It was very easy to think wrong, in a world like that. It was very easy to be seduced by a wrong view of faith and fellowship... We can think that faith and fellowship, the stuff that holds us together, is sentiment or slogans... But John is determined, our fellowship with each other and with God, is more than sentiment or slogans. Let's start with our relationship with God...
When God says he loves us, it's not sentiment; it's not slogans...
None of us can dare to claim “Hey, I have no sin!” John has already dispatched that idea (1 Jn 1. 8). A hundred years ago, G K Chesterton, a newspaper columnist and committed Christian, said that Original sin is “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” Want to give it a try? Anyone going to tell me they went a whole week without sinning once, let’s say since exactly this time last Sunday? So we are in trouble, then. Or maybe not. After all, God is love. He's nice. He's cuddly. He wouldn’t punish us for our sins, would he? But that's a cute, cuddly-kitten kind of god, and it's a merely sentimental understanding of his love.
It's a gospel of sentiment. I admit I don't like sentiment. If I get another picture on line of a kitten doing something really cute, I may throw my computer out the window!
What John says, is different. If we do sin (and we do!) we need help. We are found “guilty.” If you go to court you need someone to speak on your behalf, to prove your innocence or to plead for mercy. Jesus is our advocate, our lawyer, called alongside us to speak on our behalf, to plead for mercy... and he has a particularly strong argument for doing so. He is Jesus the Just. He doesn't just plead our case, he pleads because he is the sacrifice that deals with sin; he has carried it, instead of us. He has already paid the fine, so he pleads with the Judge to let us go.... And John adds in “that Jesus is the sacrifice not just for us but for the whole world.
So our relationship with God isn't based on sentiment. It's forensic, it's a legal transaction, a contract, a covenant, sealed with the blood of Jesus. That's tough love. It doesn’t “let us off” as though sin were just a stupid wee thing. It sees our sin as the outrage it is, but then pays the price. It says to us “You can't sort this out, not in a million years. I will sort it out.”
Our relationship with God is more than sentiment or slogans. It is rooted in the tough love, the sacrificial love that God has for us. And it results in tough love. This atonement, pleads our case, seeks mercy from God; but it also plants a seed of eternal life in our hearts.
Our love for God – it's not sentiment or slogans.
Having been received, forgiven, welcomed, we are transformed. It's more than sentiment in the outworking of that relationship in our lives.
If we say we know him (a slogan that no doubt would trip off the tongue of those selling the new teaching) we will keep his commands. Each time John uses that expression “we know Him” (v. 3) or “You know him” (v. 13-14) he uses the perfect tense: it is rooted in a past experience with continuing results.
Some of us in this room today “know Jesus”. In other words, like John and his readers, we “have come to know him.” Some may be like me and can point to a specific place, a specific time when you came to know Jesus: I was at a meeting in a marquee at a camp-site between North Berwick and Dunbar in 1968. I still have, somewhere, the Good News for Modern Man New Testament I bought at that camp. Others, like Pam, find it difficult to point to a specific time but you just know that over a period, something happened, you grew to trust Jesus as Saviour, and he came in and started to change you. If you don't know him, I invite you to come to know him today...
But if you have come to know him, that has to be more than a slogan. If you know him, then you will obey him. You don't obey him to become good enough. You obey him because God has done something in your life. You don't obey in order to get to know him.. But if you know him, your life will start to be transformed. If you are close to him, live in a Jesus-atmosphere, you will begin to do what he did. Some of us may be a bit unsure: was it real? Do I know him? Well, the more you obey him the surer you become. That relationship with God, is more than sentiment and slogans: it is transformation. That transformation is seen in one vital way: in keeping one vital commandment.Our Love for each other is not sentiment or slogans.
And one commandment sums it up. John insists he's writing nothing new here: it's familiar. Jesus Himself said it. “You had this from the beginning (v. 7); I heard it from Jesus Himself.” But it's new because just as it was fulfilled in the life of Jesus, it it is being fulfilled in creative new ways in you.”
It's like a new day dawning. At 6 a.m. it is still dark. But by 7, it's just beginning to get light. In the world we know, it's dark in many ways. People don't show a lot of love for each other. People live alienated, separated lives with a lot of hostility. But we are the people of the new day; there's at least a few rays of sunlight in our lives. We are beginning to learn to love one another. That special relationship with each other, is love. If we say we are in the light (another slogan!) yet hate our fellow Christians, we are really stumbling about in the dark. John Wimber was an evangelist and church consultant. He visited and studied all sorts of Churches, including snake-handling pentecostal churches. He taught the importance of power evangelism – healing as a tool for mission. He knew lots of Christians form different backgrounds; some people admired him; others opposed him fiercely. But Wimber said, “my brother is never my enemy!”We are in a special relationship with each other. John speaks of his readers really affectionately: he calls them “little Children.” (v. 1) It's one word, and it's incredibly fatherly and warm: the best way I can translate it is using the Scottish “Bairnies.” We are called to show the father’s love, and it begins by loving one another and building real, affirming, caring relationships with one another. We need to be family.
There's something really significant that happens when that relationship really works out right: other people want to join in! Jesus isn't only the sacrifice for our sins but for the sins of the whole world (v. 2) and he said “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13. 35)
So, dear old John, writes to build fellowship – a special relationship – between him and his readers. And he writes to strengthen that fellowship relationship between us and God... he finishes off this section with a lovely word of encouragement, in verse 12-14. These people are all different. Sometimes they rubbed each other up the wrong way. Little children, fathers,young men, they are all God's children. Men and women, old and young, Fifers and foreigners, we area all God's children. John speaks to them all in this wonderfully positive, encouraging way: “your sins are forgiven; you know him who is from the beginning; you have overcome the evil one; you are strong; and the word of God abides in you.”“I'm not suggesting that you don’t' know him, that your sins are not forgiven, that you have not done battle, shown strength and overcome the enemy. On the contrary I fell free to write to you precisely because are forgiven, victorious. It's vital that you build on these strengths to keep the New Commandment... to have fellowship; to love one another.
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