Redefining Spiritual Maturity

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All right. Well, before we turn it over to John and Tyler, we're going to continue our series going through 1 John. And so if you want to follow along on your phones or the house Bibles around you, we're going to 1 John chapter 2. We're going to be looking at verses 9, 10, and 11 today. While you get there, I want to point out that when we think about spiritual maturity, when most of us, when you think about spiritual maturity, I think that there are some common ideas that come into all of our heads. When we think of spiritual maturity, we might think of somebody's biblical knowledge. How much of it do they have? Do they have a master's degree of divinity? You know, where were they trained? What about theological understanding? When we think of spiritual maturity, it's not just the Bible versus somebody knows. It's how do they understand scripture and apply it to their real life? You might think of that older saint at your church or in your family who's been going to church for 80 years, and you're like, that is the definition of spiritual maturity and faithfulness or spiritual disciplines. You know, the person who wakes up at 5 a.m. to pray for a couple hours and read their Bible and do their devotion. Those are all things I think we think of when we talk about spiritual maturity. And yet we can contrast that with what we're reading in 1 John, because he's John is writing about spiritual maturity, and he refuses to let spiritual maturity be in the realm of what we say and what we know. John keeps bringing us this back and forth pattern that we've we've gotten really used to in this little letter, this back and forth pattern of what do you claim and how are you living? What do you say? What are you doing? What do you say you know, but how is that reflective in your life? He keeps going back and forth. And the passage we looked at last Sunday, John talked about knowing God leads to an abiding in Christ. So what we know leads us to walking with Jesus. It keeps coming back to this idea that knowing God for John is not simply to have accurate information about him, not necessarily the biblical theological knowledge, not necessarily the years spent in church, but rather it's reflective of a life that is shaped and reshaped daily by Christ. John connects this knowing. He says, when we claim to know God, we are obedient. And obedience is a word that gets thrown around in church and in culture all the time. But here with John, when he talks about it, he doesn't give you room to guess what he means. He says, when you're being obedient, that means that your life looks like Christ and expresses that love, that Christ-like love to those all around us. And that sounds easy enough. I know it does, until love gets tested. Like it's easy for us for one hour this morning to talk about love and how we're supposed to love like Jesus, and we can all nod and say, Yeah, I mean, who's gonna who's gonna disagree with that? But what happens when our patience is pushed? What happens to the grace we extend when we feel wronged? Do we celebrate the future when there's division within us and within our communities? You know, almost everyone believes love matters and is good and everything while the relationship is healthy. But love gets tested when things are pulling us and people are pulling us in opposite directions. We discover what love means when something has been said about us that isn't true, when trust has been damaged by deception, when fingers are pointed, and when friendships we assumed would last forever or a long time suddenly disappear. And some of us know that experience really well. We talked about it this week at our emotionally healthy spirituality group. We talked about the pains and the things that we've experienced. And, you know, I'll admit, as I did to my group, to all of you, and if you're listening to the podcast, I'm not sitting here as somebody who has this figured out, and now I'm gonna tell you what I've learned as I've figured it out. I'm not saying that at all. Actually, there have been relationships I've lost that mattered deeply to me. And there are still moments I replay conversations in my head and things I wish I would have said and other things I wish I hadn't have said, and I remember what happened, and I can feel that old hurt starting to creep in. And, you know, I wanted to acknowledge that this isn't like a passage that was easy for me to preach. I was actually talking to Tyler yesterday, and I was like, I think this whole like sermon is just for me this week as I've wrestled with it. As you recall, the context of this passage is that John's community, this little church, has experienced deep division. People have left, and there are serious disagreements about Jesus and truth. And these things, these disagreements have fractured relationships and it's left wounds. People are hurt. And John is now turning to those who remain, and he pushes them beyond, well, were you right? That actually doesn't come up. John's not arguing that. Instead, he says, What's going on with you now? With what remains and where you're heading. He's pointing out, I think, that it's possible to be right about something that happened. It's possible to be right and still

The Aftermath Of Division In Church

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become someone you were never meant to become. And so John writes in chapter 2, verses 9 through 11: Whoever says, I am in the light, while hating a brother or sister is still in darkness. Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go because the darkness has brought on blindness, blindness. One of the commentaries that I'm reading for this series is written by Gary Burge, and he makes an observation about this passage, and that is that John's kind of shifting. For the first chapter or so, he's kind of been like, you know, if they did this, but then you can kind of contrast it with this. And he's kind of been talking about the people who left a little bit while also addressing the church here. This shift is now completely on the church that remains. He's not talking about those who left, he's talking about them. And not just how they feel about one another, but how they feel about those who left. He's addressing the aftermath of division, and he's warning this wounded community to not let what happened to them become hatred within them. Don't let what happened to you back then change what's going on with you right now and who you are becoming. And hatred here, let's be clear, hatred here is larger than anger. I'm not talking about anger. Anger can absolutely be appropriate. We know that God feels anger. Okay. John is describing something that has had time to settle in: a posture, a habit, a way of seeing another person, a way of seeing an entire people group. That explains the movement of verse 11. John says the person who hates is in darkness. And they're not just in darkness, they walk in darkness. And then eventually they don't know the way to go because they've been walking in darkness. They don't know up and down, left and right, they don't know where they're going, they don't know where they've begun or where they began. And what begins is a posture towards another person affects our own vision of ourselves. Hatred doesn't just affect the target, it changes the person who carries it. John understood something about hatred that I miss and that I think is easily missed. And that we tend to think that hatred is primarily about the other person. We imagine that our resentment, our strong feelings, that that's keeping the record straight, that it preserves the seriousness of what happened, and somehow it's going to make the other person pay. But Frederick Buchner here, he writes about the strange way we can savor old grievances, how we replay the pain in our minds. He says the chief drawback is that you are wool that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton and feast is you. Now, we're not members of that first century church, and their theological conflict is not identical to every disagreement that we experience. I want to throw out there that we should be cautious anytime we're reading the scripture to not automatically cast ourselves as the faithful group of people, and anyone who's ever done us wrong is not. Okay, I want to caution us, let's not do that. But communities do fracture, people misrepresent each other. That's not just something that happens at Madison Church. That happens at churches everywhere. I'm sure Tyler has stories, and anyone listening, we all have stories when trust gets broken and friendships end, when we believe that we've been wronged and we're convinced that we're right, and we begin to believe that

When Anger Hardens Into Contempt

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our righteousness justifies contempt. The theological principle here in this text for us today is that a genuine relationship with God reshapes the way that we relate to one another and to other people. Settled hatred contradicts a claim to walk in God's life because hatred eventually distorts our ability to see. And this isn't unique to John. I mean, let's John refers to himself as the disciple Jesus loved. I mean, this is somebody who walked closely with Jesus. And he's kind of quoting Jesus a little bit here, and he's alluding to ideas he learned from Christ himself. Jesus tells his disciples in John 13, just as I have loved you, you should also love one another. The words that give Christian love its shape are as I have loved you. You don't need to guess, how am I supposed to love God? How am I supposed to love my neighbor? Jesus says, as I have loved you, there's the scorecard. That's the floor. That's where we begin. And we will spend the rest of our earthly lives trying to get to that point. None of us have arrived. But then Paul says something similar in Romans 12. He says, Do not repay anyone evil for evil, and later do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Across the New Testament, we find the same pattern. Someone else's wrongdoing does not get to determine what kind of person we become. Someone else's wrongdoing ought not to determine the type of person we are becoming. Something wrong may have actually happened to you. Your anger can be completely justified. Accountability is necessary, but evil cannot be allowed to reproduce itself in us. It cannot reproduce itself. John invites us, you and me, to examine our anger, to examine our disappointment, our grief, and our hurt, to examine it. Sometimes anger does begin with something legitimate. Someone lied to you, trust was broken, someone made an accusation that wasn't true. Someone damaged a relationship that mattered to us. Love does not, Christ-like love does not require you to pretend like those things didn't happen. It also doesn't mean that you have to say, Oh, I gotta figure out how this can be acceptable. Following Jesus doesn't mean abandoning wisdom or getting rid of boundaries or accountability or avoiding difficult conversations. Some relationships might need distance, and some may never return to the way that they were. But the danger here for us is when that anger hardens into contempt. Contempt reduces a person to the worst thing we know about them. It assumes motives rather than asking questions and interprets everything through the least charitable explanation available. Eventually, we can start to enjoy another person's failure because their failure seems to prove, or at least feels like it

How Darkness Trains Our Vision

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proves to us, that our judgment was correct. And enough after enough time, all that darkness begins to feel like clarity. What I mean is when you first walk into a dark room, you know it's dark. And when you think about it when you're getting in bed for the night and you turn off all the lights and you get in bed, you look around the room, you can't really see anything. When you wake up a few hours later, you see a lot more things. Your perception has changed, your eyes have physically changed to adapt, right? Shapes become visible. You're able to move around the room with confidence, and eventually you forget how dark the room is. You forget that when you turn those lights off, you couldn't see anything. That's how resentment works in our lives. At first, we recognize that there's something in us that's unhealthy, but then as time goes on, we when we rehearse it, we justify it, we repeat the story, we find people who confirm our interpretation. And over time, the darkness becomes familiar enough that we stop recognizing it, that we're in the dark. There's a difference between recognizing that someone did something wrong and allowing their wrongdoing to train us in contempt. Love does not require us to call everything good, but it refuses to stop seeing another person as someone made in the image of God who is deeply loved by God. John gives us a picture of spiritual maturity. Remember, that's how we began. We said, What is spiritual maturity? John says spiritual maturity is more than just knowing the right things. He cares deeply about the truth, but he refuses to separate the truth of God about the kind of people we are becoming. We can be right about what happened and still need to ask what is happening to us. Because just as Christ has formative power over our lives, so does pain. But what pain forms in us isn't good. Betrayal can form us, loss can form us, being misunderstood can form us, repeating the story over and over can form us, and people who are no longer even present in our lives, people who are no longer in our lives can continue to shape us through the resentment we carry of them toward them. We can bring anger, grief, disappointment, broken trust, and resentment before Jesus without pretending those things are smaller than they are. Jesus is not asking you to try to manufacture warm, fuzzy feelings toward everyone who has hurt you. He is inviting us to give him access to the places where hurt

A Prayer For Wounds And Formation

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has begun to harden us. So our prayer today, as we enter into communion, is simply, Jesus, do not let what someone did to me become what forms me. Don't let another person's dishonesty make you dishonest. Don't let another person's cruelty make you cruel. Don't let someone's rejection teach you to stop loving. Don't let the darkness around you become the darkness within you. Spiritual maturity doesn't mean reaching a place where none of it hurts anymore. It means that the hurt doesn't get the final word about who you become. If we know God and we abide in Christ and are learning to walk as Jesus walked, then even our wounds can become places where Christ forms us. We cannot always choose what happens to us, but by the grace of God, we can refuse to let what happened become the thing that forms us.