Speaker 1: 0:00

And welcome to our Madison Church online audience. I'm Stephen Feath, lead pastor, and I'm wondering if you've heard anyone recently say or you've seen it posted I'm spiritual but I'm not religious. You've seen that. Would any of you, like me, define yourself that way? Because I kind of do. Still, I'm spiritual, not religious. Maybe you've seen a post this week. It's been a long week for a lot of different reasons, but you've seen this kind of get posted.

Speaker 1: 0:30

Everything happens for a reason, implying that anything that does happen God was behind it, like there's got to be something good. Now, phrases like this they do seem harmless. They're meant to be hopeful. I mean, they try to offer a way to make sense of life. Why did this bad thing happen to me? I'm trying really hard to be a good person. Well, everything happens for a reason. So God must have just put me through this and it gives a reason behind all of the pain and suffering. God, why don't I feel well, god, why aren't things going the way that I want them to go? Well, this must be part of a grand master plan and this is very attractive to you and me.

Speaker 1: 1:13

And if you're here today, you're watching or listening online for those of us who are spiritual and we're leaning into the divine. We want those answers when life is hard or when things don't make sense. We want to know there's a why, that there's a meaning that I didn't go through all this pain and suffering and bad stuff just because the world is sinful and broken. But I'm here to tell you that any religion can offer that to you. It doesn't have to be Christianity. If you're looking for a rhyme and a reason for the bad stuff, the pain and suffering in your life, the challenges and the hardships, any religion out there, any system, can offer you those answers, because religion explains, it gives us categories, it gives us reasons. But here's the thing for us today, as Christians, as followers of Jesus, that's not why he came. That's not why Jesus took on flesh. It wasn't to give us a why. He didn't come to just provide an explanation for the things that are, in fact, out of your control. So if it wasn't that, then why did Jesus come? Well, some of the cool answer is that he came to give us himself, to be with us, and, instead of giving you an answer behind why you're going through pain and suffering, you follow a God who walks with you through pain and suffering.

Speaker 1: 2:40

Cs Lewis, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the last century, puts it this way. He says I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I love this next line. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly do not recommend Christianity.

Speaker 1: 2:59

Now, lewis is right Christianity it isn't about easy answers, it's not about comfort to all of the things going on in life. I kind of have a spiritual eye roll when I see those posts of everything happens for a reason and there must have been a grand plan behind it, because the Jesus that we follow, the Jesus we read that the disciples followed, the, the early church centered their entire lives around, was the Jesus who unsettles us, who challenges us and meets us in the real flesh and blood realities of our lives. And that's why this series that we're calling Blurred, I think, has really gone to matter to to all of us. A blurred Jesus leads to a blurred faith, a faith that can't hold up when life gets hard. And some of you know exactly what I'm talking about because you're there right now. You're like why isn't my faith holding up a little bit better. Perhaps it's blurred. A blurred faith leads us to a faith that feels fine when life is easy. Well, if life is good, god is good, because right now I'm comfortable and things are going the way that I planned it, or I wanted it to, or I hoped. But the minute life crumbles, the minute the trajectory of our lives change, when life gets really hard, you know what I'm talking about the diagnosis that you didn't want to receive but that you got. When your marriage is strained but you did all the things that the pastor who officiated your wedding told you to do. So how did we get here? When your dream job turns into a nightmare, where is God then? Where is our faith then? Half-truths, a blurred faith, a blurred Jesus won't help you get through those things. Only Jesus will. And so, for the next month, we're going to unmask the distortions that sound spiritual. They're spiritually sounding, but they're hollowed out and they've got the gospel.

Speaker 1: 5:06

My goal throughout the next five weeks is that we develop a faith that doesn't just live in our head. It's not just information, words on a page, read and put away, but a faith that reaches into our body, our relationships, those everyday choices, a faith that is rooted not in a vague religion that's like a fortune cookie when I'm going through a bad thing, oh, I need a good word today but the real Jesus who is speaking, leading and transforming us. I think that if you give yourself to this series, this study, you'll walk away with a faith that is just a little bit more resilient than it is right now, a faith that's a little bit more embodied than it is right now, a faith that is way more capable of carrying you through the hardest parts of life, even if it means having less answers. And so today we're going to 1 John, right at the beginning. 1 John, chapter 1. This is where John begins the letter, and the earliest Christians faced the same exact challenges that you and I do today, that we do today. There was a system spreading in the first century and it was called Gnosticism, and that's what we're going to be talking about. And I said this is a big word. Some of you might know what it means, some of you might not, but what Gnostics did is they claimed that faith was about secret knowledge, that your body didn't matter and that Jesus was more of an idea rather than a real person. Those don't sound like ideas from 2,000 years ago, do they? They sound like modern ideas, and that's the relevancy for you and I Now. The apostles didn't ignore it. They spoke up and they spoke against it. They reminded believers that the gospel is embodied, it's public and this gospel is is for everybody.

Speaker 1: 6:56

Listen to how John opens his letter. He says we proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes, touched him with our own hands. He is the word of life. This one who is life itself was revealed to us and we have seen him. You're kind of seeing a repetition here, aren't we? And now we testify and proclaim to you that he is the one who is eternal life. He was with the Father and then he was revealed to us. We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.

Speaker 1: 7:51

The repetition I was pointing out is that we saw him, we touched him and we heard him, which should insinuate to you, without having any context, of 1 John somebody's questioning those things, because John is really hammering it. So somebody must be asking questions about seeing him, touching him, hearing him. Now, some time has passed. This is the same John who wrote the gospel, our fourth gospel the same John. Some time has passed, he's already written that and now he needs to add to it. There's more stuff going on that needs a response. The church has grown, new generations have risen up and they didn't walk with Jesus personally, and it's in that gap that new teachings have crept in. You can't find people who walked with Jesus around anymore. This is the end of the first century. Most of them have died off. So now someone who did see him, touch him, heard him, writes as he's coming to the end of his life, he realizes that as he goes, so does one of the last people who could claim those things.

Speaker 1: 8:57

As one of the last people who could claim those things, some were saying that Jesus was divine. Yes, but he wasn't really human. In Greek culture, the gods would show up all the time, but they would take on the appearance of a human. So if Zeus were to show up in your life, he wouldn't show up as Zeus the god, because well, who could imagine what that even looks like. But Zeus would come to you and he'd look like me, or he'd look like you, a bearded old white guy that we've conjured up in our comic books. And that's what the Gnostic teachers were saying about Jesus. Yes, there is a God, and Jesus was that God. But he wasn't real, he just was appearing to us like that.

Speaker 1: 9:42

To John's audience, this sounded plausible. Sure, that makes sense. What's the big deal about that God taking on human image and appearing real? What's the big deal? But John is going to tell you what is at stake. You see, if Jesus only seemed human, then he never truly shared our lives. If he only appeared human, he never truly suffered. If Jesus never truly died, had a body that could die, then the cross and the resurrection lose any sort of saving power that they would otherwise have. You see, this Gnostic teaching that Jesus was just kind of like an optical illusion carried more weight than meets the eye.

Speaker 1: 10:30

Initially, john pushes back with everything he has. He goes no, no, no, no. Hold on a second. I heard him, I heard his voice, I saw him with my own eyes. We even touched him. Fellas, ladies, he was real, is what John is saying. It wasn't a shadow of divinity. It wasn't a passing appearance. This was the eternal son of God, both fully divine and fully human.

Speaker 1: 10:59

John warns them a bit later. This is what he was getting at when he starts the letter. He says friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the Spirit they have comes from God, for there are many false prophets in the world. This is how we know if they have the Spirit of God. If a person is claiming to be a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ came in a real body, that person has the Spirit of God. But if someone claims to be a prophet and does not acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that person is not from God. Such a person has the Spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming into the world and indeed is already here.

Speaker 1: 11:45

This is a society, as we've talked about a lot, that had a lot of spirits and visions and appearances, and people were so used to hearing new spiritual claims. Somebody could say I had a dream last night. I had a vision this morning. I received hidden knowledge at lunch and it would carry weight. You'd believe them, because why not? If they were wrong, who cares, but if they were right, you don't want to disagree with that. John is telling the Christians don't accept, don't just accept every spiritual sounding message that you hear. If somebody says they had the vision they received hidden knowledge, whatever it might be, would you question that? Push back a little bit on that. Don't let the voice of someone who wasn't even there outweigh my testimony. They're claiming Jesus wasn't real, but they weren't even there. John says but I was and I had friends who were, and I'm not lying to you. You can trust us.

Speaker 1: 12:49

To believe these new spirit teachers was to reject the eyewitnesses who ate with Jesus and traveled to synagogues with Jesus and touched his resurrected body. They saw him sleep. They said this was not a mirage, this was a human. For John's audience, the choice was real. It was a kind of an either or. Who will you trust these false teachers who weren't there, promising you secret wisdom nudge, nudge, wink, wink or will you trust what the apostles who actually were there said? We were there, we saw him, he came in the flesh.

Speaker 1: 13:30

We live in a culture that often doubts the supernatural altogether. So if somebody were to approach you and say I had a dream, I had a vision, god spoke to me and gave me this secret knowledge that I'm going to give to you. You would feel very defensive and dismissive. You'd be like thanks but no thanks. Their challenge was deciding which of the many voices to trust. Our challenge is the temptation to explain everything away. Well, god couldn't possibly have spoken to you in a dream or a vision, or spoken to you whatsoever. That's kind of how we fault.

Speaker 1: 14:08

They lived close to the eyewitnesses. John could write to them and say we touched him and we saw him. But we live 2,000 years later. We can't go down the road or look someone up and say did you see and touch and hear Jesus himself? That's not possible. We have testimony preserved for us in scripture. This latter first John again, as he knows he's coming to the end of his life. He says I'm one of the last ones. I have to write this down so that churches in like Madison, wisconsin, 2000 years later will know Jesus was real.

Speaker 1: 14:43

For them, the danger was distortion inside of the church, teachers reshaping Jesus into something that was more comfortable for them, something that was less costly. But for us today? I think the Gnostic problem for us today is that the distortion often looks like a watered-down version of Christianity. It's a faith that we only want to inspire us and not ever demand anything from us. It's a spirituality that stays vague and we try to keep it very private, but avoids the flesh and blood reality of following the real Jesus. These distortions threaten their fellowship and joy. For us, the same danger exists Our fellowship and our joy. When my Christianity becomes my truth, my spirituality, and we cut ourselves off from the fullness of community, we in part cut ourselves off from Christ. That's why the principle here in this passage is so important. Every generation must guard against distorted versions of Jesus, because a blurred gospel always leads to blurred discipleship and, as I said earlier, a blurred Jesus, a blurred faith, it won't get us through the pain and suffering of this life. That was true for John's audience and it's true for us today.

Speaker 1: 16:11

The whole arc of Scripture points to this. Think about the Israelites in the Old Testament constantly trading God for idols. We talked a little bit about that last week. They blurred his reality and as they blurred his reality, their lives unraveled. In the Gospels, Jesus himself warned that false messiahs and false prophets would indeed come. Then he told his followers to build their lives not on sand but on the rock. Paul wrote to the Galatians that if anyone preached another Jesus, they would be under God's curse.

Speaker 1: 16:51

In this arc of scripture, the story of God pursuing a people ends in Revelation, with Jesus himself as the faithful and true witness, the one who stands against every false spirit and blurred truth. You see, from the beginning to end, the biblical story is consistent. God's people, you and me, we are always tempted to blur who he is, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, but God always calls us back to clarity. When things get blurred, god calls us back to clarity. And so the challenge I want you to carry into this week where have you blurred Jesus? Where have you reduced Jesus to an idea or an inspiration or private comfort, instead of following him as the real Savior who came in the flesh? That's the challenge for us today, and how you might live that out this week is taking time to reflect on the question honestly. Ask yourself where have I made faith more about my comfort than Christ? And don't just think about it. Maybe jot some notes down on a piece of paper. You can act on it. Maybe jot some notes down on a piece of paper, you can act on it.

Speaker 1: 18:11

Choose one concrete or physical area of your life this week and invite Jesus into it. Maybe it's what you eat or what you don't eat, or what you drink, or what you don't drink, how you rest, how you treat your body, how you treat your family, how you handle all of your relationships. Invite Jesus in to the physical aspects of your life and don't keep this to yourself. Share with a trusted friend. You know we have elders at our church, tim and Kyle. We have trustees. I'm here, liz is here. You have trusted companions on this journey.

Speaker 1: 18:45

Share with us what's hard in your life, what's not going well. Where do you feel disconnected? I promise you, me and my team, we're not going to try to fix you, but we'll walk with you through what you're going through. We have that together as a community, and it's so important that we have it, because a blurred faith thrives in isolation, but clarity grows in community. Okay, Blurred faith thrives in isolation, but clarity grows in community.

Speaker 1: 19:20

The good news isn't hidden or abstract. It's not just ideas in our heads or explanations on why life is hard. The gospel is so much bigger than those things. The gospel is embodied. The gospel is real. The Jesus John touched was the same Jesus who meets us in our flesh and blood lives today. A blurred gospel. As I've said a couple times already, a blurred gospel will always lead to blurred discipleship. But when we follow the real Jesus, he transforms all of us mind, body and spirit.

Speaker 1: 19:58

So imagine what would happen if we all lived this way. I mean, what would your home look like, your household look like, if love and forgiveness wasn't something talked about on Sunday morning but something practiced Monday through Friday? What would that look like around the dinner table in text messages? What would our workplaces look like if people saw Jesus in the way we worked, by being honest, having integrity, being dedicated, going above and beyond, by the way we treat those around us our bosses, our co-workers, our customers, our clients with dignity? What would it look like if Madison Church wasn't just faith, limited for an hour on Sundays, but showed up in our daily rhythms?

Speaker 1: 20:52

Where generosity isn't something I practice once a week or once a month or once a year. It was a regular part of my life. Where hospitality isn't something I plan for a couple times a year, but it's something I live out every day. Where I'm ready to help care for someone when those things in life come up that they didn't plan for, and you know what I'm talking about because they come up for you too. When the things come up that you didn't plan for, will we be a community that is ready to care for those?

Speaker 1: 21:23

That's the vision of embodied discipleship. It starts in our own lives. Yes, you have to make the choice. You have to be responsible. You can't control the person sitting next to you. You can't be responsible for the person sitting next to you because you're responsible for yourself and the choices that you make. And as you do that, your life becomes a spiritual fountain of sorts, in which the Holy Spirit works through you and impacts other people. It transforms not just churches, but communities and cultures.

Speaker 1: 21:59

This stuff, this God, changes the world, and so, as we head to the communion table today, ask yourself where have I made my faith more about comfort than Christ? Where have I reduced Jesus to an idea, instead of letting him be the Lord of every detail of my life and then invite him back into that space? This week, I was thinking about it. You know, as we come to the communion table, we're not remembering an idea of Jesus. This isn't just simply symbolic. We're remembering the real Jesus, who took on real flesh, who was really broken for us and who really rose again.

Speaker 1: 22:42

And I concluded that communion is the opposite of Gnosticism, because it's something that you can touch, it's something you can taste. It's something you can taste and it's something you can see. It's tangible, just as Jesus was, and I know that for some of you, you walked in today carrying questions that feel heavier than your faith can support, and that's okay. I'm not here to offer you a neat explanation or to say everything happens for a reason. I am here today to point you to the real Christ who will walk with you and through this situation or circumstances that you find yourself in today, following Jesus is never disembodied. It's not abstract, it's real and it changes lives, and next week we'll dive in deeper to this concept. Our culture today often treats the body like something we either need to escape and disassociate from, or something that we need to make perfect, but Scripture tells us a different story, so I hope you'll join us next week. Let's pray.