Ep. 120 | 123 John Part 3: Congruent with Christ
Speaker: Michael Rogers
Available on all podcasting platforms
-
Available on all podcasting platforms -
Summary
Michael addresses the importance of congruency and the audacity of claiming to have a sinless life.
Scriptures Explored: 1 John 1:5-10
contact@parableministries.com
https://www.parableministries.com
https://www.instagram.com/parable_ministries/
Music created by Chad Hoffman
Artwork created by Anthony Kuenzi
Speaker’s Bio
Michael Rogers is an Oregon native and Arizona resident. He is a husband to his amazing, spectacular, wonderful wife and a new father to his son. He spends the rest of his time working in landscaping as an irrigation technician, earning his M.Div at Phoenix Seminary, studying and sharing God's Word, and throwing Star Wars into all of it.
Transcript
Intro:
Hey there, welcome to Pickled Parables. This podcast is presented by Parable Ministries as a Bible teaching resource. Thank you for joining us. Pickled Parables is a podcast about taking in and living out the Bible. Here we will study, contemplate and testify to the Bible's incredible teachings and how it leads us to live better lives. To stay up to date with all things parable, follow us on Instagram at parable underscore ministries and visit our website at parableministries.com. We hope today's message finds you well.
Message:
Hello there, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Pickled Parables.
I am Michael Rogers, one of the Bible teachers here at Parable Ministries.
I am excited to be once again opening up God's Word with you today.
For this episode, our passage will be 1 John, chapter 1, verses 5 through 10, and we will be continuing our series going through John's letters.
To begin, I will just read through the passage, and then we will kick it off from there.
Verse 5, This is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you, that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
But if we walk in the light, as he 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 we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us.
Now, to set a little bit of context here again, John is a shorter book as compared to other books in the New Testament, and as we've noted already, he doesn't give us a lot of specific information about the context to his letter.
The letter isn't addressed to a specific church like many of Paul's epistles, but it does seem to address Christians in a general sense.
The frequent usage of children or my little children or beloved children indicates that this is written to Christians and not an evangelistic letter.
As we read John, we will be able to pick up a few clues as to what John's purpose of the letter is and what situation he's trying to address.
In today's passage, John really sets the stage for the rest of the book, and to do so, he introduces his theme of congruency in Christian living.
In mathematics, two shapes are considered congruent if they are identical in shape and size.
If you can match up two shapes, one on top of the other, they're considered congruent.
So you could say here that John is concerned about a Christianized version of matching the life of Jesus.
He's concerned about Christians living congruently with the Word of God.
The theme of congruency isn't just interspersed throughout the letter, it really dominates it.
In today's passage, those who walk in the light have fellowship with God, whereas those who walk in darkness do not.
The rest of 1 John is full of very similar parallel statements that give us both sides of the same coin.
One side is a positive example, the other is a negative.
One example later is that one who loves his brother clearly loves God, where the one who hates his brother simply does not have the love of God.
But throughout the letter, there appeared to be two groups of people that John is talking about.
Not two, just about.
One group appears to be his listeners who presumably love God, but there's also another group of false teachers that he talks about in Chapter 4, perhaps even a group of self-professed Christians who are not living congruent Christian lives.
In fact, their false Christianity is evidenced by their incongruency.
Their false Christianity is evidenced by them walking in darkness.
Their everyday lives did not match the Word of God.
It did not match the life of Jesus.
So as the context of the letter begins to take a little shape, we have a group that John is writing to, we have another group of false teachers that are throwing the recipients of John's letter into confusion.
While today we might be a little bit more familiar with people and groups who claim Christianity but in reality are walking in darkness, John's audience likely was not.
By most estimates, the church was only between 40 to 60 years old at the time.
Splinter groups weren't necessarily all that common that early.
They happened, but they weren't that common.
Some scholars think that the false teachers in 1 John represent an early form of Gnosticism that plagued their early church shortly after the disciples' deaths.
Some scholars think that it was an early form of claiming to have a unique and special relationship with God that not every Christian had.
You had super Christians who had special access, special revelation, and special exemptions from righteous living.
But no matter who this group was, John wrote in Chapter 5 so that his recipients would know that they have eternal life.
John hoped to clear this confusion and give confidence to his readers in their own salvation.
Now, a lot of times Bible teachers will take that verse in Chapter 5 and make 1 John into a book that is only about testing one's own salvation, all about confirming whether or not you yourself are truly in the Kingdom of God, making self-examination the only lens through which this book can be interpreted.
However, while assurance of one's salvation is an important theme of John's letter, it's important element to it, I would suggest that it needs to be held together with the context that there were groups of so-called super-Christians splitting off and claiming to have a relationship with God that is superior to that of John's readers.
This letter serves not only as an encouragement and guide for assurance of salvation, but also as an indictment against any sect of Christianity that departs from the message of Jesus Christ that John had seen and heard with his own eyes and ears, as we heard about in the last episode.
Now verse 5 reads this, This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
That message, I believe, is in part the five verses we are studying today, as well as the broader gospel message that John began to introduce in verses 1 through 4, and pops up throughout the whole letter.
Here John begins by saying that God is light and in him, there is no darkness.
Now light in relation to God might at first conjure up images of perhaps Jesus appearing to Saul and blinding him, or perhaps of when God passed by Moses and his face shone for days on end.
But here, however, light and darkness become symbols of good and evil.
For John, God is holy, God is righteous, and in him, there is no evil or wickedness.
None whatsoever.
Light and darkness are very common placeholders for moral goodness and moral evil.
So from here, from verse 5, John launches into a series of conditional clauses or if-then statements that are arranged parallel to each other so that all together, they better inform our interpretation of the whole series.
The first conditional clause is in verse 6.
If we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
Seems rather straightforward.
The word walk here and most of the time in scripture, means literally to walk around, and it is a commonly used word to describe someone's way of life, their pattern of behavior.
It's not about one particular point in time, but rather, just the general pattern of one's way of life.
So we can understand the if-then statement this way.
If someone makes the claim to have fellowship with God, to have a relationship with God, to have communion with God, while at the same time is living a life of evil, that person is simply a liar.
Why?
Because God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
We cannot have fellowship with God, to have a close, intimate relationship with God, while being evil.
We cannot claim to be a special Christian, while living a lifestyle of sin.
You just can't, because God is light.
We cannot have fellowship with God, while being evil.
And anyone who says otherwise is simply a liar.
But on the flip side, John continues in verse 7 to say, but if we walk in light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus' Son cleanses us from all sin.
There are two results of walking in the light here.
One is fellowship with one another, which shouldn't be terribly surprising.
Churches have more than enough stories of damage done when congregants sin against one another.
So walking in the light, walking in righteousness, results in fellowship with each other.
That the second result is an ongoing cleansing work of Jesus Christ.
It's easy to read the verse at first glance and conclude that walking in the light earned salvation, but that's not the case.
John isn't here talking about justification, salvation, or forgiveness in this verse.
The present tense in the Greek here indicates an ongoing activity and not a one-time event.
Walking in the light or living a pattern of righteousness has a cleansing, sanctifying effect.
And because of this, because you're being cleansed, you can have fellowship with each other.
You can have close, intimate relationship with God.
Just like any regular relationship, your relationship with God can be affected by your sin.
And by affected, I mean, imagine you're married.
Maybe you don't have to imagine that, some of you.
But imagine you're married and you lie and cheat against your spouse.
You're still married, for now, but your relationship is heavily damaged.
It's ruined.
There's no going back to the way things were.
And it takes time and trust to rebuild that.
Sometimes it doesn't get rebuilt.
Now, a relationship with God is often compared to marriage.
And the analogy does break down.
But if you lie and cheat against a spouse and they are offended, then it damages your relationship.
How much more so when we sin against God?
Verse eight goes on to say, If we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
This cleansing effect does not mean perfection now.
It serves as a strong indictment against any person or group of professing Christians who claim to live without sin.
I once went to school with a young man who actually claimed just that.
He claimed that the blood of Jesus allows him to live a perfect, sinless life every moment of every day.
I had to do some pretty wild mental gymnastics to interpret different passages of scripture to support this conclusion, but this verse is designed to cut right through all that confusion and just stop it in its tracks.
If we say that we are without sin, if we ever say we do not sin, that sin is not present within us, then we are simply self-deceived.
It is very likely that someone like my friend, he didn't come up with his theology on his own.
It's very likely that someone else tried to teach him this lie that you can be without sin in this life.
But ultimately, that individual is self-deceived.
Someone who claims to be without sin is actively choosing not to see reality, to see what is clear in front of their faces, to see that we are sinful creatures by nature, that we have a natural tendency toward wickedness.
Anyone who denies that are ultimately self-deceived, John says.
But you know what the opposite of self-deception is?
Confession.
Verse 9 says, If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Confession literally means to say the same thing or to agree with something.
In this case, confessing your sins, agreeing with the reality that we have sinned and are going to sin again.
Confession is coming to faith in Jesus Christ, believing not only that he will forgive us, but that he is faithful and just to do so.
Ultimately, verse 10, if we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and the truth is not in us.
Confession is believing and proclaiming the same as God, that we have sinned.
Because it's not just a matter of interpretation or personal opinion that we have sinned.
It is something that God tells us here in 1 John and throughout scripture.
To claim to be without sin, you're not just self-deceived, you're not just lying to everybody else.
1 John verse 10 says that if we say that, if we say that we are without sin, we make God a liar.
We're saying God is a liar.
But if we confess our sins, if we come to Jesus in faith, in the spirit of confession, he is faithful and he is just to forgive us our sins.
That forgiveness is the basis for our fellowship and communion with God.
It's not us pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.
It's not us trying to be super Christians who have some special ability to not sin and to resist temptation at all times, always.
It's faith and confession in the Lord and Jesus Christ.
It's the forgiveness of our sins that he bought for us with his own blood.
In verse 9, it says that he's both faithful and he is just to forgive us our sins.
The justice of God's forgiveness is a complicated topic in theology, but the basic question is this, is how can I just God let sinners get away with it, in a sense?
How can God be just to forgive?
And it boils down to, on the cross, when Jesus was hanging there, God applied the punishment for our sins to Jesus.
Instead of us bearing the burden of our sin, instead of enduring the punishment ourselves, instead of enduring the anger, the wrath of God on our own bodies, Jesus took it all upon himself.
The audacity of saying that we are without sin, the sin of calling God a liar was applied to Jesus even.
The full wrath of God, instead of being applied to us, it was applied to his son.
That is how God can be just, because he did dole out the punishment.
He just found it fit to apply it towards someone else, to apply it to someone who didn't deserve it, to apply it to someone who willingly took it.
Because God was the one who was offended by our sins, he found it fit to be satisfied in applying our sin on Jesus.
When we believe in Jesus, when we have faith, we are forgiven.
And that is the basis of our relationship.
And in that initial moment when we first believe, not only are we forgiven, but we are, the theological word is imputed Christ righteousness.
Not only is our sin applied to Christ, but in turn, his righteousness is applied to us.
So not only are we just forgiven, not only is the slate clean, but we are seen as righteous.
We become adopted as sons and daughters of God.
And we have that relationship now.
We have a new nature that isn't hell bent toward committing sin.
Paul says in one of his letters that we are new creatures, that we are a new creation.
The old has passed.
The old natural sinner is gone.
We have a new nature, new tendencies.
We are still at war with ourselves in a sense, because we're still in our physical, earthly, sinful bodies.
But we have a new, new life within us.
We have the Holy Spirit inside of us.
We are not yet perfect, because we still battle temptation, we still battle against the flesh.
But that's where John's verse 9 comes in.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive those two, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
I'm trying really hard not to jump ahead to chapter 2, but it tells us that Christ is our advocate for when we sin.
He's our mediator between us and God when we sin.
When we offend God, yet again, Jesus doesn't have to die all over again.
He's advocating for us.
So if there's anything to take away from this episode, it would be, first and foremost, the gospel.
Christ died for our sins, that he bore the full wrath of God on our behalf.
Now we have communion and fellowship with God, that no one can take away from us, because Jesus Christ advocates for us on our behalf.
In a more practical sense, do not be scared of super-Christians who claim to have a more special relationship with God than you, because they do not.
Do not be discouraged when someone comes up to you and says that they have beaten sin, they have overcome temptation when you struggle with it every day.
And when we sin, do a quick check to see what your general pattern of behavior is.
You know, are you walking in darkness?
You're walking in light?
Maybe ask a friend for a different perspective, because it's really easy, and I know this because it's me, it's really easy to focus on your own sin and make it much more pervasive than it really is.
So maybe get a second opinion from someone you know and you trust and who knows you.
So do a quick self-examination, see if you're walking in the darkness.
But no matter the case, let's say you go through this whole self-examination process and you conclude that you're really just a horrible, horrible, sinful person, and you don't know God, you've never believed.
Regardless of whether or not you're supposedly not a Christian at all, or if you're just a Christian who stumbled, the answer is still the same.
You go to Jesus.
If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, that applies to everybody.
So, don't get stuck in this downward spiral of eternal self-examination when you sinned.
The answer is always the same.
When you're a sinner, it's to go to Jesus because he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.
We have an advocate in him.
He's the propitiation for our sins.
He's the one who took the wrath of God for our sins.
The answer is and always was the same, to come to Jesus in faith.
Outro:
Thank you for listening to Pickled Parables. If you enjoyed this message, please rate us, subscribe and share with your friends. If you're interested in more things like this, check out our secondary podcast called My Dusky Bible. To stay up to date with all things Parable, follow us on Instagram at parable underscore ministries and visit our website at parableministries.com. Parable is a volunteer organization and we would deeply appreciate your prayers. Thank you for joining us today, we'll catch you later.
See More Available Episodes Here
