The Next Awakening Part 6 - Purity
The Next Awakening • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Have you ever prayed for revival? What’s keeping revival from happening? I do not claim to be an expert on this matter, nor do I have a specific word from the Lord to our current situation, but there are biblical patterns and commands that are seen in previous revivals and awakenings. One that we have talked a lot about in this series yet is prayer.
Not just our rambling of requests, but our two way conversation with the Lord and in the Lord - this is our connection to heaven and how we position ourselves for revival. We have to know what it is that God wants. How can we know if we won’t ask and then listen.
Each week we’ve looked at this list of signs of true revival that Jonathan Edwards wrote concerning the first great awakening:
When esteem for the true Jesus is raised
When Satan’s kingdom is attacked (sin and worldly lusts)
When people come to love Scripture more
When men are led away from falsehood to truth (sound doctrine)
When there is an increase of love to God and man
Here is the list of when we know revival is not coming:
When esteem for politics, sports teams and celebrities is raised above Jesus
When sin is normalized, accepted and encouraged
When Bibles gather dust in favor of secular writings
When truth becomes subjective
When there is an increase of love of self
This list is not for the world, this list is for the church. We can’t even begin to challenge the world when we haven’t cleaned our own house. Let’s put the other list up again:
When esteem for the true Jesus is raised
When Satan’s kingdom is attacked (sin and worldly lusts)
When people come to love Scripture more
When men are led away from falsehood to truth (sound doctrine)
When there is an increase of love to God and man
Are we pursuing these? Are we positioning ourselves individually and corporately as a church body to make these 5 areas important?
I know this is a little out of order from what we normally do, but I want to pray us through each of these. As I do, the Lord may speak to you about one or more of them. If He does, make note of it however you need to in order to remember. Write it down, text it to yourself, text it to me…Then commit to following up with Him in your personal prayer time.
Prayer
Is our object of worship Jesus or something else?
Is there sin to confess? Bring our sin to light.
Reveal yourself to us in your scripture. Give us understanding that can only come from you. Remove barriers to spending time in your word.
Reveal falsehoods in our beliefs. Reveal truth about the Gospel and your love for us.
Fan the flame of love in us that we can’t help but love. Help us to return the love for you. Help us to love each other better. Help us to love the people who don’t know you better.
Let’s read in our Bibles today starting with the scripture from last week…1 John 2:18
18 Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.
19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.
20 But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.
21 I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth.
22 Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son.
23 No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.
24 As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.
25 And this is what he promised us—eternal life.
26 I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray.
27 As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you, remain in him.
We ended last week with an exhortation to remain in Jesus and in what he taught. This week we pick that thought up as we continue reading:
28 And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.
Remember, John is writing this letter to the church to warn them of those who would try to lead them astray. There were those in the church, the early church that were trying to preach a gospel contrary to the one Jesus preached. The best and frankly only way to steer clear is to continue, or remain in Him
By remaining in Him, we will have nothing to be ashamed about when He returns. What does remaining in Him mean? Let me use an analogy from my time in the military...
My job in the Navy was to safely operate a nuclear reactor onboard a submarine. In order to do so, I had to have over a year of classroom training followed by another 6+ months of hands-on training. When I got to the sub, I had to read and memorize procedures of what to do when. It didn’t suffice that I knew where to look to know how, I needed to know by heart what the procedure said. After 6 months on the sub, I was allowed to watch a few electrical panels, write down the numbers and make coffee. After several more months of reading, studying and testing, I got to actually operate the reactor while a more senior person sat next to me watching every move and questioning me on everything.
I had to know what to do if something went wrong. “There’s a leak here...” “There’s a fire there...” “This part fails...” What do you do? 115 other sailors’ lives depended on me being able to answer.
I was constantly reading, training, memorizing, asking questions about the workings of the reactor. I was remaining and continuing in my training. It never stopped. There were chiefs on the boat who had a 20+ year career behind them and they did the same. They studied and trained themselves as they helped train me.
Our learning about and dependence on Jesus never stops. There is always something more to know about Him. There is always some way that we need to be reminded of his great love for us.
Imagine one of the chiefs on my boat “let himself” go. He got fat, he got lazy, he got complacent. He relied on his previous understanding and training and didn’t refresh from time to time. What do you think would happen if something broke and we had to depend on the fat, lazy chief? Our lives would be in danger. There would be regrets. Let me just say that submariners don’t let other submariners get fat and lazy.
I think there are times as believers that there is a temptation to be satisfied with where we are and we start to get fat and lazy in our faith. We are no longer remaining or continuing in Him. We are depending on our own strength…Christian brothers and sisters should not let other Christian brothers and sisters get fat and lazy....because then there will be regrets…we will be ashamed.
John is encouraging us to remain in Him that we would have confidence and be unashamed when He returns.
He continues:
29 If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.
How’s your fruit look? Would someone recognize you as a believer?
1 See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Great news. You have been loved into the family. You now carry the title of God’s child. You’re his and he is yours. Nothing can take that away. John got so excited, he used not one, but two exclamation points! Fun fact, there were no exclamation points or any punctuation in the original Greek, but when translated into English, the translators added punctuation.
Following the declaration of this good news, John says to not get too big of a head because the world doesn’t recognize our Father, so how can they recognize who we belong to?
This verse and the next two are a transition from the warnings of those who would deceive and remaining in him to being a holy people.
Verse 2 gives us a little more of the aside about the world not knowing Jesus:
2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
John is helping us to keep our eyes out to the future…Jesus is coming again. Since we are children of God, we have this event to look forward to. We remain in Him and when He returns, we will be like Him. Not like Jesus was when He walked the earth, but as Jesus is now in His heavenly, eternal form.
3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
We will end today with this verse. John says if you have this hope, you are to purify yourself.
What does that look like? For the old testament priests, there was an instruction on how to purify yourself. Those who abide by orthodox Jewish customs also must purify themselves. In some cases it can be quite complicated.
Just a few chapters earlier, John says this:
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
Purification happen by confession. If you look at many of the Old Testament purification rules, they all start with a recognition that purification is necessary. That’s no different for us. We must first recognize our sin and our need for purification. The Bible tells us to confess them. We confess them as part of our prayer time.
3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
So, we purify ourselves by confession, but we don’t keep doing what we’ve confessed…we repent or turn away. That is part of the purification process as well. I think an easy way to preach this is to just stop doing what you were doing, but that doesn’t work. You tell a kid not to touch something, that usually the first thing they do. God told Adam and Eve to not touch one tree. Every other tree is good, but not that one…and what did they do…they touched it.
The key instead is in the first part of this verse…All who have this Hope.
Hope is the key. There is this good news of forgiveness, inclusion into the eternal family of God. Grace, Mercy. A comforter send to us in the Holy Spirit. We’re not alone. There is hope.
If we focus only on correcting the behavior, we will fail. If we instead place our focus on the good news, the Hope that is Jesus, it is there that we find purity.
Will we still mess up? Sure, but our remaining in Him brings us quickly to the place of confession, repentance and ultimately forgiveness. From that place, there is no shame. There is confidence in knowing our place when Jesus returns.