The Credibility Gap In Christianity

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Uh and then welcome online to our church audience, the church online audience. I'm Stephen Feith, lead pastor, and we're continuing our series going through 1 John called Staying in the Light. And one of the things that the people that you know and love who are far from God, far from the church, or struggling with their faith, one of the things that makes them so skeptical of Christianity is because they have experienced. They don't just know the gap, they've experienced the gap between what those of us who are followers of Jesus claim and the way we live. I'll say that again. They've experienced the gap between what we say and what we do. For example, they've seen churches talk about love while living in hate. They've seen Christians talk about the truth while practicing dishonesty, deception, lying, some form of that. They've seen the faith, the Christian faith, become a brand or tribe, a set of rules to follow, a way to feel superior to others rather than a life shaped by Jesus. We understand how and why people get so skeptical. We kind of talked about that a little bit last week. As this isn't a new problem, this isn't a Madison, Wisconsin, a United States problem. This isn't a 21st century problem. This was a Middle Eastern, 2,000 years ago first church, early church issue that they were dealing with. The church that John is writing to, the whole reason that we have first John was that a community church that he had started with friends and family was shaken by

Why First John Was Written

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division, competing claims, and confusion on what it meant to know God, to have a relationship with Jesus. And he began, and we began our series with his first four verses, and that was grounding the Christian faith in the real Jesus, not a theory of Jesus, not some idea, some philosophy, some otherworldliness that only a few of us can attain, but this idea that God burst onto the scene, our world, and made himself known to us so that we could know him. And he wasn't like a figment of someone's imagination. He says, We touched him, we heard him, we saw him, and we've proclaimed that to you. And then he told us last week at the center of everything is that God is light, and in him there's no darkness at all. Now, if John, now John today is going to press the question if God is light, what does it mean to claim fellowship with him? So if you want to follow along, we're going to first John and those blue or green Bibles all around you. Of course, you can use your own Bibles, you can use your house Bibles, your phones, but we'll have the words on the screen. And in 1 John 1, 6, it says, If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. John begins a phrase that we're going to hear several times going forward. You're going to notice this repetition if you join us or if you're listening. It's that if we say, if we say, he's setting up kind of an argument. If this is what we say, then dot dot dot. Remember, John is dealing with people saying things about God and truth and Jesus and sin and fellowship. And he's writing all of these things to a church wounded by division. We're not talking simply about theology, we're talking about everyday real life. That's why John writes. And what he writes about affects the community's life. And when John uses that word fellowship, you have to maybe some of you who were here a couple weeks ago remember that that word wasn't just like Christianese or like a Christian way of saying let's hang out and have fun together. This was something much deeper than that. That this word carries significant weight. And that is that fellowship is shared life with God. Fellowship isn't something you and I create, it's something given to us by God through Jesus. And when that happens, we have fellowship with one another, not just Madison Church or like-minded churches, but Christians everywhere, all over the world. The problem is what comes next. John says if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, there's the argument. He's saying, those who left, they're claiming to have fellowship with God, but they're walking in darkness. And remember what we talked about last week light and darkness. Some are claiming shared life with God who is light, and they're walking in a way that resists that light, that expands the darkness around those to those around them. John is talking about a pattern, a direction, a way of life.

Fellowship Means A Shared Life

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He's not talking about one particular thing. He's not saying, oh, you know, they screwed up that one time, really big, or oh, but do you remember that one time they made that mistake three years ago? Yeah, that we never really dealt with that. No, he's talking about a pattern, a way of life, something that affects them every single day. Because in a few verses, John is gonna say, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. John is saying, hey, we we all mess up. We all sin. Okay. There's a difference between that, which we're gonna talk about in a couple weeks, and what we're talking about today. John is not saying if you ever sin, if you ever mess up, you don't know God. That's not what he's saying at all. That would be misunderstanding the text that we're presented with today. And then John says the part that is hard to soften. He says, if you do this, if you say that you're in fellowship with God but you walk in darkness, you lie. It's deception. It's not true. And that's confrontational. Nobody likes to be called a liar, but that's exactly what he does. They're lying. A divided life becomes a false witness to Christ. When our mouths claim to fellowship with God, but our lives resist the light of God, we're not only saying something untrue about ourselves, but we're saying something untrue about God. This is why John adds, and do not practice the truth. Because for John, the truth isn't just something you believe. The truth isn't just having the right facts known, the right theology, the right history. Truth is something we practice. I mean, yes, John cares about good theology. That's part of why he writes. But he remember, he begins the letter by talking about the physical life, seen, heard, touched, what we believe ought to affect what we do. And what we do often proves what we really believe, what we really value. In this letter, darkness includes falsehood instead of truth, denial instead of confession, hatred instead of love, and a life that claims God while resisting God. The original meaning of 1 John 1 6, I think, is pretty clear. Fellowship with God cannot be reduced to a mere claim. It must correspond to the God we claim to know. Let me break that down. God is life, so life with God must begin to take shape of the life. If we claim to know God, our lives ought to look more like God. It ought to be shaped or more around God. God should become a higher value. Since Jesus is the word of life who reveals God to us, then fellowship with God cannot be separated from the way of Jesus. Yes, our lives become more God-centered, and we begin to look more like Christ in our everyday interactions. And we cannot claim to have fellowship with Jesus while refusing to walk again in the way of Jesus with those around us. God initiates the relationship. We reprioritize our lives. We begin to walk with Jesus and we do so with one another. Then in John 13, on the night before his death, Jesus gathers his disciples, he washes their feet, taking the posture of a servant, he moves towards

Truth Is Something We Practice

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them in humility, knowing their weakness, knowing their confusion, knowing soon some will deny him, knowing within moments one will betray him. And he washes their feet, nonetheless, all of them the same as the next. And he ends by saying, A new command I give you, which should perk our ears up a little bit, a new command. A new command. What what Jesus is bringing out something new that we haven't heard before? And he says, Love one another. And you might say, No, we've heard that before. You've heard it said, love God and love people. So what's the new part? The new part is Jesus says, as I have loved you, now you must love one another. What makes it new is that the law said, Yes, love God and love one another. Jesus isn't inventing love, he's escalating it. He says, What you've been doing before that was with according to the law. You love God and you love people, but now I'm instructing you. Love one another with the same love I show you. That same love that wakes up and greets me with grace. The same love that meets you and offers forgiveness, not just once or seven times or 77 times, as many times as you need. That is the kind of love Jesus calls us to. Jesus Himself becomes the very definition of love. Christian love ought not to be whatever culture calls love. It is not whatever your personality finds easy. It is not a sentimental affection or even a selective kindness toward people that we already like. It is not loyalty to our own group while despising everyone else. This love that looks like Jesus is a giving love, a love that gives himself, herself, themselves away. That is why later in the same letter, this gospel, John will say, this is how we know what love is, that Jesus Christ laid his life down for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. So when you hear Christians or pastors or church leaders say something like, we ought to be willing to die for one another, it's not an exaggeration. It is the standard in which Christ has called us to. It is the shape of Christian love. Now most of us will never be asked to die for someone else, most likely. But the way of Jesus is still cruciform. It is that life that dies to pride within ourselves, to convenience, to superiority, to resentment, to comfort, to self-protection. Those are the things that we die to for one another. I want you to consider that. That how you dying to those

Love As Jesus Loved Us

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things helps those around you. Because when I die to my pride, to my convenience, to my feelings of superiority, when I let go of my resentment and my comfort, people around me, the people closest to me, benefit the most. When John says if we have fellowship with him while we walk in the darkness, we lie, he's not giving us some vague spiritual warning like turn or burn. He says a fellowship with Jesus must be shaped by Jesus in a visible manner that people can see. And since Jesus defines love, then the Christian faith cannot be measured by how well we impress the powerful, the wealthy, the popular, or the most influential. That is not the standard. The standard of love is not how well we love those who are better off than us. The truth is, most of us know how to love upward and honor people who can benefit us. We know how to do so really well. But Jesus always moves in the direction of those overlooked, those who aren't powerful, who are weak, those who don't have wealth, who are poor, those who aren't not, they're not just unpopular, they're despised, those who carry no influence. Now, in the church world, we use words in scripture. We'll talk about how we need to love the sick. But you know, we have modern words for those too. So when Jesus calls us to love the sick, that ought to today conjure up images in your mind of the person with chronic illness. Love the person whose body doesn't cooperate the way that they want them to, the person whose pain is invisible or unseen, the person with disability. Scripture talks about the poor, but when we talk about it, we should talk about the person who's living paycheck to paycheck, the person without stable housing, the person buried under medical bills or student loan debt, the person one emergency away from losing everything. Scripture talks about grieving. We ought to think about the widow, the divorced, the parent who has lost a child, the person everyone else checked on for two weeks but then forgot about for six months. Scripture talks about the outsider. We call that the immigrant or the refugee, the person who doesn't know the language, the person who doesn't know the customs, the person who walks into a room and feels unwanted immediately. Scripture talks about the sinner. We might call them the person with the complicated past, the person carrying shame, the person whose reputation arrives before they do. Scripture talks about a person with no status. They might be the person with no network, no quotes, and no the person nobody invites because maybe they're socially awkward or they have nothing to contribute or they're an absolute liability to whatever event you're trying to put on. Scripture talks about the people who are inconvenient, the person whose needs interrupt your schedule, the person who stretches your patience, the person who very easily exposes the limits of our love. That is what we're talking about when we're talking about loving other people like Christ, not just our friends and family and the people we enjoy being around, but all of them. And so one test for all of us of whether we're walking in the way of Jesus or not, is to see how we are treating people around us. Especially those we're inclined to ignore. And I'm not talking about as a project, people are not projects. And I'm not talking

Who Are You Being Called To Love

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about charity, because people aren't charity cases. I'm talking about who are the people that you feel inclined to ignore who are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God just as you are. The people who are known and loved by Jesus just as much as you are, those whose lives are more complex than we can see on the outside and might even invite a little drama into our own. The challenge for all of us today in the room or listening is who are you being invited to intentionally love in the way of Jesus? Not just this afternoon, not just this week, but for as long as it takes. He walks with us as long as it takes. When we're engaged, when we're disengaged, when we're serving him, when we're serving ourselves, Christ is with us because he loves us, and that is the kind of love we need to approach other people in our lives.