in 1 John 2:2. Let’s talk about Jesus as our liberator. Our lawyer but now our liberator. It says, “ and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.” Just one quick word about the whole world. Now, I do not hold that Jesus has finished and effectual redemption for everyone when he died on the cross. If you hold that when Jesus died he accomplished effectually redemption for all the world of all the people of all the times, then you are a universalist. You believe that everybody is saved and everybody is going to be saved, there is no reason to preach the gospel, no reason to have missionaries for missions, that Jesus effectually finished redemption for the whole world. That’s not what this text is saying and that’s not what the Bible teaches but it is teaching in the sense that it’s not just John’s audience, it’s not just Jewish believers but God has, in effect, saved peoples from all peoples, tongues, tribes and nations. People all over the world are believing on Jesus Christ and having their sins remitted. Now, that being out of the way, to some degree and I understand that there’s some debate on those kinds of things, I just don’t know how the brothers who talk about a universal atoning work get away from universalism which is a radical liberal doctrine that came out Germany about 100 years ago and it’s a liberal viewpoint that has just contaminated Christianity and taken over most of the major theological schools of the world except Baptists and a few other evangelicals who got ours back from the liberals about 20 years ago, 25 years ago and cleaned them up some.

Let’s talk about propitiation now. “A nd He Himself is the propitiation for our sins.” The word “propitiation” has the idea of “satisfaction.” In other words, when God looked on Christ dying on the cross on our behalf, the holy justice of God was completely satisfied. There is, in a sense, that this great holy and just God had a raging, righteous fury against sin and sinners. Some people say, “Well, God hates the sin but he loves the sinner.” I beg your pardon. The people in hell are not experiencing the love of God. Their sins are not the only thing in hell, they are in hell. Now, there’s a sense in which that’s a figure of speech and there’s a sense in which, I suppose, that is true and that God will save any sinner that turns to Christ, however, God has a true and righteous indignation raging against sinners but when Jesus Christ took the place of his children on Calvary’s cross and there in our place, received the wrath for us, God’s holy wrath and justice; a death and justice and a ram of holiness we can’t comprehend but God’s holy justice was fully satisfied. It’s as if God’s justice went from thundering roars to quietly at peace. God’s holy justice is now silenced in sweetness and satisfaction and settledness as far as being against us. That’s a glorious truth.

Now, here’s what happens that is so frustrating, so frustrating: people, preachers let’s say, want people to feel good and want them to have joy and want them to have rest in their hearts and so instead of teaching the greatness of Christ being our propitiation, they begin to dumb-down the justice of God. They begin to dumb-down the holy indignation of God against sin. Friend, look, that’s blasphemy. That’s wickedness to redefine God so we might feel better. What we need to do is be humbled and tremble before this God but glory in the great sufficiency of his Son being our propitiation whereby God’s wrath is now no longer raging against me; it raged on Christ in my place and now it is satisfied. Now listen to me child of God: if you’re a true believer in Jesus Christ, every time you sin, every time you fail, every time you have an embittered spirit, an ugly attitude, a jealousy, a me-first, all the lust, all the dirtiness, all the wretchedness, all the meanness, all the selfishness, every ounce of holy justice that should come against you – listen – has already been satisfied. Already been satisfied. Do you know what that is? That’s liberation. Don’t you walk around with your head down in guilt. Now, there’s a proper Christian humility but it’s not the way to be guilty lawbreakers. We don’t walk around in guilt; we don’t walk bowed down in condemnation. Why? Because we have a mighty Savior.

That little song our children sing is an adequate song: What A Mighty Mighty Savior You Are. And he is. He is. He himself. Verse 2, “and He Himself,” there’s a double emphasis there, “He Himself,” Jesus, that’s the one, “is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.” Now listen, God cannot just forget sin and then forgive it. God can’t sit in heaven – you know, some things God can’t do because of who he is. He has bound himself or he is bound by the truth of who he is. God can’t in his justice just say, “You know, I’m just going to let those sins go. I’m just going to overlook that.” Now, you can do that because you’re an equal sinner so when you, an equal sinner with another equal sinner, has that other equal sinner do something to you that hurts you or offends you, you can choose just to let it go because you don’t have any real justice or righteousness anyway. When somebody hurts you, they haven’t hurt much. Are you with me? When somebody offends you, they really haven’t offended much. You ought to be in hell and so should I. Now, don’t misunderstand me: the Scripture describes ways we can resolve our conflicts and there’s a biblical way to do that and we ought to do that but 98% of the time when somebody wrongs you, what you ought to do is just get over it because you’re not special. I’m sorry, Momma was wrong. You’re just a sinner that ought to be in hell that God has saved so we can just get over it when we sin against each other.

But God is not like that. God’s not just another equal sinner. He’s the infinitely holy God, beautiful and perfect in justice so when we sin against him and we violate his holy law and we are clearly transgressors and we have offended his holy nature, he can’t just say, “Well, you know, I’m just going to forgive that.” You say, “Well, surely, a parent can forgive his child and that’s the way a loving God is.” No, no, no, no, because he’s not just another parent. He’s infinitely greater and superior. He’s absolutely holy and just. That’s why Hebrews 9:22 says, “Without the shedding of blood there’s no forgiveness of sins.” There must be a payment. There is a punitive nature to justice. We’ve lost that in Western civilization; we’ve lost a lot of it. Today, when somebody does something wrong, the whole focus is on the criminal, on the perpetrator of the evil and how we can help them do better. We need to – and I’m not saying that’s not an appropriate part of the whole mix but first and foremost when somebody does something wrong, there should be a punitive, we used to call them penal institutions, there should be a punishment for the wrong that was done. A righteous answering of punishment for the crime that was committed and that’s the way God is.

But though God must bring a retribution, since Jesus is our propitiation, he satisfies completely all the claims and all the desires of justice against us. God doesn’t just forget it and overlook it, he put it all on his Son and he took care of all of it. There are those who claim, “Well, you know, Christianity doesn’t require the literal death of Christ. That was something that happened but that’s not that foundational to what we are as Christians.” I’m telling you, it is absolutely the cornerstone of Christianity. Please, child of God, never be seduced into some sort of shallow, man-centered ideas that the atonement of Christ and his death is somehow optional. It’s absolutely essential. Everything falls apart. That is the keystone in the arch of all Christian truth. If Christ did not literally die in our place as a vicarious atonement for us, everything we have and everything we believe falls apart.

Well, security, I don’t know about you but there’s a lot of security in those two things. We have an adequate advocate, Jesus is our lawyer. Secondly, he is the propitiation. All the wrath of God against us has been satisfied in him, he’s our liberator out from under that guilt, that condemnation or that judgment. Listen to me: you cannot out-sin the liberating grace of God through Jesus Christ. You just can’t do it. Now, as a child of God, you wouldn’t try to do it but you couldn’t do it if you were able to try to do it. You can’t overcome and outdo the mighty, mighty salvation of Jesus Christ.

Secondly, sanctification. Now, John’s going to weigh in pretty heavy here. Again, he’s not talking about Christians who are fighting sin and want to be repenters of sin and struggles sometimes, he’s talking about these folks who make a professed lifestyle of promoting immoralities and wickedness. Here’s what he says about that, he says, first of all, there ought to be a predetermined purpose of our life that’s different. Once we’re saved, we predetermine to go in a different direction is what he’s saying here. Look at verse 5, if you will, he says, “but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him.” First of all, he’s talking about whoever keeps on keeping; whoever keeps on keeping the commandments of God. In other words, when you’re saved, you don’t just say, “Okay, what’s the three things I’ve got to do? Alright, I’m gonna get those three things done. Alright, what’s the five laws I’ve got to keep and I’m gonna keep those five laws and then am I done?” No, no, the child of God has a new predetermined purpose that says, “I want to learn God’s word and for the rest of my life, as I choose a life partner, as I look at a career opportunity, as I look at where I’m going to live, how I treat my neighbor, how I respond to my husband or wife, how I raise my children, what kind of church I pick out, everything, the totality of my life, the predetermined purpose will be what does God’s word say?” I’m one who wants to keep on keeping the word of God. I don’t want to just jump through a few hoops and say, Well, am I in? Am I okay now? Can I go do my thing now that I’ve done the thing?

Some very unwise person, I guess I would say persons when it came to teaching people how to be good witnesses for Christ used the phrase “do the deal.” Get people to the point in thinking they’re sinners and then get them to do the deal. What do you mean “do the deal”? The deal is: God transforms your life, you become a believer in Jesus Christ and now the predetermined purpose of your life is to look at his word and honor his word from now on. That’s what he’s saying here. Verse 5, “whoever keeps His word,” means keep on keeping his word, and then he says, “in him the love of God has truly been perfected.” What does that mean? It means our love for God is mature. We have a mature love for God because – listen- Christianity is not about rules and laws, it’s about a new heart who loves God and loves God’s rules and laws because they love the God who gave the rules and laws. Don’t you rejoice when your children grow up and gain maturity and instead of just keeping the rules so they don’t get the hand popped or the time out or whatever punishment you use and by the way, I still believe corporal punishment is God’s will and God’s way most of the time, not all the time but most of the time, and the child, they respond and they behave because they fear the rod. There’s good in that. There’s good in that but isn’t it a blessing when they get on up in the teenage years and maybe God’s worked on their hearts and pretty soon they begin keeping the law because they realize their Moms and Dads are wise and they think there’s wisdom in the law and they love their Mom and Dad who gave the rules. That’s what he’s saying here: a mature Christian doesn’t worry about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of the law, the mature Christian has a heart that loves the God who gave the rules and begins to want to keep them.

So, we have a new heart that’s matured in love for God, when we see ourselves predeterminately purposing to obey God’s word and God’s law in our lives, wanting to, striving to walk in obedience. You see, if he is God and he is, then there is only one mode of expressing our love for him. Did you hear that? If he’s God and he is, there’s only one mode of expressing our love for him: obedience. Obedience. Think about it: we don’t meet with the Almighty Creator God and negotiate; we’re not a union that negotiates a contract on what we’re going to do. No, we just obey. We bow in submission and he says so that’s how you know you’ve matured. Love is maturing in your heart when you have that predetermined purpose of, “I want to obey my God. Not because I’m under some laborious burden that somehow God’s going to crush me, cast me into hell, punish me deeply so I’m under this burden and I want to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. No, no, no, because my back is straight and my chin is raised and I glory in the great sufficiency of my advocate who is also my propitiation and I want to obey him and please him in my heart.”

Well, secondly, not only our predetermined purpose of life, that’s an aspect of our sanctification. We’re all building this under that second word “sanctification.” Secondly, the perpetual practice of our life. Look at verses 3-4, “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments.” Again, it’s the present active sense of the verb there, if we’re those who keep on keeping his commandments by showing that we do not allow ourselves just to wallow in the strongholds and the ruts of sin, when we find sin in our lives, we want to be humble and repent of those and get back on track with God so we keep showing that we have come to know him because we keep practicing our profession. We profess that we have come to know him; we profess that he’s changed our hearts; we profess that he’s made our predetermined purpose different than it used to be, it used to be self-centered, now it’s Christ-centered. Now we want our practice to match our profession and it doesn’t perfectly ever but increasingly so in sanctification, it should match our profession.

Again, the Gnostics of this day claimed superior knowledge; they were elitists. They said, “We have an understanding most don’t have. If you really want to understand something, you’ve got to go to a handful of our key Gnostic elitist leaders and they can give you the understanding.” Again, that’s why I so despise a lot of what I see in some realms of professing Christendom where the word is not enough, you’ve got to go to some person, some priest, some cardinal, some something and they have the real guidance or the real direction you need. That’s just a form of Gnosticism in one way or another so we don’t have to go to someone to find the insight, we just are those who look to the word and want to purposely practice this in our lives. Perpetual practice of keeping the word of God.

Now, he says, if you’re one who is not purposing to practice this in your life, look at verse 4, “The one who says, ‘I have come to know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments,” now again, the context is as a professed lifestyle you desire and promote sinful dishonoring of his commandments, he said, “the person who does that is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” Not the person that sins. Not the person who fails some in his pursuit. The person who promotes wickedness as an acceptable lifestyle and, of course, we have that in our country, don’t we? How many people in our country today are professing Sodomites who would tell you that they’re good Christians? A lot of them would. John says, “When they are promoting and living out that kind of lifestyle and they say they are true children of God, they are liars.” Don’t you like the word of God? It doesn’t beat around the bush. They’re a liar. Discussion over.

Now, because Jesus lives in our hearts, we know more than just the law. Christianity, look, it is not keeping a bunch of rules though there are rules we want to keep. Did you hear that? Christianity is not keeping a bunch of rules though there are rules we want to keep. There’s a lot going on in Reform circles right now about, “Well, you’ve got to do church this way. You’ve got to structure that way. You’ve got to have these rules for women. You’ve got to have these rules for kids.” And some of those are helpful and I understand some of those but you’ve got to understand, God does not regenerate the heart by external rule keeping. God does not make you born-again by external rule keeping. It’s not about the external rule thought there are rules we do want to keep, of course. It’s more than knowing the rule or the law of God – listen – Christianity is knowing the God of the law. There’s a huge difference there. There’s a huge difference there.

Earlier in the text when he says we know love is perfected when we are beginning to love this God in such a way that keeping his law is not a burden, it’s a joy. We’re beginning to see the wisdom in it and beginning to see that he gave us these laws because he loves us so deeply. Listen, when the word of God, the law of God says “thou shalt not” what he’s actually saying is “don’t hurt yourself.” That’s what he’s saying. He’s saying, “I’m smarter than you. It may look like it’s working for a season but if you keep walking in violation of the law, you end up hurting yourself.”

Well, not only in our sanctification is there a predetermined purpose of our life that’s changed, not only is there something of a perpetual practice in our life that’s now different but, thirdly, we find a new perfect pattern for our lives. The perfect pattern for our lives. Look at verse 6 there, “the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked. In other words, did you ever see Jesus telling lies? Did you ever see Jesus manipulating and scheming and cheating to gain monetary advantage? Did you ever see Jesus living sexually immoral or corrupt lifestyles? Did you ever see Jesus unjustly dealing with anyone? So he’s saying, “If you have come to know him, your heart should have changed so that you become a little Jesus,” which is what “Christian” means. You want to walk like him. Again, the contrast is with the Gnostic, Stoics of the day who would promote an open willful lifestyle of corruption, sin and immorality. You say, “No, that’s no longer who you are,” and Jesus is the perfect pattern to walk after and to imitate. Now, we imitate Jesus as Christians not for our salvation. When we’re saved, we have identification with Jesus but in our sanctification, we imitate Jesus. There is an identification in salvation. I am identified with Christ. I am in Christ. Paul loved that phrase “in Christ” because we are now in Christ before the heavenly Father.

In other words, we stand in the righteousness of Christ before God but that’s our salvation now for our sanctification, we are imitators of Christ. He is the one that we want to follow after. It’s like our love for God is like Christ’s love for God and he would go to the Garden of Gethsemane and bow before the heavenly Father and under such amazing stress and agony that we could never enter in, perspiration comes on his brow and drips off his face literally in the form of blood, just the agony of his soul and yet, his conclusion going to the cross was, “Not my will but thy will be done.” And over and over and over, he would state, “I show that I love the Father that I keep his word. I didn’t come to do my will but I came to do his will.” So we’re imitators of him and he is the perfect pattern that we are beginning to learn to know and love God because he’s changed our hearts and now we have the capacity to receive from the word of God the revelation of who God is and we are learning to love and know him and joy in him so we are becoming more like Jesus in loving God and wanting to obey God out of that love for God. 1 Peter 2:21 says that Jesus suffered as an example that we should follow in his steps.

So, the people who know who Jesus really is should be able to see Jesus in us. An old hymn says,

“When we walk with the Lord in the light of his word, What a glory he sheds on our way. While we do his good will, he abides with us still, And with all who will trust and obey.

“Trust and obey. Trust and obey for there’s no other way, To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”

Two wonderful words: security and sanctification.

Let’s stand together in prayer, alright?