Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: 1 John 1:5-2:2

N:

Welcome

Good morning!

I’m Bill Connors, senior pastor here with Eastern Hills, and I’m blessed to be here this morning as the church gathers together to worship the Lord and to reflect on His Word.

I pray that this time is a blessing to you as well, but more than anything, I pray that our joining together today brings honor and glory to God, and points us to Him.

I wanted to take a moment this morning and say thanks to a couple of groups of people who are so important to the church family: our Safety & Security and Welcome teams.

Every week, they get here early in order to be the first faces that folks see as they come on campus and into the building, and I really appreciate their faithfulness and hearts of service.

If you’re a first-time guest this morning, whether you’re in the room or online, we’d love to have the opportunity to drop you a note and thank you for joining with the church family at Eastern Hills today.

If you wouldn’t mind, would you just shoot a quick text with just the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004?

You’ll get a text back with a link to our digital communication card, where you can give us just a little more information so we can pray for you and drop you a quick card thanking you for being with Eastern Hills today.

If you’re here in the building and you’d rather fill out a physical card, you’ll find those in the back of the pew in front of you.

Just take a minute during the service to complete that, and you can drop it in the offering plates as you leave the sanctuary at the close of service, or you can bring it down here to me when service is over, so I can meet you and thank you personally for joining us today with a gift.

Either way, thanks for being with Eastern Hills this morning.

Announcements

AOM tonight: Dimitrii Sozontov and family will be sharing at 4:15 in the Parlor

Evangelism Conference Info

Monday night 2/27 starting at 5:45; pie fellowship following

Tuesday 2/28 all day starting at 8:50 am; breakout sessions that afternoon beginning at 1:00 pm; praise & worship & preaching that night beginning at 5:45 pm.

Registration is free.

Register at bcnm.com/nmec.

Opening

Last week, we began what will be a 13 week series on the book of 1 John.

We primarily looked at the incarnation: the theological word that explains that Jesus is both God and man, and as we considered the truth of the incarnation, we ultimately opened this series by saying that the book of 1 John is all about Jesus, as John declared in his prologue or introduction.

This morning, we will continue through chapter 1 and into the beginning of chapter 2 of this important epistle.

So as you are able, would you please stand in honor of God’s Holy Word as we read our focal passage together:

PRAYER - Taking a week off of praying for sister CBA churches to pray for the nations of Turkey and Syria following the massive earthquake there on Monday.

The death toll continues to rise, and is currently well over 25,000.

I’ll be very honest here about something that is actually painful for me to contemplate.

Over my years in student ministry, I had a lot of students come through the doors of that youth room.

Some were students that I invested a great deal of time in, even some that I had serve as student leaders alongside me, some that I met with one-on-one on a regular basis and who I talked with about faith and life and Scripture and God and holiness, students I prayed with and prayed over.

I was the student pastor for nearly 20 years, so I can’t even guess how many students came through the ministry during my time in Trevor’s chair.

Thankfully, many of them are still walking with Jesus—serving in churches (some still in EHBC), raising godly families, even pastoring or serving in other ministry capacities.

But one thing that bothers me about my time in student ministry is how many former students graduated from the student ministry and shortly thereafter graduated from the church, or worse: they kind of graduated from faith altogether.

They went off to college and threw off the shackles of parents and youth group, decided that there were other things in life that they cared more about, and walked away from the path I believed that they were on.

When they were in the student ministry, I’d have said that they were saved, and I would have been sure of it.

I mean, I baptized some of those students.

But now, I think back on some of these students, and I have to wonder: “Was I wrong about them?” It’s heartbreaking to know that some of the students I was closest with no longer walk with or even claim to believe in Jesus.

So to make a quick aside for the students in the room right now: make the most of your time in the student ministry.

Trevor is a great teacher of Scripture, and I know that his heart is for you guys.

Listen and engage now.

Really consider the truth of the Gospel message, the hope and security that Jesus brings, and respond to that message in faith.

Draw a line in the sand and determine that it’s Jesus that you’re going to follow and be faithful to.

This church loves you and wants the very best for you.

We are your family, and we care for you.

So plug in and connect, so that you’ll have this body of believers as a home base, even as you get older and your life changes.

To be completely frank, the actual knowledge of whether anyone is saved is above my pay grade.

God knows if someone is saved, I don’t.

I can make an educated guess based on knowing them and watching them and talking with them, but as I’ve experienced, I can be completely wrong.

Then we come to a passage like this one.

This passage is difficult.

It’s severe in what it says—so severe, in fact, that there is a part of us that recoils a little bit from how starkly John paints the picture here.

And when we read it, we might want to soften it a little bit, to come up with a way that John isn’t saying what he seems to be saying: that it’s possible for someone to say that he or she belongs to Jesus, and to even think for a time that he belongs to Jesus, when he actually doesn’t.

The problem with us trying to soften this passage is that John doesn’t.

He doesn’t give us an escape hatch in his language so we can get out of the severity of what he’s actually saying.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but he’s saying that if you’re in Christ, your life should show it.

And if instead your life looks to be exactly the opposite—that Jesus has no place in your life, and you look nothing like Him—then you’re probably not actually in Christ at all, and if you aren’t in Christ now, then you never really were in the first place.

Before you mentally accuse me of saying that John is claiming that we’re saved by works, please know that I’m not.

Salvation is a gift of God’s grace received by surrendered faith in Jesus Christ that can never be earned or deserved.

But if our lives don’t have any resemblance to Jesus, then can we really call ourselves His disciples, His followers, those who bear His name: Christians?

John’s not preaching perfectionism here, as we will see.

He’s basically just saying that salvation is an all or nothing deal: either you've been really, truly, honestly, completely, regenerately saved through faith in Christ; or you’re really and truly lost and bound for eternal hell because of your sin.

John is likely dealing with some bad thinking that had arisen in the church here—likely an early form of a heresy called gnosticism—people who claimed that they could have fellowship with God through a special kind of secret knowledge, and without actually believing that Jesus is the incarnate Son of God.

As is often the case with heresy, it’s the bad thinking that forces us to clearly state what right thinking is.

And John opens by saying something about God that sets the stage for the rest of his argument.

He says that God is light.

1) God is light.

What we looked at last week in verses 1-4 was all about Jesus: That Jesus is the eternal God stepping down into time, the transcendent God knowable, the invisible God visible, the intangible God tangible.

Now suddenly, John says that he heard directly from Jesus a message that he declares about who God is, and it is this statement which gives meaning to the rest of our focal passage this morning:

God is light.

What does John mean by this?

Does he simply mean that God is shiny or sparkly?

I really doubt it.

I mean, there is some aspect of that which is true, because Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6 that God lives in unapproachable light, and we see in Revelation 21 that the heavenly Jerusalem will be illuminated by God’s glory, and won’t need the sun or the moon.

But in the context of what John is saying here, it must be something more than a physical manifestation of light.

In John’s prologue to his Gospel, he speaks of light in connection with the Word:

This builds on what we looked at last week in verses 1-4 as we looked at Jesus at the Word of life.

Light represents the source of life.

The fact is that both life and light have to have a source for them to exist at all.

God is the only One who can be the Source, because only He has always existed.

At the dawn of creation, nothing but God existed, and then God spoke and all things apart from Him came into being.

And the first thing that God spoke into existence was light:

That declaration made the life of everything and everyone else possible, because without light, there would be no life.

So God is the Source of life, and our life (the “light of men”) is derived from Him.

This makes sense then with what we see in verse 5 of 1 John 1: God is the ultimate Source of life, the fullness of what life is, and the One who defines life.

By contrast, there is absolutely no darkness, no “lack of life” in Him at all.

He is light.

Our triune God is the only One who has life in Himself:

The rest of what John says here is based on this initial declaration that God is light, and has no darkness within Him.

2) To walk with God is to walk in the light of Christ.

As I said earlier, John doesn’t mince any words when he makes his argument here.

He draws what for many of us feels like a really hard line… a line so hard that we might feel uncomfortable drawing it as well.

Notice that verses 6 and 7 include two different perspectives: one negative, and one positive.

Before we look at the two comparatives, a note: the word “walk” in these verses is used to denote one’s “way of life.”

This is what defines your life, who you truly are and how you truly live.

Again, this isn’t about being perfect—it’s about the bend of your life.

First, the negative.

In verse 6, John argues that if we say we have fellowship with God, but we walk in the absence of light (darkness, or the absence of the Source of life), then we are lying and aren’t “practicing the truth.”

This is completely logical.