The Way of Salvation Is a Sin-Defeating Journey

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  1 John 2:12–14 (ESV) I am writing to you, dear children,     because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name. I am writing to you, fathers,     because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men,     because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, dear children,     because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers,     because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men,     because you are strong,     and the word of God lives in you,     and you have overcome the evil one. CONSIDER THIS In some ways this passage feels like a “Now for something completely different” text. The more I think about it, though, it strikes me as reassuringly pastoral. John came out in chapter 1 with guns a-blazing. It felt like he had a major axe to grind with somebody. But after examining today’s text, I think it’s all coming together for me. I think John’s coming out so strident until now was more about crushing the ideas of the false teachers who were influencing the people than it was being aimed at the people themselves. Someone had been teaching these followers of Jesus some version of a cheap-grace gospel. What do I mean by this? I think these teachers were soft-pedaling the gravity of sin as though it didn’t matter anymore. They believed that because of the work of Jesus, they had a license to do whatever seemed right to them, no matter its impact on others. Said another way, these false teachers basically taught the followers of Jesus that because of Jesus’ finished work, they were finished with sin. Here lies the subtle seduction of false teaching. It’s true that because of Jesus’ finished work on the cross, we who place our faith in him are finished with sin. The problem is, sin is not finished with us. It has not gone away, nor has sin somehow been reclassified as not sin, which seems to be the essence of the false teaching. All people needed was some claim of knowing Jesus and nothing else mattered. Go back and reread 1 John up to the point of today’s text and see if you agree with my hypothesis. John takes the proverbial bull by the horns: he says we must call sin “sin,” confess our sins, receive God’s forgiveness, and lean further into the grace of God. The sign of salvation’s authenticity is the ever-increasing obedience of holy love, which can be witnessed only in human relationships. “They will know we are Christians” by our T-shirts? Not a chance. It will be by our love (John 13:35). John wasn’t holding up a mirror in front of the people and calling them liars for the ways they failed to love one another. John told them the love of God could cleanse them from the effects of sin and deliver them from the power of sin. The love of God could bring them into relationships with other people in such a way that their lives exuded the joy-filled, holy love of God, which is the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ that can take a broken world and transform it into a new creation. False teaching is as present today as it was in John’s day. It must be confronted because of its seductive and even compelling allure to redefine sin as not sin. When we do that, it is like ignoring the diagnosis of an aggressively metastasizing cancer and pretending it’s not there, all the while claiming to know the doctor, as though that knowledge will somehow cure our disease. Sin, like cancer, destroys the body from the inside out. That’s what it does to people, to relationships, and to communities. Sin is not a problem for God. Self-deception is the big problem because it immunizes us from the cure of confession. In short, when sin gets redefined as “not sin,” all hell breaks loose. Okay. We are in pretty deep now. Let me describe how this all comes together. John reassures the flock. He frames the way of salvation not as a sin-free path but as a sin-defeating journey, a journey in which we can be secure in the grace of God just as we are, while confident that the love of God will not leave us just as we are. As a child grows from adolescence to adulthood to parenthood and beyond, so the power of God will prosper us through every stage of faith and life, transforming us from one degree of glory to the next until our image reflects Christ’s likeness. THE PRAYER  Lord Jesus, would you take me beyond the doctrine of my confession and reveal the doctrine of my real life? What do my real life and my real relationships reveal that I believe? Come, Holy Spirit. Expose and root out any false teaching that has lodged itself in my soul. Something tells me a breakthrough could be near. In your name, Jesus. Amen.