Foreign please turn to First John chapter 2, beginning at verse 28.
And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.
See what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God! And so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.
Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.
For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning: that we should love one another. This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Lord, you tell us things in your word that are hard and challenging for us to believe sometimes. Help us to be obedient children to you, to trust your word, and to have our practice and our habits be not of sin, but of righteousness as we seek to serve you. We pray this in Jesus’ name and we ask that you open our hearts to hear your word as we consider how best to love as your children. Amen.
So, John wrote this missive for the purpose that our joy may be complete—that his joy, God’s joy, your joy, and my joy would be made complete. Our joy is made complete through the knowledge and experience of being in fellowship, Koinonia, with God the Father and God the Son through the anointing of God the Holy Spirit.
Then, he explained to us and encouraged us in how we may know that we have come to know him, God the Son Jesus Christ. We know that we know him, and we can know that others know him through the evidences of our lives, the proof of our words and deeds. If we keep his commandments, walk in the light as he is in the light, walking in the same way as he walked, Christians submit to God’s sovereign authority by desiring to and by making the effort to obey him.
Thereby, we affirm Jesus Christ as God and affirm his truthfulness. Therefore, we begin to look up to him and act more and more like our spiritual brother, Jesus. But then, John also described for us the alternative, teaching us how we may recognize and know those who do not know Christ—all of the many antichrists—so that we may better avoid them and thereby remain steadfast and persevere against their opposition to Jesus and his reign.
We know that antichrists are liars because they deny the deity of Christ and his authority. They are blinded, stumbling about in the darkness. They hate their brothers, which means they actually hate everyone—God, Jesus, Christians, and their fellow antichrists. They indulge themselves in every manner of lust, all the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life. Antichrists, therefore, refuse to submit to God’s authority, and they live in active rebellion and disobedience against him.
They appear to act more and more like the Antichrist and their mutual spiritual father, the devil, more than they do the people of God.
Now, as John explains what it means for us to be in Koinonia with God, it’s also helpful to read John’s words alongside the Apostle Paul. Paul teaches that Christians have been sovereignly and immutably elected and chosen by God from before the foundation of the cosmos. John parallels this same thought in his gospel and carries it on through its effect:
‘All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day; for this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.’
See, we were chosen by God the Father and have been given to God the Son. We are being preserved by the Son and we will be raised by him through faith into eternal life. That is what John meant when he wrote, ‘He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor the will of man, but of God.’
So now that we’ve been brought into Koinonia with God, our social status and relationship with him has been changed. See what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God! And so we are!
Now, we are the children of God. Sons and daughters of the Most High, we are his children according to his unqualified choice of election through his agape. We are now God’s children of love, but what exactly has changed?
Back before we were born again, before we were regenerated by the Holy Spirit, Paul says, ‘And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.’ Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
Translating Paul into John’s vocabulary, we were previously all antichrists. Antichrists are the sons of disobedience and children of wrath, walking in their trespasses and sins, following the course of this world and living in the passions of the flesh.
But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. ‘By grace, you have been saved.’
John and Paul are just saying the same thing—only in slightly different ways. Once we were all antichrists, the sons of disobedience and children of wrath.
Once we followed the way of the cosmos, but because of the great love—the great agape—which God the Father has given to us, now we are the children of God along with Christ, God the Son. And now we possess eternal life like him.
John says, ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.’
See, even though we are now like Christ, we are not yet what we shall be. We have not yet been perfected. We have not fully grown up into who we are predestined to be according to the Lord’s providence.
All children have responsibilities and obligations to their parents and to their brothers and sisters, but they are not as many or as onerous as they are once they become adults. Our duty before the Lord now as his children is subtly different from our duty to him before our adoption, but it is a very important difference.
And to better understand how our relationship has changed, we need to recall what it used to be like back in the beginning, prior to the fall, back in the Garden of Eden. The Lord created Adam and Eve in his image. The Hebrew word for image is ‘selum,’ but that does not merely refer to an image like a picture or a statue. The word carries far greater weight; it is something which is actually representative of what it depicts and not just a likeness. A ‘selum’ is functionally equivalent to an accurate authoritative representative of the original. An ambassador is a ‘selum’ for a king—they represent them, they act on their behalf.
Adam and Eve were not declared to have been made in God’s image because they looked like him, but because they were created as his personal representatives in the world. They were made to be his authoritative delegates to all the rest of creation, a fact made clear by his first command to them: ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth, subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.’
They were commanded to expand their reach and fill the Earth, to subdue it and bring it under their authority, to exercise dominion over all forms of animate life—fish, birds, animals—all on God’s behalf. And this was the beginning of what we call the Covenant of Works.
But our forebears, our family according to the flesh, were like the employees of a company while the Lord was like the owner of a business, hiring managers and workers to oversee the details of the daily operations. These managers were given authority to make decisions and the responsibility to manage the business on their boss’s behalf. If they operated it profitably, then they would receive their wages.
‘Behold, I’ve given to you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the Earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.’
So they were given the responsibility to perform according to the Lord’s stated expectation. The primary motivation for their performance was only their compensation. However, then God placed one simple condition upon them for their continued employment, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat; for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.’
And it was this condition which became the weak spot for their motivation. The devil, Satan, the tempter, that ancient serpent, exploited this weakness by insinuating that God was withholding something from them. By making that prohibition, Satan encouraged dissatisfaction with their job by suggesting that God was not rewarding them properly.
Saying, ‘You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’
The serpent convinced them that because they were not allowed to eat from this one tree, God was not actually giving them a just, fair wage. Therefore, they would be justified in disobedience, since they deserved more because they had earned it through all of their effort and work thus far.
See, they were ensnared by the devil’s lies, and so they fell from walking in the light to stumble around the darkness of sin and became like miserable disgruntled employees.
But now, since our adoption as the children of God, we are no longer like employees. Instead, according to God’s loving Covenant of Grace, we’ve been brought into the family business and are now more like junior partners and shareholders.
Now, rather than working for our wage, because we’ve been given partial ownership, we want to work for our father’s benefit and glory, since we’re also working for the increase of our own by doing so.
Once we were like employees working for a wage, had no reason to care about the overall success of the business, nor did we really care about the boss’s profit margins. All that we selfishly cared about was getting paid at the end of the day.
At best, we did our job to the best of our abilities because we knew that it was the right thing to do; at worst, we did the bare minimum and expended the least amount of effort in order to just get paid and keep our jobs.
But now, now we are family members, partners, working for the benefit of the whole family. We care about the success of the business because it’s good for our heavenly Father, and good for our brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, and good for ourselves.
We work, we do our duty, and we fulfill our obligations not because we must, but because of the love and trust that our Father has shown in giving us this responsibility and from our desire to prove his confidence true—because of the love that we have for him and for all the rest of our spiritual family.
Can you now feel the difference between our old and new relationship? As the children of God, we have been given a great deal more responsibility than we had before, and our workload has increased exponentially. But our motivation has been so completely changed that we are not now merely working for a living but doing what we love for the ones we love—the Lord and our neighbors.
However, this change in relationship is not the only benefit we gain from Koinonia with God. Since what we will be has not yet appeared, we know that our changes are not complete. Yet, we have some idea of what we will be changed into because eventually we shall be like him.
Therefore, everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. See, this is how John affirms the value and continuing applicability of God’s law to our lives. You know, back in Leviticus, God says, ‘For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.’
So since we have been brought into Koinonia with God and are now walking in this light, the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin, and we are now being made pure and holy like Jesus.
He has wiped our slate clean and given us a great reset. He has brought us up and out of the moral deficiency of our sin to the zero mark. Therefore, now it is part of our job to keep ourselves clean. It is our obligation and our desire to purify ourselves to preserve and maintain our purity.
Now that we have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus, this purification is our sanctification. While it is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit within us—unlike our salvation, which is solely the work of Jesus Christ accomplished for us—our sanctification is a work whereby we cooperate with God the Holy Spirit.
While we’re being perfected, we purify ourselves. We maintain our purity through active obedience to God’s commandments. We prove that we love him; we prove that we know him and are known by him through how we keep his commandments.
It’s by our keeping of his commandments that the love of God is perfected within us. But what commandments must we keep? The Ten Commandments? Absolutely. But we also need to keep all the rest too.
Traditionally, the Jews count 613 commandments in God’s law. But Jesus proved time and again that no mere man can ever hope to keep all of them perfectly; only the one perfect God-man, Jesus, has.
However, we are still supposed to want to try and obey, and thankfully, God gives us his grace whenever we fail and contritely repent for our disobedience.
See, if you’ve been brought into Koinonia with God as his child by grace, then it is your dutiful response to obey your heavenly Father in all things. It’s the requirement of our duty and obligation to him for us to stop sinning, period.
There is no acceptable excuse to keep on sinning, keeping on as we once were because we have been changed. Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.
God’s commandments are the law, and since sin is the transgression of God’s law, it is law-breaking. Lawlessness—he’s talking about here—is our habits, our intention, what we are practicing, what we choose to do.
Do we choose and seek to sin, or do we choose and seek to work after righteousness? So if we’re going to keep God’s law and be obedient to Christ, we must stop sinning. It’s not something that’s optional. Trying to stop is not good enough.
We must want to stop, and we must trust that God the Holy Spirit will help us to stop. We do not have to try and rely upon ourselves alone, because if we do that, we are certain to fail.
Both God’s help and in his mercy, one day our sinning will cease because we’ve been called out of the world’s darkness, out of the cosmos, out of the fallenness within creation, to be different from all the rest of sinful humanity. We are called to be like Christ, not be like Satan, and the Holy Spirit will make us so.
We’ve been pulled out of Koinonia with the cosmos and brought into Koinonia with God as his children, and that is the reason why the world does not know us—because it did not know him, Jesus.
Because we are more like him than we are like the world, the world does not know us. It does not know why to us, therefore we should not want to order the world any longer.
Jesus came in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Therefore, there is no room—there’s no room—for sin within us.
How do we keep from despairing when we know that it is impossible for us to keep all these commandments? Jesus summed them all up for us. We’re not supposed to worry ourselves and walk on eggshells, trying to avoid doing any of the things which God said to not do.
Not worry about avoiding the negatives—instead, focus on doing the positives. That’s more like what Jesus really taught. The law is not about the do-not; it is more about the dues.
See, the Pharisees were really good at not doing the do-nots, but Jesus condemned them because they did not do what they were supposed to do. He called them out because they were negligent about doing what they were supposed to do.
And what is it that we are supposed to do, that we must do? Jesus summed it up with one word: love—agape.
For this is the message you’ve heard from the beginning: that we should love one another. He commanded us to agape one another and to agape our neighbors, because by doing so, we agape the Lord God.
Agape: self-sacrificing, unmerited, unreciprocated, even costly love. And if you would do that, if you agape as Jesus agape, then you would be practicing righteousness. You will be righteous as Christ is righteous because you will have been clothed by his righteousness.
If you do that, if your agape is Jesus’s agape, then God’s seed abides in you, and you cannot keep on sinning because you have been born of God.
So you may know that the world will know that you do not belong to the cosmos but that you belong to Christ Jesus. By these things, through your agape, you are proven to be a child of God and not a child of the devil.
By this, it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.
Therefore, the greatest and most important commandment for us is to agape. If we do that, if we pour our whole heart and effort into loving others as our obedient expression of our love for God, then we will never need to worry about accidentally sinfully doing any of the do-nots because doing any of them goes directly against agape.
So why do we love? We love because we believe God and because we have faith and trust in Jesus Christ, his Son.
How do we demonstrate and prove our faith in Christ? We demonstrate our faith through our works of love. Therefore, it is in our love that we abide in Christ and thus enjoy our Koinonia with God.
So then, how are you yourself doing with your obedient works of agape? It is good and important for us to stop on occasion and evaluate ourselves to make sure that we are doing what we ought to be doing and are not stepping off the path of obedience and into the darkness.
Are you doing everything that you can or feel like you should do to love the strangers, the neighbors, and the family around you? Or do you feel convicted about something you have not done or are not doing?
Do you feel like you will stand guiltless and confident, clothed in the righteousness of Christ before God’s throne when Jesus returns, standing without shame and believing that you have loved as you ought to love, as much as you ought to love? Or are you feeling convicted about something that you have not done yet?
Fortunately, I’m not talking about Christ’s judgment for our salvation right now. Anointed by the Holy Spirit, we know that we are justified by our faith and cleansed by Jesus’s blood. But what I am talking about is the judgment of Christ concerning our eternal reward—something which Jesus talked about with the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, Jesus’s command to store up treasures in heaven in Matthew 6, and the reward due for our works of love that Paul writes about in First Corinthians 3.
Those things tell us to expect this judgment. So what are you doing to give Christ’s love to others? What are we as a congregation doing to love others for Christ’s kingdom? We support Educations and their schools in Sierra Leone. We support Samaritan’s Purse with Operation Christmas Child, their veterans programming, and urgent relief efforts like the fire in Hawaii.
We support Pioneer and their evangelistic ministry to Muslims through a missionary family. We support Richland Pregnancy Services right here in town. We support a local food bank operated out of another church here, and the funds generated by our rummage sale support various other local missions.
All of these are great ministries and charities for us to support because they help to spread God’s love. But is there something more that we can be doing? Can we do something more as a congregation to have greater local impact right here in Mansfield, Ohio?
What else can we be doing? What else should we be doing? I’m open to suggestions, and our missions committee is always open for suggestions.
See, we cannot hide behind the reasons and excuses of age or ability because everyone who is able to do something is able to do something to love others. If you are here today, right now in this room, I guarantee that you are still able to do something.
Pick up the phone and call someone just to talk and listen, or go visit those who cannot go out. Write cards, send letters of encouragement or sympathy. Go out and mow your neighbor’s lawn. Bring your neighbor’s mail up to them whenever you go down to the mailbox and get your own.
Take a neighbor to lunch while their car is being worked on, or even take their car to the shop for them so that they don’t have to wait around. Cook and take a meal to someone, or invite someone who is lonely and alone over to join you for dinner.
Volunteer at one of our many different kinds of shelters here in town, or pray—pray for others. This may well be the most important and most impactful thing that we can do, but all too often we think of it last.
I have to admit that I feel pretty convicted about this myself. I don’t feel as if I am doing everything I can or should. I could offer the excuse of not having enough time, that I am too busy, but really what I would be saying is that I have other priorities.
I do not attend the Thursday prayer group as much as I should or as I would like. I miss doing prison ministry because there I could see and feel the immediate impact it was having on the guys.
I am involved with the United Way’s Big Red Bookshelf program, working to improve literacy here in our area, and I serve on the Salvation Army Advisory Board. But I wish I could be doing something more with them.
I volunteer as a chaplain over at Evita in Ontario, and I go pray with patients whenever they request, plus I help to organize and coordinate all of their chaplain volunteers. I try to visit any of you when you’re in the hospital and I know about it, or I visit you at home when I’m invited or requested.
I take communion and visit our shut-ins with Deacons. I know that I do a lot, but I’m not listing all this stuff off as a way to brag. I am saying it because, even with everything I do, I feel like I could somehow be doing more.
I feel like even with all that I do to agape others, it is not a good enough response because of how much more Jesus has done for me out of his love. I owe him a debt of gratitude and love that I know I will never be able to satisfy according to my own expectations.
All who profess an earnest faith in Christ want to hear, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’ when they wake up in heaven. But I would be happy enough just to hear, ‘My beloved child, that’ll do.’
So it is a good thing that God does not judge us, does not judge me, according to my expectations. That feeling and attitude and the conviction which I expect that you presently feel as well is a responsive consequence of our adoption and our changed status before God.
We want to love because we have been and we are loved by Jesus Christ. Our Koinonia with God is so wonderful that we want to draw others into this same fellowship. His love is so great that we do not want to keep it all to ourselves.
We want and need to share it with others. Jesus fills our cup with love until it overflows, and he still continues to pour.
So if we are children of God, then we must therefore love one another. See, that is our true change. We love because we are loved. Amen.