Transcript

I want you to go to 1 John with me tonight and let’s look at a very practical text of Scripture that’s a great and encouraging exhortation. In the message earlier today in the gospel of Luke, we were looking at the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, and how they were of a Satanic inspiration in that they were imitators. They had substituted true worship of God and true conversion and true godliness with really a fleshly Satanic counterfeit. Unfortunately, this type of spirit has been invading the church from the very first century. 1 John was written to that very end. The Gnostic heresies, in particular, had become quite prominent in the churches in the first and second centuries. Gnosticism was sort of an elitist religion as such, the Gnostics believed there was some special knowledge that only a few men could get and you had to depend on those men to get that special knowledge so that you could really know God and really know salvation. They had a funny belief about the flesh, the physical body. They said that everything that’s material is just inherently and thoroughly evil and there can never be any good in it so they would basically say, just give in to all your lusts, all your desires, because there’s nothing you can do with the old flesh anyway, the only thing that’s pure and good is the spirit. They would even argue that Jesus only appeared to have a human body. He was really just a spirit being because, you see, if he was real in human form, that would destroy their whole premise that good could have a visible form. So all of these things are swirling around and the culture, the Gentile culture of the age was where we’re headed very fast as a country. They were just very given over to sensuality and immorality and corruption in the form of sexual immorality.

So John writes this letter to sort of clarify things and straighten things out to a great extent so there’s a lot here for us to look at and think about. 1 John 1, verses 5-10. Look at it with me. John says, “ This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you,” in other words, we’re setting some things straight about the practical true Christian life. We’ve heard it and we’re announcing it to you, that is, “that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.” First of all, I’m going to entitle this “Walking and Talking the Truth” and that’s what John is getting at: the living out the reality of a true born-again child of God and something of what that ought to look like. First of all, let’s note the truth revealed. The truth revealed and we see that in verse 5 where John simply says, “This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” If God is an intelligent being and certainly he is, and if God has given man some degree of intelligence and though we are fallen, he has done that, he has given us a degree of intelligence, then it makes sense that God would communicate with man and God has done that. The communication of God with man is what we call truth or the revelation of truth. Now, truth is transcendent. Truth is beyond our subjective viewpoints and evaluations. As one man said: truth is objective, it has to be discovered. Truth is absolute reality. Truth does not come from us. Truth does not derive from our rationalizations and our cognitive abilities. Truth is outside of us, it is independent but we can know truth because God has revealed truth, that is, revealed himself to man.

Two things about this truth that God has revealed. 1. The source and we see that in verse 5 where he says, “This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light.” From him, he’s taking about “him” being Jesus Christ, he has come and truth has been revealed. Listen to John 12:49-50 and John 14:10. Listen to this, “For I did not speak on My own initiative,” this is Christ, “but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak. I know that His commandment is eternal life; therefore the things I speak, I speak just as the Father has told Me.” “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.”

So, God has communicated who he is, what he’s about, what he desires, through his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. God ordained in his sovereign purposes that there would be men who would fill the office of apostle and those men would be superintended by the Holy Spirit of God to write for us the finished canon of Scripture, that is, the completed New Testament and that’s why often you’ll find phrases in the Bible where it says “our faith is built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.” You think, “Wait a minute, how can our foundation be built upon the apostles? I thought our foundation is built upon Christ?” Yes, but Christ superintended through apostles who wrote the Scriptures and the Scriptures teach us the truth about Jesus Christ so in that sense, they are the intermediaries, if you will, those worked through by the Spirit of God to reveal to us the truth of God. So the source of truth is Jesus Christ. I was reading Barry Keene’s report from the church planting work there in London and he talked about a secularist, a young man who just woke up one morning and decided he had to find truth. I remember Barry saying the young man basically said, “I’m not sure what that is but I need to find it,” and he got into this cult and this religion and this movement and then stumbled upon one of their church plants and began hearing the gospel preached and came to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He found the truth because he found Jesus Christ.

That is the source of truth. Now, God wants to point out something of the – maybe you would say – the outstanding or one of the most prominent aspects of truth and I call this the substance. The source of truth – Christ, the substance of truth in verse 5 is light. Why is that? Because light always has the figurative understanding of goodness and holiness and uprightness. It is the opposite, the antithesis of darkness which speaks of darkness and evil and that which is bad or wrong in the world. He says verse 5, “This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light.” Whatever else we think of when we think of God is light, we think of God’s holiness. Once again, God’s holiness is that word that is actually the composite of all the glorious attributes of God. You see, God is infinite but that’s just one attribute of God. God is truth but that’s just one attribute of God. God is Spirit but that’s just one attribute of God. God is good but that’s just one attribute of God. But when you put all of them together, there is a glorious dynamic and a harmony and an awesomeness to all the composite of God’s person and when you put all that together, you have God’s holiness or as one writer of Scripture said, you have the beauty of holiness.

Brothers and sisters, we’ve got to reclaim the infinite, holy, awe-inspiring truth of the person of God. He’s not just the guy upstairs. He’s not just the deity as Bill O’Reilly might say. I like O’Reilly’s program but when it comes to theology, he ought to just shut up. He just is so off base. Nothing is worse than a liberal Catholic but nevertheless, there should be a note of even – and I want to say this in the right way because I’m preaching to Christians – there should be a note of terror. There should be some awe. I mean, on the one hand we’re perfectly comfortable in the sufficiency of our Savior’s grace to make us acceptable and on the one hand we do come boldly but at the same time, there’s a part of us that’s overwhelmed by this God, the greatness of this God. That’s what John is saying. He’s trying to get through to these Christians as they are talking to so many others who profess to be Christians but are living in wanton immoralities and corruptions. You say, “Wait a minute, if you’re a Christian, you’ve come to know this God who has revealed his truth himself through Jesus Christ and he’s a God of light, of transcendent holiness and there’s no unwholesome or unholy thing in him.”

That’s the truth revealed, now let’s go a little step further. Secondly, John wants to point out the truth reveals. The truth reveals. What John is getting at here is the truth reveals all darkness or you might say, what is the true nature of darkness. We wouldn’t know much about the evil of evil, we wouldn’t know much about the sinfulness of sin if God did not enable us to begin to know something of the light and the holiness of God because it is the contrast. When we see the brilliant light of God, we begin to be penetrated, if you will, or feel more deeply the dark darkness of sin and ungodliness.

There are two aspects of darkness that when we walk in the light begin to be exposed, begin to be revealed or revealed before us. First of all, I call this the darkness of liberalism. The darkness of liberalism. Look at it in verse 6, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness,” note the word “walk” there. In other words, as a lifestyle purpose and pattern, you are enjoying, you are searching after, you are glorying in and promoting evil or darkness or sinfulness. That’s a liberal perspective. Now, friends, I don’t have to tell you there’s a lot of folks around the world today who claim the name Christian who walk in darkness. They’re not wrestling with darkness, they’re not struggling against the darkness they find in their own heart and in the world around them, they’re just wantonly walking in darkness and John says, “Those who walk in darkness,” verse 6 again, “lie and do not practice the truth.”

Theological liberalism. I told you this morning that when a man walks in sin, pretty soon his doctrine gets corrupted. He starts having weird views of, “Well, the Bible’s not really inspired. Well, it really doesn’t teach that. Well, Christ really didn’t mean…” You get all of these liberal explanations and liberal theology started over in Germany and higher th textual critics probably the, I would say, the early part of the 19 century became very prominent and then it floated overseas and it got into our universities and all the great universities that the Puritans originally started quickly shifted over and they decided that the Germans were so brilliant they needed to take that higher textual criticism perspective and begin to study the Bible in the same way that they studied Homer or Shakespeare. In other words, they set themselves up as the final authority and began to critique the word of God instead of reading it and humbling themselves before it and studying it as the true word of God. That’s theological liberalism. All it is, friends, at the end of the day, cut through all the leaves, cut through all the limbs, get down to the trunk and get down to the root of the whole issue, the root of the whole issue of theological liberalism is this: I want to sin and I don’t want to be accountable for it and I come up with pseudo- intellectual viewpoint whereby I can say the Scriptures really don’t mean that. You come up with allegorical interpretation where all the miracles of the Old Testament particularly and even the miracles of Jesus are just allegories to teach us lessons, they didn’t really happen.

As a side note here, I meant to say this earlier but I understand tonight on the History Channel they’re beginning a ten part series on the Bible and I saw an interview with the producers and it appears that they are very conservative and were very committed just to give the biblical story as it appears in the text so it might very well be worth watching. Now, we may turn it on tonight and say, “I’m through with this,” and hurry back off but it’s likely to be something that is quite accurate and something to look at and I just thought very seldom do we get something that at least has the appearance up front to be solid and sound biblically. It might be something you want to check out. We’re recording it with the box thing there, whatever they call it, and we’re going to watch it tonight and see what it is.

Jesus exposes the darkness of liberalism both theological liberalism and this lifestyle, this liberal lifestyle that says, “Well, we can live like this. God doesn’t matter.” My, how that has flooded our country today. Oh my goodness, the wickedness, the vileness, where a woman’s right to choose and, again, – I mean, in the last few years, the radical expansion and promotion and celebration of the sin of homosexuality. Unbelievable how our culture…and you might say, “Pastor, why is that?” I’ll tell you what bothers me so much because it seems like up until the last few years there was sort of a, “Well, it’s there and we ought to be kind to all people.” I believe we ought to be kind to all people but there was still a sense of shame. We’ve gone from shame to celebration. We’ve begun to glory in things that God calls evil in this country and here’s what’s worse, so many under the banner of Christianity are embracing these things. So, John writes to us and his says, “Look, if you say you fellowship with him and yet walk in darkness, you lie. You lie. You lie. And do not practice the truth.”

Now, you can’t fellowship with the one who is holy light. You can’t be in fellowship with the one who knows no unholiness and who knows no darkness and by whose very presence, exposes and makes sin to be what it really is. His very presence makes sin look dirty and sinful. There is no way you can be doing that and then walk in sin. Of course walking, again, here means a willful and wanton purposing of lifestyle so this is a very pointed and simple and straightforward statement. John just leaves no room for ifs, ands or buts. Wanton sexual immoralities and wanton and willful social carousings and settings that are unChristian and using as a lifestyle pattern vile language that shows the evil of our hearts, or lying or stealing or gossiping or you just name it. A willful lifestyle that condones those kinds of evils is not one who is in fellowship with the God of light.

Well, the darkness of liberalism is certainly exposed by the light of Jesus Christ but he goes to the other end of this thing: also the truth reveals the darkness of legalism. The darkness of legalism. We see this in verses 8 and 10. First of all, let me just say this: legalism works out a system whereby one can arrive at a feeling of having arrived or perfection. He can work his way to where he feels like both in his nature and in his practice he’s done what God requires and now he’s pleasing to God. That is, in and of his own natural earthly abilities and energies. But in this, we foolishly deceive ourselves if we think there’s a code of works, there’s a system of religion, there’s a ritual that we can somehow follow and if we follow it well enough, then we can feel good before God. I’m telling you, Jesus exposes the darkness of those systems of legalism.

A couple of things happen in legalism. First of all, we deny the principle of sin. That is, if there is a sin principle or a sin nature that is inherent in us, it is as much us as our bones are us and our hair is us and skin is us. It’s just there from conception. Look at verse 8, he says, “If we say that we have no sin,” that’s the idea of the sin principle or the sin nature. He says, “we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Here’s what, I thin, John is getting at: what John is saying is if you think there is some way, somehow, you can whip into shape your natural being, you can mold into certain behaviors your very human nature and somehow by whipping into shape and molding yourself and denying yourself and sacrificing and working and joining religions or whatever it may be, that somehow you can please a holy God, you deny that sin is the very essence of your being because look, if sin is the very essence of your being, everything you do is polluted by sin. There is nothing you can do that doesn’t have the stain of sin on it.

As I’ve heard many illustrations before: if I had a gallon of pristine pure water, no such thing really exists but as pure as we can possibly get it, and I put just one drop, one tiny drop of black dye, it permeates the whole gallon. Well, that’s what we are, we’re permeated and John said, “If you say you don’t have that sin,” verse 8, “you’re deceiving yourself and the truth is not in you.” That’s exactly what the legalist does. He feels like there is a goodness. Now, David Miller was telling me about this while we were here. I don’t want to go into it that deep but in some Southern Baptist circles there is quite a debate going on right now. There is the group like us who believe like 98% of all of our forefathers and Baptist theologians that man is totally depraved. Totally depraved. That means the totality of what we are is hopelessly corrupted by sin: our minds are corrupted by sin; our emotions are corrupted by sin; our wills is affected and corrupted by sin; our hearts are corrupted by sin. The totality of my being is hopelessly marred by sin. Now listen: total depravity does not mean you act as wickedly as you possibly could, it just means there’s no part of you that has any true godly goodness and so when you take a totally depraved being and try to do something good with him, he can put on a lot of outward shows but the nature of sin and depravity scars, marks, pollutes, stains, everything he is and does so nothing he does can be pleasing to God. We’re hopeless.

Anyways, there’s that group like us who holds to the older pattern and now there’s a new group that’s coming up and they say as reformed theologians are new, we’re not new, we’re old, it’s absolutely unequivocally clear in church history that we’re the old guys, but there’s a new group come up and they’re kind of along the free-will Baptists. I love my free-will Baptist brothers, I just disagree with them on some important points of doctrine but the free-will Baptists say that when man fell into depravity, he didn’t fall all the way. He fell a lot of the way and sin corrupted a lot of him but there is an inherent, genuine, godly goodness left whereby he can, in his own strength and in his own natural being, have the virtue and the wisdom and the goodness to turn and receive Jesus Christ with no aid from God. I’m telling you, I abhor that doctrine because once you open that door then you open the door to all the legalisms, all the sacramentalisms, all the hoop jumping that the world and the flesh and the devil has put on the church for all these centuries. It is the early Baptists who gave their lives, it’s the early Protestant reformers who were sacrificed as martyrs to go back to preach the total depravity of man and the absolute sovereignty of God and the preaching of the gospel and the work of the Spirit of God on the hearts of men is the only way men will see their sin and every turn to Christ to start with.

So, John is really hitting on all of these things when he says, “If you think you don’t have a sin principle, you lie and the truth is not in you.” So, every type of works or legalistic religion is gone when you understand that everything you do is tainted by the sin nature you inherited from your forefather the moment you were a one-celled human being in the womb of your mother who inherited their sin nature from their father, who inherited their sin nature from their father, all the way back to father Adam. Furthermore, not only did you inherit their nature, you inherited the guilt of Adam. You bore the guilt of being Adam’s when you were in the womb. Now, you proved you were guilty the moment you could choose right and wrong, the moment you could choose to be selfish or unselfish but you inherited a guilt. Some people say, “Well, I don’t know about this inherited guilt in Adam.” Well, you sure do like the inherited righteousness you get in Christ. I don’t know how you can claim the imputed goodness and righteousness of Christ if you want to reject the inherited guilt of Adam. It’s amazing how a guy loves all the parts that seem to be humanly conceivable but the biblical truths, they sort of leave off. There’s a lot there and I’m vacillating and going too far off track here.

Notice secondly, not only the principle of sin but notice secondly he says these legalists deny personal sin also. Look at verse 10. He says, “If we say that we have not sinned,” that’s talking about sinful acts that we participate in in our lives, not the sin principle, “we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.” Now, the Pharisees had this problem and even a man in church history that I really respect, John Wesley, who did a lot of great good and preached a thunderous gospel of commanding all these unsaved church members to come to repentance in faith. You do understand the Great Awakening with John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, roughly 1730-1750-1760 maybe, that Great Awakening shook Europe and shook the Colonies in the United States. Those men began the Methodist church out of the people who were saved. Do you know where the great, great, great majority of the converts came from? From the church pews. They went into the existing churches and said, “You’ve lost the gospel. You’ve lost the truth,” and they preached a thunderous truth of the sinfulness of man, the lostness of man and you must be born-again. They’d always ask John Wesley, “Why do you keep saying you must be born-again?” He said, “Because you must be born-again.” The point was, they had devolved into ritualism and going through hoop jumps and just joining the church instead of truly coming to know Christ. Isn’t it interesting how every few centuries the same thing repeats itself again: people get into churchianity and get comfortable going through the motions and God needs to raise up some great John and Charles Wesleys and George Whitefields and Jonathan Edwards and other great men to thunderously preach the gospel again.

But after John Wesley got going in the Methodist church, he stepped off the ledge, in my opinion, and he began to teach that you could arrive at perfection. There is a new blessing and a work of the Spirit that comes, John Wesley would say, and you can get to the point where you never sin again. That’s what John writes his epistle to absolutely refute. “If you say that you’ve not sinned, you make God a liar and his word is not in you.” We all have sinned, the principle still remaining in our unredeemed humanity and we all do sin in our lives so this whole concept of thinking you have arrived and I’m no longer sinful is a lie and the truth isn’t in you if that’s where you are.

John writes and says I want you to know that the truth revealed is Jesus Christ. He’s the truth of God. Then the truth reveals if you’re off on one end in liberalism, if you’re walking in wonton sin because you think God is okay with it, you’re not walking in the truth. If you’re over here in legalism thinking you don’t even have a sin nature and you’ve all of a sudden become above sin and you can keep all these commandments and never fail God, he said, then you’re a liar and the truth is not in you. You make God a liar if you do that. Now, the truth realized. John, what does it look like then if we’re true Christians? Let’s look at the truth realized and we see this in verses 7 and 9. First of all, notice our new purpose here. He says when you’re born-again and you know Christ and you fellowship with Christ, the purpose of your life changes. Look at it in verse 7, “but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light.” When you get the new heart, regeneration has occurred and you can call it being born-again, that’s what Jesus called it, then all of a sudden the purpose of your life changes. I’m not saying there’s never any pull back at all but there is a new purpose and all of a sudden you see yourself as a sinner, you see Christ as your only hope and source of salvation and there’s a new goal, a new aim to want to honor him and please him and obey him.

How do you look at a person like Jeff Noblit and look at my total non-church life and look at the Agnostic teaching of my childhood and there were some good spots in there and some good things, I’m thankful that God brought some things into my life here and there, but all of a sudden, driving my car back to Middle Tennessee State University, hearing a Presbyterian preacher on the radio, I came to know Christ as Lord and Savior and instantly, very imperfectly but instantly, I changed. I went from not ever having a thought of Christ unless maybe somebody brought him up to me but just thinking, “Yeah, you believe in him kind of basically and that’s all it is,” to now basically all I thought about was Christ and I wanted to please him and I wanted to serve him. I don’t mean to be arrogant about this or demeaning to Baptist folks but I run into so many Baptists in the next few weeks and months and it wasn’t long until I realized I don’t think these people can help me a whole lot. My goodness, the stuff I saw in churches. Now, you’ve got to understand I didn’t grow up in church. I thought everybody in church loved God, I thought they loved the Scriptures. I thought they would love me if I loved the Scriptures and within just a few years of Christianity, I had so many church members hating me. Just to be honest, I was brash and I was zealous and I was immature and I did a lot of stuff wrong, a lot of stuff wrong, and I’m so thankful to you for letting me grow up and grow through a lot of those things and we do that when we’re young and brash and immature. But the problem was, there wasn’t anybody really to follow. Boy, I hope that God is allowing us to have some degree of impact so that young men called into the ministry have a little better track to follow on if they want to try to follow the word of God.

Well, our purpose changes, that’s what John says here. Secondly, our practice changes. Our practice changes. Notice how he words it there in verse 9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” So as our hearts are changed and we purpose to walk in the light, we do find ourselves stepping out into the darkness but it bothers us different now. It troubles us in a new way. It breaks our hearts and we can’t just walk in the darkness. We may have stepped over into it but it bothers us and we confess our sins. Notice, here’s what this means is: we became when the new heart came in, a sin confessor. Not just, “Well, everybody does it. Oh, we’re all human.” No, here’s what we say, “Oh God, I’m so wicked. Oh God, I’m so fallen. My old heart is so antichrist and it is so dark.” What do you think the Apostle Paul meant when he said, “Who will deliver us from the body of this death?” What was he saying? He’s saying, “My old fallen unredeemed humanity I still walk in down here, it’s just death to me. The new true me hates the old sinful me.” There’s a warfare raging in there. The flesh, Paul said, wages war against the spirit and the spirit wages war against the flesh so we may not do what we please. I no longer just listen to my wants and desires, I try to go to the word of God and I filter my desires and I filter my life through what the word says and I get into small groups because I’m weak. I don’t get in a small group because I’m committed, my stars, you get in a small group because you’ve got to have some help. Or get in a good solid Bible believing church where membership is meaningful and where compassionate accountability and discipline is a part of the life of the church. Why? Because I’m a strong committed Christian? No, because I’m weak and need help.

Just this afternoon, just this afternoon, meditating on this text, I thought about things in my mind and I thought about what I’m hearing some people do and I said, “Oh God, thank you I’m in a church where if I started down that road my brothers are coming after me.” That’s good. Why? Because I’m committed? No, I’m weak. I’m weak. A church member told me this morning about some people they are closely associated with who are involved in willful, open, deliberate wickedness and they’re good standing members of a church down the road. They said that if that church would just do what the Bible says and lovingly confront them and call them to repentance and threaten them with being excommunicated if they didn’t try to do better, that might cure this whole problem I’m having to deal with. You tell me: 42,000 Southern Baptist churches, what if every one of the 42,000 Southern Baptist churches really tried, we’re never perfect, but really tried to enforce biblical convictions on church members, I’m telling you, we’d clean up this nation. We don’t have a political problem, we don’t have a republican problem, we don’t have a democratic problem, we’ve got a church problem because we’re the light and we’re the salt and our light is dark and our salt has lost its savor.

John says here that the practice of your life is different now. You purpose to walk in the light. You may step over into the darkness but you’re a confessor and a repenter and you want back on track. You can’t wait to get back to church to hear the word of God because your heart is so ugly, dirty and vile and wicked. You need the truth pumped back into you again. Some of you go home and before it hits 11 o’clock you need another sermon. That’s why we’ve got it online, anchoredintruth.org, just pull one up, plug one in and say, “Oh God, help me.” Get thyself to a nunnery. No, get thyself unto the word of God. Need small groups. Need fellowship. Need brothers and sisters. Amen? That’s the new practice of what we are. We are confessors, we see what we are. We’ve got to get back on track and notice the beauty and the glory and the wonder of this.

Notice our provision, that’s the third thing: our new purpose, our new practice and notice our provision. Verses 7 and 9 again, “but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” I believe that’s talking about the sin principle. We can know that God has cleansed us from the guilt and the effect, if you will, the eternal punishment of having a sin nature and then verse 9, “ If we confess our sins,” if we’re one of those sin repenters and confessors because we’ve got a new heart, “He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Now, we confess as best our finite minds grasp our sin and, therefore, able to comprehend it and say to God, “I agree with you, God. That was wicked. I’m evil. I need your forgiveness.” That’s where we are but, listen, that’s our upward confession but his downward forgiveness encompasses his omniscient infinite knowledge of the depths of our unrighteousness and he forgives everything he knows about us. That’s much greater than what you confess. It’s just too glorious to be true but that’s what we have.

It says, “He is faithful and righteous.” In other words, he’s faithful in the sense that he’s absolutely fully and completely reliable. You have a Savior that is totally – look, you’re looking at a pastor that’s not 100% totally and completely reliable. I want to be. It’s my heart to be but I’m just not. I stumble and fall like you do but thank God you’re not looking at your priest, you’re not looking at the pope, you’re not looking at the cardinal or the bishop in the terms of church hierarchy though the word “bishop” is a good word for “pastor.” You’re looking at a man called to preach the word who is a fellow pilgrim and a fellow sinner saved by grace. My job is to keep pointing you to the one who is always reliable. Did you hear me? If you as the purpose and the pattern of your life is now for Jesus Christ and the building of his church and bringing him glory and you walk in the pattern of purposing to walk in the light, though sometimes you stumble in the darkness and you’re a confessor when you do, then you can be absolutely for certain that Jesus Christ looks down on you with total reliability to cleanse you of all your unrighteousness.

How are you going to sleep tonight, thinking about that? Is that not good stuff? Faithful, it means he’s reliable and righteous, he says, to forgive us of our sins. Righteous means he’s qualified. Listen to me: Buddha is not qualified; Confucius is not qualified; the pope in Rome is not qualified. Jesus is qualified before the heavenly Father to take your case and win it convincingly every time. What a Savior. What a Savior.

Well, John wants to combat the false viewpoints probably and primarily the Gnostic heresies which basically were saying just give in to your lusts, God understands. Look, I can deal with any man and any woman who is struggling. Someone comes to me and says, “Pastor, I’m struggling with this lust. I’m struggling with this but I don’t want to know all your story, just talk to me in principles.” But they say, “Pastor, I hate myself for it. It’s dirty and it’s vile and it’s wicked. It dishonors my Lord. I want some help. I want to be accountable. I want to work on this.” Do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to be totally confidential and we’re going to help that brother. Amen? And if he falls 100 times but is a repenter, we’re going to still put our arms him and love him and help him and keep it quiet and nobody else needs to know. Amen? That’s the way Christian brothers and sisters are. But what I can’t tolerate is a hardened stiff neck and a brazen spirit where a person gets in sin and they won’t let the brothers and sisters help them and the reason why they won’t let the brothers and sisters help them is because they’re walking in darkness. They don’t want the light and John says that’s a lie. You’re not a Christian if that’s your attitude and if that’s your heart.

Don’t you love the Bible? Where are you going to get stuff like this? Reader’s Digest? It’s just not out there, folks. Only in here.

Let’s stand in prayer on this Sunday night.