Simple Things: 1 John 5:11 - 12

Simple Things

1 John 5:11-12

            So think about three things: one is chaos, one is lonliness, and the other is fear. These are three things that you and I, in our culture and in our life, face all the time. Chaos, lonliness, and fear. Me, as somebody who, I have a beautiful wife, I have two lovely kids, I have a home, I get three meals a day (I’m pretty sure), I have two cars that work most of the time, I have wonderful friends and a beautiful community to be part of and a job that I really love even though sometimes it’s hard and you guys are frustrating. But in all of that, I still taste the chaos of life. I still am impacted by lonliness. And I still face fear. And you can’t run away from it. Last week I talked about this tide of evil – that we all kind of are holding our breath under – that came out of the Garden. And some of those waves that we experience are chaos, lonliness, and fear. Now, if you say, “No, I don’t experience those”, then you’re in a fourth wave, and that’s denial. But tonight we’re starting a series, up to Lent, called Simplicity, or Simple Things, and what we are going to talk about are just some simple verses that we think are really core to following Jesus, and really core to maybe being part of the Village. And so tonight we’re going to talk about 1 John 5:11-12.

            Now, John was a disciple of Jesus, and John was ostentatious enough to say in his gospel, his story about Jesus, that he was the disciple that Jesus loved; that’s how he identified himself. John writes in the New Testament and he writes three letters. He named them creatively: 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John, and he wrote a gospel called the gospel of John. I don’t think he had any part in giving titles to them, because that wasn’t part of the thing. But we titled them very creatively. He wrote these. And in his first letter, in 1 John 5, he basically summarizes everything he says in the gospels and everything he says in his letters. And it’s: “This is the testimony that God has given us eternal life and this life is in his son. Whoever has the son has life and whoever does not have the son does not have life.” This echoes one of the major themes of Scripture, and that is that life can only come through Jesus. But John starts with this word: “testimony”. That this is “the testimony”. Some translations say, “record”. But this is a testimony. To have a testimony, or a record of something, you’re proclaiming something. And the proclamation that he’s making is that eternal life is in Jesus. That God has given us eternal life. But to have that kind of testimony, you have to come from somewhere. You have to have an experience of something. And so, let me read to you a little bit out of 1 John 1, as to what John’s testimony actually is out of which he’s making this proclamation that God has given us eternal life. So chapter one of John says this: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched.” Now I just want you to catch that theme there. John is saying, “the thing that we have seen and the thing that we have heard.” Well if you remember back two sermons to Advent, in Advent we talked about how this angel shows up to the shepherds, and then the thing that they’re proclaiming to everybody, and the thing that they’re talking about to each other is the things that they have seen and the things that they have heard. And then we jumped forward last week and we looked at Acts 3, and we looked at John and Peter, after Jesus had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, and they are in front of the Jewish rulers, who are saying, “You’ve got to stop teaching about Jesus’s healing and Jesus’s name.” And they’re like, “Well, if you’re telling us that we have to stop talking about what we’ve seen and what we’ve heard, then good luck. Because we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve seen and what we’ve heard.” And John, in 1 John, adds something: “Something we’ve touched.” “We actually wrestled with the Word. We saw the Word. We heard the Word.”

            There’s this relationship. So when John is saying, “And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life”, he’s saying, “I saw eternal life, I heard eternal life, I touched eternal life.” And then he continues and says, “This we proclaim concerning the Word of life: the life appeared, we have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ, we write this to make our joy complete.” So, John says that he wants to tell you that there are two reasons he has this testimony that God has given you eternal life (that it’s yours). One of these is reasons is so that you can have fellowship with him. With John. So you can have fellowship with John. Now, when he’s saying that, he’s not saying that he wants to hang out with you and with his first century contemporaries at McDonald’s. That’s not what he’s talking about when he says fellowship. And for you foodies, he’s not talking about Zinburger or any kind of high-falooting place like Harvest, or any other places that you might go to if you’re a person who loves food. He’s not talking about sitting around, hanging out, and having fun. And if you’re a kid, In-and-Out Burger. When John says fellowship, what he’s talking about is communion. He’s talking about the eating of God’s body and the drinking of his blood. The thing that connects us to life. So he’s saying: “What I want is for you to be able to come, together with me, and be in fellowship with Jesus. I want us to be in community together, with Jesus”. And then he says: “Because I want my joy to be made complete.” Now, Gareth is sitting here. Gareth makes amazing sweet rolls. Now I know Gareth well enough to know that when he makes sweet rolls, there’s a reason that he gives them away to his friends. Number one is that he wants us all to be fatter than him so that he can feel good about himself. No that’s not trueJ. Number two is that his joy is made complete when he sees you eat, or hears about you eating his sweet roll, and you just melt, as the calories and the sugar and the butter…right? His joy is made complete when you taste the thing that he tastes. The thing that he enjoys. So when John is saying, “This is the testimony, that God has given us eternal life”, what he’s saying is, “I want you to be with me in this eternal life, and the way that I have touched it, seen it, and heard it, I want you to touch it, see it, and hear it. I want to see that on your face. I want to hear the stories of your experience of Jesus.”

            Now, in the gospel of John, John 4:6, Jesus says something really interesting. He says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. And nobody gets to the Father except through me.” By me. I’m it. Now, most of us, if you’ve grown up in the church, maybe you’ve thought, “Wow, that’s a great statement by Jesus”. Most of us think, when someone asks, “What’s true?”, you say, “Well Jesus says he’s the truth.” Well here’s the cool thing about that that I haven’t told you in awhile and it’s that, in the Old Testament, we have the Law and the Prophets. And a Jewish person would call that, in general, their Torah. But the Law and the Prophets, for a Jewish person, was called The Way, The Truth, and The Life. And so a Jewish person would say, the way to God is through the Law and the Prophets. The way to truth is through the Law and the Prophets. The way to life is through the Law and the Prophets. But Jesus said, “No, no, no, it’s not the Law and the Prophets, it’s me. The Law and the Prophets just point to me. I’m the way, I’m the truth, I’m the life.”

            Now, John says, “This is my testimony, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” But at the end of the gospel of John, John says that the reason he’s telling this whole story, and if you read the first letter of John you will find this out, is because he wants you to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. But there are some problems with belief, right? You can’t just “believe” something (what does that mean?). If you’re going to take hold of this proclamation and say, “This is my testimony. That God has given you eternal life and this life is in his Son, and he who has the Son has life and he who does not have the Son does not have life” – if that’s going to be my testimony, if that’s what I’m going to proclaim, then what does that actually look like? How does that actually happen? Well John, in 1 John 5:1, kind of lays that out for us. It says this: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”. Okay, so everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. So the first thing that you have to believe, the first thing that you have to assent to is that Jesus is the Christ, and is born of God. So part of following God, part of having the testimony that eternal life comes from God – to be able to proclaim that – you have to be able to say, “Okay, well Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is the King. He’s the Son of God.” You have to be able to just say it.

            But to say something doesn’t really mean anything, right? You have to have some kind of action that goes underneath that. Something that shows that it’s true. It says, “And everyone who loves the Father, loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God. By loving God, and carrying out his commands. This is love for God: to obey his commands and his commands are not burdensome.” The other day, somehow my son said something about “How do you know that I love you?”, and I said, “When you obey!” Right? What does God say, what does John say is involved in believing? Involved in eternal life? Loving God and his people, loving Jesus and his people, and obeying. So we have a statement: “I believe that Jesus is God and that he was born of God”, which for an ancient person is just saying that Jesus is God. And now I’m willing to act on that. But, you know what, acting on that without any kind of motivation doesn’t go very well. After awhile, belief and acting on belief, without any motivation, doesn’t do anything. And so, it says, “For everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” So, part of believing is making the statement. Part of believing is obeying and loving. But the reason that you would do that is that there is this hope that you would overcome the world.

            Now, last week I told some people I was going to go see Rogue One. And everybody said, “Oh, well it’s going to end up in your sermon.” And I was thinking, 1 John 5:11-12 – Star Wars – I don’t think that’s going to work. ….Oh, it does. And for the people who said it was going to be in my sermon, here you go. There is this scene with this monk, and he’s blind, and the monk has this mantra that is, “The force is one with me and I am one with the force”, and he repeats it when he’s nervous. Or something along those lines. Now there’s this scene at the end of the movie, where this guy and a few of the rebels are pinned down, and they need to get from one place to the next to flip this switch. So the monk stands up as the laser bolts are flying around and he holds his little staff and he’s blind and he begins to walk into the battle field, saying, “I am one with the force and the force is one with me. I am one with the force and the force is one with me,” and he just walks straight through the battle field. As things are flying at him, and he makes it across, and I’ll leave it there. But it’s a pretty compelling scene. And as I think about 1 John 5:11-12, these two verses are very similar to the mantra of this monk. Because as you and I face chaos, lonliness, and fear, the thing that we’ve been given in belief and obedience and love and hope of overcoming, the way that we actually practice that is to stand up, grab our little staff and say, “This is the testimony, that God has given to us eternal life and this life is in the Son. And he who has the Son has life, and he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. And this is the testamony….”

            Now here’s what happens when you begin to embrace eternal life. Because, when you’re embracing eternal life, when you’re willing to make the proclamation that Jesus is the Son of God, when you make that proclamation and when you begin to love his people and love him, and embrace the hope that he will overcome, you begin to face chaos. And the thing that you face chaos with is truth. Because there are lots of virtuous people in the world who don’t know Jesus. You do not need Jesus to have virtue. You do not need Jesus to be good. But you need Jesus to have a reason to be good that’s not selfish. That’s not about you. You need a construct that’s moral to ground you. And the thing that’s different about Christianity is that Christianity comes along, and the God of the Universe says, “I am the anchor. I am the Way. The Truth. And the Life. I will give you a boundary. I will put a way.” Now I don’t know how many of you follow history, or like to read about World War II, but when the war ended and the Nazis were on trial, and most of the western world was saying, “How could you do these things?” And the people would say, “Well, but we were just operating according to the rules of our country.” And if you go into the courtroom at Nuremberg, you will see, on one side of that courtroom, there is Adam and Eve and the Serpent, and on the other is the Ten Commandments. And eventually the appeal is, “Well isn’t there a higher law? Isn’t there something beyond your virtually-constructed truth?” Well, in Christianity, eternal life is to say, “You know what’s going to anchor you in the chaos? The thing that’s going to keep you bobbing straight, and not caught off guard and terrified in the chaos of evil? Is Jesus. The way, the truth, and the life”.

            Now, the second thing that we face is lonliness. And you would think that maybe this doesn’t connect, but it does. The thing that eternal life offers us, in the face of lonliness, is justice. When you are saying, “This is the testamony that God has given us: eternal life and this life is in his Son and he who has the Son has life,” what you are saying is that there is a justice. Let me explain this. Justice is the highest virtue. Because without justice, you can’t have friendship. Without justice, you are lonely. Think about it: all of our relationships are built on wrongs. You can love me, you can care about me, you can be so nice to me for years, and you do one thing to me, and you will never fix it. Ever. I will hate you for it. Oh, I’ll be nice to you. I’ll be kind. I’ll pretend that everything’s okay. But there is a wound and it will always be there. Because we cry out for justice; it’s in our pores, it’s the thing that makes life right. Now, 5,000 years ago, the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Abraham, climbed up a mountain with his son. And his son was named Isaac, and according to Abraham, he thought that God had asked him to sacrifice him (which I believe he did). So they went up the hill and Abraham got ready to kill Isaac, and all of the sudden, God says, “No. Wait.” And he provides a different sacrifice. And any historian worth his salt (if you took your humanities 101 class you would have found out) that the moment that God stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son was the moment we can trace in history when human sacrifice began to slow down and stop. That is when human sacrifice began to stop being one of the primary ways of worshipping God. That’s not that it didn’t continue, but it changed in that moment. When God stepped in and said, “Wait. There’s another way.”

            Now, 2,000 years ago, Jesus climbed up a hill, and was killed. And justice was meted out for him so that, when I am super nice to you for a couple years, and then I do something stupid and hurt you, that justice is actually paid, by Jesus. That you and I can actually be friends, because now, in eternal life, we can taste justice. And do you know how we taste justice? Through Jesus. Jesus, who stepped in between our marriages, our friendships, our stupidity, our arrogance, and provides justice for us. So that we can eat the bread, drink the wine, and be in fellowship together. And actually taste goodness. So the way that we stand in the way of lonliness is through justice. That’s what eternal life offers.

            Last, is love. And really, we could say, grace, love, belonging. But really what eternal life offers, when it speaks out against fear, is it really speaks about belonging. Because when you belong somewhere, and to someone, you are loved in spite of yourself. Not because of who you are. Because you belong. That’s what grace is: it’s belonging. It’s actually why we have a belonging service every year. We have a doctrine of belonging at the Village. You belong here and you should be reminded of that, but it’s not that you belong in this particular little community. It’s that you belong to the table. You belong to Jesus. There’s nothing you can do, or can be done to you, that will separate you from the love of God. Nothing. So as we face chaos, lonliness, and fear, my encouragement is for you to imagine yourself as the monk, as chaos and lonliness and fear come flying at you, to stand up, hold your staff, know that you’re blind, and begin to say: “And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life”. And when you hear “eternal life” I want you to hear, “God has given us truth. God has given us justice. God has given us belonging. And this truth, this justice, this belonging, is in Jesus.” And I want you to repeat that mantra. Because no matter how hard you work as good Americans to avoid any kind of adversity and surround your life, as much as you possibly can, without any chaos, without any lonliness and fear, you will face it. It will come knock on your door. And it will meet you every day, and it seeps into your pores. And the only way that you and I can stand against it is to stand with Jesus. To stand in life. So my invitation is simply to take that verse as your mantra this year, and to remember, “That this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son, and whoever has the Son has life, and whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”

Community Part 3

The disciples had everything in common. They were in fellowship together.  Fellowship is a weird word.  Think about the passage with me for a minute - when we talk about having all things in common, that doesn’t mean that members of the early church could walk into Peter’s house and say, “Hey the Lord has need of your television.  Give it to me because we have all things in common.” No. I don’t think that’s exactly what this means. I think they had something in common that tied everything together. What was that? That was Jesus.  Of course, this is the easy answer, but this is what pulled them together. This is what held the early church together.

Paul, the apostle, begins to develop the concept of fellowship with regard to the Lord’s Supper. The idea of fellowship, having things in common, can be translated in many different ways.  For example, the participating in, the sharing in, or being together.  The idea that something holds us together, that we participate in something, that we are in fellowship the very thing we have in common is clear in Paul’s writing.  In 1 Corinthians chapter 10:16  Paul states, Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks, a participation, a sharing in, a fellowship in the blood of Christ. Is not the bread we break, a participation, a sharing in the body of Christ because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake in one loaf.  What pulls us into oneness? This participation, this sharing in Christ death and resurrection. The apostle John loves this word fellowship and uses it to glue his letters together. In 1 John 1:7 John says: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship. We have a participation with one another and the blood of Jesus, his Son purifies us from all our sin.”

If we walk with Jesus, we have a relationship with each other. We share in his journey. Walking together is a togetherness journey towards Jesus and with Jesus.  In the same passage John says, we proclaim to you, being the apostles, what we have seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. Knowing Jesus allows us all to have relationship where there was no relationship - so that you may have fellowship with us and our fellowship is with the father and his son Jesus Christ we write this to make our joy complete. John is saying, we have fellowship with Jesus, and we are telling you about Jesus so that the barrier between you and us, between God and you can be broken. We can journey together with Jesus who makes all things right. The resurrection is what makes us community together, so there has to be a response to this. 

Community Part 2

From the being of time, humanity has been trying to fix itself.   Humans are trying to make things right in the different communities that they have destroyed. Environmentalists try desperately to reconcile the environment. Animal rights activists try to reconcile the animal kingdom to the human kingdom.  Psychologists try to reconcile man to each other. Ultimately, humankind is on a quest to reconcile itself to God.

What we don’t realize is that God is the only one who can reconcile man to Himself.  If you read the New Testament, you will quickly see that the early church believed that God did reconcile the world to himself in the person of Jesus.  The narrative goes something like this: God sends his son Jesus to earth as a man, fully man and fully God, to die on the cross for our sins; to make right what was made wrong. On the third day, Jesus rose from the dead and he went home to prepare a place for us.   One of the interesting things about this narrative is that Jesus doesn’t choose Rambo to pass on his story and its reconciling power.  He passes the baton to the disciples - these 12 men who followed him for at least three years. He passes it on to a community, and he entrusts this group of men to move the gospel forward.

If you look at the gospel of John, the last of the four gospels in the New Testament, in particular John 13:34, you get this small indication of what Jesus thought about how this gospel was going to go forward. In verse 34 he says “A new command I give unto you, love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this shall all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

How are people going to know Jesu? They are going to know Jesus and know you as followers of Him by the way you interact with each other and the way you interact in community. Community is an interesting word. If God is entrusting us the church, the ecclesia, the community, with the gospel, with this reconciliation, this offering of Jesus’ victories to the world so they can be reconciled to God so they can be made right, so they can have perfect relationships with God. What is this word community because community is not in the bible? There idea of community is prevalent within the New Testament and the Old Testament but the word itself does not exist, so what is community?

To have community, you have to have something in common. Think about it in basketball terms. There are a bunch of guys who like basketball so they have the game of basketball in common.  Most likely, they will play basketball together, or at least they will watch basketball. There are two parts to community. First, what we have in common, and second, the response to what we have in common.

It might sound kind of silly to ask, what does the church have in common? What does the community of faith - followers of Jesus - have in common with itself? That should be obvious in the name - Jesus is who we have in common, but do we truly grasp the depth of this statement?

If we have Jesus in common, how should we respond to him?  Acts chapter two verses 38 through 47 offer us a look into how the early church responded to Jesus as a community. Leading up to verse 38, Jesus has given his disciples the command to go preach the gospel to all nations. He has handed off the baton to 120 people who are his close followers. They are waiting, in an upper room of some unnamed building, for the Holy Spirit that Jesus had promised he would send them - the one who was going to help them talk about the gospel.

The Spirit of God shows up in the upper room.  Everyone who was gathered together began to speak many different languages, and they probably didn’t have soundproof walls!  So everybody outside heard it, and they think. “Man, there is a big gigantic party going on in there and everybody’s drunk.” Peter realizes this. He dashes out onto the balcony and he says, “No, we are not drunk” and he preaches the gospel. At the end of his talk, it says, with many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them save yourself from this corrupt generation. Those who have accepted this message were baptized and about 3000 were added to their number that day, so the first church was planted.

Acts is about the being of the early church. Peter oversees the first church being planted after Jesus ascends into heaven - 3000 members.  Peter is the forerunner to Billy Graham.

If you continue to read chapter two, you discover how the early church responded to Jesus. Starting at Verse 42 it states, they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Stowing their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as they had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Lord added to their number daily those who are being saved.

Community Part 1

Community is a natural thing for all of us. We all exist in some form of community somewhere in some way. Most of us have attended high school.  I, of course, have a hard time remembering high school, but high school is often our first adult experience of community.

                        What kind of communities do we have in high school? We’ve got the nerds, the dorks, the geeks, and the goths, the list goes on and really these are just groups of people – clicks.  All of these groups have, at the bare minimum, shared interests.  These shared interests link them together.  For the most part, everyone has this innate desire within themselves to gather with people who have something in common with them. I think this is demonstrated in our culture, in a broken way, through reality TV.  In particular, the television show Survivor. I know a lot of people say they don’t like the show, but really, I think most of us secretly do. It’s not hip to like it, so most people say they are not a fan, but then they go home watch Survivor or go to the bars to watch the show.

                        Why is Survivor so popular? Well, because it fits nicely into our post-modern world, in the sense that, to win the game, you have to form alliances? To win the game you have to have some sense of community. You have to work together to make progress in this game but ultimately there is only one winner - so betrayal is an intricate part of the game, and that’s what our culture resonates with.  Survivor touches on our longing to be part of a community, but it also touches on the reality that we cannot truly trust anyone, because if we do, they will ultimately stab us in the back.  

                        This longing for community is woven into the very fabric of who we are.  In the very first pages of world history in the book of Genesis, God speaks the world into existence. He speaks mountains and oceans and animals, tigers, lions, and elephants into reality. He speaks life into existence. In chapter one verse 26 of Genesis God creates human beings.  God said let us make man in our image and in our likeness. Let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

                        The story continues in verse 27 - God created man in his own image and the image of God he created him male and female he created them. Two things should be noted here. God created man and woman in his image, but there is an interesting thing about God’s image. What does he say in verse 26? He says let us make man in our image, in our likeness. In the beginning of the page, the first page of Genesis, at least in my book of the university edition of the bible, we find God saying - Let us create man in our image. We see the trinity, a picture of God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit, creating man in their image which means that you and I are created by a community.

                        At our core, we find, that we are created for community. We were created to be with like kind. If you move to chapter two in Genesis, there is a more detailed account of this creation story. God has created all the animals and everything. He is going to place man into the garden and man does not have any needs. The reason the is important is because God is says something very dramatic in verse 18. The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

It is not good for man to be alone. Man has everything, perfect relationship with God. No need for food, shelter everything is just there for him. Yet it is not good for him to be alone. Now a lot of young men will take this and say, “See that just means it is not good for man not to have a wife.” This is not to hard to agree with, but I think this statement goes far beyond a wife because everything is right. Everything is perfect. No sin has entered the garden at this point and something is not good - being without like kind. That is important. It shows that we are created for each other.  I believe this transcends just the man and the woman. It is about the human race.  We need each other.

The Genesis story continues - Adam gets Eve and Adam and Eve sin. They disobey God. They eat from the tree that they are not supposed to eat from. They are removed from the garden and everything is impacted.  The community of the environment, the community of animals, and the community of man are all thrown into chaos, and all those communities are damaged because of sin. No longer can the community of man and the community of God have any kind of meaningful relationship. It is now a broken relationship.