Welcome And Series Recap

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To our online audience, I'm Stephen Fief, lead pastor at Madison Church. And we're in a series on First John. So if you guys want to get those house Bibles or your phones out, we'll also have the words on the screen. We're going to 1 John chapter 2. And to recap a little bit, if you're joining us, you're listening and you're not sure where we were last week or last couple of weeks, so far in this little letter, John has talked about walking in the light, confessing our sins. He's talked about obeying Jesus, loving one another. And these are all serious kind of tests of our faith. And if we're not careful, talked about it the last couple of weeks, and we're going to continue to lean into this idea. If we're not careful, we can hear this as John saying, this is the test, this is the filter, this is how you prove like you're spiritually mature. And that's not what he's getting at. And today John clarifies that your sins are forgiven. Okay, you're not earning forgiveness. You already know God. He made himself known to you first. God's word remains in you. You don't have to wake up one day and wonder, like, well, does God still love me after those things I did or those things I said yesterday, last week, last month? You don't have to worry about that. And you've overcome the evil one because of the power of Christ within you. I put it like this: obedience does not earn our place with God, but it grows out of the life we already have received from God. So obedience isn't the first step. Jesus did the first step for us with his life, death, and resurrection. It's in this walking with Christ, this relationship that we have with Christ, that out of that obedience becomes a fruit of that spirit.

Identity Before Any Command

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John begins with identity before he talks about the desire and to not love the world, which is the passage we're looking at today, beginning in verse 12, and we're going to read through 17. But he begins, he's like, you know, I'm about to say you don't love the world, but before I get into that, I just want to remind you of your foundation and of your identity in Christ. So John says, I'm writing to you who are God's children, because your sins have been forgiven through Jesus. I'm writing to you who are mature in the faith because you know Christ, who existed from the beginning. I'm writing to you who are young in the faith, because you have won your battle with the evil one. I have written to you who are God's children, because you know the Father. I've written to you who are mature in the faith because you know Christ, who existed in the beginning. I've written to you who are young in faith because you are strong. God's word lives in your heart, and you have won your battle with the evil one. And then he says, Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you. For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world, and the world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever. So this is a big chunk of the scripture we're looking at today, and we're going to kind of move through it pretty quickly. But the first thing to point out is you notice the repetition, the poetic repetition that John employs here. He says, little children, children, God's children, fathers, young people. Now, you can pick up a whole bunch of commentaries on 1 John, and scholars are not entirely clear what John is specifically getting at here, because there are a few different angles here. He could actually be talking about literal age groups, you know, young men being, you know, maybe in their teens or their 20s, older people, 30s, 40s, little children like we just had in service. He could be. He could be talking about stages of spiritual maturity. So perhaps it's the 40-year-old who just came to know Christ, whereas there's a 20-year-old who's known Christ for a decade. It could be that. He could be using family language. So it's not necessarily fathers like gender male. It could be just spiritual parents within the church. We don't know. But that doesn't change the meaning of the text. Whether or not we know that, it's not going to change the meaning of the text because what John says about them is children, you are forgiven by your father. Fathers, you know the one from the beginning. You know God. Young people, you're strong because the word of God remains in you, and you have overcome the evil one. These are the realities that already define their life with God. You might remember this church is a young church that has been through division. It's a church that John either started himself or helped see the start of this church. He knew these people, he was in relationship with them. They've gone through division. Some influential people he knew, undoubtedly knew. They have left. Now John is responding to those who remain and the competing claims about who truly knows who God is and what does following Jesus actually look like. His warning to not love the world and the things of the world might not be at first glance what you think it is. Because we've heard it said,

What “Do Not Love The World” Means

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don't love the world. And you've probably, if you've got older Christians in your life, not necessarily, but if you've had Christians or grew up around the church, don't love the things of the world has often probably, in your experience, been referred to as like the type of books you read, or the movies you shouldn't see, and the music you definitely shouldn't like buy the album of. And that's what you've heard, right? Don't love the things of the world. But what John is actually talking about here is an alternative way of living that isn't of God. He's going to frame it like this. Here's the way that we live for God and of God is over here. And then there's the world. Now, there's a lot of overlap then in music and movies and books between the two, but he wants to talk about a pattern of values and desires and how we're aligning our lives. Where do we find our worth? Is it in the world, our possessions, our influence, or is it in God and just being comfortable with that, that we are of God? He names three expressions of the pattern of the world. So he says there's the world, and you say, Well, what does that actually look like? He says there's the desire of the flesh, there's the desire of the eyes, and there's the pride of life. These are not isolated sins in as much as they are a way of living. And we're going to talk about that more at the end when I talk about kind of our application, what we can do with it today. The biggest difference between us and them, and it's almost always this every single week when we're studying scripture, is that they live in like a very pre-technological world, right? We have AI, we have the internet, we have smartphones, we have social media, we have targeted ads. We have a constant exposure to what other people own, what they experience, what they look like, what they've achieved, right? You go on Instagram and it's like everyone's Hall of Fame on their boards. We have that. And our culture is very, very good at shaping desire. And you think about how advertising works, advertising first has to convince you that something in your life is missing. It has to put an ache in you, a dissatisfaction. And you begin to feel that. And they say, but hold on, we have the answer for that hole in your heart, and

How Culture Shapes Desire

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we have the promise to help you solve it. And if that isn't enough, social media adds another layer to it. Because it's not just that we're what we're being told and sold from companies. Now we look around at our friends and families and we see their house and what they're doing with their house, and we see their career advances and how it's going out for them. We see their body, their vacations, their families, their ministries, their success. And when we do all of that combined with the advertising, we feel small. We feel smaller. We feel like we're disappearing if something doesn't change. Of a very, I think, harmless example of that today. As noted earlier, I'm wearing an Indiana Fevers t-shirt today. And I'm not really a Fevers fan, if I'm being honest with you. I don't think I've watched a full game before. I mean, truthfully, I don't think I've seen some highlights. But hey, when I was in middle school and high school, I lived outside of Iowa City, the University of Iowa, the Hawkeyes. So I was familiar with that team. You know, they were the hometown team. And so when Caitlin Clark became this phenomenon a few years ago, I was like, hey, you know what? I'm already interested in the Hawkeyes in Iowa, and look at what she's doing. So, I mean, for the first time in my life, at like 35 years old, I was watching NCAAW games. I was watching the bracket, I was, I was rooting for Iowa. You know, you expect superstars to like go to LSU or something, but not Iowa. And here she was breaking all of these records, and and this Big Ten team that doesn't normally compete was competing. And so if you don't know, then Caitlin Clark gets drafted by Indiana. So I knew that, but didn't I I went back to just not caring? But then the last couple of months, some of you have heard of Sophie Cunningham. And what stuck out to me was the the reels and the memes of the point. If you guys remember that. This went viral, the like one-minute point where like everyone's pushing her away and she doesn't move, and and all sorts of funny things became of that. So there's Caitlin Clark, there's Iowa, there's Sophie Cunningham, and that's funny. And then seriously, a week ago, I'm just scrolling on Instagram and Homage, which is a t-shirt store that I've never been to. I don't even know if they have physical stores, but they target advertising me all the time. And this shirt popped up. And in that moment, I was like, I just want that shirt. I want it enough that I'm gonna spend 30 bucks to buy it and order it. And so I did, and I wanted to wear it today because it's a harmless example, but I think it highlights what John is getting at. What we see shapes what we want. And it's not always a big one-moment thing. I just explained how for the last four years I've been influenced to buy this shirt. Little things that I didn't think were gonna come to this point. You see, desire, the desires in our lives, in your life, and in my life, it's formed by what gets our attention. And not just what gets our attention, advertising, social media, but what the people around us value. Those people you spend the most time with, what they value, I promise, influences what you value. What we repeatedly practice, what we are told will make us secure, important, and satisfied. These are the things that shape what we want, what we desire. The technology that we have, yes, it's new. They did not have smartphones 2,000 years ago, but the same heart that's beating in your chest right now is the same heart they had beating in their chest then. And the human heart has remained the same. Over time, our desires influence and dictate how we live. John says, is it for God or is it for the world? What we love forms who we become. What we love forms who we become. To the contrary, John is saying actually what you all individually desire absolutely impacts this community. Christian formation, it begins with grace, but grace doesn't leave us untouched. It challenges our desires. The life we receive from God slowly changes or ought to slowly change what we value, and therefore what we seek, and therefore what we celebrate, and therefore what we are willing to give our lives to. Identity and desire belong to one another. So if God has given us a new life, then over time our lives produce new loves. So if you've just come to find and start to follow Jesus this year or recently, you're gonna notice those things change. Your values get shifted, and that's okay, that's good. That's part of what it means to carry our cross and to conform to the image of Christ. If you've been following Jesus and you've known God for a decade, you can probably stand here and witness, like, yes, the things I cared about 10 years ago are a lot different right now. And we examine ourselves and our lives to make sure that that's continuously happening.

Obedience As Formation Not Rules

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This gives us a broader way to think about Christian obedience because we often ask, is this wrong? Go back to the idea of the world and how you've probably heard it applied to your life. Don't do this, do this. Don't watch that, but this is okay. Kirk Cameron's in it. So, you know, somehow that's alright. Do this, don't do that. Sometimes that's the right kind of angle. Okay, sometimes that's okay. There are objectively black and white things that are right and things that are wrong. I'm not trying to water that down. But I think what John wants us to get deeper at and to not stop there is to say, what is this doing to me? Not just is this right or wrong, black and white, but as I engage in this, or if I don't engage in that, what is it doing to me as a human being in my relationship with God? What kind of person am I becoming by giving this my time? What kind of person am I becoming by giving this my attention? What kind of person am I becoming when I put my money and I use it this way instead of that way? Or am I when I use my affection this way and not that way? John wants your desires to be shaped by the God you already know, so that our lives increasingly reflect the new life we have already received. What John is saying here, and I've tried to do this almost every week, is to kind of connect it to Christ and the greater New Testament and the early church. And this is something that we do see. We're like, yep, John definitely heard this from Jesus and is perpetuating it in a positive way. Because in Matthew 6, Jesus says clearly, where your treasure is, your heart will be also. Where you put your time, your money, your efforts, what we repeatedly invest in begins to matter more to us. And a few verses later, Jesus says, you can't serve both God and wealth. In this passage, money isn't presented as this evil thing in and of itself, but rather the allegiance to money and the allegiance to wealth. He's saying that money can that and the things that we possess, not just money, but the things that we possess slowly become things that possess us. We think we own that. But Jesus says, before you know it, it owns you. Paul makes a similar point in Romans 12. He tells believers not to be conformed to the pattern of this age, but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. Paul knew well and better than most of us that the world around us is always offering patterns to imitate. We call them influencers in our society, but they're people who are trying to tell us there's a better way to live, that I've discovered something, I've broken into another realm or another room, or go deeper with me. But Paul's saying, despite all of that noise, don't let that be the thing that transforms you. Continue to come back to the God you know. The New Testament gives us a picture of discipleship that goes deeper than just having the correct beliefs or avoiding certain sins. Following Jesus involves the reordering of our loyalties and our habits. John's warning fits directly into the larger picture that we see in Scripture and the early church and who we are today.

Three Diagnostic Questions For Desire

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And so as we get ready to go into our time of kind of communion and reflection, I want us to really think about the question here: what is shaping what I want? And you think about the things you gotta do this week. You think about what's on the calendar already. What's shaping that? What's the value behind that? Are we more aligned with the world or are we aligned with Christ? And none of us are perfect in here. I'm not, you're not, nobody listening here is. We're all working it out, but that's why we're called to this. You are influenced. We're all going to be influenced by the world and the people around us. But this question calls us to reflect on what are we doing with about that? How are we responding to it? And I mentioned earlier I would come back to these three ideas that John had about what does it mean to respond to the world. He talks about the desire of the flesh, and that asks where our appetite has become authority. Where has our appetite become authority? Where have you started assuming that wanting something is enough to pursue it? Just because I want it doesn't mean I need to pursue it. Where is my appetite becoming authority? The desire of the eyes asks what I keep looking at that makes my own life feel inadequate. Where are you allowing the comparison to feed your envy or your dissatisfaction with your own life? Sometimes the problem isn't not what you or sometimes the problem is not what you have, but rather it's constantly comparing it to what everyone else has. The pride of life asks, what am I using to prove that I mattered? Is my sense of worth tied to achievement, recognition, my possessions, influence, appearance, or being seen as successful? Or am I content with who I am in Christ? One useful practice that we've been working out through our emotionally healthy spirituality small group on Thursday nights, and we've been incorporating into our services here is that prayer of examine. And we're going to do that again next Sunday. But it's this intentional time of silence and to reflect and to ask where is my life aligned with right now? John ends by saying that the world and its desires are passing away. We have to be reminded of that, that the things of Christ are eternal, and the things that are not of Christ will one day end. Possessions wear out, recognition fades, careers end, your body's going to change, other people's opinions change. Sometimes it's unjustified and unfair, but they change nonetheless. If those things carry the weight of our identity, they will eventually fail us. But there is a different way. There's a different foundation. Remember what that is. You are already forgiven. You are already known by God. You are being formed by God. An evil has been overcome. The invitation as we head into this time of reflection is to let that identity reshape what we want.

Communion And Receiving Grace

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And that brings us to communion. We do not come because of our desires are perfectly ordered. Your desires, mine today, they're perfectly disordered desires. But we get to come to the table every week because Jesus has given himself for us. And at the table we receive rather than achieve. And we remember that life with God is a gift. So as we receive Christ this morning, we ask him to keep forming in us desires that lead toward what is good, what is true, what is loving, and what is lasting.