Why Worship Can Turn Violent

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All right. So today we're in 1 John. And kind of the tension that we're looking at is how can people worship God? We just talked about worship. How can people worship God, be aligned with God, and still destroy or come at each other? Right? We're in the same body. So how can we how can we do this? And so we're going to 1 John, we're going to chapter 3, we're going to specifically verses like 10 and 11. And this is the turning point for this little itty bitty letter. It's only got six chapters, but it is a turning point. And he begins this next section with the way he started the letter. He tells those he's writing to, This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you, God is light. That was in chapter one. Now in chapter three, he uses almost the same language. He says, This is the message you have heard from the beginning. We should love one another. God is light, and those who live in his light are learning to love each other. Because we don't get it right. We hardly ever get it right. So at the longer we know God and in our communion with God, the more we're learning to love each other, love each other better. John has spent much of the first half of this letter helping his church, that that small itty bitty church, understand what is true, who Jesus is, what sin is, what it means to walk in the light with Christ instead of darkness, and how to recognize teaching that departs from the truth, right? Those kind of the first three chapters. Now his attention turns more directly to what the truth should produce in the lives of those who follow Jesus. So we've kind of set up some foundation, some it's more than theory, but he set up theology, but he's now saying, so what? How does this actually look in our regular, everyday lives? Eventually, what we believe about God has to become visible in how we treat other people. Eventually, what we believe, what we claim to believe, ought to change how we treat one another. John

Cain And The Disconnect

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writes, we should love one another, and then he uses, he says, unlike Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. So John, like it seemingly comes out of nowhere that he brings Cain into this little letter, and he kind of just brings them up and then he moves on. But if all you knew about Cain, you've probably heard some sort of story of Cain and Abel, and you knew one of them was a brother who got killed, and the other one was the brother who killed him. You might imagine then Genesis, where the story comes up, Genesis 3 and beyond, introducing Cain as some sort of obviously wicked person who had no interest in God. But you'd be wrong if that's what you thought. Cain's story is a little bit deeper than that, more nuanced. Cain is actually bringing offerings to God. He's worshiping God, he's doing the things. He participates in doing this and bringing something to offer to God. It's something recognizably religious. And then he murders his brother. Okay, so he worship and then murder. And we already know, because we talked about it last week, that it's it's possible to practice religion without it allow without allowing it to change us. We know we can say the right things and claim to believe certain things and not let it really change us. And and Cain is an extreme example of that. His worship of God never became love for another, love for specifically his brother. He worshipped God, and there was a disconnect with his relationship with his own sibling. Whatever religious activity was happening on the outside, it was resentment, jealousy, and anger that was growing inside of him. John asks why Cain killed Abel, and then he answers that Cain's deeds were evil while his brothers were righteous. Why did Cain kill Abel? Because his brother was righteous. Abel didn't do anything to Cain. He didn't provoke him intentionally. Abel was just living his life. He didn't attack him, he didn't cheat him, he didn't harm him. But the way Abel lived exposed something in Cain. The way Abel lived exposed something in Cain. Genesis tells us that Cain became angry, and God confronts him before the murder, and God says, Why are you angry? If you just do what you know is right, it's we're square. Everything's fine. God warns him, he says, sin is crouching at the door. And instead of Cain listening to God, letting God change him from the inside out, even a little bit, Cain allows all of those other things to get to him. And he makes Abel the problem. Couldn't be me. It's Abel. He's making me look bad in front of God. Not me. Him.

Conflict Rewrites Our Memory

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Now, one of the things that I've had to confront myself with over the years and leading a church is how quickly conflict, little conflict, big conflict, all sorts of conflict, one of the things I've learned is that conflict quickly changes the way you remember someone. And you know this. Any of you who have an ex, whatever, in your life, you know the minute that it goes wrong, all of a sudden we start to think of all the bad and horrible things that we were letting go of, we were forgiving, and just living with. When the relationship is good, we overlook those things because we know the whole person. And we know nobody's perfect. And so there's like this acceptance. Okay, they're not perfect, but I love them. And the thing, when things go wrong, we go back through the relationship's history and we revise it. That person wasn't as good as I said. I was crazy. I don't know what I was thinking. All the warning signs were there the whole time, right? And then we turn every awkward moment, every disagreement, or every weakness into evidence that they were actually a terrible person the whole time. That's too extreme. I'm guilty of it. I imagine you're guilty of it. It's too extreme. Someone can hurt us without everything before that point becoming fake. We can be right about what happened at the end without rewriting the entire relationship. And take it from me, the harder work is letting God show us what the conflict reveals about us, about me. It's that Cain question. Am I gonna let God change me from the inside out, or am I gonna point my finger at someone else? The pastor John says that way of living belongs to death. He says, We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers and sisters. This is the fruit, this is the evidence that you are no longer in the darkness, that you are no longer dead, that you love one another. That is the clearest sign, John says, that the life of God is beginning to take a hold of you. Now, his example of Cain is severe, but that's what he wants us to do. He wants to evoke emotion out of us. I can't be like Cain, and I don't want to be like Cain. If you feel like that, that's what John wants you to feel. He wants us to see where hatred, left unattended in our hearts, leads to. When hatred gets the Rome free in our lives, it turns another person into something less. They're no longer somebody created in the image of God, but rather they're a threat or they're an obstacle. That person is a problem to be managed, but that's the logic of Cain. And John warns the church to not let that take root inside of you. He also tells them, Don't be surprised if the world hates you. So one of the evidence of God taking root in your life is that you will love one another. So if God hasn't taken the root root in their life, what are they gonna do? They're gonna hate you. It's kind of just logical, is what he's presenting to us. Love will not always be returned. You can love people, you can do that inside work we're talking about. That doesn't mean that everyone around you is gonna give you that round of applause and high five, and you're the best. Faithfulness will not always be rewarded with approval. But the hatred of someone else toward you never ever becomes Christian or permission for you to become hateful yourself. We don't respond hate with hate. John is concerned not only with what the church believes, but what those beliefs are creating in you and us. Then

Jesus Defines Costly Love

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John gives us the opposite example. He says, This is how we have come to know love. He laid his life down for us. So we're gonna go from Cain in Genesis, who kills his brother, to Jesus, the one we have seen, heard, touched, the one we knew. Cain turned against his brother to protect himself. Jesus gave himself for everyone else. And John says this is how we learn what love actually is. Love is more than affection, love is more than agreement. Love is way more than just being nice. Christian love, this love we receive from Jesus, and are to let flow through us to one another, seeks another person's good even when it costs us something. We don't just love when it's convenient, love when it's easy. We do it when it's hard. He said, John says, we should lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. And that's another kind of this exaggeration because there's not gonna be many times, if ever, in your entire lifetime where you're gonna be faced with like, do I need to die for someone so they can live? Okay, probably not gonna happen. But that then here becomes the analogy and the example for how we go forward in our life. If anyone has this world's goods and sees a fellow believer in need but withholds compassion from him, how does God's love reside in him? We're going another step. John says, God's light's in you, it's transforming you, they ought to know you by your love. And for anyone wondering, this is what love looks like. You can follow his argument here. Most of us, again, will never be asked to die for another Christian. However, love will cost you time, it will cost you money, it will cost you comfort, it will cost you pride, it will cost you your attention. And that may mean if we were writing a little bit and adding to John's letter, we would say, what does Christian love mean? It means making the phone call you would just rather not make and avoid. It means sitting with someone who's hurting when you don't know what to say and you don't know what to do, and it's awkward, offering practical help to someone, forgiving someone, whether they ask for it or not, whether they think they need it or not. Loving someone means apologizing when, not if, when you do something wrong, simply noticing that someone around us isn't doing very well. Yeah, they seem a little off. Okay, check on them, ask them. That is why John says, let us not love in word or speech, but in action and truth. Churches, including this one, we're good at talking about love. Check, we got it, we can do it, we'll do it every week, right? We use words, we put them on our website. Community, belonging. Everyone's welcome here. Those things are on our website, I'm pretty sure. John is interested in what happens when those words require something of you. That's great you're welcoming. That's great you're inclusive. That's great you have open arms. But what's it mean when those things aren't easy? What's it mean when those things cost you? And again, as we've done every week in this series, we go back to remembering that John walked with Jesus. So none of this is new content. Jesus tells his disciples, John being one of them, love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. John is taking the church back to the beginning, back to the foundation of Christ. The truth about Jesus and the command to love are inseparable. They go together. You can't tear them apart. If you claim, if I claim, if we claim, if the person down the road claims to know Jesus, then over time the way Jesus loves should shape the way we love. John also knows that we can hear a passage like this, and some of us who are maybe are a little bit more internal thinkers and self-reflective, we begin to think about all the times we've failed, where we've come up short. We're talking

When Your Heart Condemns You

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about, hey, not making the phone call, and all of a sudden you can start to get burdened and buried underneath the guilt and the shame and all the I should've, I knew I could've, and and and yet I didn't. But John isn't bringing this up to condemn us. He writes, This is how we will know that we belong to the truth, and we'll reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts. Again, John's like one step ahead of you for those of you beating yourselves up. Our feelings about ourselves are not the final authority. John is not saying that we know we belong to God because we have loved perfectly, because we haven't, none of us have. Instead, he points to God, who knows us completely and still loves us. He says that ought to reassure your heart. The same thing that you're beating yourself up over, God also sees it, and he still loves you unconditionally and covers you in his grace and offers forgiveness readily. God knows our failures, but he also sees what's being formed inside of us. He sees the place that you're becoming more patient. He sees how you're trying to be more generous. God sees that you've forgiven someone that maybe 10 years ago you wouldn't have. God sees how you are willing to go out of your way to care for others. Our assurance does not rest on our ability to perform a flawless spiritual audit of ourselves. God is greater than our hearts. And then John says, This is his command that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and love one another. Now, with all of that said and unpacked and presented, just laid out, what does that mean for you and me today? Because that's what John did back then. He was this is what it means for you. What does it mean for us today? And I think that the challenge of this passage is deeper than whether we would say we hate someone. I think that might be letting us off the hook a little easy. Well, just don't hate anyone. Okay, check. I want to go deeper than that. Bonhoeffer wrote that even the hour of disillusionment with my brother can be good for us. Because eventually the people around us stop matching the version of them we had in our heads. That conflict that you have, that can be good. That can be good because you're actually going to see someone as they are, and that is when love is challenged. Beyond first impressions, beyond 90 days, and everyone's trying to be perfect. When we have that moment, it reveals whether we actually love the person in front of us as they are, or if we loved a version of them that we preferred. When someone frustrates us, disappoints us, needs something from us, or exposes something in us, we would rather not see. Do we reduce them to a problem to protect ourselves? Or do we push against that and continue to walk and learn the ways of Jesus? Not perfectly and not all at once, but increasingly. That is the kind of community John is trying to form 2,000 years ago, and his text being spread through 2,000 years all around the world is trying to form in us. And

Love Your Enemies Through Prayer

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so this week, I do want to give you one specific challenge. Everyone in the room, everyone listening, it is applicable to all of you. We can fight about it after if you disagree. But I want all of us to practice something Jesus explicitly tells his followers to do. And it's not something we covered in emotionally healthy spirituality group. It's not something that gets talked about on Sundays a whole lot. It's not part of any membership thing at any church you've ever been to. But Jesus says in Matthew 5, 44, to love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you. And Paul echoes it saying, Bless those who persecute you, bless, do not curse. That doesn't mean pretending that a relationship that was unhealthy is healthy. I'm not asking you to pretend. I'm not asking you or telling you you should give someone access when boundaries are necessary, especially if you're like in an abusive relationship of any sort. That's not what Jesus is saying here either. Prayer is not the same thing as reconciliation. But even when a relationship remains broken, we can refuse to let that hurt become bitterness and that bitterness become hate. So I would ask that this week you pray for someone who has hurt you. I would ask that you pray for someone you would say, This is my enemy. I know personally, if you've never done this before, this is difficult. This is a very difficult exercise. After my first pastoral job, my first job, I worked for a guy who on my, it was like my first day, and we're walking through, I think, the church and doing all those orientation things you got to do at your job. We do those in churches. And I remember one of the things he was kind of talking about and bragging about was how he could make and has made everyone on staff cry. And he could do it anytime he wanted. And I just was like, that's mean. That's I that's really mean. That's not Christ-like at all. And why would that be something that you would be like, why would you share that? Like, that's not something to brag. If you can actually do that, that's something to work on, and maybe not like that's not a strength. You don't put that on the resume. I can make anybody feel worthless. Great. I don't know. But that also set the tone of my relationship with him, because then I was hell bent on not letting him ever make me cry. I was never gonna be weak around him. I was always gonna be strong. I was gonna stand up to him, and I did. And I got fired. Okay, six months into my first pastoral job, it's very hard to explain after you graduate and you get the job, and then you have to explain why you got it's kind of like complicated, but I had so much anger, bordering, teetering on hatred toward this person because they took away my income. I wasn't planning on being fired. I didn't get written up. It was just one day pack your stuff up. Here's a box. Oh, okay. I was worried about rent, I was worried about groceries, all those things you would be worried about if tomorrow your boss just said, nope, pack it up and go. You're like, oh my gosh. And I remember thinking this. I'm supposed to pray for my enemies. And so I do it. I would Okay, God, thank you for this day. And I pray for oh no, not today. I didn't even want the words to come out of my mouth. I don't want anything nice to happen to him. Look how he is. He doesn't deserve anything nice. As a matter of fact, I wanted to pray some of those Old Testament prayers. God, let the clouds open up and the thunder and lightning calm down and take him off the earth. May the ground just open up and swallow him whole. I want to talk about that, God. But Jesus was like, pray for your pray for your enemies, love them. And so then I would just eventually I'd get to the point where I could like I could say his name to God. And then I find myself being like I can't believe I'm asking the God of the universe to do this guy a favor. God, do me the favor, not him. I need a job. He's got one. But I did, I started to pray for him. And I don't know. I I I don't know if those prayers changed him. Probably not. I don't I don't think they did, but maybe. Those prayers definitely changed me though. Because I did. I when I say I was teetering on hatred, yes, I was. And by praying for him by name and asking God to bless him, that hatred just turned to kind of bitterness. And I started to reroute it backwards. And that bitterness turned into, man, I hope someday he has that awakening. I hope one day he realizes this is no way to operate. Not as a person, not as a leader of a church, nothing. It changed me. So

Prayer Of Examen And Practice

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we we go into this prayer of examine every Sunday at Madison Church. And today I want you to kind of think about, identify someone who has hurt you, who has disappointed you, who has angered you, who has wounded you. And I would ask that you try to pray for them by name today. Ask God to bless them, to heal what is broken inside of them, to lead them toward what is good and true, and for God to do whatever work needs to be done in you. Not just them, but you. Now, I will say this. This is not like a one-week trick for getting over something. Like I mentioned, we all have those X whatever's in our lives. I don't think in a week you're gonna be like, Oh, I love that person all again. I'm not saying that. I don't think that's gonna happen. But it's a practice that we need in our lives because resentment grows when we rehearse what somebody has done to hurt us over and over and over. John says, Let us not love in word or speech, but in action and in truth.