Why Change Usually Feels Slow

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Most of us here today, this morning, I know that we want to be like Jesus. I believe that's why you're here is to be more Christ-like, or you're taking steps of faith and heading in that direction. And we want our faith, as followers of Jesus, we want our faith to shape the way that we speak, the way that we make decisions, how we treat people, and the way that we respond to difficult situations. We want to be a faith-informed people. And we want it to happen quickly. We want it to happen very fast. We have come to believe that as a culture, as a society, that spiritual transformation arrives through a dramatic moment. Those tend to be our favorite Bible verses, the ones in which God shows up, the Holy Spirit comes down, big changes happen in the moment, and we want to celebrate that. And we want that to be like our life. We want it to be like one day I went to church and I heard the perfect sermon, or I prayed the most powerful prayer. I had a new insight when I was asleep last night, had a dream. There was an experience that suddenly rearranged everything for me. And those moments, don't get me mistaken, they do happen and they do happen from time to time. But the way I like to talk about those moments are that they're usually like the mile markers. And life is a long trip for a lot of us. It's a long journey. And if you've been on a long road trip, you know what I'm talking about. The mile markers, you're like, oh, we're getting closer to the exit that we have to go on, or to the next highway, or to our destination. You know what the mile markers are, but you're also aware that most of the journey happens between those mile markers. The mundane, all the cornfields or bean fields, the nothing to look at, or the forest and the trees. Most of life happens between the mile markers. Most of what we become as humans, or who you are today, who you're going to become next year or in 10 years, it's going to be formed by the millions of choices you make week to week. Those little choices that you don't think matter matter a lot more than you think they are. Those repeated choices that you make eventually become your habits. Those habits eventually shape your character, who you are. And character shapes the kind of people that you're going to become eventually. That person who is two or three stages down the road, that person who's 30 years away, the person you are becoming now will impact the person who becomes that person. Eugene Peterson once observed that there's a great market for religious experience in our world. And that there's little enthusiasm for the patience, the patient acquisition of virtue. Great market and religious experience, right? That's what we do. We get on the website when we go church shopping. What are we looking for? We're looking for that religious experience. And there is there is a great market for it. But what it ultimately comes down to is you and me, the choices that we make. This is one of the central dangers, I believe, of the Christian life, of our faith is that we can become deeply interested in spiritual things without becoming spiritually formed. I think you see it all around you every day, and it does to some degree impact all of us. We can listen to sermons and we can read the books, we can discuss theology, we can have sincere experiences with God and not allow any of it to reshape how we actually live.

Staying In The Light Context

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Now, John, we've been in this series called Staying in the Light. And so if you want to follow along in your own Bibles, the house Bibles around you, you can. We're going to 1 John, and John is writing to a church, I want to remind you, that is surrounded by conflict and confident spiritual claims. So there's a conflict in the community, and it all stems from this confident spiritual claims. Some people are claiming or have claimed and they've left, but that they had a deeper spiritual knowledge, that they were more mature, that they knew God better, and yet how they treated one another contradicted that so-called message. And so John responds with this very little letter, and just giving the church something concrete. And it's a theme he's going to repeat over and over again. That theme being that knowing God in here eventually becomes visible out here. That the God you're getting to know if you're new to faith, the God you're always learning more of, it doesn't just change what happens in here, it impacts what goes on out here in our lives. We don't obey God, and that's going to be the theme of today. He is not talking about earning a relationship with God. Obedience is not about earning a relationship with God. Our growing in obedience, rather, is the fruit that God is working inside of us. That's what John wants to do. When he's contrasting the people who left and he says, look, there's no fruit in their lives, there's no this, there's no that. Look at the conflict in them. He's saying they cannot be spiritually mature because of that. Because if what was going on on the inside was really happening, the outside would look a lot different.

Knowing God Shows Up In Life

SPEAKER_00 5:48

And so we're reading chapter two, verses three and five, in which John says, and we can be sure that if we know him, okay, we can be confident, we can stand on this business if we obey his commands. If we know him, we obey his commands. If someone claims they know God, but doesn't obey God's commandment, that person is a liar and not living in the truth. But those who obey God's word truly show how completely they love him. That is how we know we are living in him. Each verse moving an argument that John is putting forward, continuing building on the previous verse. Verse three tells us that knowing God has a recognizable shape. It's something that you and I should be able to look at and say, aha, yes, they have God in them, or God is a priority to them, faith is a value. Verse 4 warns us that our claims can outrun our lives. He says there does come a point in which we might think we're more spiritually mature than we actually are. That happens to all of us. And he says, verse five and verse five shows us that love reaches its purpose when it becomes embodied in obedience. So let's go back and kind of break down each of these verses, in which John says in chapter, or sorry, verse three, that we can be sure that we know him if we obey his commandments. Recall again that he's writing to a church with people whose confidence in their faith has been shaken. It's been shaken. The people that were leaders in the church or the most spiritually mature on outward appearances have left. And they're kind of wondering: is something wrong with me? Is something wrong with them? Is something wrong with us? They're asking all of those questions that a lot of us can relate to. Those people who left the community, they claim to have a deeper understanding of God. John doesn't come here and point them to a secret knowledge. He doesn't say, oh no, they can't be that deep because I know something deeper. And he doesn't say, well, if you thought that was amazing, I will give you a deeper spiritual experience. He doesn't do any of that. He just points them in the direction of their lives. He says, I'll make it even simpler for you. It's not about deeper knowledge or more knowledge. It's just look at their lives. Look at the way that they're living. To know God is to trust God. To know God is to belong in God. To know God is to share life with God. This Greek word that he uses in this verse is not about more knowledge. It's not about more facts. It's not about being able to like pass a quiz or a test. It's actually relational language. It's when you're in a relationship with someone and you know this. Anyone who has a friend, you can tell me facts about your friend, where they work, where they were born, what they like and what they don't like. But there's something deeper. Any of us who have friends, we know, we get past the facts and we begin to know that person, their essence, who they are. That is the word that John is using here. It's not knowing facts about God, it is knowing God. And that genuine knowledge of God begins to take form in our lives and begins to affect what we value, how we act, and whose voice has authority over us. And to keep God's commands means more than just obeying them occasionally. It's deeper than just, oh, I did that thing and I feel kind of bad about it, and I'm sorry. It includes that, but it is so much deeper. John is describing a direction of life, not a flawless performance. He already kind of addressed, like, hey, we're all sinners, we all mess up. That's going to happen. But he's saying that those of us who keep God's commands, it's about remaining in Christ. We're going to continue to try. We're continuing to align and realign our lives around Christ.

Failing Obedience Versus Dismissing It

SPEAKER_00 9:56

He continues in verse 4 if that if somebody were to claim that they knew God, but they don't obey God's commands, that person is a liar, not living in the truth. That's a bold accusation, but it's a bold claim. It's a bold claim to say that you know God and you don't act like it. That's a bold claim because how you then act and react to life on the claim, this deep confidence of spirituality, can then turn and impact, then negatively impact other people's walk with God. That's what I mean when I say it's a bold claim. Think of all the damage that has been done by people who claim to have a deep relationship with God, but actually don't. John gets confrontational. He says, Nope, they're lying. I mean, this is such a it's bullshit. It's such a direct confrontation. He's saying, that's just no, it's trash, it's garbage, take it out, get it out of here. It is strong language. And throughout the letter, he repeatedly calls attention to what people claim. He says, if we say, referring to us, or whoever says, likely referring to them, I know him or they know him. He says, just look at their lives. And what is it producing? He's not condemning imperfect Christians, people who struggle. I think that that's the flaw in thinking that we can get to this passage is that we can come here and say, okay, we're just gonna look at everyone's outside habits and behaviors and we're gonna judge their spirituality on that. John also isn't giving us license for that. There's a difference between failing in obedience and dismissing obedience altogether. A difference between failing in obedience and dismissing obedience altogether. It's one thing to say, I'm trying and I'm trying and I'm aligning and I'm realigning, and another to just say, yeah, you know, nothing really matters anyway. A struggling Christian may become impatient, speak harshly, withhold forgiveness, maybe even act selfishly. But when the truth is exposed, they confess. Yep, you're right. I shouldn't be doing that. Or I'm sorry, I hurt you. Can we repair this? Can we fix it? It's to receive grace, but it's also to give grace back and forth. And it doesn't mean that we say, oh, I'm sorry, and it never happens again, because anyone who's have ever had to apologize knows that even with the best intent, change takes time. And it takes a lot more time than we usually want it to take, especially when the change we want to see is in the other person. We have different types of expectations for how long change should take when it comes to me versus you. The people that John is confronting, they see no contradiction between claiming to know God and resisting transformation. They want the comfort of religion, the confidence of being right, the status of special spiritual knowledge without ever being accountable to one another. You be accountable to me. You are responsible for you. It's a one-way street. John is exposing a spirituality that wants the benefits of knowing God without the surrender that comes with knowing God. And then John says in verse 5, those who obey God's word truly show how completely they love him. That is how we know we are living in him.

Obedience As Love In Action

SPEAKER_00 13:37

So John shifts from speaking about God's commandments to speaking about God's word. He's not reducing the Christian life to a checklist of do's and don'ts. He's describing a life that receives and treasures and practices the message revealed in Jesus. And so when John says that the love of God is perfected and the love of God is made complete, he doesn't mean that our love becomes flawless. Our love will be flawless until the day we die and Jesus completes his good work in us. But he's talking about a love that reaches his intended purposes, moves from something we claim to something we embody. What I mean is that when our love for God becomes honesty, when lying or covering up would be easier. When our love for God, when when forgiveness, when we have to forgive someone and resentment would have been justified, or even easier. When big generosity, it becomes generosity when fear tells us to hold tightly to what we have, or when humility, when we want, don't want to admit that we're wrong. This is the theological center of the passage here. Christian obedience is love taking visible form. It's love taking visible form. That's what John is gonna spend a lot of time in this little letter coming back to this very point. He's going to point out that spiritual maturity, a closeness with God will be most revealed in how well we love one another and how well we love the other. And sometimes that means our enemies. We often treat love and obedience as opposites, as though love is warm and relational, while obedience is cold and mechanical, right? When we think of relationship in that language, it's oh, it's warm, it's nice. We like that, that's love. And then you hear obedience and you're like, here's the rules. But John won't let you separate it. He won't say there's a dichotomy here where obedience is over here and love is over here. He says, no, they're they're the same, they're two sides of the same coin. For John, knowing God, loving God, and obeying God, it all belongs together. Now, the setting has changed for us. We live in 2026 now, but the temptation is not. Knowing God is not the same as being changed by God. Lots of us know God. As a matter of fact, I think if you were to reflect on your own spiritual journey, you knew God a lot longer, or you knew God for a while before the change started to happen. You knew God, and there were some steps. There was a journey, something occurred, and then at some point you recognize, hey, my life is now being changed by God. John reminds us that Jesus is an advocate. Our forgiveness rests on his faithfulness, not our own ability to perform well enough. But the grace that forgives is also the grace that forms us. Again, from the inside out. God welcomes us as we are, but does not leave us unchanged, or as I've written about elsewhere, that Jesus loves us enough to meet us where we're at and enough to not leave us there. Prayer, scripture, worship, confession, generosity, service, Christian community, all of these things are good, but they do not earn God's favor. They help us become attentive to God and responsive to God, but they do not change our status in God's family. And this isn't just something in 1 John. We see it in Psalm 1, when it describes the faithful person as a tree planted beside water, slowly bearing fruit until it becomes rooted. In John 15, Jesus describes himself as the vine and his disciples as the branches. The branch does not earn its place by producing fruit on its own. It bears fruit because it remains connected to the vine. Paul uses another image in Galatians chapter 5, telling Christians to walk by the Spirit. The language in all of these passages aren't something that happens right away, but something that happens over time, season after season, ups and downs. Not anxious striving, not instant transformation, just a life that remains open to God long enough to be changed by God. And that's John's point. Obedience doesn't create our relationship with God, it's the visible fruit of a relationship that we have with God. Grace establishes that relationship. Spiritual practices keep us attentive to that grace. And obedience is love taking visible form as we gradually shape our lives into the person of Jesus.

Lego Faith And The Work Of Repair

SPEAKER_00 18:55

The challenge for you and I today is that faithfulness begins when we stop waiting to feel ready and practice the obedience we already understand. The Christian life is not a finished house. It's an ongoing life of building, repairing, and sometimes rearranging what we thought had already been settled. It's like a Lego kit. And you get that box and you have options. And you can choose between those options. Maybe it's three options. But I think in Christian life, in our lives, it's hundreds and hundreds of options. And we open that box. And as we begin to explore our spirituality and have a relationship with God, it's like an instruction booklet. And we can see where we're going. And we can see step five, but we can't get to step five without first starting step one. Now we may look at the outside of the box and maybe it's like a puzzle piece that only puzzle piece that only has a hundred pieces, but maybe it's one that has 10,000 pieces. And we might get overwhelmed and say, man, the 10,000, when they're all together, it looks great. But right now it's just a box full of pieces and they're turned every which way and they're not placed together. And that can be overwhelming and it makes us like, well, we're just not going to start. But if that was our attitude, we'd never get the final piece. And if it's like a Lego kit, what we do is we start putting pieces together. We're looking for the right pieces according to the book. And sometimes, as my son has done before, he misreads the booklet. And sometimes he puts the two wrong pieces together and he doesn't realize it right away. He realizes it in four pages. When all of a sudden now we have to go back and we have to take Legos apart. And if you've ever built the Lego kit, you know this is tedious and discouraging work. And you start taking pieces apart and you got to go back now. And it's not that what you did the next four pages were wrong. It was what you did four pages ago. And it wasn't that you meant to do anything wrong. You were trying your best. It's just you realized you were a little off. And oftentimes it's it was just a little off. It wasn't even a big mistake, it was just a little. And so as I tell my son, we take a breath, it's discouraging, we get angry, there are some tears. But we come back to it and we start working again. And then we got to do that next page, which is frustrating because we had already done that part right. And the next page, which is frustrating because we already done that part right. And then we get back to where we were before we made the mistake that we needed to. But then that's where there's progress. That's when we get to move to the page that we haven't been before. As I've told my son, we don't just throw the Legos away, we don't just give up, we take a moment so that we can get to our final product right here. And one day that's the work that Christ does in us. Finishes it. And like I said, it's like a Lego. It could be like an old house. I mean, if you live in an old house now, you know that as you begin to pull off drywall and get to see what's underneath the drywall, that it's a mess. And it's not a mess always because somebody was cutting corners or being lazy. It's a mess because how we do things now is a lot different than how they were doing it 50 or 100 years ago. Wiring that was once adequate 50 years ago isn't up the code anymore, and you cannot do it that way anymore. A room that once served a purpose doesn't meet the needs of the people living there anymore. And as problems become visible, as our understanding as people grows, a responsible owner goes in there and they start to make repairs. That doesn't mean that the house is worthless. It doesn't mean that you go and you tear the entire house down because, oh, it's outdated a little bit because I hate to break it to you. The things you are doing to that house today, in 60 years, somebody will be cursing you. You're doing your best right now if you're working on that house, but I know it in 60 years, somebody's gonna be like, why did they do it that way? We're doing the best we can with the information we have, the tools we have, the products we have. Legos, houses, puzzles. That's kind of like the Christian life. The way of Jesus will never become outdated, but our understanding and practice of following him will change. It is complete, incomplete. We continue to walk with him and we begin to notice things that we did not see before. A habit that once protected us, now keeps us disconnected. A belief that we used to hold confidently needs to be challenged and requires humility. The way of speaking, leading, relating may not reflect the love of Jesus as faithfully as we once believed. Growth requires the willingness to let God and others show us what needs to be repaired. And if we don't have that attitude, we realize we made a small mistake four pages ago, or the wiring isn't up to date. We might throw the Lego kit away and never get to see what the finished result was. We might burn the house down and ruin all of these other good things that were in the house because something just wasn't right. And yet, or we might walk away from our faith because we just, oh, we just messed it up. We can't get it right. But John is pleading and trying to give us another way. Just tell the truth, receive forgiveness, and also give forgiveness. Help one another, carry each other's burdens. Don't grow weary doing good. Arm in arm, let's follow Jesus together. Faithfulness is not pretending that things are complete. It's just remaining open to the work that God is still doing in us. And so the question as we head into communion today, that you should ask yourself is what in my life needs to be repaired in light of what I now know? We can try to move on. But you know that when you get to the end of the puzzle, if you just jam those pieces in there where they don't belong, you know it's not gonna look like it should, how you want it to look. You can continue to try to build that Lego, but eventually there's gonna be a piece that needed that thing where it was supposed to be. You might not be able to finish your Lego kit. If you don't address the bad wiring in the house, the house may burn down. And if we don't deal with the things in our lives that we've been putting off, that we've buried, seemingly insignificant, it'll impact the direction of our lives and following Jesus. We are all being formed, what we repeatedly give our attention to, what we trust in and how we practice. And John invites us to not ask, you know, not only whether we believe the right things about Jesus, do you know the facts about God, but do you know God relationally? And is that becoming evident in your life? Is the love that I claim to have becoming more concrete? Is my confession becoming more honest? Is my forgiveness becoming more possible? Not perfectly, not all at once, but genuinely and over time. God's love receives us, forgives us, and then it begins the slow work of bringing our lives into alignment with Jesus.